Name: Jordan Peterson Explains Self-Authoring (from Joe Rogan Experience #877)
Uploaded: 2016-11-30T23:06:56.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jordan Peterson Explains Self-Authoring (from Joe Rogan Experience #877)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-11-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jordan Peterson Explains Self-Authoring (from Joe Rogan Experience #877)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-11-30. Transcript available.

hello freak bitches we've tried out we've tried other online interventions
too so I have my these YouTube videos up but we also designed I worked with
some corporations a while back because I've done some consulting and I had
designed tests to help people hire better employees which I still do and in
fact I work with this company up in in California called the Founder Institute
and it's the world's largest stage early technology company incubator it's
created 2500 companies in the last four years and we test now in 135 cities but
when I was marketing these tests to companies they kept asking me what could
be done about their poor performing employees and I said well I didn't know
because it's not that easy to if you have someone who's problematic who's
troubled it's not that easy for a manager to figure out how to straighten them
out
and they just don't have the time they don't have the time they don't have the
plan power and they don't have the training usually to do that but I designed
this set of programs called the self-authoring suite and one of them the
future authoring program helps people write out a plan for their life so it
helps
them it asks you some questions about six dimensions of your life you know your
your health mental and physical your use of drugs and alcohol your wishes three
to
five years down the road for intimate relationships for family for career for
education and so on it asks you what could your life be like three to five
years down
the road if you set it up for you like you were someone you were taking care of
so it
asks you those six questions then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about
about your
vision for your life you get to have what you want and what would be good for
you what
would that be and then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about what your life
would be like
three to five years down the road if you let your bad habits and your you know
idiocies and your
foolishnesses and your weaknesses take the upper hand and augur you into the
ground because everyone
knows about that and so it's like you get to design a little heaven to strive
for and a little hell to
avoid and then you write for then you basically turn that into an implementable
plan that's the
second part of the program we've used that with about five thousand five to
seven thousand university
students now mostly in europe at the rotterdam school of management and we've
raised their grade
point average of their kids 25 percent drop their dropout rate the same and it's
had a walloping
effect on men and on non-western ethnic minorities it's moved the non-western
ethnic minority student
population performance at rotterdam school of management from 70 percent below
the the average
to above the female dutch natives and so the other the reason i'm telling you
this apart from the fact
that it's a very good program and um we did it at mohawk college in canada a
year ago and we dropped
their dropout rate in the first semester 50 percent and that especially again
worked well for men because
men are at more risk of dropping out now and and especially for men who didn't
have good grades in
high school so not only is there the possibility for the net to provide
tremendous dissemination of
intellectual material but there's also the possibility for the net to provide
dissemination of
psychological interventions that have major impacts on people's mental health
and productivity at almost
extraordinarily low cost so that's really been fun too so well i think
providing
some that sort of a structure and a framework giving people the tools just in
form of asking them
questions what would you like to do please describe this what is your fear and
when you do that you
sort of allow them to help themselves outline what they would like to
accomplish which most people
don't do no well in our education system our education system was designed in
in chicago in the late
1800s to produce factory workers because it was set up when when rural people
were migrating to the
cities on mass because their kids first of all were likely to get factory jobs
and second of all if
you were working in the factory your kids needed to be taken care of and so the
purpose of the schools
was to train factory workers which is why everyone's lined up in roles rose and
why there are bells it's a
factory model the problem with that is that now people's careers basically have
to be self-determined but
that's never that's never part of the education system part of the reason i
developed these programs was
because i realized this is the same course where i'm teaching students that if
they would have been in
germany in the 1930s they would have been nazis i'm trying to get them to
design their lives and
it's way better to have someone articulate their own plan you actually neurologically
rewire people by
having them formulate their own thoughts which is why you know your school
teachers used to say put it
in your own words it's actually very good advice if they would explain what
that means it's like
if you have to conjure up the thoughts and you have to articulate them then
they change you
and so well and so this program has had
the the the the the effects have been absolutely overwhelming for us as
researchers because it's very
very difficult to produce an intervention that actually has a positive effect
on people you know
you hope it does but generally when you test it out it's like no it doesn't do
what you thought it
did or sometimes it even has the reverse effect that sounds fascinating how do
people have how can
someone a regular person have access yeah they it's called self-authoring so
that's s-e-l-f
authoring like like writing a book self-authoring.com and the programs i gave
away the future authoring
program i think it might still be free um it was yeah it is till the end of
november i i did a video
called message to millennials where because one of the things jonathan height
said about uh he called
carl marx the patron saint of the social justice warriors and john stuart mill
the patron saint of
people say who stood for objective truth and freedom of expression and i
thought that was really smart
he said brown university is number one for social justice warrior universities
in chicago for truth
universities but one of the things that marx has over john stuart mill is that
marx is the social
revolutionary and young people like to think about ways to change the world
right and that's actually a
positive part of their development it's a stage that the developmental
psychologist jean piaget called
the messianic stage and he associated that with late adolescence it's like
while young people want to
change the world the problem is is that that's been harnessed into attempts to
change other people but
that isn't what you should do if you want to change the world you should change
yourself and i don't
mean that in some cliched sense i i mean it in the sense that alexander solzhenitsyn
said when he
analyzed the soviet union he said don't be thinking that the line that divides
good from evil runs down
a political spectrum or or or countries or something like that it runs down
right down the middle of your
soul and if you want to sort out the world then what you do is you sort
yourself out it's a serious
business right they say it's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a
city and that's the truth
because you're complicated and there are horrible monsters inside of you that
need to be tamed and to
and to be brought and to be brought into alignment and submission so that you
can be a powerful and useful
person and um i gave away the future authoring program as part of this video i
made suggesting to
millennials that instead of rushing out there to change the world by changing
other bad people
that they should look inward and sort themselves out properly and um i think we've
given away about
four or five thousand of those programs so far now you said it's free till the
end of november and then
what happens with it it's well the self the future authoring program is
regularly 14.95 and the whole
self-authoring suite which involves it's a program that helps you write an
autobiography so it helps you
sort out things about your past that are still burdening you you can tell if if
you have a
memory that's more than 18 months old approximately and when you pull that
memory up to mind if you
still have an emotional reaction that means you haven't fully articulated the
memory you haven't
analyzed it causally you haven't you haven't freed yourself from its grasp and
you're carrying it like a
weight and your brain responds to that like the more more weight you're
carrying like that more baggage
let's say the more of the stress hormone cortisol your brain produces and
cortisol makes you old
some of this work has been done by james pennebaker at the university of texas
at austin because he
he started to pioneer these sorts of writing programs and he found that if
people wrote about uncertain
things past present or future so they could be traumatic things they could be
uncertain things
that their physical health improved and he he did a lot of detailed research
trying to figure out why
that was and basically came down to the explanation that it was something like
an uncertainty reduction
mechanism at work because your brain is always figuring out how well situated
are you in the world
how much do you not know compared to how much have you mastered and you can
tell that you've mastered
things because when you go somewhere and you act things turn out the way you
want them that's an
indication of mastery and your brain is sort of keeping track across your whole
life of how many places
you've been where things haven't worked out compared to how many places you
have been where they have
worked out and if all those places in your past where things haven't worked out
you need to map
and master and that that decreases the existential load on you but that
actually decreases your
psychophysiological load it makes you healthier it makes you less stressed and
so we put all that
together in this self-authoring suite to help people write about their past to
sort it out in a in a
detailed autobiography it asks you questions about your past it says divide
your life up into six epochs
and then divide each of those that might be say oh birth to kindergarten and
then maybe elementary
school and then maybe junior high school however you want to do it and then to
write about the
emotionally significant events in each of those epochs and then to describe
their effects on you and then
to analyze how you did in those situations what you might have done differently
what you might do
differently in the future to straighten out your past and i've done that with
my students in my maps of
meaning class for about the last 10 years and some people have written 15 000
words it's not that uncommon
for students to write 15 000 words in their autobiography wow so that's such
great advice that's such great
advice about reconciling with your past because so many people just carry it
around yeah well if you're
if you're thinking about your past what it means is you haven't analyzed the
causal change because you might
say well why do you remember your past well you might say well it's in order to
have an objective you know
record of the past it's like it has nothing to do with that there's only one
reason you remember the past
and that's to be prepared for the future that's why you remember the past and
so what you're supposed
to do is take the past and extract out from it wisdom and wisdom is the ability
to avoid stumbling
blindly into ditches and so you think well here's a time in my past i stumbled
blindly into this horrible
ditch and terrible things happened to me it's like okay you need to take that
apart you need to figure
out how was it that that events conspired with your participation voluntarily
or involuntarily so that
that terrible consequence emerged you need to know why that happened and how
you could react differently
in that situation and as soon as you do that your brain will leave it alone it
won't obsess you about it
anymore because the anxiety producing parts of your brain are basically trying
to tell you where there
are obstacles in your environment it's like look out don't go there don't go
there it's like well
don't go there there's fire well maybe you could master the fire right then you're
a wielder of
fire you're not just a victim and lots of situations are dangerous or not
dangerous depending on your level
of mastery right life is like that and so a negative emotion that's associated
with a memory is is
something that's crying out for mastery and writing can really help with that
so you're reorganizing
your brain when you write autobiographically you're you're basically the
emotions imagine emotion
memories can be stored at different levels of your brain some from sort of primordial
reptilian
image-laden areas that are very emotional up to finely articulated plans for
your future life
well you want to take everything that's negative and emotional and transform
that into a fully
articulated vision for your future and that frees you of your past you shouldn't
be thinking about
your past i mean maybe if you're 80 and you know you're going over a well-spent
life that's a whole
different thing but if you're 30 35 or 20 and most of the time you're thinking
about your past it's like
it's like your soul is trapped back there and you need to you need to free it
through investigation
and the metaphysical language is appropriate because that is in a sense what
you're doing
you're trapped in the past it's like you got to break free of that so you can
use all your resources
you can use all your resources to move ahead into the future

Jordan Peterson Explains Self-Authoring (from Joe Rogan Experience #877)

hello freak bitches we've tried out we've tried other online interventions
too so I have my these YouTube videos up but we also designed I worked with
some corporations a while back because I've done some consulting and I had
designed tests to help people hire better employees which I still do and in
fact I work with this company up in in California called the Founder Institute
and it's the world's largest stage early technology company incubator it's
created 2500 companies in the last four years and we test now in 135 cities but
when I was marketing these tests to companies they kept asking me what could
be done about their poor performing employees and I said well I didn't know
because it's not that easy to if you have someone who's problematic who's
troubled it's not that easy for a manager to figure out how to straighten them
out
and they just don't have the time they don't have the time they don't have the
plan power and they don't have the training usually to do that but I designed
this set of programs called the self-authoring suite and one of them the
future authoring program helps people write out a plan for their life so it
helps
them it asks you some questions about six dimensions of your life you know your
your health mental and physical your use of drugs and alcohol your wishes three
to
five years down the road for intimate relationships for family for career for
education and so on it asks you what could your life be like three to five
years down
the road if you set it up for you like you were someone you were taking care of
so it
asks you those six questions then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about
about your
vision for your life you get to have what you want and what would be good for
you what
would that be and then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about what your life
would be like
three to five years down the road if you let your bad habits and your you know
idiocies and your
foolishnesses and your weaknesses take the upper hand and augur you into the
ground because everyone
knows about that and so it's like you get to design a little heaven to strive
for and a little hell to
avoid and then you write for then you basically turn that into an implementable
plan that's the
second part of the program we've used that with about five thousand five to
seven thousand university
students now mostly in europe at the rotterdam school of management and we've
raised their grade
point average of their kids 25 percent drop their dropout rate the same and it's
had a walloping
effect on men and on non-western ethnic minorities it's moved the non-western
ethnic minority student
population performance at rotterdam school of management from 70 percent below
the the average
to above the female dutch natives and so the other the reason i'm telling you
this apart from the fact
that it's a very good program and um we did it at mohawk college in canada a
year ago and we dropped
their dropout rate in the first semester 50 percent and that especially again
worked well for men because
men are at more risk of dropping out now and and especially for men who didn't
have good grades in
high school so not only is there the possibility for the net to provide
tremendous dissemination of
intellectual material but there's also the possibility for the net to provide
dissemination of
psychological interventions that have major impacts on people's mental health
and productivity at almost
extraordinarily low cost so that's really been fun too so well i think
providing
some that sort of a structure and a framework giving people the tools just in
form of asking them
questions what would you like to do please describe this what is your fear and
when you do that you
sort of allow them to help themselves outline what they would like to
accomplish which most people
don't do no well in our education system our education system was designed in
in chicago in the late
1800s to produce factory workers because it was set up when when rural people
were migrating to the
cities on mass because their kids first of all were likely to get factory jobs
and second of all if
you were working in the factory your kids needed to be taken care of and so the
purpose of the schools
was to train factory workers which is why everyone's lined up in roles rose and
why there are bells it's a
factory model the problem with that is that now people's careers basically have
to be self-determined but
that's never that's never part of the education system part of the reason i
developed these programs was
because i realized this is the same course where i'm teaching students that if
they would have been in
germany in the 1930s they would have been nazis i'm trying to get them to
design their lives and
it's way better to have someone articulate their own plan you actually neurologically
rewire people by
having them formulate their own thoughts which is why you know your school
teachers used to say put it
in your own words it's actually very good advice if they would explain what
that means it's like
if you have to conjure up the thoughts and you have to articulate them then
they change you
and so well and so this program has had
the the the the the effects have been absolutely overwhelming for us as
researchers because it's very
very difficult to produce an intervention that actually has a positive effect
on people you know
you hope it does but generally when you test it out it's like no it doesn't do
what you thought it
did or sometimes it even has the reverse effect that sounds fascinating how do
people have how can
someone a regular person have access yeah they it's called self-authoring so
that's s-e-l-f
authoring like like writing a book self-authoring.com and the programs i gave
away the future authoring
program i think it might still be free um it was yeah it is till the end of
november i i did a video
called message to millennials where because one of the things jonathan height
said about uh he called
carl marx the patron saint of the social justice warriors and john stuart mill
the patron saint of
people say who stood for objective truth and freedom of expression and i
thought that was really smart
he said brown university is number one for social justice warrior universities
in chicago for truth
universities but one of the things that marx has over john stuart mill is that
marx is the social
revolutionary and young people like to think about ways to change the world
right and that's actually a
positive part of their development it's a stage that the developmental
psychologist jean piaget called
the messianic stage and he associated that with late adolescence it's like
while young people want to
change the world the problem is is that that's been harnessed into attempts to
change other people but
that isn't what you should do if you want to change the world you should change
yourself and i don't
mean that in some cliched sense i i mean it in the sense that alexander solzhenitsyn
said when he
analyzed the soviet union he said don't be thinking that the line that divides
good from evil runs down
a political spectrum or or or countries or something like that it runs down
right down the middle of your
soul and if you want to sort out the world then what you do is you sort
yourself out it's a serious
business right they say it's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a
city and that's the truth
because you're complicated and there are horrible monsters inside of you that
need to be tamed and to
and to be brought and to be brought into alignment and submission so that you
can be a powerful and useful
person and um i gave away the future authoring program as part of this video i
made suggesting to
millennials that instead of rushing out there to change the world by changing
other bad people
that they should look inward and sort themselves out properly and um i think we've
given away about
four or five thousand of those programs so far now you said it's free till the
end of november and then
what happens with it it's well the self the future authoring program is
regularly 14.95 and the whole
self-authoring suite which involves it's a program that helps you write an
autobiography so it helps you
sort out things about your past that are still burdening you you can tell if if
you have a
memory that's more than 18 months old approximately and when you pull that
memory up to mind if you
still have an emotional reaction that means you haven't fully articulated the
memory you haven't
analyzed it causally you haven't you haven't freed yourself from its grasp and
you're carrying it like a
weight and your brain responds to that like the more more weight you're
carrying like that more baggage
let's say the more of the stress hormone cortisol your brain produces and
cortisol makes you old
some of this work has been done by james pennebaker at the university of texas
at austin because he
he started to pioneer these sorts of writing programs and he found that if
people wrote about uncertain
things past present or future so they could be traumatic things they could be
uncertain things
that their physical health improved and he he did a lot of detailed research
trying to figure out why
that was and basically came down to the explanation that it was something like
an uncertainty reduction
mechanism at work because your brain is always figuring out how well situated
are you in the world
how much do you not know compared to how much have you mastered and you can
tell that you've mastered
things because when you go somewhere and you act things turn out the way you
want them that's an
indication of mastery and your brain is sort of keeping track across your whole
life of how many places
you've been where things haven't worked out compared to how many places you
have been where they have
worked out and if all those places in your past where things haven't worked out
you need to map
and master and that that decreases the existential load on you but that
actually decreases your
psychophysiological load it makes you healthier it makes you less stressed and
so we put all that
together in this self-authoring suite to help people write about their past to
sort it out in a in a
detailed autobiography it asks you questions about your past it says divide
your life up into six epochs
and then divide each of those that might be say oh birth to kindergarten and
then maybe elementary
school and then maybe junior high school however you want to do it and then to
write about the
emotionally significant events in each of those epochs and then to describe
their effects on you and then
to analyze how you did in those situations what you might have done differently
what you might do
differently in the future to straighten out your past and i've done that with
my students in my maps of
meaning class for about the last 10 years and some people have written 15 000
words it's not that uncommon
for students to write 15 000 words in their autobiography wow so that's such
great advice that's such great
advice about reconciling with your past because so many people just carry it
around yeah well if you're
if you're thinking about your past what it means is you haven't analyzed the
causal change because you might
say well why do you remember your past well you might say well it's in order to
have an objective you know
record of the past it's like it has nothing to do with that there's only one
reason you remember the past
and that's to be prepared for the future that's why you remember the past and
so what you're supposed
to do is take the past and extract out from it wisdom and wisdom is the ability
to avoid stumbling
blindly into ditches and so you think well here's a time in my past i stumbled
blindly into this horrible
ditch and terrible things happened to me it's like okay you need to take that
apart you need to figure
out how was it that that events conspired with your participation voluntarily
or involuntarily so that
that terrible consequence emerged you ne