Educate Your Children! | Jeff Sandefer | EP 336
Should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? Get the hell up! Get your act together! Adopt some responsibility! Put your life together! Develop a vision! Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within. Be a force for good in the world, and that'll be the adventure of your life.
[Music]
And you know, my great-grandfather was president of the University; he's buried on their campus. I mean, I came from a—my wife's mother, Joanna, was one of the incredible teachers in Oklahoma City. In fact, the quick story that's worth telling about that—we're having one of these exhibitions I talked about, and this woman comes up to me, and we're in Austin, Texas, and she comes up, and she said, "You know, this reminds me of my eighth-grade science teacher." And she said, "I live in Oklahoma City. I came to see this, and it reminds me of her." And she started describing this wonderful teacher who was Socratic and who did all the things. She said, "Um," she got finished, and I said, "And her name was Joanna Anderson." Oh, and the lady said, "How in the world could you have known that?" And I said, "Because that's her daughter, Laura."
And the woman just started crying, and she said, "That lady changed my life."
Right? So adults have an important role to play in a child's life. Yeah, that role shouldn't be to be an authoritarian, you know, having order to sit at a desk where a bell rings every 45 minutes. Yeah, that's not the teacher's fault; that's the system, right? It's the system. Now you're participating in the system.
Yeah, but I always try to do—you know, I try to divide; the teachers are often the heroes and sometimes not. The system's the problem, and I don't think there's anyone who doesn't think the system is broken.
Hello everyone! I'm pleased today to be speaking with Jeff Sandifer, who's someone I've known for a number of years and worked together on a variety of projects. Um, we're going to talk today about childhood education and about his background. Depending on which platform you're viewing, Jeff is an entrepreneur and a Socratic teacher, which is a teacher, by the way, who tends to ask questions rather than provide answers. He began his first business at the age of 16, then trained as an engineer, and then went on to graduate from the Harvard Business School. He has started and run many successful businesses, the most recent of which is Sandifer Capital Partners, an oil and gas investment firm with several billion dollars in assets.
He's also started multiple academic programs in schools. I'm going to concentrate on that today, such as the Acton School of Business, whose students were named the most competitive MBAs in the nation by the Princeton Review. He's extended this work over the last 15 years into the K-12 realm, kindergarten through grade 12, with the Acton Academy, a cutting-edge program that blends the one-room schoolhouse, the Socratic method, and 21st-century technology to aid each student in changing the world— themselves and the world.
So, Jeff, we get a chance to sit down and talk today and share that with a very large number of people. So it's—we, Jeff and I were talking before this podcast about what we wanted to talk about. And last night we thought about construing this in terms of educational reform, but really the proper way to set this conversation up is to talk about education, not so much reform, but education per se. And so let's start a little bit by talking about your background, though, and we might as well go back to, I guess, your early experiences in early adulthood and let's lay that out, and then we can place in the educational discussion as appropriate.
Sure! And I, you know, I think, as you say today, that I'm here more as a father and a husband, you know, than an educator or even a Socratic teacher. But I really started life as an entrepreneur—at age 16, I had my first real business. We made a hundred thousand dollars in profits, which, as old as I am back then, that was real money.
By age 26, I'd taken a million-dollar investment and within four years turned it into 500 million dollars in profits. So what was your first business?
Uh, oil and gas exploration.
F-16?
Yeah, 16! We were actually painting tanks out in the hot West Texas sun, and my father had had me working in the oil field as a laborer, and I didn't want to do that anymore. So I found I could hire the high school football coaches at our local high school, and instead of paying workers by the hour, I paid them by the job. They hired their football players underneath them, and their productivity was nine times higher than the average cruise.
So we went out and competed, charged two-thirds what our competitors charged, and had 80 percent profit margins. So why were they more efficient?
Uh, because they were getting paid by the tank, by what they did. You had the incentives, and so they would show up at, you know, break of dawn and work till dusk. The people who were being paid in those days two dollars and fifteen cents an hour had no incentive to work hard. So it was just purely incentive work ethic. You can imagine football players and coaches are conscientious.
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, it was a home run. Why did they take you seriously when you were so young?
I think because if you think about coaches during the summer, they had nothing else to do. What do they have to get a chance to work with their team too, right? And what do they have to lose? Right? They're not doing anything anyway. So it was kind of one of those things where you could put together pieces of a deal to make the pipe bigger for everyone, right? Right? And it just worked. It's exciting to give people an opportunity to experience a direct return on their immediate investment.
I mean, one of the things that's nice about hands-on labor, carpentry and contracting, and so forth, is you immediately see what you produce, and the harder you work, the more there is of it. And so, yes, obviously, you built those incentives in. And so then you took that money and you further invested it, you said, into something that generated a million dollars, and how did that happen?
Well, I actually didn't. I went off and got an engineering degree; I went to Harvard Business School, and then when I got out of Harvard Business School, I raised a million dollars, and we went out and we drilled the oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico. And, you know, through hard work, a lot of luck, good timing, we turned that million dollars into 500 million dollars in profits in four years for our investors and our employees and ourselves. And so I'm at now age 29. I've got more money than I'll ever spend. I don't spend much money.
Yeah, I'm a cheap guy.
Yeah, yeah. What do I do next? And so I decided to take a year off to become a Socratic teacher and lead case discussions at the University of Texas MBA program, and that changed my life. And so for 35 years now—I've been going on 40 years!—I've been a Socratic teacher.
Okay, so let's define that for everyone.
Sure.
So, Socratic teacher and this case method. Yes, so let's go into what constitutes a Socratic teacher first. So, um, you're put in the shoes of someone facing a real-life dilemma where there is no right answer. Their moral choices—you're going to have to trade off efficiency and money and what you want to do with your life, and then you've worked maybe 10 hours preparing this case. This 10 to 100-page case might be about Enron; it might be about Acton Academy. We have a Harvard case about Acton, our school. And then it's, "Mr. Peterson, you're not a doctor." Then you're going to be younger. "Mr. Peterson, what would you do? Invest or not?" Right? And so you then you have to make your case their counter cases, and you know, the Socratic method is interesting.
The way we practice it, there's only two questions: Would you do a or b next?
Right, right.
And then the second question is, what do you mean by a?
Yeah, it's definitional. So the entire Socratic method is just helping people understand what to do next and why and when you say what you're going to do, exactly what are you going to do? Right? So it's the interrogation of a story.
So yes, the thing about a story that makes it unique is that it provides a deeply contextualized representation of something complex. Yes, and you see this happening in a court case when we're trying to decide whether someone is guilty or innocent. Really, what we do is set up a dialogue between competing narratives, yes? Right? And so the defense a bones, the defense narrative, and the prosecution mounts the prosecution narrative, and then what you're attempting to do is weigh the narratives. Yes.
Now, using the Socratic method, as well as you pointed out, you're going to be asking people questions and getting them to inquire after definitions, and then you said this is very strategically oriented, so it has to produce a binary outcome—a decision-related outcome. Yes, with the strategy associated with that.
Yes. In psychotherapeutic practice, one of the things you learn very rapidly—pretty much all therapists of any school of repute who are well-trained know this—is that you can't really give people advice about what to do; you have to ask them to delineate out the problem. You have to ask them to lay out what they might see as a solution, and you can interrogate that and then encourage them to step through all the intermediary steps towards the solution.
And I think the reason that works is that unless people walk through all of that—if they're just delivered the prepackaged solution—they actually have no idea how to implement it, but also no real motivation to implement it.
Yeah, there's no drama to it. There's no part of life. I mean, something I've learned from listening to you, you know, about the power of a story—you don't have any of that. And also, for the real world, there's no action. I mean, there are consequences; eventually, you're going to go out and do these things yourself.
And I think I was a straight-A student and, you know, a good student when I was younger, but it was all about learning to know. And so this method is more about learning to learn: what are the routines and the recipes that we go through learning to do something that requires courage? And then that leads to learning to be who you're going to become.
Yeah, well, it seems to me like it's something like an analysis, not so much of what the facts tell you the next step should be, because you never really get to that point. It's more like a delineation of the principles by which you're going to operate and an exploration of what principles you're willing to put faith in. And I would say the reason I would use the language of faith is because you have to leap into the unknown, absolutely, right?
And so you want to be informed while you do that, but you don't have the data at hand and you won't until you run the experiment, right? So, and so where were you doing the case studies?
Well, so I learned the method at the Harvard Business School, and then I took that in my own exploration of trying to figure out what to do with my own life. At age 28, I was teaching a room full of 28-year-old graduate students at the University of Texas, and so that was—and you know, as you said, what you're doing, if you do a hundred cases, you're seeing pattern after pattern after pattern—much like the stories you might see in the Bible—and you're learning through these patterns and to have the courage to then go do it yourself, as you point out, in the face of uncertainty.
Yeah, well, you know, you're doing something that brought up two ideas for me. One is, well, you're exposing yourself to a number of diverse cases, right? Yes, and then what you're doing—you do the same thing that these advanced language processing models do. Yes, you're looking for commonalities across the narratives, and as you gather more and more narratives within a certain domain, you start to understand the underlying principles. Yes, so this is what happened in the book of Exodus, by the way, when because before Moses has the Commandments revealed to him, he sits for an unknown amount of time—dawn till midnight every day—judging the Israelites and their complaints, and so we hear thousands and thousands of cases, right? And then you can imagine that the Revelation—it's the revelation of the substructure of what constitutes justice itself.
Yes, and but you can't get to that without this case analysis. So why, with all the money at your disposal and the hypothetical freedom that that might have bestowed upon you, why did you decide to well, stay actively working, stay actively employed?
Now, you were a professor at UT Texas?
Yes, I was an adjunct.
You're an adjunct in the business school?
In the business school. Okay, but—and so you decided to continue doing that, and what was driving you to do that?
Because I was fascinated with asking questions. And, you know, the difference from a judicial setting and the way we practice the case method is in the judicial setting, eventually a jury or a judge is going to decide what's right. In our setting, it's the actor themselves playing out the act.
So I was fascinated, and frankly, I didn't know what to do with my own life. I mean, I had first started my first business to get out of the hot sun; I started the second business so I could make more money than my father. I wanted to overcome him.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, but then I did that, and it's like, "You're 28; what next?" Right? I didn't know, so I went to actually learn myself and by, you know, asking questions and digging in. And then were you ever tempted on the hedonistic front? I mean, you're pretty young at that point; you have the world at your feet in some real sense.
Well, I'm not exactly Brad Pitt, so I don't think the hedonistic part of chasing girls—
Well, no, it doesn’t help. It does help, apparently; it didn't help enough. But, yeah, no, no. I just never was interested; the hedonistic thing just didn't really appeal to me.
Well, I had a father who I loved dearly, but he was rich one year and broke the next, but always lived as if we had money, and there was something about that I didn't like. Now, I'm sure there's something our children don't like about me, so that's a typical father-son, you know, judging it.
But I think that it set up something in me that I've always been more about competence than prestige, and so chasing prestige, to me, just never felt right. And so the hedonistic roots would have felt—prestige over competence is narcissism.
Yeah, so I just—that just didn't—wasn't appealing. But I was lost.
And so how long lost?
When I was lost at 29. Uh, people only ask—they're only desperate when there's no hope and they hit rock bottom, yeah? Or you get to the top and you ask, "Is that all there is?" Right? So I'm at the top, and I have to ask, "Is that all there is?" It all there is.
And I said, "I don't know what to do except to go socratically explore with a group of us."
Right? Well, that's a good thing; if you're somewhere and you don't know what to do, exploring seems like a good idea!
Right? It is definitely the case that the only genuine pathway to exploration is something like the pursuit of the questions that honestly plagued you.
Yeah, right? And so you know, and there's a destiny in that too; that's extremely interesting because a different set of problems plagues each individual.
Yes, right? So you're going to have doubts; everyone does. But you're going to have your doubts, and the strange thing about your own doubts is that your doubts contain the seeds of your progress. Yes, because if you pursue those doubts—first of all, they're stopping you because they're doubts. If you pursue them and you rectify them, then you're going to find a pathway forward, but you can't do that without honest questioning.
Well, and to foreshadow what will happen later, you know this set up everything that my wife, Laura, who really gets credit for the schools we've built—which sets up everything. It's the hero's journey story, right? It's Pilgrim's Progress. It's the hero going out looking for the Grail, fighting dragons and monsters, and then you realize when you get to the end, it wasn't about the Grail at all. That's how the hero changed in the process.
And so it really began to set up that pattern over and over and over again, right? Eternal transformation, right? As a consequence of learning!
You know, one of the things I've thought about Joe Rogan a lot because Rogan's success on the media front, I would say, is unparalleled. Yes, he has the number one podcast in a hundred countries. Wow, right? It's not there. I think he's the most significant media figure who ever lived, possibly, in terms of sheer numbers and breadth of reach, and he runs a shoestring operation.
It's really just him and his producer. He picks all his guests, and all he does is ask them the questions that he actually has, and what's so interesting about that is, well, it's made Joe an incredibly well-informed person. I mean, yeah, because he's, I think he's done some thousands of podcasts now, so he's had thousands of hours of case studies, let's say. But he also can bring his listeners on the same journey because, yes, the probability that he's asking an honest question that that will be a question that resounds with his audience is extremely high.
And it's so interesting to see how much power there is in that, is that his stripped-down approach—which also requires virtually no editing and certainly no special effects—his stripped-down approach is the most compelling approach, and I think it is because it's based on an honest Socratic method.
But it does require curiosity, and it requires a genuine interest and true choices, and one of the hardest things is a Socratic teacher is if you never ask a question you know the answer to, it has to be an equal balanced question; it has to be fair, right? And so if you're trying—otherwise, putting your thumb on the scale, the other person immediately will know it.
And so I, when I've listened to you on Joe Rogan and Rogan's podcasts, he's incredibly good at listening and asking a very honest question.
Yeah, there's no—and people would spot it if he was.
Absolutely!
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There is an old—a very old religious insistence that pride is a cardinal sin and that humility is the virtue that counters pride, and then you have to ask, well, what does it mean—what does humility mean? And it means something like admission of ignorance.
Yeah, but what's so useful about that? And why it's a virtue and why it's something very useful to practice is that if you do admit to your ignorance—which is to note what you don't know—and to dare ask it, right, then you immediately rectify. I told my daughter, for example—oh, you know—very straightforwardly, "You only have to ask a stupid question once if you listen to the answer."
Right! So she's been in many situations where, you know, she was in over her head, like well, like we all are, yes, very often. Like me today!
Well, and it is very tempting to pretend that you know and to not ask the stupid question, but first of all, almost everybody around who's participating, let's say in the conversation, has the same stupid question. And second, if you don't ask it, well, then you remain stupid.
So that's not helpful.
Well, you know, I think this was a great lesson of like a lot I've learned about Parenthood and about having this same approach with your children. I mean, you know this, and I've seen you with with Julian up close of, you know, being generally interested but offering choices and listening and caring as a parent, and so, you know, I didn't have children at this point but I have a room for 28-year-olds that are bright, and we can explore life together in entrepreneurship and how you make money and what it means if you make money.
Um, and that ended up being—I spent quite a time at the University of Texas. We built up the entrepreneurship program; we won all sorts of awards, um, and then spun off our own business school.
Why did the—why—why was it well-received, do you think? And why was it also?
Two things: well-received by the students, but obviously, it was also well-received by the administration.
Okay, it was well-received. And you know enough about academia, the teachers—so the professors who were teachers loved us. What we did, though, is we had a very firm, very hard contract of what was required to be in the class. We graded on a forced curve when everyone else gave all A's. The harder we made the program, the more people we attracted.
Yeah, yeah!
And so, but at some point, I think our teachers, who were all entrepreneurs who had been successful, so all adjuncts won the Teacher of the Year award 11 out of 11 years, which—and how big a group was that?
Well, we for the—there were 141 professors, and our group of eight were teaching 25 of all the elective hours in the school as adjuncts.
Wow! As adjuncts and so being paid nothing?
Yes! So you can imagine what happens next in this story.
Yeah, right!
Right, right? So we're basically all fired; we all quit, depending on which story you want.
Yeah, yeah!
We go start our own school, and we focus on what—this would have been 2000, and what was I—so that was after eight years.
Yes, eight years. And what was the rationale for the firing slash quitting?
Probably that I was too disagreeable, which was fair.
Um, but I will say I got a call from inside the school from someone, and he said, "Look, a tinkered professor." And he said, "Look, I have to tell you they're going to fire half of you this summer and the other half at Christmas because—and we were at that point attracting more than half of all the students to the school and teaching a quarter of them." And they said they just, you know, the—the tingered political faculty just doesn't want you here.
So we decided we were going to teach one last class off campus—across the street from the campus. And um, 130 people showed up for no credit. They drove—credit, they drove from Waco, from Houston to Austin, from Dallas to Austin.
So they came from all over, including faculty from those schools, and we thought, "You know what? Maybe we should have our own MBA program."
Right? Now we knew nothing about that. That was impossible, right? No one ever told us you couldn't get a credit! But we managed to build a program; we ended up winning all sorts of awards from Princeton Review with really Navy Seals, Olympic athletes, and young entrepreneurs, and we built this hundred-hour-a-week, ten-month program that was just brutal but changed our lives and changed the lives of the students.
So that was right after you were at the University of Texas?
Yeah, yeah! We were fired, and it was right. The next thing we did was have this free class, and the next thing after that was launch our own NBA program.
And so what was the rationale for dispensing with you guys? I mean, it must have been somewhat difficult given the fact that, well, it was half the students; it was very popular.
Yeah! There was an outcry! But as the dean put it to the students at that point, "You are not our customers; our customers are the pursuit of scholarly knowledge."
And so your opinion doesn't really matter—is what they were told!
So anyway, we spun off; it was successful; it was a lot of fun. Um, and really, I'm now, you know, still doing some business things—mostly teaching this program's a lot of fun.
And then we come to kind of one of the most important things in my life, and that is, um, our two young boys are in Montessori School and they're just about—so you had them after you left the University of Texas and started this now independent program, right?
So this is—didn't have accreditation for the independent program? We did get accreditation. We did! We managed to get accreditation because we won all these awards, and they had to give us accreditation.
Who awarded you accreditation?
Uh, SACS. We were—we had SACS accreditation through a small university that my great-grandfather had been president of at the turn of the century, and SACS is—oh, the Southern Accrediting Association. So it's one of the regional accreditors, right? You got associated with a small college, but it didn't matter because as long as you have accreditation, right?
Right, right, right! And so accreditation was set up so that, well, so that in principle, so that there was some—what would you say? Some consistency, reliability, and validity to the accreditation of a degree. I mean, that's the theory.
That's the theory. What it really serves, of course, is a protection of the cartel, right? I mean, it's not really that—but we managed to get it. It wasn't an issue! Um, and, and you know, we built the program by the then—I've got these two children, Charlie and Sam, and they're about to leave from Montessori to get ready to go to elementary school.
So I go to see the very best teacher and the very best middle school in Austin that's teaching our daughter, who's older. And I said, "When should we move the boys into a regular school?" And I'll never forget this; this gentleman was an African-American; he looked like Abraham Lincoln—tall, stately— and he, he, and he said, "As soon as possible!" And I said, "Well, why?" And he said, "Well, once they've had that kind of freedom, they won't want to be chained to a desk for eight hours a day, and talk to them."
So get them in, get them in chains young! And I—I was kind of stunned, and I said, "Well, I don't blame them!" I just blurted that out, and he looked down at the ground for the longest time, and he looked up, and he had tears in his eyes, and he shook his head very quietly, and he said, "I don't either."
So I went home that day, and I told Laura, I said, "I don't know if we're going to homeschool; I don't know if we're going to start a school," but our boys—the best teacher in this town just told me not to put them in traditional school, so we're going to do something else."
Do you know Paul Gotti?
No.
Okay, Gotti—I hope I have his name right—he was a teacher of the year in New York State a number of years ago, and he wrote—a he died, unfortunately—I wanted to interview him, but that never was never possible. He was no admirer of the current education system, let's say, and he wrote a history of the education system which was extremely interesting.
He pointed out that the public education in the United States—I was investigating this because I was wondering why our school systems are so bad at fostering individual vision, yes? Because it's such a lack—I thought, why is there such a lot? There's something going on here.
Okay, the Prussians established the first public education system, and the reason they did it was because the Prussian emperor wanted to produce obedient soldiers. You know, disciplined, obedient soldiers.
No, I don't want to get cynical about that because in a society that requires a military, disciplined people who can follow rules are arguably necessary.
Now, obviously, that can go very badly, right? But we've got to give the devil his due, and the Prussians actually put forward a very effective military training system.
Now that was adopted in the United States in the late 1800s by industrialists—mostly self-proclaimed fascists. So at that time, of course, it wasn't Mussolini, Hitler-like fascism; it was far—the early precursors of that.
But they were people who believed that the state and the corporate world could integrate at the highest levels and there might be some utility in that, which is a very dubious claim nonetheless. So they noticed that they knew that all sorts of rural people were pouring into the cities to start working in factories, their kids needed to be cared for while they worked, and then their kids were likely to have factory jobs.
And so the purpose of the public education system—this is why there's rows of desks and factory bells and this insistence on timing—was to produce disciplined obedient workers, certainly not to produce people who were autonomous.
And um, that was adopted in the U.S.; the Japanese adopted it and militarized like mad, and part of the consequence of that was the outbreak of the Second World War!
But, but that being chained to a desk—that's not a bug; that was a feature! Right, right? And you know, you can also even say, well, let's give it some credence.
A rural worker, their time schedules must be like stringent than someone who's going to work on a factory, right? They're on an agrarian farm; they're on a farm. Yeah, you're much looser in your time sense, and it is the case that industrialization requires clocks, yes!
And so you have to give the devil his due, but in a somewhat post-industrial world, which is what we're in now, it's not obvious at all that obedient worker/slash soldier is the right model for human development. Right!
And so, okay, so back to yourself. So really not knowing any of that, which I would find out later, we just wanted something different for our children. So we started out with a blank sheet of paper. This is all about the time Khan Academy and some great new things on the internet are bubbling with the Socratic method and said, "What would we design for our children?"
And this is you and your wife.
Yeah, and my wife gets to be careful just like Tammy. Special Laura is the one that did all this, and I kind of come into the picture later. But she's, I mean, I'm helping from behind the scenes, but she's—I mean, I'm, I'm just helping. We start out with seven children.
Um, where did you get the other kids?
By talking to everybody in town and seeing who would be crazy enough to join us. Now, by that point, the acting MBA, named after Lord Acton, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
The acting MBA is pretty well known in town, so the fact we start this thing called Acton Academy—it has a little bit of linkage in Austin to be something people might trust us with their children. Right? Right?
So you've got a bit of—you've got a bit of communication classes.
Yeah, so there was enough reputational, you know, that we were able to attract some very committed families. The school takes off; it starts to grow.
Um, it's all based on one mission we stayed true to from the start—that every child who enters our school is a genius who deserves to find a calling that will change the world.
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That's Hallow.com/Jordan. Now, by genius, we don't mean 180 IQ; what we mean is a special talent at something because if you're the best plumber in town, right, you're going to make more money and be happier than the average Ivy League graduate.
Plus your customers won't be knee-deep in sewage, which is also—well, that's a good major plus! That's a very plus!
Yeah! You know, when I was at Harvard lecturing there, one of my students, who—you know Daniel Higgins?
Oh, yes!
Um, we were working on the formulation of theories of general cognitive ability and and then personality predictors of success at the same time Howard Gardner was working at the faculty of education there, and he produced this theory of multiple intelligences.
And it's a preposterous theory on psychometric and scientific grounds, partly because Gardner famously noted that he didn't really care about measurement, and yeah, that's a no-go if you're—it's like, well, there are multiple intelligences but we can't measure any of them.
Right, right!
But, you know, having said that again, you have to give the devil his due, is that cognitive ability does seem to have a unidimensional structure. There's sort of—there's one dimension of being smarter, not being smart.
And so, the smarter you are, the faster you can learn a complex job. And so for complex jobs, that's very useful. But the idea that there are multiple talents, that's a fine idea, you know, and you see that reflected more in temperament, is that open people are creative, and agreeable people like to take care of people, and disagreeable people are competitive and tough, and conscientious people are hardworking and dutiful, and extroverted people like socializing.
And so the idea that each person is composed of a composite of traits and that that composite is unique and that out of that unique composite something unique and valuable can emerge—that seems extraordinarily probable.
Well, and I'd say the biggest finding we've had has been that children are capable of far more than you've ever imagined.
Children will play down to an institutionalized system, but if freed, along with structure and responsibility and systems, they will build—are capable of incredible things.
You know, in the Michaela school, which takes a very different approach to you in the UK, it's an inner-city school and there's a wide range of general cognitive ability as a consequence, so you can imagine in a typical class of 30 kids, there would be kids with an IQ of 90 on the low end, likely up to maybe 85 on the low end, and then maybe up to 130 on the high end, right?
So a real distribution! But they're teaching at a very high rate, and 75 percent of their graduates get accepted to Russell Group universities in the UK, and Russell Group includes what, the big UK universities?
So they've managed to set up a system where regardless of that immense variability in innate intelligence, let's say, there's tremendous emphasis on rapid learning.
Well, so here's where we might differ a bit—or at least what we've discovered.
And what we've discovered is, you know, IQ, no question, is the most important determiner of success or, you know, socioeconomic success, but it's still only what, 25 percent?
Right! That seems about 25 percent!
So what we found is regardless of IQ, if we can build a tribe where every person there believes that they have a calling to change the world, that there is a place in that tribe—now, if my IQ is 100, I'm not going to be doing three-body orbital problems.
Right!
I mean, I just can't. Advanced physics—I can't do that, right? So that's okay; there are other things I can do.
Yeah! So what we've found is there's very little variability in the ability to learn to do things if you provide people with a compelling story and reason, yeah? If you provide them with a recipe—which is now you can find a recipe for anything on the internet—and if you provide them with some sort of rubric so they can among themselves judge it, and you provide them with some gamification, some way to keep score that's fun, it builds a tribe.
Yeah! And if you can do that, and we do this in groups of 36, the tribe is so complex and interesting; it's all about the tribe.
Once the tribe works, we get learning happening at a two- to three-times average rate. And most importantly, the academic subjects become unimportant; they all happen.
I mean, it happens at a rapid rate, but you're learning self-management, self-governance, and how to get along with people and build a culture. And you can have all the artificial intelligence you want; it can't do those three things.
Okay, so how—okay, so now let's go back to when you started building this school and walk through it step by step because I'd really like to understand more deeply how these schools operate.
Sure! You know, in the Michaela school that I referred to, it's very structured, yes, and the teachers do the guiding, and it's clear that the teachers are the ones in control.
And yes, I was very impressed when I went there, and her results are also very impressive. The children are very secure, and they're very pleased to be there— we had about six of them take us around, and they were just randomly selected from the school population, and I asked them a lot of questions, and so they're liking this.
Um, you're taking an approach that also requires the children to participate in their own self-organization, yes?
So you could imagine that you could have a system where the basic rules of engagement are established by the authorities, but the game is actually playable, or you could have a system where the game, if it's looser—which would be the system that you set up—where the demand for self-governance is placed in there to a large degree right at the beginning.
And, and so this is very similar to a top-down society that develops from the bottom up. We are providing, though—they don't have to invent democracy or Democratic Republic or a tyrannical government—we'll provide them with choices.
So you don't have to prevent everything from a blank sheet, but by experimenting, it's a very Hayek in the bottom-up series of experiments. And they learn by doing, and I'll tell you that, you know, the environment is, um, it's tyranny one week and Lord of the Flies the next, and they learn to find a medium between freedom and responsibility, and they're continually working on the society.
Okay, so what would the experience like—so how young—what's the youngest children that you have in the program?
Uh, the youngest will be preschool.
So, so five, four, five, six?
Okay, so what do they experience their first day of school?
Okay, so at that age group, it differs a little bit. So there's 36 in the room; it's mostly Montessori-like learning to do real work, so the routines of real work and free play, and it's only—and so you're beginning to learn to read and write, and I'll get back to that in a minute.
Elementary studio is more about important work, so you're doing real chores; you're doing real work—you're helping to start running the studio, and you're playing hard games, and that hard game may be learning math, but it's a hard game.
I mean, right? So these are games. Now, by middle school, you know, you're tackling real-world things; you're beginning apprenticeships as early as age 11 or 12.
And so you're actually beginning to take those talents out in the real world, so it changes from studio to studio.
Right!
So what happens with children's games is that as the children mature, the games become more and more like real-world occupations. That's what we're doing.
And then, you know, you could also say, interestingly enough, on the adult side, the more you can turn your real-world occupation into a genuine child's game, the better you are at it.
So it's weird how those things meet! Well, and that's part of playing!
This is the realization; if you're always saying, “We believe you're a hero is going to change the world, here's a story about Martin Luther King,” here's the story of that.
So when I said there's a “why” to doing this, you're you're continually being given archetypal hero real-world stories of flawed heroes, right? Yeah! Perfect heroes—and you're having to work this out at the same time you're working out whether I'm going to hit you in the head at age at five.
And if I do, there are consequences, but those consequences lie largely meted out by eight-year-olds who are forming their society and learning to form their society.
And I will tell you in our high schoolers and our middle schoolers, um, 80 percent of them are better than anybody that graduated from my Harvard Business School class in culture, because all they're at—what? At culture? Forming a healthy culture, right?
So is that better? At negotiating?
It's negotiating! It's carrying!
Um, I’ll give you a quick example of how you move up. So no grades; the standards are held by the community—very high standards. But here's how they work: you keep track of the work you've done, and you earn points—that's effort.
Yeah! So how much effort are you putting in? Yeah! Every six weeks, there's a public exhibition. The public's invited. It's not a science fair! It's going to be an exhibition of learning!
For example, if we're doing the medical biology Quest, these young people will be diagnosing diseases of people coming in who have a stack of cards that are their disease, and the winner of the game most accurately diagnoses real diseases—for real—with real cost. So what do they learn? They learn to manage their own healthcare, which in the United States, the public reward progress, but you actually have standards of attainment at the same time.
Yes! See, what there's an overlap between what you're doing in the Michaela school, because they're also extremely good at rewarding both progress and actual levels of attainment.
And so the attainment here is, did most of your patients live? Right? At a low cost? And through that, you're going to learn to actually listen and diagnose diseases even for yourself!
So badges are attainment! Yeah!
Public exhibition, points are effort!
Last piece, which is important, is 360 peer reviews. Every person's asked, "Is Dr. Peterson warm-hearted one to ten?"
Yeah!
Or "Is Dr. Peterson tough-minded enough? One to ten."
Yeah!
And then I give you feedback, and it can't be you're stupid. It can be, you know, when you interrupt me when I'm working hard, that's really frustrating, would you please, when I have the red flag up, not interrupt me when I'm working hard.
Right! So I'm requesting—so I'm learning how to be a good friend, a good citizen.
Okay, so now you've got, okay, so those are the three things happening.
So you've got reward for progress; you've got an absolute standard of attainment.
And then you've also got something like evaluation of the manner in which you conduct yourself within the group.
Okay, so in the 360 process, just for those of you who are watching and listening, is that it's not that easy to figure out how to evaluate people inside a corporation.
So for example, if you're trying to evaluate middle managers, you can't get a direct measure of their sales effectiveness because they're three steps removed from any sales process.
And so the question is, how do you know if they're succeeding, and how do they know? That's a big question because you can't even get rewarded unless you know what the criteria are for success and failure.
And so one of the ways that corporations have learned to deal with this that's actually quite effective is by doing these processes they call 360s. And in a 360, your subordinates rate you and give you feedback; your peers do, and your superiors do—yes!
And so then that's aggregated, and you can set that up so that it's not so it's as unbiased with relationship to the hypothetically desirable outcomes as you can manage.
But it's an effective way of compiling multiple reports like that; it's an effective way of gaining valid, say, diagnostic information and a great way to learn to give and receive valid criticism.
Right!
Right? That it's helpful criticism! This is positive criticism, right? So, yes! And criticism—we should also point out that it's not, "Here's what you're doing wrong."
That's "Here's what you're doing really right," because, yes, the core of criticism is what you're doing right! But here are things you're doing that, as far as we can tell, are interfering with what you're doing right, and the separating of the wheat from the chaff.
And that's why almost all of us offered at the school's growth mindset praise: we appreciate your—the method of what you're doing.
Now, again, adults can't do this; adults can never make a declarative sentence on campus. Adults can only ask you questions, and they're very few adults, because the young people run everything.
So let me fast forward a bit to the story, and then we'll come back.
Um, we're running these; it's a lot of fun. Um, a researcher comes down from my old professor, Clayton Christensen, at Harvard, and said, "We're going to pick you as one of the top elementary schools in the United States."
We've only been around 18 months.
That's—that's really silly! They call back, and the researcher says, "We're actually going to name you the top elementary school in the United States of the ones we've studied."
And this is the Christensen Institute, so it's a big deal at Harvard.
Um, we're kind of shocked! The researcher and her husband, who's CFO of Hawaiian Airlines, fly from Hawaii to Texas for their first visit.
They said, "Can we come visit?" We said, "Yes!" We get an email from them at the DFW Airport while they're changing planes, going back to Honolulu: "We decided we're moving our family and five children to Austin so they can attend the school."
Wow!
And so we said, "Wow, maybe we have something about this!" Same time, a dear friend and former student is very successful in Guatemala, asks if he can start a school.
So we hand him a big stack of mimeograph stuff.
Yeah, yeah!
And six months later, we're learning more from him than he is from us.
Right, right! So you're starting to franchise it!
Yeah, well, actually it was just like—hear a friend, a parent moves out to California, and she tells her husband, "I'm not leaving if I can't take the school with me."
So we hand her a stack; we're learning more. I said, "Okay, let's start 10 of these, and we can learn from each other."
We'll be right back. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series Exodus.
So the Hebrews created history as we know it— you don't get away with anything!
And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost.
You will pay the piper! It's going to call you out of that slavery into freedom! Even if that pulls you into the desert! And we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine.
The highest Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny.
I want villains to get punished, but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That's such a Christian question!
Yeah!
Are you still operating fundamentally at the preschool and early school?
Well, we're now beginning to have a middle school, and that's why I step in, and I end up—I end up running the middle school and the high school with 45 students.
I do that because we've hired this traditional teacher who's won a lot of awards, and the week before we're going to start, he turns to me and says, "You know, when these middle schoolers get out of line, you just jack them up against the lockers and tell them who's boss."
And I went back and told Laura, "I said, you're going to fire this guy." So you might as well do it now, and she said, "Well, middle school is going to start in a week! What am I going to tell the parents?"
And I said, "Well, I'll step in for a little bit, and I'll help!" And that was my introduction. And then for 13 years, I did that!
But suddenly, we have two—we have three of these schools now—we're going to have 10, and it just takes off!
And fast forward to today—we have 18,000 people who have started an audition who want to start a school! We have 300 schools in 26 countries and 43 or 44 U.S. states!
And so we built a model with all these wonderful entrepreneurial parents, and most of the people that run the schools are people like you and me that want to do it for their children.
And it's a loose consortium—it’s almost like building Legos or Eunuchs or, you know, it's—it's a network that's continually changing a model, yeah, that's improving!
And so now we've got 300 people contributing to the improvement of the model, which changes really weekly, gets better almost all of it though—handing more freedom and responsibility to the children.
Yeah! Decentralized model though, too! And we can get back to what that means on the cost front.
So, yeah!
Okay, so now a kid goes—if a kid goes to one of your classes, you said that there's—there's some formal learning taking place.
So with regard to reading—
Well, but there's a lot of play!
Well, so there's a lot of play. They're learning math on Khan Academy once they can learn to read.
I mean, so they're learning to read, and you know really children, when they want to learn to read, unless they're dyslexic, will learn to read.
And I'll get to how we do that. If they're dyslexic, they need a little extra training.
Yeah!
But if you just—some children learn to read at four, and some learn to read at seven. I mean, it's just—there's a span of when they're ready.
You see the same on the speaking.
Yes! You know, and there's actually—you might think that the smart kids learn to speak earlier and there's actually no evidence for that!
So!
Yeah! Kids can vary substantially in the date at which they pick up language. It's the date at which they formulate full sentences!
I wish you would talk to some of our parents who are panicked that their child isn’t, you know, it’s like, "If you'll just be patient, the child will come."
Yeah!
There's almost no children that don't develop language! It's such a universal human!
So, they're around all these peers who are helping them, and it's multi-age, so remember you got older and younger, and they're mixing around, and you can't really tell who's the smartest or—because everyone's good at something!
But the way we handle reading—and I've gotten criticism—is you can start with comic books or a magazine.
Yeah!
And so, "Well, let's make them read the classics!" And I said, "If you make them read the classics, they will hate the classics."
But what happens is you can't have them read something that's too difficult for them right off—I mean, you have to then—there's no reason not to use incremental movement forward.
Let's read The Iliad at six—it's like, "Okay, but once they start reading comic books and magazines, then all of a sudden you see them pick up Harry Potter."
Yeah!
And then by 11 or 12, summer reading Democracy in America, War and Peace. Now, if you read that at 11 and 12, you need to read it at 21, 31, 41! Right?
I mean, but they love to read as a group, and so reading becomes something that's just—what's your failure rate on the literacy front, excluding the dyslexic kids?
Well, we could talk about zero.
Zero, uh-huh!
It's zero, and so what are your—what's your criteria for evaluating literacy, say, by the age of 10?
Or hear about. So, um, so you read something, uh, you get a badge for something called a deep book. You have to pitch the book as being, you know, important, rated by experts when there's a whole criteria.
Right!
So you teach them how to select good books; your classmates have to agree that it's a deep book, and then if it is, it goes on a list.
So you can choose from the list, or you can pitch one that you like, yeah?
Yeah! But these are all real books! I mean, they're really, they're books that would—anybody!
And so you have to read that book; you have to tell why it impacted you and whether you would recommend it to someone else, and that becomes a badge.
That's probably like a six-page thing that you create to try to pitch the book to someone else!
Right?
And so, how to make a case? How do we know that they're good? Is you look at the badges.
Now, here's the thing. Who approves that badge?
Right, no adults in the room.
Uh-huh!
Well, the answer is the standards of excellence are if you've never done this before, did you put your heart into it?
Yeah!
Okay, so that's effort! If you've done it once, is this time better than last time?
Yeah, great!
If you've done it enough times that it's hard to see the incremental gain because you've kind of plateaued, let's compare it—critique it to a master. How is your story—short story compared to Hemingway?
Right?
Right! And if you win some sort of contest in the studio or an external contest, it's excellent!
So Dr. Peterson signs off on my badge as excellent!
Now you're going to imagine, with human nature, there's a little log-rolling that's going to go on, right?
We're buddies; I'm going to approve yours; you're going to approve mine.
But if you're real buddies, you're not going to game the system so that the results are no longer—yeah!
But there are enough Free Riders, and so that starts to happen, but there's an audit committee.
So the audit committee will put out a survey that's anonymous every six weeks and say whose badges should be audited, and you take those three because who knows whose badges should be audited? Right? The people in the room know!
And you don't embarrass those people!
How do you stop that from turning into a like an Informer festival and getting Free Riders on that front?
Well, I'll get back to kind of when you have toxic—I mean toxic sub-drives and things, so yeah, but generally the group is one tribe by this time, and so you don't really have that.
That's not really tolerated by the group!
Okay, but so what will happen is, you know, who volunteers for the audit committee?
Yeah!
Well, they're tough people, right? I mean, the easy people don't want to do the work!
So now you've got the toughest judges; they'll take the three people that the studio said should be audited and at random choose three more!
Now, no one knows whether you were chosen at random or you were on the list, kind of everybody probably knows, but then we're going to do a deep audit of those badges!
If Jordan Peterson approved Jeff Sandifer's badge and it's rejected, then you lose a badge of the same value.
So you just lost six weeks of work, and now all of your badges are going to be audited.
So we've had learners real strict—real strict, uh, what would you call it—that's free-rider control, essentially.
So for those of you watching and listening, the population prevalence of dark tetrad traits at a clinical level is about four percent, and so the dark tetrad is Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic.
And that cross-culturally, that seems to be about one person in 25 who's enough like that to be a serious problem, and they're basically, in the extreme, they're something like parasitic predators, and they'll game well-functioning systems to attract credit to themselves with no work.
And so you always see people think that societies can just be set up on a cooperative basis and that you can just assume the best about everyone and that'll work, but—and it does work 96 percent of the time, but it really doesn't work four percent of the time!
And that four percent is toxic enough to bring the whole damn system crashing down!
So you need to return tit for tat, essentially; there has to be control mechanisms set up in a well-functioning micro-society so that the Free Rider, narcissist types can't get a toehold, and that takes a certain amount of tough-mindedness.
Yes, right? Often that's the sort of thing that's lacking among utopian-minded, utopia-minded educational reformers because they have a—well, we don't need competition in our schools, for example; it's all cooperation.
It's like, "Yeah, that's fine until the Free Riders come along," and then it's not fine at all. You need justice and mercy, right? Because they're both—yeah!
And so if you think about it, warm-hearted, tough-minded—the 360s—that's what we're measuring and encouraging and giving people.
But you need this system of auditing.
Well, that's interesting that you use both warm-hearted and tough-minded, eh? Because that's a reflection of a trait on the agreeable dimension, and agreeable people are compassionate and polite.
They're maternal; that's really the right way of thinking about it—the kind of maternal that would be properly devoted to a very dependent infant.
And so there's something lovely about that, right? As lovely as maternal love, but on the other end, which is the more masculine, and there's more—let's keep the Free Riders at bay, and then let's also only reward actual attainment, right?
And there's love in that too, but it's more like—it's the love of discipline and encouragement. Well, and those of us that are tough-minded, I'm tough-minded, disagreeable, need to learn when to be warm-hearted!
The ones that are too warm-hearted need to learn for their own good when to draw boundaries, and so that's what develops in all this!
Now, by the way, we do see—for us, it's about one out of a hundred—we see someone—
We see highly toxic children come in.
I can't explain why. I'm just telling you their behavior; I'm not saying they're damned or they're doomed.
Yeah!
Because you can always actually be asked to leave the community and come back; you can repent!
Yeah! But you see every once in a while—I mean, now there's also often a strong correlation to the family or not.
Listen, but sometimes not, you know? But that's the only time an adult will step in if they see that happening.
And what markers do you have for that?
They’re telling very small lies, just like the Dragon book, right? You just can catch them, because otherwise, the system will correct, but the system can't take someone who's smart enough to parse this, you know?
You're always staying right inside the lines, right?
And so over time, the tribe will learn, even the young ones, to recognize that, but when you're fresh and new, the system can't catch it.
Yeah!
That's why psychopaths, like in the real world—psychopaths are itinerant because they can't stay longer.
Well, they can't stay because people figure out their games, and then they stop them! And you know one of the problems with the virtual world right now is that it allows the psychopaths to be continually itinerant, which is essentially what you are if you're anonymous, right?
Is that nobody can get a handle on you. You can't track the reputation, and you know the people who promote the benefits of online anonymity say, "What about the heroic whistleblowers?"
And it's like, "Fair enough, but they're one percent, right?"
The heroic whistleblowers, but what about the enabled psychopaths?
Well, the whistleblowing is worth the psychopathy—it's like, yeah, it doesn't look like it's—
Interesting because the group gets pretty good, even in early Asia, recognizing it, but the first time they see it, it's like when you've said before about a dark triad or a dark quadrant—a male can take advantage of a young female.
Yeah!
The females will learn!
Yeah!
Well, eight-year-olds learn too!
Yeah! Yeah!
But we will step in and say, "Here's a transition contract. If these things don't happen, you're going to need to leave and reapply."
So we will pick out—but it's one out of a hundred!
Yeah!
We’ll see someone who's—and so we're probably drawing from some segment that's slightly healthier because they won't apply, maybe.
But about one with kids—so there's pretty good literature on this; if you group two-year-olds together and watch them interact, about four percent of the males, it's almost none of the females—yeah, about four percent of the males at age two will kick, hit, bite, and steal.
Okay, so that's not very many; that's three percent of the populations—one in fifty, so it's not much different from—
But, but most of those kids, despite their temperamental proclivity to be aggressive, are socialized by the age of four.
Almost all of them—someone has to socialize them!
Yeah!
And so the kids who don't have that integrated by the age of four, they're in for a pretty dismal ride!
Yeah!
There isn't a lot of clinical evidence suggesting that if those traits are still in place at the age of four, that they can be ameliorated at that point.
Yeah!
Yeah! And so—and those are the kids that turn into bullies and delinquents, and we see something very similar that—and I wanted to ask you because we see something else, and I'm curious what the literature says about this.
It appears to us that the tribe in these systems, and this took villain in society, will shape conscientiousness until about 13.
Yeah!
And so, so there are some people that are naturally conscientious, yeah? And there are others—it seems to shape. Our experience is when we take someone after the age of 13, if the culture is spun up, they will behave in a conscientious way.
But without the culture, they will regress back to where they are!
Well, part of what happens at 13, okay, so imagine you have these aggressive kids.
Yeah!
Okay, at four, now they maintain a high level of aggressive behavior.
Okay!
Now at about 14, the boys join them under the influence of testosterone, and so—and then, for normal boys who have this spike in aggression, that decline starts to decline pretty rapidly around 18, and then goes back down to where you'd expect it if you just tracked it linearly.
Um, whereas the criminal types don't desist. What happens with the criminal types, generally speaking, is that they start to desist in their late 20s.
And so the fundamental hard-headed penological theory for repeat offenders—you know, one percent of the criminals, right? Costs! So for re—for true repeat offenders, is you just keep them in jail till they're 30, right?
And then it might be delayed maturation, something like that, you know, but after that, they're not as big a threat.
Yeah, yeah!
They start being so. So incentivized. By the way, the thing we see over and over and over again—and I can't stress this enough, and I think it's my theory of why the United States works—is the 80/20 rule is one of the most powerful rules of prayer.
And so what you see is if you believe every child's a genius, yeah? You find the child that's good at all these different things, but they all have a place.
Yeah! Just like I can be a plumber or an airline pilot, but you see that in these societies as they grow, and you've got to find your place in the—so the Pareto, this 80/20 rule—this is, um, 20 percent of your customers produce 80 percent of your sales, 20 percent of the recording artists sell 80 percent of the records, 20 percent of the authors sell 80 percent of the books.
The actual rule is the square root of the number of people doing a particular task perform half the labor, and so this drives inequality in every creative domain, but your point is there's a diverse enough range of potential Pareto contributions that it doesn't matter, right?
Like, you can be an off-the-chart plumber, and I can be an off-the-chart mathematician, and there's zero trouble if we're only going to measure how quickly I can memorize things for a test I'll never use again, and it's basically IQ.
Then there's only going to be one winner of that or one group of winners!
Yeah! In this case, there's all sorts of ways you can win, and it's so complicated, you can't even keep track.
Yeah!
But what you can keep track of are these stories that are repeated over and over and over again about heroes—don't win when they get knocked down; they get back up! Yeah!
And it becomes kind of a resilience, a resilience—a "Hey, it's a challenge!"
Yeah!
And we talk about—I may have gotten this from you—like, what are the three monsters?
The three monsters are resistance, distraction, and victimhood. It's like, "If I can't—" which one of those is standing in my way?
Right! Resistance, I just need to take the first step!
Right? Yeah!
And that might just be apprehension of sheer complexity! Right?
But what do you do? Take a step, okay? Distraction, it's what's valuable to you in focus! I mean, prioritizing focus!
Right!
Right? If it's victimhood, then gratitude is the only substitute for it; it's the only elixir!
And so they learned that! Yes!
And we should—we should also point out in that regard that that gratitude isn't the naive insistence that the world is a perfectly delightful place and that everything is going to go well.
Gratitude is a practice; it's a moral virtue, and the virtuous part of it is the courage to find, and even in the darkest place, some light that can guide you through!
Right? And the willingness to do that, the understanding that that's a practice.
I mean, when my wife—my wife was extraordinarily ill a few years ago, like fatally ill, so the story went, and one of the things she did that was of aid to her physically because it helped her be less stressed, and that's good on the immunological front—but also spiritually, let's say, was to strive very diligently to look for what she could be grateful for in each day and even in each moment.
And in her situation— I think this is very often the case for people who are facing very serious illness—she was grateful for the love and support of her family and her friends, and that was also genuine and also of genuine aid!
But it is a—it’s a courageous practice; it's not a kind of naivety!
And so if you're surrounded by a group that understands if you're playing the part of the victim, they don't say, "Don't be a victim," they begin to ask you questions about gratitude and give you space!
Right?
Sometimes, you want to play the victim for a while!
Yeah!
Well, sometimes terrible things are happening, right? Right?
Sometimes, yeah, your life's just—
And so then you get someone who's actually, you know, I'm very empathetic that that's happening; I'm sympathetic to you that that's happening!
But then the answer is, once you're finished with that, yeah, what are we going to get up and go do?
Right! That's good for you, right?
And we're going to have this moment.
So just imagine all these young people, and by the way, the high schoolers are going up and down to the middle school in elementary, all the time.
The middle schoolers are going up and down; you'll see elementary.
So this is a family; this is like a neighborhood of young people moving around between studios, helping each other!
Often you'll get a 10-year-old that's better at calculus, you know, than a high schooler, right?
And they're up—and it has to always—for the 10-year-old, he gets to share his knowledge with older kids!
That's what we have.
10-year-olds that actually sell tutoring services, so they have to be Socratic; they can't lecture!
Yeah!
But anyway, but that's the beauty— they're learning how to build a society; they're learning self-management; they're learning self-governance; they're learning how to treat other human beings, yeah?
And guess what? The learning's exploding!
Oh! And by the way, they've had six or seven apprenticeships in the world by the time they're in high school!
Yeah!
And how do you set those up, and what do the apprenticeships look like?
It's the easiest and best thing we do—you go through a series of challenges of what you might want to do with your life even 11 or 12.
Like, what's exciting? "I want to be a vet! Yeah, I want to be."
So then you learn how to go find out the owner of the vet service! What have they done in their life that's valuable?
Then you write an email that says, "Mr. Smith, I've so admired your compassion with animals; I know that you won this award—it has to be genuine!
Right? Right? Would you show—you've done your homework! But then the question is, I'm looking for this apprenticeship; I'm not asking you for it; I'm just asking, can I have a five-minute phone call to explain it, right?
It's all I want!
Yeah!
So you get the phone call; you listen for objections and try to answer them.
Right?
And only ask then is, "Can I have two minutes in person?" You show up in person, and you imagine this 12-year-old has showed up ready, and they say, "Dr. Peterson, would you give me a chance?"
Yeah!
I'll show up early! Yeah! Work late! Yeah! I’ll wash the floors! I'll do whatever you ask! Yeah!
If I don't ever do one of those things, not only can you fire me immediately, but it's going to reflect on all my studio mates! They're going to find out!
But if you'll give me a chance, I'll prove myself!
Yeah!
It's an irresistible success rate on that is like 98 now!
Wow!
So what—
No, that's interesting in and of itself, you know, because we're constantly bombarded with this insistence, especially from the radical left, that the reason that you might employ someone is to skim off their excess labor, right?
The Marxist theory of labor, and that you're—it's basically an exploitative relationship.
And you can be cynical about this, he said, well, no kidding, the businessmen are going to agree because now they've got free labor!
But that isn't what happens!
Like what happens is that—and you have to be unbelievably cynically blind and believe that the world is motivated by power to believe anything other than this: is that the—the ability to act as parent; uh, proxy is there in all of us to the degree we can be parents, and it's extraordinarily attractive to offer people the opportunity to establish a relationship with someone who's young where they're fostering their development.
I think that's a primary source of human gratification!
I actually think there's also something that's—I wouldn't call it cynical, but it's a little more self-interested that the people who are being like very generous because this is, you know, it's hard to have an apprentice!
Yeah!
Yeah! But I actually, we've seen this happen at the Acton MBA.
I think it's—they're looking up to you as The Wizard of Oz, and you're seeing in them a young new, right?
And there's this sense of that reminds me of myself!
Yeah!
And you know, and that's the best part of myself, the best part of myself, and in fact, if I had had this at that age!
Right!
And so I'm so attracted to this! But, but anyway, through this process, what do you learn how to do? You learn how to find something to do that matters in your life—serving someone else!
And by the time you also learn how to ask someone, you learn how to suggest, in an attractive manner to someone, how they might offer you an opportunity.
This is one of the reasons it's so useful to teach your child, uh, to help your child develop extremely polished manners!
Yeah!
And because what happens if you have well-mannered kids who say, "Please," and "Thank you," and who know how to shake hands and introduce themselves and who are sensible enough to listen to an adult, then they will charm the adults! And not in an instrumental way, a manipulative way, but they'll charm the adults, and the adults will reveal the best part of them!
And then they'll offer the kids all sorts of opportunities!
And so what a deal that is for your kids, and we see they just happen over and over!
And what do we have to do? Nothing! We don't set these up; we don't match!
Right, right?
The young people go out and do it all with parental permission, and you know the parents have to sign off; it's safe.
But they're out there doing, you know, our boys, um, went through amazing—they ended up— their final apprenticeships were SpaceX!
Right!
And you know what? They did that on their own!
I mean, well, that's great too because