The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

And now i'm in finance and rebuilding my fortunes somewhat but the exact opposite to how i began in in business where i mean as far as anyone in the public would know where because i took over a company that was made famous by very famous businessman e-p-tailor and bud and mcgold in particular i was in the public eye all the time and as a young man it's naturally going to be irritating to a lot of people well now i'm not i mean i am up to a point but as a commentator no one has a clue what businesses are there private and they're in different countries and and they know you know no one knows and so i don't have that problem of sort wrestling with the public relations monster all the time and um uh yeah i think you mentioned in one of the books that i read that you in retrospect wish that you would have handled the public relations end of things i suppose in a more sophisticated manner or earlier and you didn't realize how critically important it might be is that am i recalling that accurately is that a fair solution with them substantially so yes but my my my view was there's no way to avoid a lot of attention so what i should do is meet it head on and at least uh cause to be discarded the caricature that all business people are fundamentally stumble bombs itself expression i can't actually give a fluent explanation of what i'm doing and secondly to advance the idea that business is in fact not just a bunch of grubby businessmen scruffing for cash it actually isn't an interesting subject and i thought i thought those were correct premises and i was successful at that but but but where what you said is exactly right is i didn't i didn't appreciate as much as i should perhaps should have or would have if i were more experienced uh how tired people can get of someone who doesn't have a natural call in her attention i think this incidentally was one of the chief problems of the immediate former president of the US he he always believed i've known him a long time he always believed that there was no such thing as bad publicity no matter how apparently negative it was well up to a point he was right but not it he it wasn't right once he became president because once he got to be the in Roosevelt's phrase ahead of the American people he didn't need the publicity and he didn't he didn't want to was undignified for him to be seeking a blood alone from the tolerate so much of it to be beating sessions whereas whereas enemies challenged him and he responded i mean he had reached a position where you can safely rise above most of that and just spoke when you have some speak when you have something to say um i win my book about rice belt there's a little piece in a lettery sent to um someone who had been a colleague of his in the Wilson administration where he was saying how how a president has to know when to be in front of the public and when not when it will irritate the public and when not well i i wish i had obviously i never had a position of one percent of the consequence of being president of the US but i i wish i had taken that on board even at the modest scale of where i was you know before i embarked on this but but you know part of surviving and growing older is your learning things i think perhaps that's a good place to stop okay well i i kept you too long i hope i hope uh either people find somebody interesting or if not they should put it on when when they're afraid they may be suffering from insomnia well look thank you extremely for talking with me today and for uh always a pleasure always a pleasure Jordan i appreciate it very much and and i hope we get to do it again there's many things that we didn't talk about i i didn't talk about any of your opinions about current about current affairs or or or about the future many things that i would have like to have discussed but no we can do it another time if you want great

And now i'm in finance and rebuilding my fortunes somewhat but the exact opposite to how i began in in business where i mean as far as anyone in the public would know where because i took over a company that was made famous by very famous businessman e-p-tailor and bud and mcgold in particular i was in the public eye all the time and as a young man it's naturally going to be irritating to a lot of people well now i'm not i mean i am up to a point but as a commentator no one has a clue what businesses are there private and they're in different countries and and they know you know no one knows and so i don't have that problem of sort wrestling with the public relations monster all the time and um uh yeah i think you mentioned in one of the books that i read that you in retrospect wish that you would have handled the public relations end of things i suppose in a more sophisticated manner or earlier and you didn't realize how critically important it might be is that am i recalling that accurately is that a fair solution with them substantially so yes but my my my view was there's no way to avoid a lot of attention so what i should do is meet it head on and at least uh cause to be discarded the caricature that all business people are fundamentally stumble bombs itself expression i can't actually give a fluent explanation of what i'm doing and secondly to advance the idea that business is in fact not just a bunch of grubby businessmen scruffing for cash it actually isn't an interesting subject and i thought i thought those were correct premises and i was successful at that but but but where what you said is exactly right is i didn't i didn't appreciate as much as i should perhaps should have or would have if i were more experienced uh how tired people can get of someone who doesn't have a natural call in her attention i think this incidentally was one of the chief problems of the immediate former president of the US he he always believed i've known him a long time he always believed that there was no such thing as bad publicity no matter how apparently negative it was well up to a point he was right but not it he it wasn't right once he became president because once he got to be the in Roosevelt's phrase ahead of the American people he didn't need the publicity and he didn't he didn't want to was undignified for him to be seeking a blood alone from the tolerate so much of it to be beating sessions whereas whereas enemies challenged him and he responded i mean he had reached a position where you can safely rise above most of that and just spoke when you have some speak when you have something to say um i win my book about rice belt there's a little piece in a lettery sent to um someone who had been a colleague of his in the Wilson administration where he was saying how how a president has to know when to be in front of the public and when not when it will irritate the public and when not well i i wish i had obviously i never had a position of one percent of the consequence of being president of the US but i i wish i had taken that on board even at the modest scale of where i was you know before i embarked on this but but you know part of surviving and growing older is your learning things i think perhaps that's a good place to stop okay well i i kept you too long i hope i hope uh either people find somebody interesting or if not they should put it on when when they're afraid they may be suffering from insomnia well look thank you extremely for talking with me today and for uh always a pleasure always a pleasure Jordan i appreciate it very much and and i hope we get to do it again there's many things that we didn't talk about i i didn't talk about any of your opinions about current about current affairs or or or about the future many things that i would have like to have discussed but no we can do it another time if you want great

It's not the sort of book I ever envisaged that I would have to write.

I think if you go back 10-15 years, the idea that Free Speech, which is obviously what the seedbed of all our liberties, would be something that we would have to defend, would probably seem a little bit ridiculous to me because I basically took it for granted.

I thought that everyone was on that side but I fear that something has happened particularly over the past 10 years or so and it is connected, I feel, with the rise of this social justice.

I think my point, my principal argument at the book is that absolute freedom of speech is always going to be better.

And in fact by promoting free speech you're doing something to help those very people that you are concerned about.

He wrote, Why are you create unravelling the mysteries of the creative mind with Carolyn Gregor in 2016 and ungifted intelligence redefined in 2013?

He wrote, Why are you create unravelling the mysteries of the creative mind with Carolyn Gregor in 2016 and Ungifted intelligence redefined in 2013?

He also edited The Complexity of Greatness in 2013 which brought together leading scholars to discuss and debate the relative contributions of biology and society in determining creativity.

I was reading I wrote the read the book SUCCESSFUL INTELLIGENCE by Robert Sternberg and I felt as though creativity wasn't the same thing as intelligence I feel like that was this thing that I felt to be true that I you know I didn't know there was a whole field until I started reading cognitive psychology as well I took a course in cognitive psychology my sophomore year with Anne Feyn and got to the chapter on intelligence in Sternberg's textbook where he talks about the psychological literature on creativity and that really excited me and I and I felt like there was there was more to the story than just IQ.

I wrote a book called meeting intelligence unleashed that co-authored with an evolutionary psychologist Glenn gear but we found that the the male the male that was most attractive to women was the tender defender and I feel like you're kind of describing a tender defender.

I'm just linking that to Jeffrey Miller's the hypothesis about creativity being a reliable indicator of genetic mutation load which is why it would be so sexy you know from from the selector point of view.

The book I was referring to way back and I said I wouldn't go to title by Kessler called the "Active Creation."

It's in a lot of ways I remember the the seat door to the novel is a fictional novel.

Yes, yes that book really gave me a lot of comfort and to think my how to think of my own journey.

...'Not with a Bang But a Whimper', the politics and culture of decline 2008...

...'Spoiled Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality' 2010...

...'The Terror of Existence' with Catholic theologian Kenneth Francis in 2018 for the Spectator...

you just published a couple of books myth mythos heroism Heroes Heroes and there's there's a third one in that trilogy it just escapes my mind.