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

Hello freak. Well, we've tried out other online interventions too. I have these YouTube videos up, but we also designed... I worked with some corporations a while back because I've done some consulting, and I had designed tests to help people hire better employees, which I still do. In fact, I work with this company up in California called the Founder Institute. It's the world's largest staged early technology company incubator. It has created 2,500 companies in the last four years, and we test now in 135 cities.

When I was marketing these tests to companies, they kept asking me what could be done about their poorer performing employees. I said, "Well, I didn’t know," because it's not that easy. If you have someone who's problematic, who's troubled, it's not that easy for a manager to figure out how to straighten them out. They just don't have the time, the manpower, and they usually don't have the training to do that.

But I designed this set of programs called the Self Authoring Suite, and one of them, the Future Authoring Program, helps people write out a plan for their life. It asks you some questions about six dimensions of your life: your health, mental and physical, your use of drugs and alcohol, your wishes three to five years down the road for intimate relationships, for family, for career, for education, and so on. It asks you what your life could be like three to five years from now if you set it up for yourself like you were someone you were taking care of.

So, it asks you those six questions. Then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about your vision for your life. You get to have what you want and what would be good for you. What would that be? Then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about what your life would be like three to five years down the road if you let your bad habits and your weaknesses take the upper hand and drag you down.

Because everyone knows about that. It's like you get to design a little heaven to strive for and a little hell to avoid. Then you basically turn that into an implementable plan; that's the second part of the program. We've used that with about 5,000 to 7,000 university students now, mostly in Europe, at the Reram School of Management. We've raised their grade point average by 25% and dropped their dropout rate the same.

It's had a walloping effect on men and on non-Western ethnic minorities. It's moved the non-Western ethnic minority student population performance at Dam School of Management from 70% below the average to above the female Dutch natives. So, the reason I'm telling you this, apart from the fact that it's a very good program, is we did it at Mohawk College in Canada a year ago, and we dropped their dropout rate in the first semester by 50%. That especially worked well for men, because men are at more risk of dropping out, especially for men who didn't have good grades in high school.

Not only is there the possibility for the net to provide tremendous dissemination of intellectual material, but there's also the possibility for the net to provide dissemination of psychological interventions that have major impacts on people's mental health and productivity at almost extraordinarily low cost. So, that's really been fun too.

I think providing that sort of structure and framework, giving people the tools just in the form of asking them questions—what would you like to do, please describe this—when you do that, you sort of allow them to help themselves outline what they would like to accomplish, which most people don't do.

Well, our education system was designed in Chicago in the late 1800s to produce factory workers. It was set up when rural people were migrating to the cities en masse because their kids, first of all, were likely to get factory jobs, and second of all, if you were working in a factory, your kids needed to be taken care of.

The purpose of the schools was to train factory workers, which is why everyone's lined up in rows and why there are bells. It's a factory model. The problem with that is that now people's careers basically have to be self-determined, but that's never part of the educational system. Part of the reason I developed these programs was that I realized this is the same course where I'm teaching students that if they would have been in Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis. I'm trying to get them to design their lives, and it's way better to have someone articulate their own plan.

You actually neurologically rewire people by having them formulate their own thoughts, which is why your school teachers used to say, "Put it in your own words." It's actually very good advice. If they would explain what that means, it's like if you have to conjure up the thoughts and articulate them, then they change you.

So, this program has had overwhelming effects for us as researchers because it's very difficult to produce an intervention that actually has a positive effect on people. You hope it does, but generally, when you test it out, it's like, "No, it doesn't do what you thought it did," or sometimes it even has the reverse effect.

That sounds fascinating. Now, how can a regular person have access to this?

Yeah, it's called Self Authoring, so that's selfauthoring.com. The program I gave away, the Future Authoring Program, I think it might still be free. It was... Yeah, it is till the end of November. I did a video called "Message to Millennials" because one of the things Jonathan Haidt said about Karl Marx—the patron saint of social justice warriors—and John Stuart Mill, the patron saint of people who stood for objective truth and freedom of expression, is I thought that was really smart.

He said Brown University is number one for social justice warrior universities, and Chicago for truth universities. But one of the things that Marx has over John Stuart Mill is that Marx is a social revolutionary, and young people like to think about ways to change the world. That's actually a positive part of their development. It's a stage that the developmental psychologist Shai P called the Messianic stage, and he associated that with late adolescence.

While young people want to change the world, the problem is, that's been harnessed into attempts to change other people. But that isn't what you should do if you want to change the world; you should change yourself. I don't mean that in some clichéd sense. I mean it in the sense that Alexander Solzhenitsyn said when he analyzed the Soviet Union: "Don't be thinking that the line that divides good from evil runs down political spectra or countries or something like that. It runs right down the middle of your soul."

If you want to sort out the world, then what you do is you sort yourself out. It's a serious business, right? They say it's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city, and that's the truth because you're complicated. There are horrible monsters inside of you that need to be tamed and brought into alignment and submission so that you can be a powerful and useful person.

I gave away the Future Authoring Program as part of this video I made suggesting to millennials that instead of rushing out there to change the world by changing other bad people, they should look inward and sort themselves out properly. I think we've given away about four or 5,000 of those programs so far. It's free till the end of November.

What happens with it?

Well, the Future Authoring Program is regularly $14.95, and the whole Self Authoring Suite involves a program that helps you write an autobiography. It helps you sort out things about your past that are still burdening you. You can tell if you have a memory that's more than 18 months old; approximately, when you pull that memory up to mind, if you still have an emotional reaction, that means you haven't fully articulated the memory and haven't analyzed it causally. You haven't freed yourself from its grasp, and you're carrying it like a weight.

Your brain responds to that. The more weight you’re carrying like that—more baggage, let's say—the more of the stress hormone cortisol your brain produces, and cortisol makes you old. Some of this work has been done by James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin because he started to pioneer these sorts of writing programs. He found that if people wrote about uncertain things—past, present, or future, so they could be traumatic things—they could be uncertain things, their physical health improved.

He did a lot of detailed research trying to figure out why that was, and basically, it came down to an explanation that it was something like an uncertainty reduction mechanism at work. Your brain is always figuring out how well-situated you are in the world, how much do you not know compared to how much you have mastered.

You can tell that you've mastered things because when you go somewhere and you act, things turn out the way you want them—that's an indication of mastery. Your brain is sort of keeping track across your whole life of how many places you've been where things haven't worked out compared to how many places you've been where they have worked out. If all those places in your past where things haven't worked out, you need to map and master them. That decreases the existential load on you, but that actually decreases your psychophysiological load. It makes you healthier and less stressed.

So, we've put all that together in this Self Authoring Suite to help people write about their past to sort it out in a detailed autobiography. It asks you questions about your past; it says, "Divide your life up into six epochs," and then divide each of those—maybe say from birth to kindergarten, and then maybe elementary school, and then maybe junior high school—however you want to do it.

Then, you write about the emotionally significant events in each of those epochs and then describe their effects on you. Then analyze how you did in those situations, what you might have done differently, what you might do differently in the future to straighten out your past. I've done that with my students in my Maps of Meaning class for about the last ten years, and some people have written 15,000 words. It's not that uncommon for students to write 15,000 words in their autobiography.

Wow, that's such great advice about reconciling with your past because so many people just carry it around.

Yeah, well, if you're thinking about your past, what it means is you haven't analyzed the causal change. You might say, "Well, why do you remember your past?" You might say, "Well, it's in order to have an objective record of the past." It has nothing to do with that. There's only one reason you remember the past, and that's to be prepared for the future. That's why you remember the past.

What you're supposed to do is take the past and extract out from it wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to avoid stumbling blindly into ditches. You think, "Well, here’s a time in my past when I stumbled blindly into this horrible ditch, and terrible things happened to me." It’s like, "Okay, you need to take that apart. You need to figure out how it was that that event conspired with your participation, voluntarily or involuntarily, so that that terrible consequence emerged."

You need to know why that happened and how you could react differently in that situation. As soon as you do that, your brain will leave it alone. It won't obsess you about it anymore because the anxiety-producing parts of your brain are basically trying to tell you where there are obstacles in your environment. It's like, "Look out! Don’t go there! There’s fire!"

Well, maybe you could master the fire, right? Then you're a wielder of fire; you're not just a victim. Lots of situations are dangerous or not depending on your level of mastery. Life is like that, and a negative emotion that's associated with a memory is something that's crying out for mastery. Writing can really help with that.

So, you're reorganizing your brain when you write autobiographically. You're basically... the emotional memories can be stored at different levels of your brain, some from sort of primordial reptilian image-laden areas that are very emotional, up to finely articulated plans for your future life.

Well, you want to take everything that's negative and emotional and transform that into a fully articulated vision for your future, and that frees you of your past. You shouldn't be thinking about your past. I mean, maybe if you're 80 and you know you're going over a well-spent life; that's a whole different thing.

But if you're 30, 35, or 20 and most of the time you're thinking about your past, it's like your soul is trapped back there. You need to break free of that so you can use all your resources to move ahead into the future.

[Applause]

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]