LISTEN: Brian's full interview with JORDAN PETERSON

It turns out new hires in 2023, according to a new study, are totally unprepared for work and life.

Not saying everybody, but a lot of them. Psychologist and author Dr. Jordan Peterson joins us now. Dr. Peterson, great to see you.

Thank you very much. So when this study popped up, we thought you got to weigh in on this. They say that Gen Zers come in, they're sincere, but if they have no necessary instinct on what to do next, find them a lot sitting idly by waiting for instructions on what to do next, does that make sense to you? Something about this generation that would have trouble being self-motivated? Well, I think that if you set up an education system that's designed to do nothing but demoralize young people and to convince them that their ambition is dangerous and, while even world-threatening for that matter, a manifestation of patriarchal oppression on the social front, and then a danger to the survival of the planet on the natural front, then and you don't do anything to foster that ambition and to channel it into a manner that might be productive and to tell young people why their ambition might be useful, then you're going to get exactly that. So you hit what you aim at if you try hard enough, and the education system has been trying to demoralize people for 60 years. One of the things that really stuns me, you know, I haven't been able to figure this out yet, I've been trying to talk to Republican governors about this. I cannot understand why Conservatives have been daft enough to allow the faculties of education to retain their hammerlock on teacher certification for the last 60 years.

It's insane. You mean the criteria to get the certification? Exactly. You have to be trained in a faculty of education to become a teacher.

Why? They're the most woke element of the entire rotten university carcass, and they have the hammerlock on 50% of the state budgets. You know, the Conservatives are always complaining about the culture war. It's like, well, you handed all the young people to the faculties of education, right? Their research is terrible. It's low rate.

Their students are generally very incompetent, comparatively speaking, on the academic front. You know, it's foolish. And this is the outcome.

It's not surprising. And it's a way to work on the foundation. And when you have an RNC chair or a DNC chair, if you have an agenda, that's what to work on. Don't get Mr. and Mrs. candidate elected. Start focusing on the direction you want the country in and find out how to give people an education that will allow them to very least think, but not what to think. Well, the left wingers in the 1960s were far seeing enough, the more radical types, to envision a decades-long march through the institutions, right? And one of their goals was the capture of educational institutions.

And that's happened completely. And that's been absolutely abetted by Conservatives who tend to get lost in the details. And well, then you think, now you have young people who are demoralized and directionless. Well, they're never taught anything about how to acquire a direction.

They're not taught anything about how to acquire a direction. You know, we did a study. I used this program I developed called future authoring. We did a study where we had three studies, actually, where we had university students sit down essentially for 90 minutes, 90 minutes. This was it. And write out a goal, a series of goals for their life, right?

Who could they be in five years across seven important dimensions of their life and where might they be that would be terrible if they didn't get their act together. We dropped their dropout rate 50% and raised their grade point average 30 by 35%, three separate studies. So that's all you have to do if you want to motivate young people is to teach them a bit of visionary discipline and encourage it. And we do the opposite of that. Plus we terrify them, trigger warnings. We tell them that everything's dangerous. We tell the earth is burning up.

There's that too. And we're headed for the apocalypse. And your ambition is making it worse. Which I think the pandemic is so interesting on that is because I think adults too said to themselves, they forced, most of the population was forced to put their life on pause and just said, slow down, stop, go home. No, we're making you go home.

So not me. We, I was lucky enough to keep working, but I had to work remotely. Everyone's life changed. And people took a deep breath and they said, why am I in this job? Why is it necessary for me to do this?

If life does stop, nothing will change. It seems like our population got off the treadmill and said, why, why, why get back on? And they're having trouble getting back on when they get back on. They're not as motivated because they don't know why they're doing it. And you said to me in the break on Fox and friends this weekend, it's because they don't have goals. They don't have a vision. If you have a vision that leads to happiness.

Why? Because you have a mission. You have a direction because you know what you want the end game to be. And that's back to your 15 minutes. You put that 50 minutes and you find out what your end game is.

Don't tell me you don't know, work on it. It does two things. Having a goal. Well, if you have a goal and it's a collective goal that unites people. So a collective vision is what unites people because then everyone is heading in the same direction. Everyone regards the same things as positive. Everybody uses the same structure to protect themselves from anxiety and their emotions are aligned. So a goal, a united goal, a collective goal is what unites us.

All right. Then on the individual front, if you have a goal and you see yourself taking steps towards it, that is what produces positive emotion and positive motivation, that enthusiastic desire to get up and go. And it also stops anxiety because you either have a goal or you're fragmented. If you're fragmented, you don't know which direction to go in. That gives you too many directions. That makes you anxious.

That's what anxiety is. I don't even know where to go. I'm sorry. I'm out.

Yeah. And I think that what you just said with that 15 minutes is so important because especially with teenagers, just in college, just graduating, I don't really know what I want to do. What do you want to do?

Well, that's fine to know that, but you got to take action to solve that. To do that, you got to go take action to go find out what does Dr. Jordan Peterson do? Why does he seem so fulfilled?

What about the guy down the block that owns a garage? Why does he seem happy every day? Well, he always wanted to be his own business goals, own shots.

He wanted to help people, but you have to go work at finding out what is effective. I think you have an obligation to make the most out of life. And I think people get the warm, uh, definition on happiness. What is happiness? People, happiness is not high five and necessarily smiling.

It's having a mission. Well, it's also not the gratification of immediate desire. Like there's actually two forms of positive emotion. There's, there's the emotion that you feel, let's say after having a good meal after Thanksgiving dinner, and that's just satiation.

Okay. But satiation puts you to sleep right now. It's pleasant because you don't need anything, but it isn't, it isn't motivating. Motivation comes into pursuit. You have to be pursuing a goal. And so then you have to figure out what your goal is.

And it's not optional. You know, the other thing for people to think about is, well, you know, you might say, well, I'm the sort of person that doesn't plan. It's like, well, that's cause you're afraid. That's part of the reason. And you should overcome that.

But it's also the case that if you don't have your plan, someone else has a plan for you and whatever responsibility you abdicate will be taken up by tyrants and whatever direction you don't provide for yourself will be provided by other people who don't have your best interest in mind. That's how it works. So, Dr. Peterson, I watched you too, in the break, people like young men, especially walking up to you, can I have your autograph asking you a quick question? So you're helping people. And that must be a good feeling. A lot of people think, well, how do we, how do I feel satisfied?

One of the things I think is universal is there's nothing better than helping somebody. And one of the things you can do when you have a family on a regular basis, you're training, you're solving problems, bring them into practice, bring, get them to a better school, go and doing your best to be, to make an effort, to be a good parent. And that leads me to what would be an absence in my life without a family.

It would just be, it would almost be like not having an appendage. And now I also see in America, more and more people having less kids or no kids, deciding not to get married or deciding to be childless. And I respect everybody who makes that decision.

That's fine. But do you think it points to a bigger story in the world today, in this country today? Well, one of the points that I've put forward that has become rather markedly popular is the notion that the meaning that sustains you in times of trouble will be found as a consequence of adopting responsibility.

See, and this is another thing conservatives haven't been very good at communicating to young people because conservatives tend to be somewhat finger wagging in their morality. You should do this. And you know, fair enough. There are things you should do, but there's a better story there. And the story is the one that you started to outline, which is, well, if you look at this, if you look at what you have at hand, when times get rough, let's say, which they certainly will, you'll find that most of the genuine self-esteem that you feel and the cessation of anxiety and the pursuit of happiness is a consequence of bearing responsibility, right?

You bear responsibility for yourself over the long run, for your wife or your husband, over the long run, for your family, for your community. And that's a reciprocal interaction. So you'll get paid back by the people you're helping for doing that. But it's also was an intrinsic source of meaning.

No, no, you do it. You do it because everything works if you do that. So the other thing you see, we thought for a long time, and this is actually could be laid at the feet of psychologists to some degree that your happiness or even your mental stability is somehow an internal thing. It's psychological, but that's not exactly right. Your mental health and your happiness. So your freedom from anxiety and your happiness is dependent on the harmony that you establish within the systems that you're embedded. So you can't be sane and happy without a long-term partner. And the data on that is quite clear because married people are a lot happier than unmarried people, okay? You can't be sane and together within a couple without having a family.

It might be your parents and your siblings, but it should also be children because you have to knit that together. And then your family can't function without a functioning neighborhood and then a community and then a state. And the sanity is the harmony between all those levels.

It's not something you carry around inside you. And it's partly key to sanity being embedded at all those levels because none of us are capable in and of ourselves of regulating ourselves. Like when you and I are even talking right now, the communication regulates. We regulate each other with the communication, right?

You're saying things, I'm saying things. We're trying to keep it interesting. We're trying to move forward in a productive manner.

They're both stimulated and intrigued. Well, right, right. So we have a container, which is the goal, and then there's interest being manifested. And if we do that right, we pull everyone in.

Well, that's a good situation, right? And then your emotions are well-regulated when all of that is happening. The key to that is responsibility. You know, we talked on the Fox and Friends episode about the fact that young men are turning more towards conservatism. And I really believe, and I've watched this a lot, that that's because they're starting to understand more explicitly the utility of adopting a heavy load of responsibility. I mentioned that, you know, I think the girls will go along with that in a few years.

And I was thinking that through the other night. Boys go out with younger girls. There's a dichotomy between the political position of boys and girls that are the same age, but girls the same age as high school boys aren't their peers.

The boys are with younger girls. The younger girls will change in that more conservative direction if the boys change first. Well, that's what will happen from the Fox News Podcasts Network. I'm Ben Domenech, Fox News contributor and editor of the transom.com daily newsletter. And I'm inviting you to join a conversation every week. It's the Ben Domenech Podcast.

Subscribe and listen now by going to foxnewspodcasts.com. You are, you're a deep thinker. I'm wondering, do you set time aside to think?

Will you just wait for a gap in your day and stare out the window? Like where do you get these thoughts and conclusions from? Because I also think one of your 12 axioms for a happy life, one of which is you can learn something from everyone you're with.

So where do you, you don't think you know everything, but your viewers do and the people that buy tickets do. Where do you have time to make your conclusions and grow as a person and as an intellect? Well, I have podcasts twice a week. And so I'm always listening to someone who's smart because I find podcast guests who have something to say that I want to hear. And so when I talk to them, I have the opportunity for them to teach me. So the audience is benefiting and you're benefiting.

Absolutely. You know, and the good podcast hosts are just learning and then they bring everyone along for the ride. And that's what I'm trying to do with my podcast. I always invite people from whom I want to hear because I presume they know something I don't and they do.

So that's helpful. And then I write every day and writing, writing is the most formal way of thinking, right? Cause you have to ask yourself a question. You have to wait for the answers.

That's kind of a revelation. Then you have to analyze the answer. And that sort of thinking is extremely useful. If you want to lay things out clearly we developed someone tell you, they're not a writer. If you want to be a better thinker, you should be a writer, right?

Yes. Well, and do you have to ask yourself too, why you would bother thinking? And the answer to that is because if you think things through, then you can act more effectively. I mean, that's the point of thought. Thought is substitute for action.

So Alfred North Whitehead said, we die so that we think so our thoughts can die instead of us. Right. And so, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's too deep for me.

You also have an essay app. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we will watch you right now.

Go on Matilba, right? I'm going to skip on that advice. And the essay app helps you.

Yeah. At essay.app. Well, we built this word processor essentially that teaches people how to produce and edit because writing, reading, reading has, and thinking has three components. You have to have a problem that you want to solve. It has to be a real problem, right?

It has to beset you to some degree. Then you have to inquire humbly for a solution, and then you'll get ideas that pop up or you can read more and you get the ideas that start to percolate. But a lot of those are going to be second rate ideas that, you know, other people have already disproved, but you got to get them down. Then you have to edit and organize. And this essay.app process that we put together teaches people exactly how to do that. So if you're writing, you have to concentrate on each word because you should use the right word. You have to make the phrases proper and they have to be organized within sentences. And the sentences have to be sequenced properly within paragraphs. And then the paragraph sequenced properly to make the argument. You have to edit at all those levels.

And people don't know that, right? Ask, produce, organize and edit. Well, then you're clearheaded and then you have a pathway forward and then you're more effective communicator and everything works out better for you. And that's partly why people shouldn't use chat GPT and these AI systems to write for them. It's like, well, you can do your damn assignment, but you're not going to learn to think and you're not going to have any knowledge at hand. Well, that'll just cripple you in the future. Like, for example, with, I used to be good at directions when I used to get a Hagstrom and now my instincts have dropped through the floor. I just go, okay, where am I going?

I hit in the address. I don't even think. Yeah. I'm not even thinking with what part of the island I'm at or where I'm going. So, uh, right. So you don't know where you are with AI. I'm going to stop thinking, why do I need it? That's a really good example actually, because you think to navigate through the world, right? And so if you abdicate your responsibility to think, then you don't know where you are and you don't know where you're going.

And that's not a recipe for either happiness or success. So the navigation analogy is exactly the right one. Uh, real quick on education, you talked about accommodation. So someone has a ADD, they're told dyslexia or other things in the public school. Now there's a lot of accommodations. Give me, I'm going to give you more time for your test or things to that nature.

I have trouble tracking across the line. You think it's a common accommodations in many cases don't show progress can, can be limiting. Why? Well, the problem with the accommodation hypothesis is something like the advantage is, well, you want to do what you can to help people who might have obstacles that could be overcome to learn. That's not unreasonable, but the problem with the accommodation hypothesis is, well, what happens when you have an actual problem to solve? You're not going to be accommodated. You're not going to be accommodated in a workforce that requires genuine competition.

Because if you're accommodated in the workforce that requires genuine competition, you're just going to be taken out. There's no time for that. And you might say, well, there should always be time. It's like, well, not if there are important things at stake.

Well, it's just, there's going to, you that's foolish, right? Because when you're making important decisions, you're always balancing one catastrophe against another. You don't have the option that everything's going to turn out.

And so the problem with accommodation, well, first of all, it's going to be gamed and it's being gamed like mad. And second, it gives the person who's being accommodated to the wrong picture of the world to which they're going to adapt. You think about this with parenthood. How should you treat your kids? Well, as a mother and father, you should be a proxy for the world, maybe a slightly more merciful proxy. But basically the message you send your kids about their behavior is the same message that the world is going to send them, should be. Because otherwise you're not preparing them for the world. So maybe your kid's annoying as hell to you and your wife, and you don't do anything about it because you think, well, we're all mercy. It's like, that's just fine until your kid has to make a friend or deal with an adult that's not you, in which case they're going to get slaughtered. There's nothing merciful about that. And if you accommodate people beyond what the environment itself would allow, you misinform them about the world they're going to inhabit.

And plus it can be gamed and it's being gamed constantly. And lastly, I just noticed too, as much as you know the crowds that you draw, you told me you're going over to the Middle East where you have this huge foundation. It's unbelievable what you've done. I always find too, when you talk about yourself and your relationships, you sound like you have the same issues that everybody has. Of course. But I think people, that also helps tell the Jordan Peterson story. I'm trying hard to be successful relaying what I learned, but I'm still dealing with the same stuff. Well, it's important for people to know that people who are successful, let's say, aren't the people who are fortunate enough to have no problems. No one is in the category of fortunate enough to have no problems.

People like that don't exist. Everybody deals with aging and death and severe illness. You've dealt with that and your wife at the same time. Yes, yes.

And my daughter too, all of us at the same time. And you know, it's the case for everyone. Now you meet people now and then, and I met lots of people like this in my clinical practice who have so many things going wrong at the same time that, you know, it's just an utterable catastrophe. But the fact that there are people like that, and there are people who are clearly, clearly experiencing higher levels of misfortune say than the norm, doesn't mean that the successful people are the ones who have no problems. That's just, the successful people are the people who keep on going and they're fortunate enough to be able to do that often, to keep on going regardless of what's being thrown at them. And that's in the nature of success, right? Don't take for granted one day that it's going to continue if you put your hand, take your foot off the gas.

Yeah, that as well. Online school, you and your daughter working together. What should we know and how do we get it? Well, we've got about 30 courses recorded so far in a studio in Miami. They look very good.

They're very professionally produced. We're trying to find the best lecturers in the world. So if you think you're a good lecture and you want to participate, give that some thought. That's Peterson Academy.

We hope we'll be ready to roll in November. We want to make sure that we have the best lectures that we can possibly provide on the most germane topics. And then we're going to ally that with a very stringent testing and accrediting system so that if you are a graduate of this particular institution, the people who hire you will know that you learned what you were aiming at learning and that you did the proper work.

And that's extraordinarily important because employers need to know that absolutely. Dr. Jordan Peterson, I know you had a few hurdles to clear to get here. I really appreciate your time. I know our audience does best success. Come in your direction. And well, if you want to go see you in person, just go to Jordan B. Peterson dot com tickets on sale for a show I'm going to do in London. I started this alliance. I'm participating in this alliance for responsible citizenship, which we're trying to produce a worldview that isn't for the future, that isn't predicated on fear and compulsion. And so there are tickets on sale for London now at the O2 for the public part of that. So, wow.

You don't do things small. Dr. Peterson, thanks so much. Hey, you bet to see you, sir. Thanks for the invitation. Listen to this show ad free on Fox News podcast plus on Apple podcast, Amazon music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.