328. Jordan Peterson's Psychological Tools ｜ Dr. Daniel Higgins & Dr. Robert O. Pihl
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with Dr. Robert O. Peel and Dr. Daniel M. Higgins to discuss the business and personal relationships they ve had over the last 30 years. Dr. Peterson has worked with them on a number of projects that have helped him understand who he is, how he got to where he is now, and what it means to live out a story. He also discusses the importance of measuring the value of personal and professional relationships, and how they can be applied to business and professional life. This episode is sponsored by Self-Authoring as in Writing and Understand Myself, which helps people write out the narrative of their life, their biography, their virtues and faults in the present, and a vision for the future. Self-authorizing as in writing and the development of a vision, and understandmyself is a website that helps you understand your personality and maybe understand your relationship to the person who's closest to you. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Thank you all for your time and attention, and onward to the discussion! Dr. B.P. Peterson - Daily Wire Plus - Subscribe to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. P. Peterson's new series, "Depression and Anxiety: A Guide to Feelings Better" on YouTube, where you'll get access to all the tools and resources to help you find relief from the overwhelming feelings of depression and anxiety you may be experiencing. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients who are struggling. with a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offer a roadmap towards feeling better. in his new series that could be a lifeline . and we're reaching out to someone who needs a support network that can help them find a place to turn things around. Thanks for listening to the podcast to help them feel better Today's episode is a little bit more than just a little of what they can do to feel better, and about it in the next episode of Dailywireplus on the Dailywire plus Let this is a reminder that they can help you feel better. Thank you for listening, , thank you all of you, too, and I appreciate it.
Transcript
00:00:00.960
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740
We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420
He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360
If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780
Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460
Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:01:09.640
I recently had the wherewithal and the honor and the privilege to discuss the business and research and personal arrangements that I've had with a couple of my closest compatriots.
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Dr. Robert O. Peel, my former graduate advisor at McGill University, and my former student, Dr. Daniel M. Higgins, who graduated from MIT and under my supervision from Harvard.
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We walked through our business, professional, and personal relationships as they've unfolded through many ups and downs over the last 30 years.
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And I wanted to bring them into the picture because I have worked with them so closely.
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I've worked with them particularly on two projects that I wanted to also draw attention to as they form the basis for much of the discussion that's to follow this clip.
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One is self-authoring.com, self-authoring as in writing, self-authoring.com, and it contains a number of programs, past, present, and future authoring, that help people write out the narrative of their life, their biography, their virtues and faults in the present, and then a vision for the future.
00:02:33.120
And that's a very useful program, as you do live out a story, and it's a good idea to know what story you've been living out and know where you want to go in the future.
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And the other project that we developed on the commercial front, so that's publicly accessible, is understandmyself.com.
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And understandmyself provides a very thorough description of the fundamental elements of human personality, the five major traits, extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, differentiated into 10 different aspects.
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So it gives you a relatively simple shorthand for your personality, but also a differentiated view of who you are.
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And so if you take that test, which doesn't take very long, about 20 minutes or so, then you get a detailed description of your basic temperament.
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But also, if you have a partner and then your partner takes the test, then you can join the test together and get a separate printout, a separate report, that details your comparative similarities and differences.
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When you establish an intimate relationship with someone, there is some utility in your differences and some utility in your similarities.
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And there's some additional utility in understanding what those are.
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Because you need to understand who your partner is and you need to understand when they're different from you, that they're actually different and that there can be value in that.
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And so understandmyself.com can help you understand who you are.
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It can help you understand who your partner is and it can understand how you differ and what you might do about that.
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And so, well, with that, we'll move onward to the discussion itself.
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So that's selfauthoring.com, past, present, and future, biographical writing and the development of a vision, and understandmyself.com, which helps you understand your personality and maybe understand your personality and relationship to the person who's closest to you.
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So thank you all for your time and attention and onward to the discussion.
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So today I have two people to talk to who I've known for many, many years.
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First, Dr. Robert Peel, who was my graduate supervisor at McGill from 1985 to 1992, and with whom I've had a friendship and business relationship ever since.
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Very intense and multidimensional relationship, both on the intellectual, well, on the intellectual front, the personal front, and the business front.
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And so we're going to talk a little bit about that today, and also Dr. Daniel Higgins, who was a student of mine at Harvard after getting his engineering training at Trinity and at MIT,
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and who also got involved with Bob on the business front and helped me develop some of the measurement devices that we've been attempting to use in the corporate world and more successfully using in the private sphere.
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And so I thought it would be, well, fun for me, but also hopefully for my two guests and for everyone listening to just walk through what we learned as we've worked together over the last 30 years on the scientific front and the business front.
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I wrote him a weird letter when I was applying for my graduate training.
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I'd finished my PhD or my bachelor's degree in psychology, my second update, really, to my first bachelor's degree concentrating on psychology, and decided I wanted to go to clinical work.
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And I wrote him a, everyone, I applied to a letter that actually told people what I was like, which I'm sure scared off a hell of a lot more people than it attracted.
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But for some reason, it seemed to twig Bob's interest, and he called me one day.
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I really wanted to go to Montreal to study and asked me if I wanted to come down and study alcoholism.
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We actually had a compatriot in common, a man I had met in Fairview years ago, the town I grew up in, happened to be a student of Bob's.
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And when the letter showed up on his desk, he asked this person, Dave Ross, if he knew who I was.
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And luckily, I got a positive review, which was quite the surprise.
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What do you remember from the beginning of those days, Bob?
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Well, first of all, I remember the letter, and I remember that colleagues advised me that I should not select you as a graduate student.
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But it was exactly the nontraditional nature of what you wrote, and the deep thought that was implicit in your statements that drew me to it.
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And that, along with a basic instinct to be a risk taker, was the reason why I accepted you as a student.
00:08:02.720
Yeah, well, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about that letter, A, because it was a calculated risk.
00:08:08.940
I think I wrote, if I remember, and I can actually remember some of this,
00:08:11.720
I think I wrote that I liked to drink copious amounts of red wine and could type like a mad dog.
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And I knew that wasn't exactly standard graduate school application letter language.
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But, you know, I thought, first of all, I also indicated in the letter that there were some deep things that I wanted to pursue,
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you know, that I was interested in assessing the nature of human malevolence,
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and that I had broad philosophical and psychological interests.
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So there was a real serious part, and there was a real, I would say, well, comedic part in some sense, and provocative.
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And I thought, look, I'm going to be working with someone for a long time,
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and I want to find someone who actually wants to work with me.
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And so it was a calculated risk, like the one you took, I guess, when you accepted me.
00:09:01.560
And it's funny, you know, because people have had that kind of reaction to me, I would say, ever since,
00:09:07.700
which is that some people, like you, are quite happy with the opportunity to work with me,
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and other people think, you know, that they should keep me at a distance with a stick.
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And I think maybe, it's not obvious that the people in the latter camp are wrong.
00:09:22.280
Anyways, yeah, so you called me up and asked me if I wanted to do some work on alcoholism,
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which wasn't really the specific field that I had evinced a tremendous amount of interest in,
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But we started to work on motivation for drug and alcohol abuse and on antisocial behavior pretty much right away.
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Why do you think our collaboration was so successful?
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Oh, well, it comes down to who you are and how many degrees of freedom you're allowed
00:10:01.540
And challenges in front of you, Jordan, produce great rewards.
00:10:11.860
Yeah, well, for me, you know, I was really thrilled that I had the opportunity to come to McGill.
00:10:20.960
And then you were an ideal supervisor for me because you were very practically oriented, right?
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You had a thriving and unbelievably productive lab.
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A hundred and a half, two hundred, something like that.
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So Bob's lab was famous for its productivity, I would say,
00:10:56.300
and also for the morale of its graduate students.
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I mean, one of the things that was really remarkable about you and often in distinction to other graduate supervisors
00:11:06.860
is that you were very generous with credit, you know,
00:11:11.100
and you gave your students a tremendous amount of freedom.
00:11:15.860
And you really helped all of us through the various administrative hurdles, you know,
00:11:23.340
clearing the ethics hurdles for our research and then encouraging us both simultaneously on the career development
00:11:32.080
and the intellectual development front, which is a very thin line ethically, right?
00:11:38.360
Because obviously, to be a successful academic, there is kind of a marketing element.
00:11:48.900
But at the same time, you're supposed to be assiduously pursuing mathematically grounded truth
00:12:01.520
And you are very, very good at letting all of us know.
00:12:05.240
I mean, you've produced a lot of very successful graduate students,
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Sherry Stewart and Patricia Conrad and Jean Sagan and Peter Finn,
00:12:16.720
And you did an extremely good job of helping us know that it was our moral obligation
00:12:24.460
to stick with the data no matter what, but at the same time to develop our careers.
00:12:31.340
And for me, also, the fact that you had an unbelievably encyclopedic knowledge of the relevant psychiatric
00:12:37.940
and psychological research was, that was extremely useful.
00:12:41.960
It made our discussions extremely fruitful because I could talk about more philosophically oriented
00:12:52.500
Move laterally into the scientific realm and help introduce me into the appropriate biological
00:13:05.760
First was, accept good students and get out of their way.
00:13:10.020
That is, just provide them with what they need to do what they're interested in.
00:13:13.580
And secondly, if they have really good ideas, don't ask the bureaucrats.
00:13:25.500
Yeah, well, you know, as we worked together, that got more and more difficulty.
00:13:29.700
And we could tell even back then that the university was starting to close in on its researchers.
00:13:34.920
Because when I first started working with you, the ethics committees, the so-called ethics
00:13:40.520
committees, were kind of an encumbrance whose dictates you had to please, but could in some
00:13:48.700
real sense dispense with quite rapidly while attempting to stay in the proper ethical domain.
00:13:56.120
But as we continued to work together, the constraints that were placed on our research became more
00:14:02.260
and more onerous, and that's a process that's just continued and accelerated since then.
00:14:07.220
But you could really see it coming back even in the late 80s.
00:14:17.260
I'm somewhat happy that I'm not there now, given the kinds of constraints that researchers have to go through.
00:14:27.080
Because as we got more and more efficient at running studies,
00:14:31.680
and this happened a lot when I was working with Daniel, too, we got more and more efficient
00:14:35.920
at running studies and designing them, partly as a consequence of being able to use computational
00:14:45.100
The bureaucratic impediments to doing studies multiplied to such a degree that it became more
00:14:50.160
and more difficult to do them because there were so many hurdles that had to be leapt over
00:14:57.880
before you could even begin the process of an investigation.
00:15:01.000
And so it's really hard on people who are quick-minded and sharp because their orientation
00:15:06.320
is to do interesting things as rapidly as possible, and then to be confronted continually
00:15:11.840
with a bureaucracy that works at counterpurposes to that certainly ensures, at least to some
00:15:17.620
degree, that anybody who's fast and sharp just wants to get the hell out of there.
00:15:24.000
One of your management principles, and this is a good thing to pursue on the front of the
00:15:30.240
joint relationship between scientific endeavor and entrepreneurial endeavor, you said your
00:15:36.720
management principle was to hire really good people, students, let's say, and then get
00:15:41.740
One of the things I really admired about you and never stopped admiring you for, and you
00:15:46.900
were a great model in this regard, was that you were, you know, your students had areas
00:15:56.380
Like Segar, for example, was a near professional musician.
00:16:00.340
You tended to take in a lot of students who had non-traditional backgrounds in some sense
00:16:06.580
in relationship to psychology, and I never ever saw you, what would you say, engaging in
00:16:14.700
a turf war for intellectual preeminence with any of your students if they were operating
00:16:21.200
in an area of expertise that wasn't your area of expertise.
00:16:24.640
You know, you were always able to maintain like a calm authority and never be threatened by
00:16:33.520
the fact that you were willing and capable of bringing around people, bringing people
00:16:39.180
around you who knew some things you didn't know.
00:16:41.600
That was a relief, and that is a great management principle.
00:16:45.260
Well, less a principle and more a realization that they were all brighter than me.
00:16:55.260
That was really useful for me because alcohol, unlike most other drugs, doesn't really target
00:17:02.620
a specific brain area or set of neurological receptors.
00:17:08.840
And one of the consequences for me was that that meant that I really had to delve deeply
00:17:13.320
into biological neuroscience because alcohol essentially affected every physiological and
00:17:23.280
And so part of what I learned to do at McGill, apart from developing a certain degree of statistical
00:17:28.260
expertise, not my forte, by the way, was to delve deeply into the biological literature.
00:17:34.340
And you were very interested in biological psychiatry.
00:17:41.760
Remember that paper we did on genetics for the U.S. Congress?
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I was amazed at how quickly you were able to grasp that literature.
00:18:02.340
Well, it was one of the things that was great for me at McGill.
00:18:07.360
You know, there's this idea in psychology of construct validation.
00:18:12.280
And the idea is, you know, how do you determine if something that's abstract, a psychological
00:18:16.940
concept, let's say, like neuroticism or self-esteem, how do you know if that's real rather than just
00:18:24.040
sort of a metaphor or a linguistic placeholder?
00:18:26.700
And one of the answers to that is, well, it's real if it's a pattern that makes itself manifest
00:18:32.900
across a variety of different modes of measurement.
00:18:36.380
And I had been reading a lot of psychoanalytic material and mythology when I came to McGill,
00:18:46.300
And then as a consequence of having the biological frontier opened up, especially with people
00:18:51.320
like Jeffrey Gray, I started to see parallels between the deep biological literature, hard
00:18:59.460
neuroscience work and animal experimental work that was done on rat brain functioning and
00:19:05.260
and on the neurochemical front, I could start to see real deep parallels between that and
00:19:10.080
the mythological material that I had been reading.
00:19:13.400
And that was really what I started writing my first book when I was at McGill, Maps of
00:19:17.280
Meaning and pursued that a lot while I was working with you sort of as a side project.
00:19:22.920
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00:21:02.080
It was an attempt to integrate all the biology I was learning about with the mythology.
00:21:07.900
We were also studying antisocial behavior at that point.
00:21:10.940
And this sort of segues into my relationship with Daniel.
00:21:13.620
And we'll get to that or our interrelationship.
00:21:16.140
So Bob and I were working with the sons of male alcoholics who also had an extensive family
00:21:23.400
history of alcoholism, a very specific population.
00:21:27.000
That eventually became essentially impossible as the dictates came down from above that half
00:21:31.940
our research subjects had to be female, which was a real problem for our research enterprise
00:21:37.600
because we were actually researching a particular kind of primarily male psychopathology.
00:21:43.060
And our subjects had to be young men who weren't alcoholic, who did drink, who had alcoholic
00:21:53.540
So they had to have an alcoholic father, another close, and at least another close alcoholic
00:21:58.000
relative male and not an alcoholic mother because that would have exposed them in principle
00:22:06.920
And we were looking at the biological basis of the proclivity to alcoholism.
00:22:12.720
And we're interested in the role of disinhibition in that, right?
00:22:17.140
So you might say, well, one of the reasons people might drink is because they're biochemically
00:22:21.560
responsive to alcohol in some manner that's either directly rewarding like cocaine or anxiety
00:22:31.340
But another possible hypothesis is they're just not very good at impulse control.
00:22:36.580
And so an impulse would be a biological impetus that wants short-term gratification like lust
00:22:43.400
or hunger or thirst or the desire to breathe for that matter.
00:22:46.620
And obviously you have to abide by those dictates or you die.
00:22:50.880
But if you only fall prey to them, then you're impulsive and that dysregulates your medium to
00:22:59.380
And Bob and I started to investigate the neuropsychological literature.
00:23:04.820
A lot of people at McGill were working on the assessment of so-called prefrontal cognitive
00:23:09.240
ability and had developed a lot of practical tests for brain damaged people to see what focal
00:23:16.960
cognitive deficits they had as a consequence of their neurological condition or their brain
00:23:21.720
And we started to apply that to the analysis of antisocial behavior, right?
00:23:27.140
And Jean Seguin was very much involved in that.
00:23:30.820
So what got you interested, Bob, in the realm of antisocial behavior?
00:23:37.360
Well, alcohol and aggression, the relationship.
00:23:45.220
If you want to really understand aggression, understand the relationship between alcohol
00:23:52.660
and aggression, because alcohol is involved in half of murders, rapes, and general assaults,
00:24:05.020
And so it was a question of what is alcohol doing to the brain that, in fact, is increasing
00:24:12.440
So as we were turning to sons of alcoholics and the problem of alcoholism, it became the
00:24:23.380
same kind of question of was there a difficulty in producing inhibitory behavior, as these individuals
00:24:31.780
also tended to have a series of cognitive deficits as measured in terms of scholastic performance
00:24:44.420
And so that's where you started looking at the Montreal Neurological Institute and the
00:24:53.420
measures that they were using to measure, for example, frontal lobe functioning as its
00:24:59.240
importance in generally controlling social behavior.
00:25:03.880
Right, well, that was the first paper I published with Jennifer Rothfleisch and Phil Zalazo, right?
00:25:11.600
We put together a neuropsychological battery, and then we had people who were drunk at two
00:25:18.060
doses of alcohol, and we used high doses of alcohol in our lab, which was one of the things
00:25:24.420
We looked at the specific patterns of neuropsychological deficits that alcohol produced.
00:25:31.300
And alcohol doesn't interfere with things like vocabulary understanding or color perception,
00:25:36.620
but it has a walloping effect on the ability to move information from short-term storage
00:25:41.920
into long-term storage, even at relatively moderate doses.
00:25:45.720
And it really interferes with complex motor coordination, although it doesn't suppress, let's
00:25:53.660
say, it doesn't shorten, it doesn't lengthen reaction time per se, simple reaction time and
00:26:00.660
That's right, so we started building a neuropsychological battery, first of all, to see what the nature of
00:26:08.280
the overlap between criminal and aggressive behavior and the proclivity to alcoholism was,
00:26:13.320
but also trying to investigate why alcohol made people aggressive, because it is one of
00:26:17.400
the few drugs, and your research was part of what it demonstrated this, that alcohol actually
00:26:25.780
I remember a study we discussed that you devised where people were put into a bus aggression
00:26:33.820
task, I think, where they were asked to administer shocks, electrical shocks, of a certain duration
00:26:40.440
and intensity to their competitors in a game-like scenario, low levels of shock, and they weren't
00:26:47.700
That was a sham, but one of the hypotheses was that people who were drunk just didn't
00:26:55.440
So if I remember correctly, you had the drunks, the people who were alcohol intoxicated, write
00:27:01.760
down or otherwise record the level of shocks that they were administering and the duration
00:27:08.940
And what happened was that actually made the drunk people more aggressive rather than less.
00:27:13.460
So it wasn't merely a matter of alcohol-induced stupidity.
00:27:17.300
It was, there was real facilitation of aggression that seemed to be associated with something
00:27:27.960
And we even tried to pay them not to be aggressive and found out that that works very well with people
00:27:36.440
who generally have higher IQs, but not with individuals with lower IQs.
00:27:42.960
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, the thing is people in their real life, in some sense, are paid
00:27:50.200
And the way you get paid to not be aggressive while you're drunk is by not getting in trouble.
00:27:58.580
It's worth just dwelling for a moment on the statistic that Bob cited.
00:28:03.260
You know, we did a lot of reviews of the relationship between alcohol and aggression.
00:28:07.440
And it's, I think you could make a pretty strong case that almost all sexual assault
00:28:11.820
and almost all, and a tremendous amount of general interpersonal violence would just vanish
00:28:23.880
There's a massive relationship between drunkenness.
00:28:26.380
Half the people who commit murders are severely intoxicated, and half of the victims of violent
00:28:32.880
crimes are severely alcohol-intoxicated, right?
00:28:37.600
It's always been amazing to me that when we talk about sexual assault on campus, you know,
00:28:42.320
we talk a lot about sexism and toxic masculinity, and not very much about the fact that it's
00:28:56.880
So we were also, you and I were also talking at that point about entrepreneurial ideas, you
00:29:03.560
know, because I guess we both had a bit of an entrepreneurial bent, and one of the things
00:29:08.100
that was always noodling away at us was whether there was anything that we could do that might
00:29:13.200
constitute the grounds for the construction of a business.
00:29:18.080
And I remember we talked about the possibility of investigating treatment for hangovers on the
00:29:23.820
pharmaceutical front and went down that rabbit hole for a while, but we never really, at
00:29:29.260
McGill, we never really settled on an entrepreneurial idea.
00:29:34.840
I think one of the ideas that we had discussed, too, was to start a consulting business to help
00:29:40.020
people who had health problems do an objective review of the scientific literature bearing on
00:29:46.360
their particular health problem, and that's still a good idea, although we never did do it.
00:29:50.540
Well, anyways, after I was at McGill, and I think Bob and I wrote 15 papers together, which
00:29:57.960
was something of a record at that point for a graduate student and advisor collaborator,
00:30:05.620
I was thrilled to receive an appointment to Harvard, which was quite, yeah, that was quite
00:30:12.860
And I went down and started pursuing the same line of research in some sense that I was pursuing
00:30:19.460
with you, but it had become increasingly difficult.
00:30:22.000
The National Institute for Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, which in principle was designed
00:30:27.140
to facilitate research, kept making it impossible to bring people into the lab and actually give
00:30:34.940
I mean, I remember by the time you and I were done our research, we were having to keep our
00:30:39.120
damn subjects in the lab for like six or seven hours after we got them drunk.
00:30:44.340
The NIAAA required that we bring their alcohol, blood alcohol level down.
00:30:51.680
I think their eventual recommendation was either 0.04 or 0.02, half of legal intoxication.
00:30:58.820
They wouldn't allow us, for example, to send them home in a cab and nobody wanted to sit
00:31:03.320
in our damn lab and sober up miserably for six hours, you know, while staring at a wall.
00:31:09.000
And it made it pretty much impossible to bring people in repeated times because the experience
00:31:16.700
And there was all sorts of other restrictions that were emerging that made it impossible
00:31:24.220
And we got a long way on analyzing the effects of alcohol, associating it with opiate reinforcement
00:31:31.040
and starting to investigate potential biochemical treatments like naltruxone for alcoholism.
00:31:37.480
And we did it on a shoestring budget too, which was also an interesting thing to do.
00:31:43.920
Now, so I went to Harvard and I wasn't making a lot of money.
00:31:51.580
My wife couldn't work because she didn't have a green card and I was just kind of existing
00:31:55.300
on the threshold of survivability, you know, in a comfortable sense.
00:31:59.140
But I didn't even have magazine subscriptions when I was a junior professor at Harvard.
00:32:04.860
And I drove this old rust bucket of a car that was barely holding together.
00:32:10.440
And I remember I phoned up the dean at one day and I said, you know, I don't know what
00:32:16.700
your policy here is at Harvard, but you guys hired me to do research.
00:32:20.580
But I have to do a lot of overload teaching just to be able to survive here because it's
00:32:36.180
And I thought, well, that's not true because junior professors don't have time to consult.
00:32:41.980
But OK, if that's the damn game, then what the hell do I know that might have some economic
00:32:50.160
And I thought we had talked at that point about starting to use our neuropsych battery, which
00:32:56.540
we'd started to computerize on broader fronts, right?
00:33:00.980
We used it to investigate alcohol and then antisocial personality.
00:33:04.300
And then I thought, you know, maybe we could see if this battery of neuropsychological tests
00:33:13.340
would predict corporate and academic performance.
00:33:17.760
And so I called you and that's when, and we had a talk about, you know, potentially putting
00:33:23.760
together a company that would be designed to do exactly that.
00:33:36.420
And so, Daniel, you had done a, you had done your engineering training at Trinity and then
00:33:44.460
So walk us through a little bit about your academic and intellectual background.
00:33:51.500
I was, I did civil engineering at Trinity College in Dublin.
00:33:57.020
And then I came over to the U.S. and I found it was incredibly difficult to find a job just
00:34:08.020
So I thought, well, maybe I'll just go to graduate school instead, which sadly was as
00:34:15.560
But I went to MIT and I did a degree, a master's degree in civil engineering.
00:34:24.680
But at the time, it would have been around 1991, 92, 93, the use of computers, computer technology
00:34:36.680
And so obviously, while I'm there, I'm not going to be busting concrete beams or cubes.
00:34:45.020
I'm going to be looking at what the current computer technology is, AI and so on and so
00:34:53.620
People were much more optimistic about AI in the early 90s than they were in the late 90s.
00:35:06.040
And then I went over to take some classes at Harvard with you.
00:35:16.140
I may have been in your first personality psychology class or your second.
00:35:23.620
And we started programming the neuropsych stuff.
00:35:29.800
The work that you guys had done and that Jean Sagan had done in Montreal had used a paper
00:35:40.460
And those psych tests were, they were kind of modified from use with people from with clinical
00:35:51.400
So it was an interesting kind of a transformation of using something to detect clinical differences,
00:36:02.980
And at the time, the idea of a prefrontal cognitive ability really didn't, as far as I know,
00:36:09.940
People spoke about executive function, but they didn't speak about it in individual differences
00:36:16.420
They spoke about it more in a sort of a global, like what would happen if executive function
00:36:22.680
And so we were using, we computerized the types of tests that you'd been using with the
00:36:35.140
sons of male alcoholics and that Jean Sagan had been using with, I believe, impulsive children,
00:36:42.000
And then we did the, I think it was 1997, we, you were teaching the personality class and
00:36:53.120
we did the online computerized personality lab.
00:37:09.600
That was right when Net, that's right when, was it Netscape?
00:37:14.420
It would, it was pretty much right after, right after Netscape came out.
00:37:20.640
In computer days, it was when Perl was the way that you would do, Perl CGI programming was
00:37:28.740
And, and so we essentially set up a bunch of experiments.
00:37:36.660
And, and all the kids in the class took them, it was like, I think probably about 140, and
00:37:43.440
they divided up into groups of five to do the analysis.
00:37:46.100
So we did a soup, a soup to nuts set of, as you said, maybe 15, 20 different experimental
00:37:55.440
Well, it was, and it was, it was this, this battery of tests that I had developed with
00:38:01.680
Sagan and Bob, it took like, a lot of it required gadgets and lights and boxes, and
00:38:10.340
It also took about nine to 11 hours for a trained neuropsychologist to administer the
00:38:15.620
But when we computerized, we got, when we computerized it, we got the whole damn thing down to 90 minutes.
00:38:21.160
And so then, then we were interested in, we thought, well, we could use this test battery
00:38:28.700
to assess psychopathology impulsivity, but then could we use it to assess normative or
00:38:37.680
And Daniel and I and Bob started to investigate the possibility of using prefrontal cognitive
00:38:43.160
ability tests to assess academic prowess at Harvard and at the University of Toronto, as
00:38:51.220
And we also started to move into the corporate world.
00:38:54.280
And so that was part of an entrepreneurial vision at that point as well, because we thought,
00:38:58.340
well, I had started studying papers that were produced by, God, now I'm not going to be
00:39:04.400
able to remember, unfortunately, the names of the people who produced the initial equations
00:39:12.860
relating increased accuracy of selection to economic outcomes.
00:39:26.300
So one of the things we learned, for everyone watching and listening, is that a tiny minority
00:39:32.260
of extremely high performers produce almost all the economic outcome of a given endeavor.
00:39:38.500
So it's actually the square root of the number of people involved in a given endeavor do half
00:39:45.300
It's almost a very small minority of your customers produce all your profits.
00:39:50.160
A small minority of your workers produce all your productive outcome.
00:39:53.960
A small minority of creative people produce almost all the creative output.
00:39:57.380
A small number of criminals commit almost all the crimes.
00:40:01.400
And so what that means is that if you can tilt your selection methods, your hiring methods,
00:40:06.100
towards the upper end, even a small amount, and thereby increase the number of extremely
00:40:12.280
top performers that you have in your organization, the economic payoff to that is unbelievably dramatic.
00:40:20.140
So I think Schmitt and Hunter estimated at that point that if the U.S. bureaucracy, the
00:40:26.040
government bureaucracy, switched to accurate assessment for hiring, which they're actually bound
00:40:32.280
to do by law, they would save an amount each year equivalent to total American corporate
00:40:39.260
And I read that and I thought, oh my God, if we can develop a new way of assessing ability
00:40:45.900
that's accurate, we should be able to go to corporations and say, look, you know, for a
00:40:51.760
relatively small amount of money, we can radically increase the productivity of your employees.
00:40:56.200
And I thought we could just make a statistical case that the payoff for that would be so great
00:41:02.820
that, you know, people would literally beat a path to our door.
00:41:09.000
Now, you were put right in the center of this because in order to pursue this for your PhD,
00:41:17.120
you decided to come and do a PhD in psychology.
00:41:19.680
You had to master the neuropsychological literature.
00:41:23.660
You had to master the literature on IQ testing because one question that came up was, well,
00:41:31.020
was there a difference between prefrontal cortical ability, let's say, the ability, cognitive abilities
00:41:36.940
that are dependent on the forward part of the brain, the part that abstracts action before
00:41:47.400
And most of the neuropsychologists regarded IQ tests as these dusty, you know, ancient technologies
00:41:55.240
that had been superseded and just assumed that what they were measuring was something separate.
00:42:00.580
But that had never really been rigorously tested.
00:42:03.920
And then you also had to become a master of the relevant literature on personality
00:42:08.840
because personality traits like conscientiousness are also useful at predicting performance.
00:42:15.200
And so why don't you talk a little bit about the development of your thesis and also the fact
00:42:21.320
that you wrote your thesis at the same time that the bell curve came out.
00:42:26.120
And that was quite the political nightmare, all things considered.
00:42:29.300
So why don't you walk through what you did for your PhD research and your thesis?
00:42:33.540
Well, we sort of hit a perfect storm in a way because Hernstein and Murray's bell curve had just been published,
00:42:42.920
which was the most vilified book of the 90s, if you like.
00:42:48.220
And Hernstein and Murray were both at Harvard, although Hernstein had just passed away.
00:42:52.820
And we had been, the neuropsych guys had been speculating on.
00:42:59.400
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The way the brain works under normal circumstances,
00:44:13.300
based on research that they had done with clinical populations,
00:44:17.960
and they essentially completely ignored the statistical methods that are required
00:44:23.860
to talk about individual differences in cognitive ability
00:44:28.800
and individual differences in outcomes, differences across situations.
00:44:33.920
And so, in some ways, we caught a certain amount of flack from the neuropsych guys
00:44:41.140
because we weren't cutting up monkeys, which seems okay to me,
00:44:50.940
because the intelligence research was tainted in psychology,
00:44:58.900
which was very strange because it was the most well-developed
00:45:04.040
from a scientific perspective and has been area of psychology.
00:45:08.500
And the tools that people used throughout psychology,
00:45:15.340
were developed by the early intelligence researchers.
00:45:24.640
and it was later enhanced by a gentleman from the UK.
00:45:34.780
And so, it was very weird for somebody coming into psychology from engineering
00:45:46.540
well, the most rigorous research programs that I can see in this,
00:45:51.820
this is probably going to irritate experimental psychologists a bit,
00:45:59.420
The area that those things, that was essentially despised.
00:46:04.220
And a lot of academics in psychology were trying to figure out
00:46:12.060
how to essentially throw stones at intelligence research,
00:46:18.820
even though it would be like that meme where it's like nobody, nothing,
00:46:30.940
just to come out and make a statement against that.
00:46:35.040
So, suddenly, I found myself, and you did also,
00:46:39.000
being with the pariahs when we didn't even know that there was such a situation.
00:46:55.180
Like, first of all, we had an entrepreneurial curiosity about this,
00:47:05.540
100% by nothing but the desire to try to find accurate predictors
00:47:10.980
of measurable performance, academically and industrially.
00:47:15.700
There was no, not only was there no political agenda,
00:47:18.900
as you said, we didn't even know a political agenda existed,
00:47:23.960
till you started writing your thesis and the bell curve issue blew up.
00:47:34.300
that what they were measuring with their specific tests
00:47:45.880
and you took the forefront on this endeavor, Daniel,
00:47:51.580
all cognitive measures converge to a single factor.
00:48:03.560
If you're speculating about the higher cognitive functions,
00:48:07.460
like Alexandre Luria's The Higher Cognitive Functions of Man,
00:48:13.380
and you want to speculate about that in intact humans,
00:48:17.260
you're like two questions away from G, essentially.
00:48:20.800
You're like, well, how does this manifest itself in the real world?
00:48:24.680
Well, it manifests itself in individual differences between performance.
00:48:34.000
They're all positively correlated with each other.
00:48:44.660
But no, we're not going to ask that second question.
00:48:48.340
We're not even going to ask the first question.
00:48:50.260
We're just going to speculate about how important things like executive function are
00:48:55.700
without saying, well, can it be formalized, measured,
00:49:07.440
it is incumbent upon you to explain why it is different than the G factor.
00:49:15.380
because we had already put years into working out the proposition
00:49:21.620
that these prefrontal cognitive tests were, in fact,
00:49:30.560
I pushed the prefrontal cognitive ability as a construct,
00:49:34.680
measured by the neuropsych test that we had essentially stolen
00:49:39.480
from the neuropsych guys and the animal research guys.
00:49:43.800
And developed into an individual difference construct.
00:49:46.740
And I pushed that as far as I could as an independent construct from G.
00:49:50.700
And when I wrote up my dissertation and the paper,
00:49:56.200
the one that we published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
00:49:59.960
essentially I didn't collapse it and I pushed it as hard as I could.
00:50:03.760
But after coming away from that, I would not sit down with anyone
00:50:08.380
and tell them that prefrontal cognitive ability was independent of G
00:50:13.780
Yeah, well, this is a good indication of the kind of price you can pay
00:50:21.400
I mean, Bob and I have put six years into the development
00:50:27.120
And there was some utility in it predicting disinhibition.
00:50:30.560
And then you and I put in years developing the battery itself.
00:50:33.500
And then our discovery was we didn't know enough
00:50:36.640
about the psychometrics of intelligence to be doing what we were doing.
00:50:39.780
And that there was no escaping from the black hole of fluid intelligence
00:50:46.320
I mean, we did get evidence that the battery had incremental predictive validity
00:50:50.980
in relationship to predicting grades at Harvard and the University of Toronto
00:50:57.980
But what that meant at best in all likelihood was that perhaps we had expanded
00:51:03.780
the domain of cognitive measurement to some degree into areas
00:51:11.680
although it might have just been that it was just a secondary consequence
00:51:18.860
Well, for our measure of G, we only use the Raven's progressive matrix.
00:51:25.660
The block, the fluid intelligence components, like three of them, of the waste.
00:51:31.640
So a real intelligence researcher like Ian Drury, for example,
00:51:49.740
And he would basically want to define the whole thing.
00:51:53.680
But anyways, one of the things that you said at the time was
00:52:01.540
And that would have been, if that sort of maxim had been used from the start,
00:52:09.240
we probably wouldn't have been as naive as we were about getting away from it.
00:52:15.920
That's not to say that executive function and prefrontal cognitive ability
00:52:20.320
are reducible to some magical construct in the sky, G.
00:52:24.740
It's just to say that in psychological research,
00:52:29.340
things just don't fall along the nice little neat theoretical lines
00:52:33.520
that you build your career around, that they're messy.
00:52:37.960
Yeah, well, what I concluded at that time was that
00:52:40.600
every psychological experiment run that involves analysis of the differences
00:52:46.280
between people should, by what would you call universal fiat,
00:52:54.560
be required to use both IQ tests and likely personality tests.
00:53:02.320
general cognitive ability, which is a walloping measure,
00:53:06.000
and also pretty decent measures of temperamental proclivity.
00:53:10.300
And they're really basic the same way the elements in the table of the elements
00:53:19.080
And we shouldn't be talking about any other constructs in psychology
00:53:22.380
until we can be absolutely sure that we're not just
00:53:25.340
re-measuring constructs that have already been discovered.
00:53:29.000
And that is kind of disheartening on the psychological front,
00:53:36.600
I mean, you can argue exactly about the parameters of the Big Five still,
00:53:42.020
that they tend to suck in every other bit of research
00:53:47.700
Like, I mean, I remember we looked at the self-esteem literature, for example,
00:53:51.060
and concluded pretty rapidly that self-esteem was nothing but
00:53:54.060
low neuroticism with a bit of extroversion thrown in.
00:53:59.180
And there was no need for the self-esteem construct at all.
00:54:03.320
And I mean, that just obliterates the careers in some real sense
00:54:06.400
of the people who are proposing these alternative constructs as real.
00:54:12.140
The other thing that happened, Daniel, when we were working together
00:54:15.680
was that the multiple intelligence and practical intelligence people,
00:54:19.940
especially at the Harvard School of Education under Gardner,
00:54:31.700
although they might be united to some degree by G,
00:54:37.840
and then pursuing this multiple intelligence idea,
00:54:41.220
which was really just a political scheme right from the beginning,
00:54:45.420
because he never developed a single instrument of measurement.
00:54:49.140
And that was scandalous from our perspective, too.
00:54:58.640
that intelligence is actually a unitary construct,
00:55:04.800
And now you're putting this forward as the basis
00:55:18.480
And in that book, I don't recall the title of the book,
00:55:42.240
there's a very weird thing amongst academic psychologists.
00:56:02.760
But then, as I said, they don't like the whole idea.
00:56:08.260
I think it might be, if I may be a bit Freudian about it,
00:56:14.020
that they are conflating intelligence with value as a human.
00:56:22.100
And that leads them to see this conflation everywhere,
00:56:30.580
I personally don't consider people to be more valuable
00:56:36.220
But I think that there may be some sort of guilt
00:56:55.640
intelligence and IQ are very clearly understood.
00:57:21.820
reducing the sort of prospect of a young person
00:57:35.660
Well, Stephen Jay Gould was making the same kind
00:57:43.600
and I would criticize him ethically on this one,
00:58:06.740
with the required research that would be necessary.
00:58:10.860
You want to call your frames of mind intelligences?
00:58:33.640
He said, well, I'm not interested in measurement.
00:58:35.860
It's like, well, then you should shut the hell up
00:58:46.620
that's already extremely well understood technically
00:59:10.780
is criticizing the hypothetically abstract construct
00:59:16.420
It's like, well, what's the abstract construct here?
00:59:23.620
that the average of a group of numbers is real.
01:43:13.300
And so, Daniel, I don't think it was aggression.
01:43:19.980
kind of rigorous honesty that you've brought to
01:43:22.620
the programming enterprise because you've produced
01:43:30.380
and I don't think we've ever been offline except
01:43:35.980
And so you brought that integrity of purpose to
01:43:40.300
your intellectual endeavor on the academic front
01:43:44.100
and then to your engineering, but also to your,
01:43:49.800
but appropriate path forward was on the business
01:43:55.220
And luckily, as Bob pointed out, we had enough sense
01:43:57.920
to pay attention to that and to adjust when that was
01:44:01.820
And it got very challenging again when things kind
01:44:05.060
of blew up around me and I got sick because you ended
01:44:07.800
up, both of you ended up dealing not with me so much
01:44:12.800
And while that put another, and we also didn't really
01:44:16.560
know what to do with the fact that I had come to such
01:44:19.180
broad public attention at that point too, and how to
01:44:22.920
Bob and I just decided, Bob and I just decided that we
01:44:27.220
Just, we have meetings where we talk, hey, Bob, have you
01:44:33.880
Because, you know, we want to make sure that he still
01:44:38.480
We want to be able to ride this guy's coattails.
01:44:42.100
Well, you know, when you were talking about the VC thing,
01:44:46.880
you know, occasionally, very large window, birds will often
01:44:51.520
try to fly through the window and they hit the window and
01:44:55.380
Well, watching you and Bob trying to sell ExamCorp was a
01:45:00.100
And so, whenever somebody said, oh, hey, this is a big, let's
01:45:07.000
do a business plan, let's do this, let's do that.
01:45:11.720
And you take a look at the sales situation, it wasn't very
01:45:15.840
difficult to see, like, what would be different about these
01:45:19.540
Why wouldn't these also be birds bouncing off a glass
01:45:27.760
All I had to do was say, well, all I had to do was basically
01:45:34.820
And then, just looking at these other situations, it was a very
01:45:40.780
You know, we're going to be dead in six months because they're
01:45:44.240
not going to have any more success making sales.
01:45:46.280
And then we have to figure out a very low cost way of keeping this
01:45:53.720
And then we did figure out what the formula is.
01:45:59.900
I don't remember exactly when it was, but you just basically put the
01:46:07.640
You put together a website with a very simple PayPal button, and that gave
01:46:13.520
And from that point forward, it was just like, oh, we'll just deal with
01:46:24.680
Sometimes they complain to us about the self-authoring suite being a little bit
01:46:33.200
But there was no more of this, you know, trying to deal with a corporate
01:46:40.960
structure and being bounced back down to HR and then booted out the door.
01:46:45.240
But we were able to do that because a lot of the businesses, they have no issue at
01:46:50.060
And this is also, this is more of a function of the size of the business.
01:46:53.960
They will waste your time without giving it a second thought.
01:46:59.760
And so once we started going to end users, it was better.
01:47:04.540
Well, we were, we were on the threshold of large business deals several times.
01:47:09.860
Like we had a contract pending with a very large organization in New York for the
01:47:17.700
And it was literally on the CEO's desk for signature.
01:47:21.740
And thank God it didn't go through because we would have ended up as employees of this
01:47:26.760
And we didn't charge nearly enough money for what we wanted to do in our ignorance.
01:47:33.800
And that had taken us like a year of work to organize that deal.
01:47:39.660
Like we did have some sales successes in nine out of 10 of the initial stages, you know,
01:47:45.940
but that was another thing about, about the complexity of dealing with corporations is
01:47:53.800
that, you know, you think you want to land a big fish and there's a lot of money in that,
01:47:59.340
And there's such churn and turnover in corporations that you can end up talking to someone for like
01:48:04.820
a year and then all of a sudden they're not there anymore.
01:48:09.540
And, and that, that was certainly a reason why selling to individuals was better.
01:48:18.520
They're, it's so rewarding to provide these services for them.
01:48:24.020
I get this through the, through the emails that we get, but you also meet people at your
01:48:30.560
And that's not, that, I don't think that we would have done, I don't think we would have
01:48:36.060
done better if we were working in the corporate world and working with end users.
01:48:42.040
Like the thing, one of the things everybody listening should understand is that if you
01:48:47.080
make a deal ever with anyone who has more money than you, don't be so sure that you're
01:48:53.420
not now an employee, you know, cause you think, well, I'd like to land a big company and they'd
01:48:59.520
It's like, yeah, if the company is a lot bigger than you, they're not your client.
01:49:07.540
Because you have to have a job, but don't, don't, don't ever be convinced that there
01:49:12.260
aren't major strings that come along with that.
01:49:14.160
One of the things I really liked about you and also about working with you, Bob, too,
01:49:17.460
on the entrepreneurial front was that I think all three of us were free enough of delusion
01:49:23.520
to understand pretty immediately on the industrial and corporate front that the only thing that
01:49:33.320
really mattered, the only thing that was truly real was the in-hand existence of paying customers.
01:49:42.380
That's the fundamental metric is like, I don't care about how your idea sounds.
01:49:47.960
I don't care about the background of your team, et cetera.
01:49:56.040
But what I do care about is, have you even been able to find one person who will give you money
01:50:06.000
And that is why we eventually turned to private users.
01:50:08.720
Yeah, people who want to improve themselves or help themselves versus companies when we
01:50:16.500
were asking someone to help other people who may not have particularly wanted to be helped,
01:50:23.800
you know, have everybody in the department do the future authoring program.
01:50:27.620
I remember being in school well enough to know that I wouldn't have liked that very much.
01:50:36.080
Yeah, well, that's the advantage to dealing with these individuals.
01:50:38.720
Like you said, that's a voluntary, it's a voluntary association.
01:50:44.020
And they, they, they, they want to do it and they want to do it for themselves as well.
01:50:54.280
I mean, one of the things that Bob and I talked about a long time ago, and then obviously
01:50:58.180
with you too, is, you know, we were interested right from the beginning in working on the
01:51:03.540
entrepreneurial front, partly just because of the challenge of learning how to do
01:51:07.180
it. And God knows we learn plenty by going through the difficulties of banging ourselves
01:51:14.280
against multiple sheets of glass window and breaking our necks over and over and over.
01:51:20.660
I mean, our vision was to produce widely distributable psychological interventions at low cost with low
01:51:28.240
overhead that would not hurt anyone and that would do people good.
01:51:32.240
And I think that we, we have managed that to a large degree.
01:51:35.140
Like the research we've done on these interventions and measures has been very solid.
01:51:39.540
And it's certainly the case that the hundreds of thousands of people who've used our technologies
01:51:45.440
now have, many of them have set their lives on much more productive pathways.
01:51:50.320
And that's pretty damn good thing to be able to, to be, to have participated in and also
01:51:57.800
And, you know, one thing people who are a bit skeptical about capitalism might be asking
01:52:02.800
is, well, why the hell didn't you just give away this all for free?
01:52:07.380
And we spent a lot of time talking about the right price, say, and it took us a long time
01:52:14.560
to figure out what our self-authoring program was worth.
01:52:18.500
It's like, well, if this is going to change your life, how much is it worth?
01:52:22.080
And the answer to that was, well, it's worth about what people will pay for it because that's
01:52:31.960
I mean, it, it's not the sort of thing that anybody in the developed world is going to
01:52:36.000
have to strain themselves particularly to afford, but we decided not to distribute it
01:52:41.420
for free and we've never produced anything for free.
01:52:46.800
And for me, the advantage of that was twofold is like we had to produce the kind of products
01:52:55.980
So that was one way of demonstrating their attractiveness and value.
01:53:01.740
And then the other thing, of course, is because we've been able to generate some capital as
01:53:05.500
a consequence of doing this on a for-profit basis, we're not beholden to any outside stakeholders,
01:53:13.720
And we have enough capital so that we can produce additional ventures.
01:53:18.160
And Daniel, you're working on some, on a refitting, for example, of our predictive battery.
01:53:23.520
Do you want to, maybe we'll just wrap up with that.
01:53:25.440
Do you want to just end with a brief description of where you're headed, where we're headed
01:53:33.320
The people who are users, when they come and they pay for the assessments, I wouldn't
01:53:38.820
ask them to do it for free because I think that robs them of their agency.
01:53:43.680
When they pay for it, they can accept it or reject it.
01:53:47.560
And if they don't like it, they can ask for their money back.
01:53:49.820
And in my experience, I don't think people want free.
01:53:55.500
I think that's a delusion of the computer age, the internet age.
01:54:04.580
I mean, it's the case often that if I do offer content for free, say, that people clamor
01:54:12.000
to be involved in some manner that allows them to reciprocate.
01:54:15.960
That's the thing is people have a powerful drive for reciprocity.
01:54:20.040
And so if you offer something to someone for free, well, first of all, it begs the question,
01:54:28.900
And second, it doesn't allow people to discharge their moral burden, you know, because people
01:54:34.800
don't have to be beholden to us for having done them a favor.
01:54:39.480
And the reason for that is because they paid us.
01:54:41.500
And as far as we're concerned, that's a perfectly equal and desirable trade.
01:54:49.720
So basically what I'm working on now, and I suppose it'll probably be something like,
01:54:57.260
hopefully over the next 12 months, 12 years is a classic Freudian slip there.
01:55:05.560
But it's to make it so that my target audience for this is small businesses.
01:55:15.820
If large corporations want to use it, it's fine, as long as they don't expect to call
01:55:19.780
me on the phone, because I don't want to go down that rabbit hole again.
01:55:23.480
My target is small businesses, because we have a lot of small business users that use
01:55:27.440
Understand Myself and Self-Authoring, and they use it informally.
01:55:40.560
And so what I want to do is I want to streamline it to make it easier for small businesses and
01:55:45.940
organizations like churches and so on and so forth to be able to purchase the Understand Myself
01:55:52.700
and self-Authoring for their members or their employees, whatever the case may be.
01:56:03.680
But also, I'm going to use that platform to essentially bring the harder edged.
01:56:13.900
The fastest and easiest way to improve, let's say, your workforce is to use brutal selection
01:56:25.360
And everybody understood that until about five minutes ago.
01:56:29.120
That's why Harvard and Yale used to have brutal selection processes.
01:56:35.660
Most people wouldn't, their application is in red.
01:56:41.300
And so these ones, so the assessment things, I'd like to be able to bring those back to general use
01:56:49.780
to make them easier to use so that people can use a little bit of selection when they're hiring
01:56:57.260
people so that, you know, to avoid the situation.
01:57:03.760
Okay, so we never discussed this, but one of the least effective ways of determining the, let's say,
01:57:13.420
cognitive ability is important for jobs that are highly complex.
01:57:16.660
And so it becomes more, this becomes more of an issue if you're talking about highly complex jobs.
01:57:22.840
But one of the tools that a lot of people use to determine whether or not someone's a suitable fit
01:57:28.960
And the Hunter and Schmidt research was quite plain that interviews are not very useful unless they're
01:57:34.000
highly structured interviews or even if they include some work sample.
01:57:38.340
And so this is to provide people with an auxiliary of the, to their whole hiring process,
01:57:45.760
which may or may not include cognitive ability, but will include the big five personality assessment,
01:57:55.040
And so the idea then is to make these tools available for people to use at low cost with low commitment.
01:58:03.760
And hopefully the advice that we'll have for them will be use these tools to bias your decision processes.
01:58:16.020
Just have this, just have these in the back of your head while you're talking to people.
01:58:21.640
For example, if you, if you have a big five personality assessment on somebody before you interview them,
01:58:28.180
it's very, it would be very useful if you're about to interview somebody who's high in extroversion.
01:58:34.460
You need to know that during that interview, you're going to have an inflated view of their competence
01:58:39.480
because you will automatically conflate confidence with competence.
01:58:44.480
So it's good to know before you go in there, whether or not you're dealing with somebody who's highly extroverted.
01:58:49.880
If they're highly extroverted, they're going to present better compared to others.
01:58:53.720
And in the, in the opposite direction, if somebody is high in neuroticism, it's good to know that in advance.
01:59:04.560
They might require a certain amount of coats, coats, coaxing to, to come out of their shell.
01:59:12.280
It would be useful to have a tool to know that in advance.
01:59:15.580
So you can essentially counteract the hard wiring that you have as an interviewer to be bamboozled by the brilliant
01:59:25.120
and to, to, to discard people who don't present themselves in a forceful way.
01:59:33.960
Well, and you, you talked about brutal selection methods and people might react to that.
01:59:38.240
And I would say, well, here's something for people to think about.
01:59:42.800
Hire stupidly and put people in positions where not only do they fail painfully over a long period of time,
01:59:49.360
but they compromise the performance of everyone around them while doing so.
01:59:55.500
And it's a lot more brutal than making an appropriate hiring decision to begin with.
02:00:03.660
It's like, which form of brutality do you prefer?
02:00:06.160
And I would prefer the preventive brutality approach rather than the consequential brutality approach.
02:00:13.140
Well, I think the, I think what I, brutal is probably a, too bad, wasn't a, wasn't a good choice of words.
02:00:20.880
But I think that it's essentially, if you're using, the opposite would be to have a therapeutic view.
02:00:28.700
That you can essentially change people and you can convert them into something that they're not.
02:00:34.640
For example, and let's just keep it in the personality realm.
02:00:38.200
You might have a highly agreeable person, somebody who's very high in compassion.
02:00:42.820
And that person has been hired by a law firm, let's say.
02:00:47.380
And all of a sudden, this person has to go into situations where they have to act in a very disagreeable way.
02:00:53.320
And, you know, the therapeutic way would be to presume that that person will change over time.
02:01:04.800
But it might be better to, depending on your perspective, to look for people who are low in agreeableness if you want to hire lawyers.
02:01:14.940
Particularly if they're going to be doing, yeah, aggressive, aggressive legal action.
02:01:20.000
So, putting, but putting the wrong person in the wrong place, particularly in a complex environment where things are interconnected.
02:01:29.320
Like, for example, in software, they compare the most productive workers to the least productive workers.
02:01:34.720
And they try to work out, you know, you can speculate on what would be a factor of productivity.
02:01:38.860
And as one person said, the factor is infinite because not only will an unproductive worker not produce,
02:01:49.180
they can actually introduce bugs and errors into the system that takes more capable people time to undo
02:01:58.620
so they can have a negative impact on the overall situation.
02:02:01.940
Yeah, well, the management literature that I reviewed, and that was back in the 90s,
02:02:09.120
indicated that 60% of managers add negative net value to a given corporate enterprise.
02:02:23.180
You do much less damage to somebody by not hiring them if they're not appropriate
02:02:30.260
than you do by letting them in and then terminating them after six months or 12 months or whatever.
02:02:37.940
So, you pay the eventual price for inaccuracy in your determinations,
02:02:41.420
no matter how compassionate that motivation might be.
02:02:53.100
Bob, you're going to come down to Miami and lecture for Peterson Academy.
02:02:57.940
And so, that's at least part of what's on your horizon.
02:03:05.520
And you're going to do a series of lectures on abnormal psychology?
02:03:13.840
Yeah, and so, for everyone watching and listening,
02:03:15.620
this is part of this Peterson Academy initiative,
02:03:17.840
which is an attempt to produce something approximating an online university,
02:03:23.700
And Bob is one of our stellar lecturers lined up to work for this academy.
02:03:33.520
but I should also point out that he's an extremely popular undergraduate lecturer.
02:03:37.680
He lectured about abnormal psychology, which, of course, is a very interesting field,
02:03:42.740
although any bad lecturer can make any field dull and uninteresting, even abnormal psychology.
02:03:51.640
and witty and urbane and challenging and provocative.
02:03:57.740
And we're very happy to have him have the opportunity to bring those lectures to a much broader audience,
02:04:06.080
And so, it's a great pleasure talking to both of you guys today.
02:04:09.480
We covered a lot of the ground that we've covered in the last three decades,
02:04:17.240
It's been a privilege to work with both of you,
02:04:19.400
and quite the honour to have been able to produce a thriving enterprise,
02:04:24.260
despite the difficulties that has, in fact, resulted in helping perhaps tens of thousands
02:04:33.560
I mean, that really was a fulfilment of our initial vision, right?
02:04:36.340
Because I remember we established these principles at the beginning of our collaboration, right?
02:04:40.940
Is that we were going to produce valid psychological interventions and assessment methods,
02:04:45.840
low cost, widely distributed, scalable, inexpensive, and do no harm.
02:04:50.540
And that we were also going to stay relatively minimal on the employee front,
02:04:55.980
which we have, because there's basically us three,
02:04:59.040
and the person that you've hired part-time to do customer service.
02:05:02.980
And so, it really looks like, although it took a long time for it to unfold and to work,
02:05:07.800
it looks like we did hit the target that we had eventually set and continue to do that.
02:05:13.540
And so, I'm going to talk to Daniel and Bob a little bit more on the Daily Wire Plus platform
02:05:18.180
about how their interest in their respective fields developed.
02:05:22.620
And so, for those of you who are watching and listening that might be interested in that,
02:05:26.600
you'll have to refer to the Daily Wire Plus platform for that.
02:05:29.140
I'd like to thank them for facilitating this conversation,
02:05:31.980
and to everyone watching and listening for your time and attention.
02:05:37.460
And to say once again, thank you, you two, for the conversation.
02:05:46.260
Yeah, yeah, it's so nice to be able to sit and talk to you guys.
02:05:49.180
And, well, we'll finish this up on the Daily Wire Plus platform.
02:05:57.500
I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.
02:06:04.020
Bye to everybody watching and listening to my guest on the Daily Wire Plus platform for the Daily Wire Plus platform for the Daily Wire Plus platform for the Daily Wire Plus platform.