The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

There's a great new book out I don't profit at all by promoting it. I'm reading it right now called Cobalt Red.

When Huxley wrote about the psychedelic experience in 'The Doors of Perception', he referred to Bergson who made the claim that in some real sense consciousness was like a reducing valve.

The book was very popular with rappers um as I said because of the nature of the music industry and um he reached out to me he wanted to meet me because the 48 laws of power was sort of his Bible as he expressed it so I met him in New York um kind of in the back room of the steakhouse and sort of like a something straight out of the godfather I was kind of the one white guy amongst his whole group there I was a little bit intimidated to be honest I didn't know what to expect because he has this reputation and it up he was really nice really interesting actually very kind of sweet guy not what you expect and we I just finished writing my book on war fair and strategy which is kind of my version of Sunsu's art of war how to strategize in conflicts sort of like what you're talking about and he has a very strategic mind and he got we got very we kind of had a really nice connection and I thought you know so much in our culture is creating these stupid kind of divisions and walls like you're in academia you only write academic books you're a popular person you only write popular books you know you come from this community you come from that community and they should you never communicate and I thought it would be very interesting to write a book coming from two opposite um backgrounds you know me middle class Jewish boy from Los Angeles and him from south side queens something interesting could happen from a collaboration there's not enough of that in our culture I believe because even though our our circumstances were very different our minds were very similar we were thinking at a similar plane that kind of transcended these sort of superficial differences so I spent time with him and I was trying to figure out what is the essence of his power what makes him such a compelling figure and made him not one of those people in south side queens who ended up kind of spiraling downward ending up in prison what saved him and I determined that the quality he had was this kind of fearlessness and it isn't the kind of fearlessness where you go beating people up or something it's kind of an inner strength he had been shot when he was like 20 years old like nine bullets right there through a car window um kind of law one of them bullets lodged in his mouth and he survived miraculously and it gave him this kind of calmness like I have nothing to fear I almost died bring it on I don't really care and so I observed him in meetings I observed that kind of calmness and how he could take over a meeting not by being super aggressive but just by having this kind of dominant persona and I thought there was tremendous power in this fearlessness not being afraid to be different not being afraid to have conflict and confrontation not being afraid of actually of death itself not being afraid of the reality of your situation on and on so the book that we formed together was kind of a meditation on 10 forms of fearlessness and I found you know I thought that I was a relatively fearless person which in some ways I am I seem agreeable but I'm actually in some ways a little bit old and adventurous and but compared to him I realized no I'm actually riddled with fears and just being around him and kind of riding the book helped me a lot in my you know kind of overcome some of my own limits some of my own fears so that's where that book is.

There's there's lessons that you learn and you say oh i've seen that before there's a book it's is a book called About Face which i think the last time you and i talked you were i think you were writing the forward.

I was lucky enough to be able to write the forward for my favorite book which was re released because I was talking about it all the time and the book is called about the book is called About Face.

And it's it's about a guy that was in the Korean War and the news in the Vietnam War and his name is Colonel David hack worth but.

I read a book by Hans Rosling called Factfulness, I don't know if you read it a couple of years ago, it's a great book.

It was a book that tried to explain the economics of Bitcoin, why Bitcoin functions, why it functions the way it does and what are the implications that you would expect from the continued growth of Bitcoin in the future.

I think the key insight that I well there are several key insights but one of the most important ones in the book is that Bitcoin is the hardest money that has ever been invented because we've essentially thrown away the algorithm for making Bitcoin work has been set at producing a certain number of Bitcoin over time that's going to end at 21 million and there's no way of making more Bitcoins.

I think after 12 years of Bitcoin operating we can pretty confidently say there's not going to be more than 21 million Bitcoin.

So that makes Bitcoin truly unique as a monetary asset because it is the hardest monetary asset that we've ever found.

I think the main the main split is between the Austrians and everybody else as far as I'm concerned when it comes to the main most important questions because the Austrians come at the question from a different starting point which is that value is subjective economic value is subjective and that then leads to a whole different intellectual path with different methodologies and different conclusions from what you get from essentially everybody within the mainstream.

the first person who figured this out technically was probably Irwin Schrodinger who the physicist who wrote a book called What Is Life and he described life essentially as a continual attempt to constrain entropy to a certain set of parameters

His new book When Men Behave Badly, The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, harassment and assault was published in 2021 and it uncovers the evolutionary roots of conflict between the sexes.

I love it and so imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that see I like that one the single-mindedly part is an interesting one what I learned this at least in part from Nietzsche's

aren't that different even though they split in the 11th century over a diphthong as Gibbon points out.

In 2012, physician Ben Goldaker of Oxford University published Bad Pharma, in which he explored fraud settlements for pharmaceutical companies covering up known adverse events, including lethal ones and hiding information, including about safety.

He hosts a very popular podcast called The Psychology Podcast and is an author, editor, and co-editor of nine books including his newest Transcend, the new Science of Self-Actualization. Dr. Scott Kaufman and Jordan spoke about cognitive science, behavioral studies, humanism.

He hosts a very popular podcast, The Psychology Podcast, and his author or editor or co-editor of nine books including his newest Transcend, the new Science of Self-Actualization published in 2020 and just out in paperback as of April of 2021.

So first of all maybe you could tell everyone just exactly what a cognitive scientist is?

So you worked you worked a fair bit on intelligence per se.

It isn't obvious that those things have any necessary interrelationship so what happened?

Oscar Wilde is known as in you know a master of epigrams and which and people mistakenly think of him as shallow or trivial or facetious or vain or peacocky or something but he was very profound in fact

while was at at a dinner and someone was being rather kind of envious of someone and being rather unpleasant and while suddenly he said the devil was walking one day in the Libyan desert and he saw a monk being tormented by some of his demons and he approached

and the demons bowed in front of him and said master and he said what what goes on here this had master for 39 days and 39 nights we have tried to tempt this holy monk away from his god and his religion but he has stayed steadfast and holy to his god and his religion we have offered him powers and principalities we've had offered him the joys of the flesh we have had offered him wine and food and riches but he has turned us down there's nothing that we can do to win this holy man to our cause and the devil said out of my way and he whispered in the monk's ear and instantly the monk took the petrol cross around his neck and snapped it and filled the air with hideous curses against his garden, his church and his religion and swore he would never follow Christ again and the demons fell down and in front of the the devil and said master what can you have said in one second that we could not what did you say to him and the devil said oh it was very simple I just told him his brother had been made bishop of Alexandria

They also had a hell of a time publishing their work to begin with was resisted quite quite stringently quite assiduously by people in the field yeah I think so I mean in it in a lot of the resistance it seems to be this is too. It's too philosophical it's too abstract it's hard to pin down and understandably because I mean one challenge you know one of the challenges that people have made to the theory is when you make people aware of the mortality or when you heighten people's awareness of mortality regardless of how rigorous of a control condition you have.

And they wrote a book called the worm at it at the core on the role of death in life that came out in 2015 I haven't looked at that book I've talked to Greenberg and Solomon about about their work before they'd be good to have on this. And they'd be good to have on this podcast actually I thought about that so so yeah so so they would bring people into the lab and and remind them in various ways of their mortality and then look at the effects on their beliefs the punitive effects.

Yeah he would say that that's The Worm at the Core which is of course what what's all green bergen scht Pyszynski talked about in their book and and but i'm not i'm not even completely certain of that because like I said I think there are things that you can be more afraid of the death pain might be one.

He is the author of Nostalgia, a psychological resource, and supernatural death, meaning and the power of the invisible word.

He's published over 100 scholarly papers, co-edited three books on existential psychology and written several books including Nostalgia, a psychological resource, and supernatural death, meaning in the power of the invisible world.

Her other published books include Generation Me Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, A Sertive Entitled, And More Miserable Than Ever Before.