The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast


336. How to Educate Your Children ｜ Jeff Sandefer


Summary

Jeff Sandefur is an entrepreneur and a Socratic teacher, which is a teacher 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 Sandfur Capital Partners, an oil and gas investment firm with several billion dollars in assets. He s also started multiple academic programs and schools, such as the Acton School of Business, whose students were named the most competitive MBAs in the nation by the Princeton Review, and 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 around them. In this episode, Jeff and I discuss his early experiences in early adulthood, and how they shaped his views on education and how we should approach it in the 21st-century world. Let s get to the bottom of it! Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. 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, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and a unique approach towards healing. Let s take the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. - Dr. B. P.B. Peterson. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching the new series on Depression and Anxiety: A Path to Feeling Better. by Dr. J.P. Peterson on the Daily Wire Plus now! Go to J.R. Peterson's website and start getting the daily dose of information you need to help you on the path to feeling better. The Daily Wire is a podcast that can help you feel better, not just better, but more confident, happier, more fulfilled, and more fulfilled and a little less stressed out than you ve ever been in the past. J. RATE 5 stars on Apple Podcasts - Rate, review, review and subscribe to the podcast so you can be sure you re getting the most of what you re listening to in the future.


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.
00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. I'm pleased today to be speaking with Jeff Sandefur, who's someone I've known for a number of years and worked together on a variety of projects.
00:01:17.720 We're going to talk today about childhood education and about his background, depending on which platform you're viewing.
00:01:24.200 Jeff is an entrepreneur and a Socratic teacher, which is a teacher, by the way, who tends to ask questions rather than provide answers.
00:01:34.000 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.
00:01:42.120 He has started and run many successful businesses, the most recent of which is Sandefur Capital Partners, an oil and gas investment firm with several billion dollars in assets.
00:01:54.700 He's also started multiple academic programs and schools, going to concentrate on that today, such as the Acton School of Business,
00:02:03.220 whose students were named the most competitive MBAs in the nation by the Princeton Review.
00:02:10.220 He's extended this work over the last 15 years into the K-12 realm, kindergarten through grade 12, with the Acton Academy,
00:02:19.800 a cutting-edge program that blends the one-room schoolhouse, the Socratic method, and 21st century technology
00:02:26.800 to aid each student in changing the world, themselves and the world.
00:02:34.040 So, Jeff, we get a chance to sit down and talk today and to share that with a very large number of people.
00:02:40.840 So, Jeff and I were talking before this podcast about what we wanted to talk about,
00:02:47.020 and last night we thought about construing this in terms of educational reform,
00:02:52.820 but really the proper way to set this conversation up is to talk about education,
00:02:58.900 not so much reform, but education per se.
00:03:01.340 And so, let's start a little bit by talking about your background, though,
00:03:05.520 and we might as well go back to, I guess, your early experiences in early adulthood,
00:03:12.080 and let's lay that out, and then we can place in the educational discussion as appropriate.
00:03:20.100 Sure, and I think, as you say today, that I'm here more as a father and a husband
00:03:26.820 than an educator or even a Socratic teacher, but I really started life as an entrepreneur.
00:03:34.760 Age 16, I had my first real business.
00:03:37.520 We made $100,000 in profits, which, as old as I am back then, that was real money.
00:03:42.080 By age 26, I'd taken a million-dollar investment,
00:03:47.400 and within four years turned it into $500 million in profits.
00:03:52.120 What was your first business?
00:03:53.600 Oil and gas exploration.
00:03:55.420 At 16?
00:03:56.300 At 16, we were actually painting tanks out in the hot West Texas sun,
00:04:01.780 and my father had had me working in the oil field as a laborer,
00:04:06.020 and I didn't want to do that anymore.
00:04:07.200 So I found I could hire the high school football coaches at our local high school,
00:04:13.220 and instead of paying workers by the hour, I paid them by the job.
00:04:17.800 They hired their football players underneath them,
00:04:20.100 and their productivity was nine times higher than the average crew.
00:04:25.280 So we went out and competed, charged two-thirds what our competitors charged,
00:04:29.420 and had 80% profit margins.
00:04:30.920 So why were they more efficient?
00:04:33.220 Because they were getting paid by the tank, by what they did.
00:04:36.080 Right, so you had the incentives by that property.
00:04:37.040 And so they would show up at the break of dawn and work till dusk.
00:04:40.440 The people who were being paid in those days $2.15 an hour had no incentive to work hard.
00:04:46.600 So it was just purely incentive, work ethic.
00:04:49.880 You can imagine football players and coaches are conscientious.
00:04:52.660 Yeah, yeah.
00:04:53.340 And so, you know, it was a home run.
00:04:56.160 And why did they take you seriously when you were so young?
00:04:59.720 I think because if you think about coaches during the summer, they had nothing else to do.
00:05:04.460 What did they have to lose?
00:05:05.040 They got a chance to work with their team, too.
00:05:06.540 Right, and what did they have to lose, right?
00:05:08.260 They're not doing anything anyway.
00:05:09.180 So it was kind of one of those things where you could put together pieces of a deal
00:05:13.280 that make the pie bigger for everyone.
00:05:15.120 Right, right.
00:05:15.880 And it just worked.
00:05:16.840 It's exciting to give people an opportunity to experience a direct return on their immediate investment.
00:05:23.100 I mean, one of the things that's nice about hands-on labor, carpentry and contracting and so forth,
00:05:29.220 is you immediately see what you produce, and the harder you work, the more there is of it.
00:05:34.140 And so, obviously, you built those incentives in.
00:05:36.940 And so then you took that money and you further invested it, you said, into something that generated a million dollars.
00:05:44.180 And how did that happen?
00:05:45.380 Well, I actually then went off and got an engineering degree, went to Harvard Business School.
00:05:49.460 And then when I got out of Harvard Business School, I raised a million dollars.
00:05:52.380 And we went out and we drilled the oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico.
00:05:56.680 And through hard work, a lot of luck, good timing, we turned that million dollars into $500 million in profits
00:06:03.840 in four years for our investors and our employees and ourselves.
00:06:08.620 And so I'm at now age 29.
00:06:11.780 I've got more money than I'll ever spend.
00:06:13.600 I don't spend much money.
00:06:14.760 I'm a cheap guy.
00:06:15.840 Yeah, yeah.
00:06:16.400 What do I do next?
00:06:17.460 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.
00:06:26.820 And that changed my life.
00:06:28.420 And so for 35 years now, I've been, or going on 40 years, I've been a Socratic teacher.
00:06:33.680 Okay, so let's define that for everyone.
00:06:35.800 Sure.
00:06:35.960 So Socratic teacher and this case method.
00:06:40.100 Yes.
00:06:40.420 So let's go into what constitutes a Socratic teacher first.
00:06:44.480 So you're put in the shoes of someone facing a real-life dilemma where there is no right answer.
00:06:51.960 They're moral choices.
00:06:53.480 You're going to have to trade off efficiency and money and what you want to do with your life.
00:06:58.180 And then you've worked maybe 10 hours preparing this case, this 10 to 100-page case.
00:07:04.280 Might be about Enron.
00:07:05.980 Might be about Acton Academy.
00:07:07.700 We have a Harvard case about Acton, our school.
00:07:10.840 And then it's Mr. Peterson.
00:07:14.680 You're not a doctor then.
00:07:15.900 You're going to be younger.
00:07:17.140 Mr. Peterson, what would you do?
00:07:19.560 Invest or not?
00:07:21.020 Right.
00:07:21.220 And so then you have to make your case.
00:07:23.220 There are counter cases.
00:07:24.000 And the Socratic method is interesting the way we practice it.
00:07:27.960 There's only two questions.
00:07:30.140 Would you do A or B next?
00:07:32.620 Right, right.
00:07:33.600 And then the second question is, what do you mean by A?
00:07:36.740 Yeah.
00:07:37.180 It's definitional.
00:07:38.020 So the entire Socratic method is just helping people understand what to do next and why.
00:07:44.560 And when you say what you're going to do, exactly what are you going to do?
00:07:48.460 Right.
00:07:48.700 So it's the interrogation of a story.
00:07:50.640 So the thing about a story that makes it unique is that it provides a deeply contextualized representation of something complex.
00:08:00.820 Yes.
00:08:00.960 And you see this happening in a court case.
00:08:02.560 When we're trying to decide whether someone is guilty or innocent, really what we do is set up a dialogue between competing narratives.
00:08:09.520 Yes.
00:08:09.900 Right?
00:08:10.120 And so the defense mounts a defense narrative and the prosecution mounts a prosecution narrative.
00:08:14.580 And then what you're attempting to do is weigh the narratives.
00:08:17.500 Yes.
00:08:17.700 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.
00:08:27.960 And then you said this is very strategically oriented, so it has to produce a binary outcome, a decision-related outcome.
00:08:33.120 Yes.
00:08:33.400 With a strategy associated with that.
00:08:35.220 Yes.
00:08:35.420 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.
00:08:51.860 Yep.
00:08:51.940 You have to ask them to delineate out the problem.
00:08:55.100 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.
00:09:08.760 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, A, no idea how to implement it, but also no real motivation to implement it.
00:09:20.580 Yeah, there's no drama to it.
00:09:22.420 There's no part of life.
00:09:23.400 I mean, something I've learned from listening to you, you know, about the power of story, you don't have any of that.
00:09:27.480 And also, for the real world, there's no action.
00:09:30.060 I mean, there are consequences.
00:09:31.440 Eventually, you're going to go out and do these things yourself.
00:09:34.160 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.
00:09:41.140 And so this method is more about learning to learn what are the routines and the recipes that we go through,
00:09:47.980 learning to do something that requires courage, and then that leads to learning to be who you're going to become.
00:09:54.160 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,
00:10:02.980 because you never really get to that point.
00:10:04.540 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.
00:10:14.500 And I would say the reason I would use the language of faith is because you have to leap into the unknown.
00:10:19.920 Absolutely.
00:10:20.400 Right?
00:10:20.620 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.
00:10:27.560 Right.
00:10:28.340 And so where were you doing the case studies?
00:10:30.360 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,
00:10:38.560 and at age 28 was teaching a room full of 28-year-old graduate students at the University of Texas.
00:10:45.000 And so that was—and, you know, as you said, what you're doing if you do 100 cases, you're seeing pattern after pattern after pattern,
00:10:52.300 much like the stories you might see in the Bible.
00:10:54.540 Yeah.
00:10:54.700 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.
00:11:02.100 Yeah, well, you know, you're doing something that brought up two ideas for me.
00:11:06.400 One is, well, you're exposing yourself to a number of—a diverse number of cases, right?
00:11:11.760 Yes.
00:11:11.920 And then what you're doing, you do the same thing that these advanced language processing models do now.
00:11:16.280 Yes.
00:11:16.500 You're looking for commonalities across the narratives.
00:11:19.480 And as you gather more and more narratives within a certain domain, you start to understand the underlying principles.
00:11:26.460 Yes.
00:11:26.700 So this is what happened in the book of Exodus, by the way, when—because before Moses is—has the commandments revealed to him,
00:11:34.660 he sits for an unknown amount of time, dawn till midnight, every day, judging the Israelites and their complaints.
00:11:43.340 And so he hears thousands and thousands of cases.
00:11:45.500 Right, you see it.
00:11:46.000 Right?
00:11:46.260 And then you can imagine that the revelation is the—it's the revelation of the substructure of what constitutes justice itself.
00:11:54.920 Yes.
00:11:55.180 But you can't get to that without this case analysis.
00:11:58.480 So why, with all the money at your disposal and the hypothetical freedom that that might have bestowed upon you,
00:12:05.560 why did you decide to, well, stay actively working, stay actively employed?
00:12:10.340 Now, you were a professor at UTexas?
00:12:12.180 Yes, I was an adjunct.
00:12:13.480 You were an adjunct.
00:12:14.160 Yeah.
00:12:14.240 And in the business school?
00:12:15.300 In the business school.
00:12:16.180 Okay, but—and so you decided to continue doing that.
00:12:18.840 And what was driving you to do that?
00:12:21.480 Because I was fascinated with asking questions.
00:12:23.680 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.
00:12:33.540 In our setting, it's the actor themselves playing out the act.
00:12:37.180 So I was fascinated.
00:12:38.220 And frankly, I didn't know what to do with my own life.
00:12:40.280 I mean, I had first started my first business to get out of the hot sun.
00:12:43.240 I started the second business, so I was going to make more money than my father.
00:12:47.560 I wanted to overcome him.
00:12:48.740 Oh, yeah, yeah.
00:12:49.540 But then I did that, and it's like, you're 28.
00:12:51.820 What next?
00:12:52.500 Right.
00:12:52.700 And I didn't know.
00:12:53.640 So I went to actually learn myself, and by, you know, asking questions and digging in, and then—
00:13:00.120 Were you ever tempted on the hedonistic front?
00:13:02.900 I mean, you're pretty young at that point.
00:13:05.060 You have the world at your feet in some real sense, so—
00:13:07.620 Well, I'm not exactly Brad Pitt, so I don't think the hedonistic part of chasing girls would do well.
00:13:12.360 Well, money can make up for that.
00:13:13.800 Well, no, it does help.
00:13:14.780 It does help.
00:13:15.280 Apparently it didn't help enough, but no, I just never was interested.
00:13:19.120 The hedonistic thing just didn't really appeal to me.
00:13:22.920 That's fortunate for you.
00:13:23.880 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.
00:13:31.280 And there was something about that I didn't like.
00:13:33.320 Now, I'm sure there's something our children don't like about me,
00:13:36.560 so that's a typical father-son thing, you know, judging it.
00:13:39.160 But I think that that—it set up something in me that I've always been more about competence than prestige.
00:13:46.020 And so chasing prestige to me just never felt right, and so the hedonistic root would have felt like—
00:13:53.120 Well, prestige over competence is narcissism.
00:13:55.360 Yeah, so I just—that just wasn't appealing.
00:13:59.520 But I was lost.
00:14:00.700 And so how long—lost when?
00:14:02.780 Well, I was lost at 29.
00:14:04.440 I mean, look, people only ask—they're only desperate when there's no hope and they hit rock bottom.
00:14:12.240 Yeah.
00:14:12.760 Or you get to the top and you ask, is that all there is?
00:14:15.520 Right, right.
00:14:15.980 So I'm at the top, and I have to ask, is that all there is?
00:14:20.480 And I said, I don't know what to do except to go Socratically explore with a group of other people.
00:14:26.060 Right, well, that's a good thing.
00:14:27.340 If you're somewhere and you don't know what to do, exploring seems like a good idea.
00:14:32.300 Right.
00:14:32.600 It is definitely the case that the only genuine pathway to exploration is something like the pursuit of the questions that honestly plague you.
00:14:42.940 Yeah.
00:14:43.420 Right?
00:14:43.800 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.
00:14:53.000 Yes.
00:14:53.360 Right?
00:14:53.640 So you're going to have doubts, everyone does, but you're going to have your doubts.
00:14:57.200 Yes.
00:14:57.360 And the strange thing about your own doubts is that your doubts contain the seeds of your progress.
00:15:03.740 Yes.
00:15:04.180 Because if you pursue those doubts, first of all, they're stopping you because they're doubts.
00:15:08.240 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.
00:15:15.600 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, but it sets up everything.
00:15:26.420 It's the hero's journey story, right?
00:15:27.960 It's Pilgrim's Progress.
00:15:29.200 It's the hero going out, looking for the grail, fighting dragons and monsters.
00:15:33.480 And then you realize, when you get to the end, it wasn't about the grail at all.
00:15:38.380 It's how the hero changed in the process.
00:15:40.700 And so it really began to set up that pattern over and over and over again.
00:15:44.880 Right.
00:15:45.000 Eternal transformation, right, as a consequence of learning.
00:15:48.040 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.
00:15:55.640 Yes.
00:15:55.860 He has the number one podcast in 100 countries.
00:15:58.780 Wow.
00:15:59.140 Right.
00:15:59.700 I think he's the most significant media figure who ever lived, possibly, in terms of sheer numbers and breadth of reach.
00:16:07.380 And he runs a shoestring operation.
00:16:09.680 It's really just him and his producer.
00:16:11.600 He picks all his guests, and all he does is ask them the questions that he actually has.
00:16:18.280 And what's so interesting about that is, well, it's made Joe an incredibly well-informed person.
00:16:23.880 I mean, because he's, I think he's done, it's some thousands of podcasts now.
00:16:28.700 So he's had thousands of hours of case studies, let's say.
00:16:32.340 But he also can bring his listeners on the same journey, because the probability that if he's asking an honest question,
00:16:40.200 that that will be a question that resounds with his audience is extremely high.
00:16:44.480 And it's so interesting to see how much power there is in that, is that his stripped-down approach,
00:16:50.940 which also requires virtually no editing and certainly no special effects,
00:16:56.300 his stripped-down approach is the most compelling approach.
00:17:00.080 And I think it is because it's based on an honest Socratic method.
00:17:04.260 But it does require curiosity, and it requires a genuine interest in true choices.
00:17:10.360 And one of the hardest things as a Socratic teacher is, if you never ask a question you know the answer to.
00:17:16.880 It has to be an equally balanced question.
00:17:19.140 It has to be fair, right?
00:17:20.240 And so if you're trying to put your thumb on the scale, the other person immediately will know it.
00:17:25.340 And so when I've listened to you on Joe Rogan and Rogan's podcast, he's incredibly good at listening and asking a very honest question.
00:17:33.280 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:17:33.820 There's no—and people would spot it if he wasn't.
00:17:36.140 Absolutely.
00:17:37.140 Yeah.
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00:19:13.560 There is an old, a very old religious insistence that pride is a cardinal sin and that humility is the virtue that counters pride.
00:19:25.800 And then you have to ask, well, what does it mean?
00:19:28.240 What does humility mean?
00:19:29.660 And it means something like admission of ignorance.
00:19:33.080 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, then you immediately rectify.
00:19:46.580 I told my daughter, for example, very straightforwardly, you only have to ask a stupid question once if you listen to the answer.
00:19:56.140 Right, so she's been in many situations where, you know, she was in over her head like, well, like we all are very often.
00:20:05.500 Like me today.
00:20:06.600 Well, and it's very tempting to pretend that you know and to not ask the stupid question.
00:20:12.820 But first of all, almost everybody around who's participating, let's say, in the conversation has the same stupid question.
00:20:19.840 And second, if you don't ask it, well, then you remain stupid.
00:20:23.700 So that's not helpful.
00:20:24.780 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.
00:20:34.460 I mean, you know, this, and I've seen you with Julian up close of, you know, being genuinely interested, but offering choices and listening and caring as a parent.
00:20:42.900 And so, you know, I didn't have children at this point, but I have a room full of 28-year-olds that are bright and we can explore life together and entrepreneurship and how you make money and what it means if you make money.
00:20:53.560 And that ended up being, I spent quite a time at the University of Texas.
00:20:59.000 We built up the entrepreneurship program.
00:21:01.060 We won all sorts of awards.
00:21:02.460 And then spun off our own business school.
00:21:05.900 Why did the, why was it well-received, do you think?
00:21:09.320 And why did the, why was it also, two things, eh?
00:21:12.680 Yeah.
00:21:12.840 It was well-received by the students, but obviously it was also well-received by the administrations.
00:21:18.400 Well, it was well-received, and you know enough about academia.
00:21:22.220 The teachers, so the professors who were teachers loved us.
00:21:25.480 What we did, though, is we had a very firm, very hard contract of what was required to be in the class.
00:21:31.400 We graded on a forced curve when everyone else gave all A's.
00:21:34.840 The harder we made the program, the more people we attracted.
00:21:38.380 Yeah, yeah.
00:21:39.160 And so, but at some point, I think our teachers, who were all entrepreneurs who had been successful, so all adjuncts.
00:21:46.160 Oh, yeah.
00:21:46.880 Won the Teacher of the Year Award 11 out of 11 years, which—
00:21:51.480 And how big a group was that?
00:21:53.220 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.
00:22:04.100 Wow, as adjuncts.
00:22:05.300 And so—
00:22:06.300 So being paid nothing.
00:22:07.460 Yeah, so you can imagine what happens next in this story.
00:22:10.260 Yeah, right.
00:22:10.920 Right?
00:22:11.240 So we're basically all fired or we all quit, depending on which story you want.
00:22:16.140 Yeah, yeah.
00:22:16.720 But we go start our own school, and we focus on—
00:22:19.660 When was this?
00:22:20.200 This would have been 2000.
00:22:21.580 And what was—I see.
00:22:23.160 And so that was after eight years?
00:22:24.860 Yes.
00:22:25.360 Eight years.
00:22:25.980 And what was the rationale for the firing slash quitting?
00:22:30.340 Probably that I was too disagreeable, which was fair.
00:22:37.060 But I will say I got a call from inside the school from someone, and he said, look, a tenured 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.
00:22:49.540 Because, and we were at that point, and we were attracting more than half of all the students to the school and teaching a quarter of them.
00:22:56.000 And they said they just, you know, the tenured political faculty just doesn't want you here.
00:23:03.980 So we decided we were going to teach one last class off campus, across the street from the campus.
00:23:09.380 And 130 people showed up for no credit.
00:23:15.800 For no credit.
00:23:16.500 They drove from Waco, from Houston to Austin, from Dallas to Austin.
00:23:21.720 So they came from all over, including faculty from those schools.
00:23:25.160 And we thought, you know what?
00:23:27.000 Maybe we should have our own MBA program.
00:23:28.800 Right, right.
00:23:29.160 Now, we knew nothing about that that was impossible, right?
00:23:31.400 No one ever told us you couldn't get a credit.
00:23:33.020 But we managed to build a program.
00:23:36.320 We ended up winning all sorts of awards from Princeton Review with really Navy SEALs, Olympic athletes, and young entrepreneurs.
00:23:42.340 And we built this 100-hour-a-week, ten-month program that was just brutal, but changed our lives and changed the lives of the students.
00:23:51.760 So that was right after you were at the University of Texas?
00:23:54.260 Yeah, we were fired, and it was right, the next thing we did was have this free class.
00:23:59.040 And the next thing after that was launch our own MBA program.
00:24:01.400 Uh-huh.
00:24:01.980 And so what was the rationale for dispensing with you guys?
00:24:05.240 I mean, it must have been somewhat difficult, given the fact that, well, it was half the students.
00:24:09.460 It was very popular.
00:24:10.680 Yeah.
00:24:11.280 There was an outcry, but as the dean put it to the students at that point, you are not our customers.
00:24:17.140 Our customers are the pursuit of scholarly knowledge.
00:24:20.820 And so your opinion doesn't really matter, was what they were told.
00:24:24.720 So anyway, we spun off.
00:24:26.520 It was successful.
00:24:27.200 It was a lot of fun.
00:24:28.100 And really, I'm now, you know, still doing some business things, mostly teaching.
00:24:34.820 This program's a lot of fun.
00:24:36.920 And then we come to kind of one of the most important things in my life, and that is our two young boys are in Montessori School.
00:24:44.700 And they're just about—
00:24:45.980 Okay, so you had them after you left the University of Texas and started this now independent program.
00:24:51.360 Right.
00:24:51.660 So this is—
00:24:52.080 And you didn't have accreditation for the independent program?
00:24:54.200 We did get accreditation.
00:24:55.560 Well, you did.
00:24:55.920 We managed to get accreditation because we won all these awards, and they had to give us accreditation.
00:25:00.260 And who awarded you accreditation?
00:25:02.700 Sachs.
00:25:03.140 We had Sachs accreditation through a small university that my great-grandfather had been president of at the turn of the century.
00:25:09.520 And Sachs is—
00:25:10.400 Oh, the Southern Accrediting Association.
00:25:12.500 So it's one of the regional accreditors.
00:25:13.900 Right.
00:25:14.220 So you got associated with a small college.
00:25:16.160 Right.
00:25:16.280 But it didn't matter because as long as you have accreditation, you have accreditation.
00:25:19.760 Right.
00:25:20.340 Right, right.
00:25:20.940 And so accreditation was set up so that—well, so that in principle, so that there was some, what would you say, consistency, reliability, and validity to the assignation of a degree.
00:25:32.220 I mean, that's the theory.
00:25:33.220 Well, that's the theory.
00:25:34.060 What it really serves as, of course, is a protection of the cartel.
00:25:37.520 Right, right.
00:25:37.980 I mean, it's not really that.
00:25:38.960 But we managed to get it.
00:25:40.360 It wasn't an issue.
00:25:42.440 And, you know, we built the program.
00:25:44.420 And by 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.
00:25:52.560 So I go to see the very best teacher in the very best middle school in Austin that's teaching our daughter, who's older.
00:26:00.720 And I said, when should we move the boys into regular school?
00:26:05.740 And I'll never forget this.
00:26:06.940 This gentleman was an African-American.
00:26:09.020 He looked like Abraham Lincoln, tall, stately, you know, very—and he said,
00:26:13.320 as soon as possible.
00:26:16.500 And I said, well, why?
00:26:18.320 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.
00:26:24.780 So get them in chains young.
00:26:27.860 And I was kind of stunned.
00:26:29.840 And I said, well, I don't blame them.
00:26:31.100 I just blurted that out.
00:26:32.320 And he looked down at the ground for the longest time.
00:26:35.140 And he looked up, and he had tears in his eyes.
00:26:37.140 And he shook his head very quietly, and he said, I don't either.
00:26:40.380 So I went home that day, and I told Laura, I said, I don't know if we're going to homeschool.
00:26:45.780 I don't know if we're going to start a school.
00:26:48.040 But our boys, the best teacher in this town, just told me not to put them in traditional school.
00:26:52.480 So we're going to do something else.
00:26:53.900 Do you know Paul Gaudy?
00:26:55.760 No.
00:26:56.320 Okay, Gaudy.
00:26:57.200 I hope I have his name right.
00:26:58.580 He was Teacher of the Year in New York State a number of years.
00:27:02.940 And he wrote, he died, unfortunately.
00:27:05.500 I wanted to interview him, but that was never possible.
00:27:10.580 He was no admirer of the current education system, let's say.
00:27:15.320 And he wrote a history of the education system, which was extremely interesting.
00:27:19.420 He pointed out that the public education in the United States,
00:27:24.180 I was investigating this because I was wondering why our school systems are so bad at fostering individual vision.
00:27:31.060 Because it's such a lack.
00:27:33.220 I thought, why?
00:27:34.500 This is such a lack.
00:27:35.600 There's something going on here.
00:27:37.220 Okay.
00:27:38.420 The Prussians established the first public education system.
00:27:42.240 And the reason they did it was because the Prussian emperor wanted to produce obedient soldiers.
00:27:47.920 You know, disciplined, obedient soldiers.
00:27:49.400 Now, I don't want to get cynical about that, because in a society that requires a military,
00:27:55.140 disciplined people who can follow rules are arguably necessary.
00:28:00.260 Now, obviously, that can go very badly, but we've got to give the devil his due.
00:28:05.220 And the Prussians actually put forward a very effective military training system.
00:28:09.800 Now, that was adopted in the United States in the late 1800s by industrialists, mostly, self-proclaimed fascists.
00:28:18.080 So, at that time, of course, it wasn't Mussolini-Hitler-like fascism.
00:28:22.440 It was far the early precursors of that.
00:28:24.840 But they were people who believed that the state and the corporate world could integrate at the highest levels.
00:28:32.120 And there might be some utility in that, which is a very dubious claim, nonetheless.
00:28:35.840 So, they noticed that they knew that all sorts of rural people were pouring into the cities to start working in factories.
00:28:44.060 Their kids needed to be cared for while they worked.
00:28:47.060 And then their kids were likely to have factory jobs.
00:28:49.720 And so, the purpose of the public education system, and this is why there's rows of desks and factory bells and this insistence on timing,
00:28:57.040 was to produce disciplined, obedient workers, certainly not to produce people who were autonomous.
00:29:03.260 And that was adopted in the U.S.
00:29:05.940 The Japanese adopted it and militarized like mad.
00:29:09.500 And part of the consequence of that was the outbreak of the Second World War.
00:29:13.220 But that being chained to a desk, that's not a bug.
00:29:18.700 That was a feature.
00:29:19.720 Right, right.
00:29:20.360 And, you know, you can also even say, well, let's give it some credence.
00:29:24.100 Because a rural worker, their time schedules much less stringent than someone who's going to work on a factory.
00:29:33.260 Right, they're on an agrarian farm, they're on a farm, yeah.
00:29:35.640 You're much looser in your time sense.
00:29:37.400 And it is the case that industrialization requires clock.
00:29:41.560 Yes.
00:29:41.780 And so, you have to give the devil his due.
00:29:44.880 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.
00:29:55.280 Right.
00:29:55.600 And so, okay, so back to your kids.
00:29:57.340 So now you have kids and you've been—
00:29:58.680 Yeah, so really not knowing any of that, which I would find out later, we just wanted something different for our children.
00:30:04.900 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?
00:30:17.920 And this is you and your wife.
00:30:19.040 Yeah, and my wife gets to be careful, just like Tammy's special, Laura is the one that did all of this, and I kind of come into the picture later.
00:30:26.320 But she's, I mean, I'm helping from behind the scenes, but she's really the person who's building this.
00:30:30.860 We started out with seven children.
00:30:34.320 Then where did you get the other kids?
00:30:37.280 By talking to everybody in town and seeing who would be crazy enough to join us.
00:30:41.920 Now, by that point, the Acton MBA, named after Lord Acton, power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
00:30:48.900 The Acton 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.
00:30:59.180 Right, right, right.
00:30:59.980 So you got a bit of communication clout there.
00:31:02.940 Yes, yes.
00:31:03.280 So there was enough reputational, you know, that we were able to attract some very committed families.
00:31:09.740 The school takes off.
00:31:11.840 It starts to grow.
00:31:13.920 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.
00:31:26.100 Now, by genius, we don't mean 180 IQ.
00:31:28.300 What we mean is a special talent at something.
00:31:32.520 Because if you're the best plumber in town, you're going to make more money and be happier than the average Ivy League graduate.
00:31:39.480 Plus, your customers won't be knee-deep in sewage, which is also, well, that's a major plus.
00:31:44.560 That's a very plus.
00:31:45.520 You know, when I was at Harvard lecturing there, one of my students, who you know, Daniel Higgins, we were working on formulation of theories of general cognitive ability and then personality predictors of success.
00:31:59.940 At the same time, Howard Gardner was working at the Faculty of Education there, and he produced this theory of multiple intelligence.
00:32:09.620 And it's a preposterous theory on psychometric and scientific grounds, partly because Gardner famously noted that he didn't really care about measurement.
00:32:19.780 And that's a no-go with scientists.
00:32:22.920 Right, right, right.
00:32:23.600 Like, well, there are multiple intelligences, but we can't measure any of them.
00:32:27.820 Right, right.
00:32:28.420 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.
00:32:36.500 There's sort of, there's one dimension of being smart or not being smart.
00:32:41.000 And the smarter you are, the faster you can learn a complex job.
00:32:45.400 And so for complex jobs, that's very useful.
00:32:47.580 But the idea that there are multiple talents, that's a fine idea.
00:32:52.940 You know, and you see that reflected more in temperament, is that open people are creative and agreeable.
00:32:57.480 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.
00:33:08.440 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.
00:33:23.680 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.
00:33:30.360 Children will play down to an institutionalized system.
00:33:32.860 But if freed, along with structure and responsibility and systems they will build, are capable of incredible things.
00:33:41.320 You know, in the Michaela School, which takes a very different approach to you, in the UK, it's an inner city school.
00:33:49.700 And there's a wide range of general cognitive ability as a consequence.
00:33:53.660 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?
00:34:06.620 So a real distribution.
00:34:08.100 But they're teaching at a very high rate, and 75% of their graduates get accepted to Russell Group universities in the UK.
00:34:18.220 And Russell Group includes the big UK universities.
00:34:21.520 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.
00:34:33.140 Well, so...
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00:35:40.740 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 socioeconomic success, but it's still only, what, 25%, right?
00:36:00.340 Yeah, it seems about 25%.
00:36:01.660 So what we've 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.
00:36:13.160 Now, if my IQ is 100, I'm not going to be doing three-body orbital problems.
00:36:18.260 Right, right.
00:36:18.840 I mean, I just can't do that.
00:36:20.040 Advanced physics.
00:36:20.800 Right.
00:36:21.120 I mean, frankly, I can't do that, right?
00:36:23.140 So that's okay.
00:36:24.020 There's other things I can do.
00:36:25.460 Yeah.
00:36:25.680 So what we've found is there's very little variability in the ability to learn to do things.
00:36:32.740 If you provide people with a compelling story and reason, 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, and builds a tribe.
00:36:54.620 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.
00:37:02.960 Once the tribe works, we get learning happening at a two to three times average rate, and most importantly, the academic subjects become unimportant.
00:37:13.480 They all happen.
00:37:14.360 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.
00:37:22.020 And you can have all the artificial intelligence you want.
00:37:26.140 You can't do those three things.
00:37:27.740 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.
00:37:36.880 I know in the Michaela School that I referred to, it's very structured.
00:37:41.780 Yes.
00:37:42.040 And the teachers do the guiding, and it's clear that the teachers are the ones in control.
00:37:46.760 Yes.
00:37:47.040 And I was very impressed when I went there, and her results are also very impressive.
00:37:51.440 The children are very secure, and they're very pleased to be there.
00:37:58.420 We had about six of them take us around, and they were just randomly selected from the school population.
00:38:03.480 And I asked them a lot of questions.
00:38:05.180 And so they're liking this.
00:38:07.520 You're taking an approach that also requires the children to participate in their own self-organization.
00:38:14.700 Yes.
00:38:14.940 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.
00:38:24.160 Yes.
00:38:24.340 Or you could have a system where the game that'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.
00:38:34.580 And so this is very similar to a Tocquevillian society that develops from the bottom up.
00:38:40.180 We are providing, though—they don't have to invent democracy or a democratic republic or a tyrannical government.
00:38:47.540 We'll provide them with choices, so you don't have to invent everything from a blank sheet.
00:38:50.920 But by experimenting, it's a very Hayekian from the bottom up series of experiments.
00:38:55.960 And they learn by doing.
00:38:57.580 And I will tell you that, you know, the environment is—it's tyranny one week and Lord of the Fly is the next.
00:39:04.020 And they learn to find a medium between freedom and responsibility.
00:39:08.860 And they're continually working on the society.
00:39:11.360 Okay, so what would the experience—like, so how young—what's the youngest children that you have in the program?
00:39:16.840 The youngest will be preschool, so five, four, five, six.
00:39:21.340 Okay, so what do they experience their first day of school?
00:39:23.900 Okay, so at that age group, it differs a little bit.
00:39:26.920 So there's 36 in the room.
00:39:28.600 It's mostly Montessori-like learning to do real work, so the routines of real work, and free play.
00:39:36.840 And it's only—and so you're beginning to learn to read and write.
00:39:40.300 And I'll get back to that in a minute.
00:39:42.200 Elementary studio is more about important work.
00:39:46.760 So you're doing real chores.
00:39:48.120 You're doing real work.
00:39:49.180 You're helping to start running the studio.
00:39:51.380 And you're playing hard games.
00:39:53.900 And that hard game may be learning math, but it's a hard game.
00:39:57.060 I mean, like, so these are games.
00:39:58.640 Now, by middle school, you know, you're tackling real-world things.
00:40:02.660 You're beginning apprenticeships as early as age 11 or 12.
00:40:06.040 And so you're actually beginning to take those talents out in the real world.
00:40:08.940 So it changes from studio to studio.
00:40:10.860 Right, right.
00:40:11.340 So it starts to broaden.
00:40:12.500 Right.
00:40:12.680 So what happens with children's games is that as the children mature, the games become more and more like real-world occupations.
00:40:20.020 That's what we're doing.
00:40:20.640 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.
00:40:30.340 So it's weird how those things meet.
00:40:32.060 Well, and that's part of playing this is the realization if you're always saying, we believe you're a hero who's going to change the world, here's a story about Martin Luther King.
00:40:41.600 Here's a story about it.
00:40:42.600 So when I said there's a why to doing this, you're continually being given archetypal hero, real-world stories of flawed heroes, right?
00:40:51.000 Yeah.
00:40:51.160 Not perfect heroes.
00:40:51.960 Yeah.
00:40:52.560 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 five.
00:40:58.780 And if I do, there are consequences.
00:41:00.300 But those consequences are largely meted out by eight-year-olds who are forming their society and learning to form their society.
00:41:07.760 And I will tell you, in our high schoolers and our middle schoolers, 80% of them are better than anybody that graduated from my Harvard Business School class in culture.
00:41:18.200 Because all they do—
00:41:19.080 Better at what?
00:41:19.620 At culture, at forming a healthy culture.
00:41:21.580 Right.
00:41:21.960 So is that better at negotiating?
00:41:23.960 It's negotiating.
00:41:25.100 It's caring.
00:41:26.260 I'll give you a quick example of how you move up.
00:41:29.020 So no grades.
00:41:31.220 The standards are held by the community.
00:41:34.440 Very high standards.
00:41:35.860 But here's how they work.
00:41:36.740 You keep track of the work you've done, and you earn points.
00:41:40.540 That's effort.
00:41:41.600 Yeah.
00:41:41.680 So how much effort are you putting in?
00:41:44.080 Yeah.
00:41:44.420 Every six weeks, there's a public exhibition.
00:41:47.020 The public's invited.
00:41:48.300 It's not a science fair.
00:41:50.060 It's going to be an exhibition of learning.
00:41:52.220 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.
00:42:01.880 And the winner of the game most accurately diagnoses real diseases for real with real cost.
00:42:08.880 So what do they learn?
00:42:10.300 They learn to manage their own health care, which in the United States is probably going to—
00:42:13.220 So you reward progress, but you actually have standards of attainment at the same time.
00:42:17.340 Yes.
00:42:17.540 See, 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.
00:42:25.880 And so the attainment here is, did most of your patients live at a low cost?
00:42:31.100 And through that, you're going to learn to actually listen and diagnose diseases even for yourself.
00:42:35.960 So badges or attainment, public exhibition, points or effort.
00:42:40.780 Last piece, which is important, is 360 peer reviews.
00:42:44.800 Every person's ask, is Dr. Peterson warm-hearted 1 to 10?
00:42:50.400 Yeah.
00:42:50.940 Or is Dr. Peterson tough-minded enough 1 to 10?
00:42:54.880 Yeah.
00:42:55.280 And then I give you feedback, and it can't be you're stupid.
00:42:58.620 Mm-hmm.
00:42:59.220 It can be, you know, when you interrupt me when I'm working hard, that's really frustrating.
00:43:05.760 Would you please, when I have the red flag up, not interrupt me when I'm working hard?
00:43:11.480 Right.
00:43:11.700 So I'm requesting—so I'm learning how to be a good friend, a good citizen.
00:43:15.740 Okay, so now you've got—
00:43:16.880 Those are the three.
00:43:17.760 Okay, so you've got three things happening.
00:43:18.540 So you've got reward for progress.
00:43:20.440 You've got an absolute standard of attainment.
00:43:22.540 And then you've also got something like evaluation of the manner in which you conduct yourself within the culture, within the group.
00:43:31.200 Okay, so in the 360 process, just for those of you who are watching and listening,
00:43:34.980 is that it's not that easy to figure out how to evaluate people inside a corporation.
00:43:40.200 So, for example, if you're trying to evaluate middle managers, you can't get a direct measure of their sales effectiveness.
00:43:46.800 Right.
00:43:46.900 Because they're three steps removed from any sales process.
00:43:49.660 And so the question is, well, how do you know if they're succeeding?
00:43:52.360 And how do they know?
00:43:53.340 That's a big question.
00:43:54.500 Because you can't even get rewarded unless you know what the criteria are for success and failure.
00:43:58.940 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.
00:44:07.500 And in a 360, your subordinates rate you and give you feedback.
00:44:12.520 Your peers do and your superiors do.
00:44:14.920 Yes.
00:44:15.140 And so then that's aggregated.
00:44:16.740 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.
00:44:26.340 But it's an effective way.
00:44:27.860 Compiling multiple reports like that is an effective way of gaining valid, say, diagnostic information.
00:44:34.480 And a great way to learn to give and receive valid criticism.
00:44:38.000 Right.
00:44:38.360 Right?
00:44:38.760 That it's helpful criticism.
00:44:40.060 That it's positive criticism.
00:44:41.060 Right.
00:44:41.240 So, yes, and criticism, we should also point out, that's not, here's what you're doing wrong.
00:44:47.560 That's, here's what you're doing really right.
00:44:50.960 Because the core of criticism is what you're doing right.
00:44:53.600 Yes.
00:44:54.220 But here are things you're doing that, as far as we can tell, are interfering with what you're doing right.
00:44:58.980 It's a separating of the wheat from the chaff.
00:45:00.860 And that's why almost all that's offered at the school is growth mindset praise.
00:45:04.000 We appreciate the method of what you're doing.
00:45:06.160 Now, again, adults can't do this.
00:45:07.680 Adults can never make a declarative sentence on campus.
00:45:09.960 Adults can only ask good questions.
00:45:11.960 And there are very few adults because the young people run everything.
00:45:15.020 So, let me fast forward a bit to the story and then we'll come back.
00:45:18.780 We're running these.
00:45:19.900 It's a lot of fun.
00:45:21.740 A researcher comes down from my old professor, Clayton Christensen at Harvard, and said,
00:45:25.900 we're going to pick you as one of the top elementary schools in the United States.
00:45:30.500 We said, we've only been around 18 months.
00:45:32.140 That's really silly.
00:45:33.000 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.
00:45:41.420 And this is the Christensen Institute, so it's a big deal at Harvard.
00:45:44.880 We're kind of shocked.
00:45:46.640 The researcher and her husband, who's CFO of Hawaiian Airlines, fly from Hawaii to Texas for their first visit.
00:45:53.520 They said, can we come visit?
00:45:54.440 We said, yes.
00:45:54.980 We get an email from them at the DFW airport while they're changing planes, going back to Honolulu.
00:46:01.280 We decided we're moving our family and five children to Austin so they can attend the school.
00:46:06.680 Wow.
00:46:07.400 And so we said, wow, maybe we have something.
00:46:11.140 About this same time, a dear friend and former student who's very successful in Guatemala asked if he can start a school.
00:46:17.960 So we hand him a big stack of mimeographed stuff.
00:46:21.140 Yeah, yeah.
00:46:21.740 And six months later, we're learning more from him than he is from us.
00:46:25.260 Right, right, right.
00:46:26.180 So you're starting to franchise at that point.
00:46:27.800 Well, actually, it was just like, here, 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.
00:46:36.400 So we hand her a stack.
00:46:37.560 We're learning more.
00:46:38.440 I said, okay, let's start 10 of these and we can learn from each other.
00:46:42.540 Now, are you still operating fundamentally at the preschool and early school?
00:46:45.840 Well, we're now beginning to have a middle school.
00:46:49.160 And that's where I step in and I end up running the middle school and the high school with 45 students.
00:46:57.440 I do that because we've hired this traditional teacher who's won a lot of awards.
00:47:02.800 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.
00:47:11.720 And I went back and told Laura, I said, you're going to fire this guy.
00:47:16.980 So you might as well do it now.
00:47:18.580 And she said, well, middle school is going to start in a week.
00:47:20.700 What am I going to tell the parents?
00:47:21.860 And I said, well, I'll step in for a little bit and I'll help.
00:47:25.080 And that was my introduction.
00:47:26.640 And then for 13 years, I did that.
00:47:29.460 But suddenly, you know, we have three of these schools now.
00:47:32.680 We're going to have 10.
00:47:33.620 And it just takes off.
00:47:37.000 And fast forward to today, we have 18,000 people who have started an audition who want to start a school.
00:47:42.940 We have 300 schools in 26 countries and 43 or 44 U.S. states.
00:47:49.720 And so we've built a model with all these wonderful entrepreneurial parents.
00:47:54.900 And most of the people that run the schools are people like you and me.
00:47:57.960 They want to do it for their children.
00:48:00.240 And it's a loose consortium.
00:48:02.400 It's almost like building Legos or Unix or, you know, it's a network that's continually changing a model.
00:48:09.380 It's improving it.
00:48:10.760 And so now we've got 300 people contributing to the improvement of the model, which changes really weakly, gets better.
00:48:18.440 Almost all of it, though, handing more freedom and responsibility to the children.
00:48:22.280 Yeah, well, that's a great decentralized model, though, too.
00:48:24.640 And we can get back to what that means on the cost front.
00:48:27.000 So, okay, so now a kid goes, kid's five, goes to one of your classes.
00:48:30.640 You said that there's some formal learning taking place, so with regard to reading.
00:48:36.080 But there's a lot of play.
00:48:37.740 Well, so there's a lot of play.
00:48:39.400 They're learning math on Khan Academy.
00:48:41.620 Once they can learn to read, I mean, so they're learning to read.
00:48:45.100 And, you know, really, children, when they want to learn to read, unless they're dyslexic, will learn to read.
00:48:49.920 And I'll get to how we do that.
00:48:51.080 If they're dyslexic, they need a little extra training.
00:48:53.060 Yeah, yeah.
00:48:53.480 But if you just, some children learn to read at four, and some learn to read at seven.
00:48:56.940 I mean, it's just, there's a span of when they're ready.
00:48:59.200 You see the same on the speaking.
00:49:00.980 Yes.
00:49:01.380 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.
00:49:07.220 Ah.
00:49:07.340 So, yeah, yeah, kids can vary substantially in the date at which they pick up language, at the date at which they formulate full sentences.
00:49:15.020 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.
00:49:21.880 Yeah.
00:49:22.340 Well, in virtue, there's almost no children that don't develop language.
00:49:25.880 It's such a universal human trait.
00:49:27.500 So they're around all these peers who are helping them, and it's multi-age.
00:49:30.420 So remember, you've got older and younger, and they're mixing around, and you can't really tell who's the smartest, because everyone's good at something.
00:49:37.160 But the way we handle reading, and I've gotten criticism of this, is you can start with comic books or a magazine.
00:49:43.280 Yeah.
00:49:44.000 And so, well, let's make them read the classics.
00:49:46.000 And I said, if you make them read the classics, they will hate the classics.
00:49:48.980 But what happens is—
00:49:50.240 Well, you can't have them read something that's too difficult for them right off.
00:49:53.260 Right, right.
00:49:53.920 Then there's no reason not to use incremental move forward.
00:49:56.720 Let's read the Iliad at six.
00:49:58.620 It's like, okay.
00:49:59.560 But once they start reading comic books and magazines, then all of a sudden you see them pick up Harry Potter.
00:50:05.580 Yeah.
00:50:05.800 And then, by 11 or 12, some are reading Democracy in America or War and Peace.
00:50:10.520 Now, if you read that or 11 and 12, you need to read it at 21, 31, 41.
00:50:15.760 Right, I mean, but they love to read as a group.
00:50:18.800 And so reading becomes something that's just part of what they do.
00:50:20.560 How successful—what's your failure rate on the literacy front, excluding the dyslexic kids?
00:50:26.100 Well, we could talk about that, too.
00:50:26.800 Zero.
00:50:28.000 It's zero.
00:50:28.860 Zero.
00:50:29.480 Uh-huh.
00:50:30.200 It's zero.
00:50:30.640 And so what's your criteria for evaluating literacy, say, by the age of 10 or thereabouts?
00:50:38.860 Well, so you read something—you get a badge for something called a deep book.
00:50:44.860 You have to pitch the book as being, you know, important, rated by experts.
00:50:50.820 I mean, there's a whole criteria.
00:50:51.900 Right.
00:50:52.180 So you teach them how to select good books.
00:50:54.080 Your classmates have to agree that it's a deep book.
00:50:56.600 And then if it is, it goes on a list.
00:50:58.060 So you can choose from the list or you can pitch one that you like.
00:51:00.620 Yeah.
00:51:00.820 But these are all real books.
00:51:02.340 I mean, they're really—they're books that anybody—and so you have to read that book.
00:51:07.260 You have to tell why it impacted you and whether you would recommend it to someone else.
00:51:11.200 And that becomes a badge.
00:51:12.220 That's probably like a six-page thing that you create to try to pitch the book to someone else.
00:51:18.400 Right, right.
00:51:19.060 And so how do—
00:51:20.340 You have to make a case for the book.
00:51:21.040 How do we know that they're good?
00:51:22.400 Mm-hmm.
00:51:22.700 As you look at the badges.
00:51:24.140 Mm-hmm.
00:51:24.360 Now, here's the thing.
00:51:25.080 Who approves that badge, right?
00:51:26.880 No adults in the room.
00:51:28.060 Uh-huh.
00:51:28.360 Well, the answer is the standards of excellence are if you've never done this before, did you put your heart into it?
00:51:35.840 Yeah, okay.
00:51:36.460 So that's effort.
00:51:37.180 If you've done it once, is this time better than last time?
00:51:40.140 Right, great.
00:51:41.160 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.
00:51:47.740 How is your short story compared to Hemingway?
00:51:50.400 Right, right, right.
00:51:51.300 And if you win some sort of contest in the studio or an external contest, it's excellent.
00:51:56.700 So Dr. Peterson signs off on my badges, excellent.
00:52:00.620 Now, you're going to imagine with human nature, there's a little log rolling that's going to go on, right?
00:52:04.480 We're buddies.
00:52:05.120 I'm going to approve yours.
00:52:05.980 You're going to approve mine.
00:52:07.360 But if you're real buddies, you're not going to game the system so that the results are no longer good.
00:52:11.800 Yeah, but there are enough free riders, and so that starts to happen.
00:52:14.280 Yeah.
00:52:14.860 But there's an audit committee.
00:52:16.000 So the audit committee will put out a survey that's anonymous every six weeks and say whose badges should be audited.
00:52:24.140 And you take those three because who knows whose badges should be audited, right?
00:52:27.920 The people in the room know.
00:52:28.940 So, and you don't embarrass those people.
00:52:31.980 How do you stop that from turning into like an informer festival and getting free riders on that front?
00:52:37.040 Well, I'll get back to kind of when you have toxic, I mean, toxic sub-tribes and things.
00:52:41.760 Yeah.
00:52:41.820 So that can't, but generally the group is one tribe by this time, and so you don't really have that.
00:52:46.700 That's not really tolerated by the group.
00:52:49.520 Okay.
00:52:50.260 But, so what will happen is, you know, who volunteers for the audit committee?
00:52:55.620 Yeah, well, that's—
00:52:56.480 The tough people, right?
00:52:57.380 Yeah.
00:52:57.520 I mean, the easy people don't want to do the work.
00:52:59.240 Uh-huh.
00:52:59.480 So now you've got the toughest judges.
00:53:02.240 They'll take the three people that the studio said should be audited and at random choose three more.
00:53:07.140 Now, no one knows whether you were chosen at random or you were on the list.
00:53:09.960 Kind of everybody probably knows, but then we're going to do a deep audit of those badges.
00:53:15.240 If Jordan Peterson approved Jeff Sandefur's badge and it's rejected, then you lose a badge of the same value.
00:53:24.860 So you just lost six weeks of work, and now all of your badges are going to be audited.
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00:54:49.140 So we've had learners.
00:54:50.940 We've had learners.
00:54:52.120 Real strict, what would you call it?
00:54:55.560 That's free rider control essentially.
00:54:58.500 So for those of you watching and listening,
00:55:00.380 So the population prevalence of dark tetrad traits at a clinical level is about 4%.
00:55:08.200 And so the dark tetrad is Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic.
00:55:14.780 And cross-culturally, that seems to be about one person in 25 who's enough like that to be a serious problem.
00:55:21.900 And they're basically in the extreme.
00:55:24.060 There's something like parasitic predators.
00:55:25.920 And they'll game well-functioning systems to attract credit to themselves with no work.
00:55:32.740 And so you always see people think that societies can just be set up on a cooperative basis
00:55:38.620 and that you can just assume the best about everyone and that'll work.
00:55:42.400 And it does work 96% of the time.
00:55:46.200 But it really doesn't work 4% of the time.
00:55:48.640 And that 4% is toxic enough to bring the whole damn system crashing down.
00:55:53.840 So you need to return tit for tat, essentially.
00:55:58.660 There has to be control mechanisms set up in a well-functioning micro-society
00:56:02.460 so that the free rider narcissist types can't get a toehold.
00:56:07.020 And that takes a certain amount of tough-mindedness.
00:56:09.320 Yes.
00:56:09.640 Often that's the sort of thing that's lacking among utopia-minded educational reformers.
00:56:16.900 Because they have a...
00:56:18.240 Well, we don't need competition in our schools, for example.
00:56:21.160 It's all cooperation.
00:56:22.260 It's like, yeah, that's fine until the free riders come along.
00:56:25.780 And then it's not fine at all.
00:56:27.780 You need justice and mercy.
00:56:29.560 Right, exactly.
00:56:30.080 You need both.
00:56:30.580 And so if you think about it, warm-hearted, tough-minded, the 360s,
00:56:34.060 that's what we're measuring and encouraging and giving people.
00:56:36.900 But you need this system of audit.
00:56:39.000 Well, that's interesting that you use both warm-hearted and tough-minded,
00:56:42.700 because that's reflection of a trait on the agreeable dimension.
00:56:47.220 And agreeable people are compassionate and polite.
00:56:51.360 They're maternal.
00:56:52.260 That's really the right way of thinking about it.
00:56:54.220 The kind of maternal that would be properly devoted to a very dependent infant.
00:56:59.020 And so there's something lovely about that, right?
00:57:00.840 As lovely as maternal love.
00:57:02.300 But on the other end, which is the more masculine end, there's more,
00:57:08.020 let's keep the free riders at bay, and then let's also only reward actual attainment.
00:57:13.220 Right.
00:57:13.560 And there's love in that, too.
00:57:15.180 But it's more like it's the love of discipline and encouragement.
00:57:20.380 Well, and those of us that are tough-minded, and I'm tough-minded and disagreeable,
00:57:24.040 need to learn when to be warm-hearted.
00:57:26.040 And the ones that are too warm-hearted need to learn for their own good when to draw boundaries.
00:57:30.240 And so that's what develops in all this.
00:57:32.220 Now, by the way, we do see, for us, it's about one out of a hundred,
00:57:35.720 we see highly toxic children come in.
00:57:39.520 I can't explain why.
00:57:40.740 I'm just telling you their behavior.
00:57:41.920 I'm not saying they're damned or they're doomed.
00:57:43.760 Yeah, yeah.
00:57:44.220 Because you can always actually be asked to leave the community and come back.
00:57:47.100 You can repent.
00:57:47.960 Yeah.
00:57:48.380 But you see every once in a while.
00:57:50.420 Now, there's also often a strong correlation to the family,
00:57:53.640 once you listen, but sometimes not.
00:57:56.280 But that's the only time an adult will step in if they see that happening.
00:58:01.240 And what markers do you have for that?
00:58:03.980 They're telling very small lies, just like the dragon book.
00:58:07.480 Right.
00:58:07.680 You just can catch them because otherwise the system will correct.
00:58:11.040 But the system can't take someone who's smart enough to parse.
00:58:14.460 They're always staying right inside the lines.
00:58:16.680 Yeah.
00:58:16.920 And they're lying a little bit.
00:58:18.060 Right.
00:58:18.240 And so over time, the tribe will learn, even the young ones, to recognize that.
00:58:22.980 But when you're fresh and new.
00:58:24.380 And so what an owner will-
00:58:26.140 That's why psychopaths, like in the real world, psychopaths are itinerant.
00:58:31.360 Because they can't stay long enough.
00:58:32.400 Well, they can't stay because people figure out their games and then they stop them.
00:58:36.380 And, you know, one of the problems with the virtual world right now is that it allows the psychopaths to be continually itinerant.
00:58:45.320 Yes.
00:58:45.500 Which is essentially what you are if you're anonymous.
00:58:47.560 Right.
00:58:47.800 Right.
00:58:48.000 Is that nobody can get a handle on you.
00:58:50.240 You can't track the reputation.
00:58:51.840 And, you know, the people who promote the benefits of online anonymity say, well, what about the heroic whistleblowers?
00:58:58.960 And it's like, fair enough, but they're 1%.
00:59:01.620 Right.
00:59:02.360 Yeah.
00:59:03.600 The heroic whistleblowers.
00:59:04.800 But what about the enabled psychopaths?
00:59:07.480 Well, the whistleblowing is worth the psychopathy.
00:59:10.900 It's like, yeah, it doesn't look like it.
00:59:12.640 It's interesting because the group gets pretty good, even in an early age, at recognizing it.
00:59:16.220 But the first time they see it, it's like when you said before about a dark triad or a dark quadrad, male can take advantage of a young female.
00:59:24.540 Yeah.
00:59:24.700 But the females will learn.
00:59:25.900 Yeah, yeah.
00:59:26.380 Well, eight-year-olds learn, too.
00:59:27.720 Yeah, yeah.
00:59:28.300 But we will step in and say, here's a transition contract.
00:59:32.440 If these things don't happen, you're going to need to leave and reapply.
00:59:36.120 So we will pick out.
00:59:37.300 But it's one out of 100.
00:59:38.900 Yeah, that's pretty good.
00:59:39.280 We'll see someone who's—
00:59:40.680 And so we're probably drawing, you know, from some segment that's slightly healthier because they won't apply, maybe.
00:59:46.260 But about one out of 100—
00:59:47.040 Well, you see, with kids, so there's a pretty good literature on this.
00:59:52.500 If you group two-year-olds together and watch them interact, about 4% of the males—it's almost none of the females—about 4% of the males at age two will kick, hit, bite, and steal.
01:00:05.600 Okay, so that's not very many.
01:00:06.760 That's 2% of the population.
01:00:08.380 It's one in 50.
01:00:09.060 So it's not much different from—but most of those kids, despite their temperamental proclivity to be aggressive, are socialized by the age of 4.
01:00:20.740 Almost all of them.
01:00:22.060 If their parents socialize them.
01:00:23.860 Or someone does.
01:00:25.000 Someone does, right.
01:00:25.740 Could be siblings, right?
01:00:27.320 But someone has to socialize them.
01:00:29.500 Yeah.
01:00:29.920 Maybe help them either control that aggression or integrate it.
01:00:33.620 It's better to integrate it.
01:00:34.500 The kids who don't have that integrated by the age of 4, they're in for a pretty dismal ride.
01:00:40.840 Yeah.
01:00:41.060 There isn't a lot of clinical evidence suggesting that if those traits are still in place at the age of 4, that they can be ameliorated at that point.
01:00:51.960 Yeah.
01:00:52.160 And so, and those are the kids that turn into bullies and delinquents and then criminals.
01:00:55.980 And we see something very similar to that.
01:00:57.580 And I wanted to ask you because we see something else.
01:00:59.380 And I'm curious what the literature says about this.
01:01:01.860 It appears to us that the tribe in these systems, in this Tocquevillian society, will shape conscientiousness until about 13.
01:01:12.680 Yeah.
01:01:12.940 And so, there are some people that are naturally conscientious.
01:01:16.260 Yeah.
01:01:16.640 And there are others it seems to shape.
01:01:18.320 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.
01:01:26.560 But without the culture, they will regress back to where they were.
01:01:29.720 Well, part of what happens at 13, okay, so imagine you have these aggressive kids.
01:01:34.340 Yeah.
01:01:34.720 Okay, at 4.
01:01:35.840 Now, they maintain a high level of aggressive behavior.
01:01:38.880 Okay, now at about 14, the boys join them.
01:01:41.640 Under the influence of testosterone.
01:01:44.980 And so, and then for the normal boys who have this spike in aggression, that decline starts to decline pretty rapidly around 18.
01:01:53.440 And then goes back down to where you'd expect it if you just tracked it linearly.
01:01:59.580 Whereas the criminal types don't desist.
01:02:01.800 What happens with the criminal types, generally speaking, is that they start to desist in their late 20s.
01:02:07.980 And so, the fundamental hard-headed penological theory for repeat offenders, you know, 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes.
01:02:19.880 So, for true repeat offenders is you just keep them in jail until they're 30.
01:02:25.380 Right.
01:02:25.500 And then, it might be delayed maturation, something like that, you know.
01:02:30.460 But after that, they're not as big a threat.
01:02:32.640 Yeah, yeah, they start being so incentivized.
01:02:36.220 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.
01:02:46.780 And so, what you see is, if you believe every child's a genius, you find the child that's good at each of these different things, but they all have a place.
01:02:55.340 Just like I can be a plumber or an airline pilot I can be.
01:02:58.240 But you see that in these societies as they grow.
01:03:00.940 You've got to find your place.
01:03:01.920 So, the Pareto district, this 80-20 rule, this is 20% of your customers produce 80% of your sales.
01:03:09.480 20% of the recording artists sell 80% of the records.
01:03:13.200 20% of the authors sell 80% of the books.
01:03:16.360 The actual rule is the square root of the number of people doing a particular task perform half the labor.
01:03:22.920 And so, this drives inequality in every creative domain.
01:03:26.020 But your point is, there's a diverse enough range of potential Pareto contributions, it doesn't matter.
01:03:32.260 Like, you can be an off-the-chart plumber, and I can be an off-the-chart mathematician, and there's zero trouble with that.
01:03:38.440 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.
01:03:48.320 In this case, there's all sorts of ways you can win, and it's so complicated you can't even keep track.
01:03:53.820 But what you can keep track of are these stories that are repeated over and over and over again about heroes don't win.
01:04:01.300 When they get knocked down, they get back up.
01:04:03.420 And it becomes kind of a grit, a resilience, a, hey, it's a challenge.
01:04:09.340 We talk about, I may have gotten this from you, like, what are the three monsters?
01:04:12.980 The three monsters are resistance, distraction, and victimhood.
01:04:18.380 It's like, if I can't, which one of those is standing in my way today?
01:04:21.800 Resistance, I just need to take the first step, right?
01:04:25.140 Yeah, and that might just be apprehension of sheer complexity, right?
01:04:28.460 Yeah, but what do you do?
01:04:29.300 Take a step, okay?
01:04:30.440 Distraction.
01:04:30.900 And if you can't, then take a smaller step.
01:04:32.640 Exactly.
01:04:33.220 I mean, take one more step towards the elevator.
01:04:35.100 Yeah.
01:04:35.920 And so distraction is what's valuable to you in focus.
01:04:40.080 I mean, you have prioritizing focus.
01:04:41.640 Right, right.
01:04:42.240 If it's victimhood, then gratitude is the only substitute, is the only elixir for victimhood.
01:04:48.780 And so they learn.
01:04:49.800 Yes, and we should also point out on that regard that gratitude isn't the naive insistence that
01:04:56.600 the world is a perfectly delightful place and that everything is going to go well.
01:05:00.860 Gratitude is a practice.
01:05:02.500 It's a moral virtue.
01:05:03.800 And the virtuous part of it is the courage to find in even the darkest place some light
01:05:11.880 that can guide you through, right?
01:05:14.060 And the willingness to do that, the understanding that that's a practice.
01:05:16.820 When my wife was extraordinarily ill a few years ago, like fatally ill, so the story
01:05:23.080 went, and one of the things she did that was of aid to her physically, because it helped
01:05:28.320 her be less stressed, and that's good on the immunological front, but also spiritually,
01:05:33.400 let's say, was to strive very diligently to look for what she could be grateful for in
01:05:41.180 each day and even in each moment.
01:05:42.920 And in her situation, I think this is very often the case for people who are facing very
01:05:47.540 serious illness.
01:05:48.720 She was grateful for the love and support of her family and her friends, and that was
01:05:54.880 also genuine and also of genuine aid.
01:05:57.280 But it's a courageous practice.
01:05:59.640 It's not a kind of naivety.
01:06:01.720 And so if you're surrounded, though, by a group that understands if you're playing the
01:06:04.740 part of the victim, they don't say, don't be a victim.
01:06:06.840 They begin to ask you questions about gratitude and give you space, right?
01:06:10.060 Sometimes you want to play the victim for a while.
01:06:11.960 Yeah, well, sometimes terrible things are happening to you, too.
01:06:13.840 Right, right.
01:06:14.400 Sometimes, yeah, your life's just—and so then you get someone who's actually, you
01:06:17.740 know, I'm very empathetic that that's happening.
01:06:19.760 I'm sympathetic to you that that's happening.
01:06:21.660 But then the answer is, once you're finished with that, what are we going to get up and
01:06:25.960 go do next?
01:06:26.520 Right, that's right.
01:06:27.120 That's good for you, right?
01:06:27.920 And we're going to have this moment.
01:06:29.260 So just imagine all these young people—and by the way, the high schoolers are going up and
01:06:35.120 down to the middle school and elementary all the time.
01:06:37.040 The middle schoolers are going up and down.
01:06:38.580 You'll see elementary students.
01:06:39.680 So this is a family.
01:06:41.240 This is like a neighborhood of young people moving around between studios, helping each
01:06:46.260 other.
01:06:46.840 Often, you'll get a 10-year-old that's better at calculus than a high schooler.
01:06:51.280 Right.
01:06:51.600 And they're up, and it has to all be Socratic.
01:06:53.140 What a deal for the 10-year-old.
01:06:54.340 He gets to share his knowledge with older kids.
01:06:57.220 That's pretty damn good deal.
01:06:57.440 We have 10-year-olds that actually sell tutoring services.
01:07:00.060 So they have to be Socratic.
01:07:01.460 They can't lecture.
01:07:02.440 Yeah.
01:07:02.580 But anyway, but that's the beauty is they're learning how to build a society.
01:07:06.560 They're learning self-management.
01:07:08.060 Yeah.
01:07:08.340 They're learning self-governance.
01:07:09.980 They're learning how to treat other human beings.
01:07:12.240 Yeah.
01:07:12.820 And guess what?
01:07:13.480 The learning's exploding.
01:07:15.380 Oh, and by the way, they've had six or seven apprenticeships in the world by the time
01:07:18.760 they're in high school.
01:07:19.780 Yeah.
01:07:19.960 And how do you set those up?
01:07:21.020 And what do the apprenticeships look like?
01:07:23.020 It's the easiest and best thing we do.
01:07:25.900 You go through a series of challenges of what you might want to do with your life, even at 11
01:07:29.640 or 12, like, what's exciting?
01:07:30.780 I want to be a vet.
01:07:31.780 Yeah.
01:07:32.160 I want to be.
01:07:32.580 And so then you learn how to go find out the owner of the vet service.
01:07:36.880 What have they done in their life that's valuable?
01:07:39.520 Then you write an email that says, Mr. Smith, I've so admired your compassion with animals.
01:07:45.560 I know that you won this award.
01:07:46.860 It has to be genuine.
01:07:48.020 Right, right, right.
01:07:49.380 Would you?
01:07:49.760 So you show you've done your homework.
01:07:51.640 But then the question is, I'm looking for this apprenticeship.
01:07:56.420 I'm not asking you for it.
01:07:57.780 I'm just asking, can I have a five-minute phone call to explain it?
01:08:01.160 Right.
01:08:01.520 That's all I want.
01:08:02.120 Yeah.
01:08:02.940 So you get the phone call.
01:08:05.180 You listen for objections and try to answer them.
01:08:07.700 Right, yeah.
01:08:08.420 And the only ask then is, can I have two minutes in person?
01:08:12.240 Uh-huh.
01:08:12.840 You show up in person.
01:08:14.660 And imagine this 12-year-old that showed up ready.
01:08:17.400 And they say, Dr. Peterson, would you give me a chance?
01:08:21.580 Yeah.
01:08:22.100 I'll show up early.
01:08:23.320 Yeah.
01:08:23.520 I'll work late.
01:08:24.220 Yeah.
01:08:24.460 I'll wash the floors.
01:08:25.380 I'll do whatever you ask.
01:08:26.120 Yeah, yeah.
01:08:26.680 If I don't ever do one of those things, not only can you fire me immediately, but it's
01:08:31.000 going to reflect on all my studio mates.
01:08:32.700 They're going to find out.
01:08:33.880 But if you'll give me a chance, I'll prove myself.
01:08:36.540 Yeah.
01:08:37.340 An irresistible offer to most people.
01:08:39.180 The success rate on that is like 98% now.
01:08:42.440 So what?
01:08:42.900 No, that's interesting in and of itself, you know, because we're constantly bombarded
01:08:46.980 with this insistence, especially from the radical left, that the reason that you might employ
01:08:52.900 someone is to skim off their excess labor, let's say, right?
01:08:57.180 The Marxist theory of labor.
01:08:59.400 And that you're, it's basically an exploitative relationship.
01:09:02.240 And you can be cynical about this.
01:09:03.860 You say, well, no kidding.
01:09:04.680 The businessmen are going to agree because now they've got free labor.
01:09:07.240 But that isn't what happens.
01:09:08.980 Like what happens is that, and you have to be unbelievably cynical and blind and believe
01:09:15.260 that the world is motivated by power to believe anything other than this, is that the ability
01:09:22.380 to act as parent proxy is there in all of us to the degree we can be parents.
01:09:31.460 And it's extraordinarily attractive to offer people the opportunity to establish a relationship
01:09:36.380 with someone who's young where they're fostering their development.
01:09:40.520 I think that's a primary source of human gratification.
01:09:43.480 I actually think there's also something that's, I wouldn't call it cynical, but it's a little
01:09:46.820 more self-interested that the people who are being like very generous, because this is,
01:09:50.700 you know, it's hard to have an apprentice.
01:09:51.880 Yeah, yeah.
01:09:53.220 But I actually, we've seen this happen at the Acton NBA.
01:09:55.600 I think it's, they're looking up to you as the Wizard of Oz, and you're seeing in them
01:10:01.920 a young you.
01:10:03.000 Right.
01:10:03.660 And there's this sense of, that reminds me of myself.
01:10:06.720 Yeah.
01:10:07.480 And, you know, and that's-
01:10:08.560 The best part of myself.
01:10:09.380 The best part of myself.
01:10:11.240 And in fact, if I had had this at that age.
01:10:13.300 Right.
01:10:14.280 And so, I'm so attracted to this.
01:10:17.400 But anyway, through this process, what do you learn how to do?
01:10:20.300 You learn how to find something to do that matters in your life, serving someone else.
01:10:25.060 Right.
01:10:25.180 And by the time you're-
01:10:25.740 But you also learn how to ask someone, you learn how to suggest in an attractive manner
01:10:31.900 to someone how they might offer you an opportunity.
01:10:34.360 Right.
01:10:34.680 This is one of the reasons it's so useful to teach your child, to help your child develop
01:10:41.180 extremely polished manners.
01:10:43.480 Yeah.
01:10:43.620 And because what happens if you have well-mannered kids who say please and thank you, and who
01:10:47.840 know how to shake hands and introduce themselves, and who are sensible enough to listen to an
01:10:52.340 adult, then they will charm the adults, and not in an instrumental way, a manipulative way,
01:10:59.280 but they'll charm the adults, and the adults will reveal the best part of them, and then
01:11:03.600 they'll offer the kids all sorts of opportunities.
01:11:05.740 And so, what a deal that is for your kids.
01:11:07.760 And we see that just happen over and over.
01:11:09.820 And what do we have to do?
01:11:12.060 Nothing.
01:11:12.640 We don't set these up.
01:11:13.840 We don't match-made.
01:11:14.780 Right, right, right.
01:11:15.360 The young people go out and do it all with parental permission, and the parents have to
01:11:20.020 sign off at SAFE.
01:11:21.280 But they're out there doing, you know, our boys went through amazing, they ended up their
01:11:26.000 final apprenticeships were at SpaceX.
01:11:28.280 Right.
01:11:28.860 What a deal.
01:11:29.380 And you know what?
01:11:29.740 They did that on their own.
01:11:31.500 I mean, that was-
01:11:32.000 Well, that's great, too, because that makes it their accomplishment.
01:11:34.380 Oh, absolutely their accomplishment.
01:11:34.720 That's another thing that's so useful about not doing too much for other people.
01:11:38.220 So, one of the things that, as a therapist, it's very easy to steal your client's success
01:11:45.220 and to slough off their risk.
01:11:47.720 So, for example, if you come to me and say, well, do you have some advice on the career
01:11:51.620 front?
01:11:52.240 And I say, well, this is what I think you should do, and this is how I think you should
01:11:55.540 do it, and you go out and you do it, it's like, it's not obvious at all whose victory
01:12:00.040 that is.
01:12:00.640 Right, right.
01:12:01.180 And then if you go out and fail, well, I've failed as a therapist, but not as much as
01:12:07.200 you've failed, so it's like your skin that's really at risk.
01:12:09.380 I'm going to claim the victories and-
01:12:11.180 Let's slough off the failures, yeah.
01:12:12.880 Well, this is why, by the way, we don't ever talk about the success of our graduates, because
01:12:17.240 it's their success.
01:12:18.420 You just want to hear us talk about that.
01:12:19.920 I mean, we just don't.
01:12:20.880 It's their success, not ours to claim, and it also brings up the hardest thing we
01:12:25.240 have.
01:12:26.060 It's not the young people, it's the parents.
01:12:27.720 And, you know, I asked our son the other day, a good friend was working on something
01:12:32.320 about fatherhood, and I asked our youngest son, Sam, I said, you know, this whole fatherhood
01:12:38.260 thing, you would understand it better than I have, because you're the customer, right?
01:12:40.940 You're the-
01:12:41.300 And I said, so what advice would you give my friend about fatherhood?
01:12:45.200 And he said, you know, when you're younger, you just want your parents around and to pay
01:12:50.760 attention to you.
01:12:51.520 Yeah.
01:12:52.160 You know, not coddle you, not, but just to be there.
01:12:54.660 And he said, but once you get into kind of middle school, you're really around your
01:12:58.660 peers, and your parents, their job then is to be a good role model.
01:13:04.120 And he said, and this is what chilled me, he said, so to be a good father, all you can
01:13:08.960 do is work on yourself.
01:13:10.820 Yeah.
01:13:11.100 And that's why it's so hard.
01:13:12.900 Yeah.
01:13:13.420 And I stopped, and I went, oh my gosh, have I worked on myself enough?
01:13:16.820 I mean, you know, but it was just like this, this from a 19-year-old.
01:13:20.820 It's like, as a father, I need to love my child and work on myself.
01:13:24.940 Yeah.
01:13:25.320 And that's the way the child will be healthy.
01:13:28.000 The reason that when we have a problem is generally the parent, you know, over-parenting
01:13:32.840 or wanting to intervene for the child.
01:13:35.060 Yeah.
01:13:35.540 And they're prohibited by contract from doing that.
01:13:38.220 They sign a contract that says, I won't do that, and then they'll do it anyway.
01:13:40.880 Right, right, right.
01:13:41.660 Well, it's very hard for parents to let go of that.
01:13:43.560 It is hard.
01:13:44.000 If that's their habit.
01:13:44.800 It is hard.
01:13:45.380 And there is a narcissism in that, too, because then the parent gets to take credit for the
01:13:50.220 child's success.
01:13:51.500 Right.
01:13:51.760 And to trumpet that.
01:13:52.960 Yes.
01:13:53.440 And that's, well, that's that whole Oedipal mother nightmare that Freud outlined so brilliantly
01:13:58.080 so long ago.
01:13:59.540 It's like, and it's hard if you're a caregiver, you know, again, to give the devil his due.
01:14:04.640 Yeah.
01:14:04.840 And I think it's probably harder for women because they have to give their all to their
01:14:10.580 infants in a self-sacrificing manner.
01:14:13.100 Yes.
01:14:13.380 Because infants require full, dedicated, this isn't about me care.
01:14:19.660 The problem is, so the psychoanalyst said, the good mother necessarily fails.
01:14:24.320 And what they meant by that was the woman is faced with this terrible necessity of dispensing
01:14:31.220 with that full-fledged maternal care incrementally and letting the child, facilitating the child's
01:14:38.000 movement forward.
01:14:38.600 And I think it's very useful for a woman to have her masculine side developed for that
01:14:43.740 or to have more likely to have a male partner around who's more oriented towards encouragement
01:14:50.100 than, let's say, that intense maternal care.
01:14:52.740 But it's definitely the case that you want to foster in your children and in the people
01:15:00.560 you're mentoring that ability to do things on their own.
01:15:04.060 There's a rule of thumb for care of elderly people.
01:15:06.700 It's a very good one.
01:15:08.860 Never do anything for the person you're caring for they can do themselves.
01:15:12.060 Because you want them to keep doing everything they can.
01:15:17.460 Yeah.
01:15:18.180 Well, and you want them to retain their dignity.
01:15:20.620 And you don't want to steal from them what responsibility they have left.
01:15:25.060 And you want to encourage their autonomy.
01:15:26.740 If for no other reason, then you're not going to be overburdened with having to do everything,
01:15:32.780 right?
01:15:32.960 Right.
01:15:33.540 So, and that, well, okay.
01:15:34.760 So let's, two questions here.
01:15:37.260 One is, how do you develop that community ethos that orients the entire community to regulate
01:15:46.480 the behavior of the members in a positive manner?
01:15:50.960 How do you bring that about?
01:15:54.100 You're continuing to play game after game after game with different kinds of motivational
01:15:58.980 systems.
01:15:59.800 So sometimes it's the hero's journey and more of a, you know, Maslow's hierarchy kind of
01:16:04.480 feeling or a Jungian feeling.
01:16:05.900 Sometimes it's being rewarded with extrinsic rewards.
01:16:09.880 Sometimes those are squad based.
01:16:11.740 Sometimes they're individual.
01:16:13.020 Sometimes they're a whole studio.
01:16:14.860 Sometimes they're all, you're just playing game after game after game.
01:16:18.800 So it's an aggregation of playable games.
01:16:20.720 It's a lot of experiments going on within a rubric that, you know, is rewarding this
01:16:26.200 feedback and collapses.
01:16:29.720 And then, I mean, part of it is it's hard because the studio will completely collapse.
01:16:34.040 And as an adult, you want to step in and fix it, right?
01:16:36.320 And so we say, okay, step back.
01:16:38.320 Yeah.
01:16:38.840 Take a deep breath.
01:16:39.720 Leave it alone.
01:16:40.620 Okay.
01:16:40.860 Collapse in what way?
01:16:41.820 What have you seen?
01:16:42.560 There's two cliques and they're arguing about something and the civility's broken down.
01:16:48.300 And, you know, or-
01:16:49.180 Social fragmentation.
01:16:50.100 Or excellence.
01:16:51.300 You know, the people have kind of gotten blase about excellence.
01:16:55.160 Or I saw something interesting in our high school, in our launch pad.
01:16:59.160 They had built such a complex, cool society that the, and you know this from having run
01:17:04.000 companies, you know, if you're not careful, you build up so many rules that your company
01:17:08.420 becomes a bureaucracy.
01:17:09.260 So they were getting to that stage where it was a beautiful society.
01:17:12.420 And they looked at it and they said, we're going to do away with all but three rules.
01:17:17.400 And if we want to put a rule back, the first thing we're going to do is ask the person the
01:17:21.420 rule is being instituted for, why do you not want to be here?
01:17:25.320 Because you know, right?
01:17:27.160 So we're not going to put a rule for the edge case.
01:17:29.660 We're going to deal with the individual and try to listen to them.
01:17:32.080 And maybe they need to leave for a while, or maybe we need to help them.
01:17:34.400 Or, and so you just see these complex set and simple and complex set of experiments and
01:17:39.840 they're learning by doing and watching.
01:17:42.080 And so when you either get, you know, a tyrannical situation or Lord of the Flies going on, you
01:17:46.940 step back once and then it always gets worse.
01:17:49.760 You step back again.
01:17:50.980 Yeah.
01:17:51.260 And here's the magic that happens.
01:17:53.420 At that point, three or four of the sheepdogs, we call them because they're the ones that get
01:17:59.160 the wolves, we'll come to you and say, we don't want to live like this anymore.
01:18:04.420 And then you say, Socratically, well, do you think you would like to try a pure democracy
01:18:09.180 or a democratic republic?
01:18:11.480 They might not even know at age eight what that is, but they have the internet, they can
01:18:15.020 go figure it out.
01:18:15.660 Yeah.
01:18:16.160 And they'll come back and have a town council meeting and vote on a new structure.
01:18:20.320 We had one time, we were actually the-
01:18:22.400 Right.
01:18:22.700 So now they have a problem with governance and now they have the motivation to find out
01:18:26.580 what good governance means.
01:18:27.880 So we got actually ejected, as the guide, I got ejected from the studio because they
01:18:33.640 didn't want me in there anymore.
01:18:34.880 So for a week, there'll be a week go by and no adult goes in our middle school, it runs
01:18:39.040 itself.
01:18:39.980 So I was actually kind of asked to leave, so I left and I thought, well, we'll see what
01:18:43.240 they do with it.
01:18:43.920 Yeah.
01:18:44.300 The studio broke down.
01:18:46.260 I didn't really know what was going on inside.
01:18:49.660 I came back after about 10 days, I was invited back because they couldn't create as good a learning
01:18:54.280 challenge as the games they were creating weren't as good, so they wanted some more
01:18:57.060 games.
01:18:57.880 When I came back in, they had taken masking tape and they had divided the studio into like
01:19:03.860 eight city-states because they'd been reading about city-states.
01:19:06.540 Each city-state had a different governance system and people were voting with their feet
01:19:11.200 where to reside.
01:19:12.960 Oh, yeah.
01:19:13.980 That kept going for about six months.
01:19:15.680 It turned out to be an incredibly powerful way to organize the studio.
01:19:18.600 And then at some point that broke down.
01:19:20.260 It's a competition between, it's a competition between the invitations.
01:19:24.020 I've been thinking about this on the religious front, talking to, I probably have talked about
01:19:28.860 this most particularly with some of the more fundamentalist Muslims that I've talked to,
01:19:33.200 that the notion of holy war, jihad.
01:19:37.580 William James said 150 years ago that we needed a moral equivalent to war, right?
01:19:44.140 Something as difficult and challenging but oriented towards the uppermost good, let's say.
01:19:50.200 And I was thinking about the religious competition as a competition between invitations.
01:19:57.680 And so the idea would be, and this is sort of like the idea that as an adult, you're a
01:20:01.100 role model for your teenagers.
01:20:02.540 Like, all right, so you've got this set of principles on the Islamic side, let's say.
01:20:07.140 Are you such a shining example of those principles in practice that people look at you and think,
01:20:14.140 man, I'd like to abide by that code.
01:20:19.300 And that seems right to me, is that a competition of invitations, first of all, it has the advantage
01:20:24.720 of competition.
01:20:25.700 It's like, well, there's a bunch.
01:20:26.640 And that's experimentation, essentially.
01:20:28.660 And it can be intense competition.
01:20:30.860 But if it's invitational, then people get to use freedom of conscience and freedom of
01:20:34.680 association to choose.
01:20:36.000 And that seems to give us the best of both worlds.
01:20:40.260 So how did you manage to motivate yourself to stay the hell out of it when things were?
01:20:45.180 Well, it's where I was lucky that having been in Harvard Business School and been among
01:20:49.940 the best Socratic teachers in the world, having practiced Socratic teaching, and we had all
01:20:53.940 these hotshot entrepreneurs that came to teach with us at the MBA level.
01:20:57.620 But you had to help and work with them and yourself to keep your ego out of it.
01:21:01.240 So if you're teaching a case and you're, I mean, all of our teachers were very exceptionally
01:21:05.600 successful entrepreneurs, you want to step in and give the answer, right?
01:21:08.380 Yeah.
01:21:08.800 But that was faster.
01:21:09.920 But that was forbidden.
01:21:11.380 I mean, like you would get ejected from the teaching core for doing that.
01:21:14.180 And so we all agreed to live by a contract and we had micro routines we would execute.
01:21:20.680 Just like in the studio, there's all these micro routines layered upon each other.
01:21:23.960 Yeah.
01:21:24.180 And so I was just equipped.
01:21:26.000 I mean, I want to give an answer as much as anybody else in the world.
01:21:28.500 And I do sometimes.
01:21:29.720 I shouldn't.
01:21:30.280 Yeah.
01:21:30.960 But I'm equipped to say it's so much more powerful to say, would you do A or B next?
01:21:35.420 Well, you know, for the men that are listening, this is a useful thing to know about your wives.
01:21:40.260 I mean, it's true in interpersonal communication in general.
01:21:43.380 But, you know, your wife is going to sit down with you and lay out her complaints about
01:21:48.600 whatever happens to be happening.
01:21:50.080 And you might think that you know what to do about that.
01:21:54.540 And you might think that what she wants is for you to do something about it and to provide
01:21:58.860 an answer.
01:21:59.480 Now, that also might be your impatience because you want to just get to the cut to the chase
01:22:05.160 and solve the damn problem.
01:22:07.120 And so it's not all moral virtue on your side that you actually know what to do.
01:22:11.100 But what you have to understand is that when someone's first walking through a problem
01:22:15.300 set, part of what they're trying to do is to figure out what the problem is.
01:22:19.480 And so unless you let them lay out the problem landscape without interference, you don't
01:22:25.400 even know that the problem you're solving is the correct problem.
01:22:28.620 And so, and that, you definitely see this in the psychotherapeutic relationship all the
01:22:33.040 time is that, man, once you've got the problem properly identified, you're 90% of the way to
01:22:39.300 solving it.
01:22:40.180 But that wandering around to begin with.
01:22:42.740 Yeah.
01:22:42.920 And the Socratic method is very useful for that.
01:22:45.460 It also helps people build, well, to investigate their doubts thoroughly, but also to build
01:22:50.400 the analytic skills necessary to assess a problem properly and to start to strategize.
01:22:55.840 I remember Laura was in a discussion with one of our top acting MBA teachers one time.
01:23:01.620 We were in a case discussion.
01:23:03.400 And he's a wonderful guy named Stephen Tomlinson.
01:23:05.080 He stopped her in mid-sentence and he said, ask yourself at this moment, would you rather
01:23:10.320 be right or would you ever rather be curious?
01:23:13.060 Right, right.
01:23:13.740 And it changed her life.
01:23:14.520 I mean, she's also, she's always been a curious person.
01:23:16.500 Yeah.
01:23:16.660 She was like, oh, I was trying to be right at this moment.
01:23:19.780 Yeah.
01:23:19.960 And so it's those kind of revelations.
01:23:21.900 Yeah, that's, well, that's the, that's the, that's the pharaonic temptation as in Pharaoh
01:23:27.160 is to be right.
01:23:28.320 Now, a good way around that, I think, metacognitively is to think, okay, are there more things you
01:23:35.960 know or more things that you don't know?
01:23:38.980 Now, anyone with any sense knows that no matter how thick the book they've read, you
01:23:44.040 know, in total is the book of things they haven't read or encountered is way thicker.
01:23:49.300 Yeah.
01:23:49.720 And so then the next question is, well, would you rather be friends with what you know or
01:23:55.560 friends with what you don't know?
01:23:57.760 And that's an infinite landscape.
01:23:59.600 And so if you can learn to be the friend of what you don't know, then, and you're really
01:24:04.600 afraid about that.
01:24:05.580 It's like, no, no, I need to know here.
01:24:07.840 I might be wrong in my presumption of being right.
01:24:10.560 And then it, it opens up, I think that's part of what opens up the underlying motivation
01:24:15.300 for true Socratic questioning.
01:24:17.120 If I'm, if I'm talking to my wife, I actually want to know, you know, even though part of
01:24:22.580 me doesn't, why she thinks what I'm doing isn't working.
01:24:27.300 Because it's possible that if I could listen carefully enough, I could find out something
01:24:33.680 stupid that I'm doing and quit doing it.
01:24:36.720 And I would rather stop doing stupid things because life's hard enough without putting
01:24:42.900 up unnecessary obstacles.
01:24:44.280 Now imagine these kinds of discussions going on, they happen for, there's a 15 minute
01:24:48.820 Socratic launch in the morning.
01:24:50.420 There's a 15 minute launch after launch.
01:24:52.500 There's a 15 minute close.
01:24:53.780 So you're having, these young people are having on a detailed moral problem of real relevance
01:24:59.400 to them, these Socratic discussions over and over and over again, every day.
01:25:03.320 And then.
01:25:04.120 So what would a discussion like that look like?
01:25:06.260 What kind of topic might come up for discussion?
01:25:08.080 It might be, we're having an issue with clicks in the studio.
01:25:14.280 And so there would be something about what is a click and how do clicks form.
01:25:17.460 Right.
01:25:17.920 And the question might be.
01:25:18.920 So it's applied to socialize.
01:25:19.540 Well, actually what we would ask you is, we would say, what's the biggest issue in the
01:25:23.580 studio right now?
01:25:24.280 Is it intentionality?
01:25:25.980 Is it civility?
01:25:27.620 Is it excellence?
01:25:30.120 Right, right.
01:25:31.180 Prioritization of problem.
01:25:31.680 And whichever one they picked, it would be, okay, okay, what should we do about that?
01:25:34.780 Should we set smart goals?
01:25:36.380 Should we run a 360 survey?
01:25:38.600 Should we?
01:25:39.320 And then after a very short while, they're leading these discussions.
01:25:42.600 Right, right.
01:25:43.120 What should we do and why?
01:25:44.140 It's always relevant.
01:25:45.320 There's probably a hero story.
01:25:47.200 In fact, the way we do civilization, I've talked with Larry Arn at Hillsdale about this.
01:25:53.040 You'll be in a group of five 10-year-olds and you get a question to go research.
01:25:58.180 And the question might be, was John F. Kennedy, the ne'er-do-well son of a rich man, or America's
01:26:05.880 greatest president assassinated in his prime?
01:26:09.260 Now, 10-year-olds have no idea who John F. Kennedy is.
01:26:11.700 Right.
01:26:12.260 Right?
01:26:13.060 But he was assassinated.
01:26:14.700 He was a rich guy.
01:26:15.240 That's pretty cool.
01:26:15.960 Yeah, right.
01:26:16.660 So they'll go spend 30 minutes researching or an hour researching all about Kennedy.
01:26:21.480 Yeah.
01:26:22.000 Then they'll come back and they'll start debating that.
01:26:24.380 And before they're done, it'll be like, well, what does make a great president?
01:26:26.940 Yeah.
01:26:27.420 And what is your prime?
01:26:28.880 And what is, no adult, these deep, rich, and by the way, after that, you never forget
01:26:34.100 who John Kennedy was or the Cuban Missile Crisis.
01:26:36.540 Yeah, yeah.
01:26:36.780 But all it takes is one question and the right rules of engagement.
01:26:40.240 Yeah.
01:26:40.800 And you can back away.
01:26:42.200 Yeah, well, that's also how you can set up critical thinking as a really motivating
01:26:46.500 game.
01:26:47.300 So in my fourth year seminar, we would go through scientific papers one by one.
01:26:53.100 I would pick the papers, classic scientific papers.
01:26:56.200 And then I would extract out some of the core questions.
01:27:00.780 And then I divided, this was fun.
01:27:03.660 I divided the groups, my students, there's about 20, into groups of four.
01:27:08.020 And I put the introverts in one group and the extroverts in another.
01:27:11.560 And the reason was is that introverts will talk, but their threshold for speaking is higher
01:27:16.820 and the lag time is longer.
01:27:18.940 So if you have an extrovert in with a bunch of introverts, yeah, yeah.
01:27:22.820 Because they're more likely to interrupt earlier.
01:27:27.820 So I'd put the introverts together.
01:27:29.580 So that was fun.
01:27:30.200 And I would assign a side of the question arbitrarily.
01:27:37.100 And the rule was, look, I don't really care what your opinion is about this issue.
01:27:41.940 Not because I don't care about your opinion, but because it's worthwhile to explore the
01:27:46.540 entire problem set.
01:27:47.440 And it's very worthwhile to learn to think critically.
01:27:50.460 And to think critically, you have to take opposing sides.
01:27:52.560 And so the students would have this discussion.
01:27:55.560 And then the rest of them would vote on the outcome.
01:27:57.660 And it was extraordinarily engaging.
01:28:00.880 And the students really liked it.
01:28:01.960 And they would spend in-class time doing the investigation right then and there, right?
01:28:06.620 Without you having to do anything, right?
01:28:08.100 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:28:08.640 Well, we did the same with the Revolutionary War.
01:28:10.240 You know, you have the Tories, you have the Patriots, and then you have this group in between.
01:28:13.800 It was about a third, a third, and a third.
01:28:15.900 And then it's like the two sides, the Tories and the Patriots, have to argue.
01:28:20.520 And the people in the middle are going to vote with their feet.
01:28:22.620 And you're going to see who won.
01:28:24.500 So there's all sorts of just experiment after experiment.
01:28:27.660 Right, right.
01:28:28.880 And so that, oh yeah, okay.
01:28:29.920 So that's what Paggio, my friend, I have a friend who's a very religious thinker.
01:28:35.060 And he's developed a model of governance that's very much like that, that's extracted out of the Exodus story.
01:28:42.000 It has to do with the distribution of response.
01:28:44.920 Imagine there's tyranny and chaos.
01:28:47.920 And so that'd be tyranny and slavery, let's say.
01:28:49.960 And then there's a model of good governance that is the alternative to both of those.
01:28:55.020 And it's something like distributed responsibility and something like this idea of nested games.
01:29:02.340 So in the subsidiary organization, an individual has responsibility for himself, and then paired individuals have responsibility for their family.
01:29:11.300 And then paired families have responsibility for the community.
01:29:14.900 And then paired communities have responsibility for the state.
01:29:17.760 And there's games going on at every level that are, well, they should be games that are guided by the spirit of the logos fundamentally.
01:29:25.800 But it should be distributed at every single level.
01:29:28.620 And that's the opposite of a totalitarian system.
01:29:31.020 So instead, like in a totalitarian system, every single person lies about everything all the time.
01:29:36.620 And in a well-governed system, the opposite of the lie isn't the truth.
01:29:41.000 It's more like something like the humble approach to expanding knowledge.
01:29:46.760 Right, it's an experiment or something I'm going to try.
01:29:48.640 Yeah, it's a way of generating new knowledge.
01:29:50.360 Well, so think about the individual, the squad, the 36 people in a cohort, and then the whole campus.
01:29:57.360 Yeah.
01:29:57.980 And then you have people that are also doing, you know, they're specializing in chemistry versus math.
01:30:02.560 And so you've got all these mixes like that going on all the time.
01:30:06.040 Yeah, right.
01:30:06.300 And out of that comes the culture.
01:30:07.840 Right, and also because you have that diverse range of options.
01:30:11.720 So the answer to the problem of inequality isn't equality.
01:30:16.520 The answer to the problem of inequality is a diverse enough game so that the distribution of inequality is normal, right?
01:30:25.540 So, like you said, you can be a good plumber, you can be a good abstract mathematician.
01:30:29.860 It doesn't matter.
01:30:31.340 They're both infinitely playable games, and they're infinitely expandable games.
01:30:37.360 Well, and the question that keeps getting asked over and over again, so one of the other things they go do is they go do what are called stars and stepping stones interviews, where you'll find people you admire who are between, let's say you're in high school, your age and 25, 25 and 40, and then over the age of 60.
01:30:53.700 So there's a range.
01:30:54.700 And what we found by doing thousands of those is at the age of 60, most people ask the same three questions.
01:31:01.940 They phrase them differently, but it is, did I contribute something meaningful?
01:31:06.640 Was I a good person?
01:31:08.360 And who did I love and who loved me?
01:31:11.020 Those three questions, even at age eight, are always on the table.
01:31:15.580 Say them again.
01:31:16.660 So did I contribute something meaningful?
01:31:19.140 Right, so meaningful, specific.
01:31:20.740 Meaningful.
01:31:21.480 Was I a good person?
01:31:22.780 Who did I love and who loved me?
01:31:25.660 Right, right.
01:31:26.160 Now, I bring that up because we could pick, I mean, you and I could prioritize those differently and both win the game, right?
01:31:33.160 Right.
01:31:33.760 I mean, so you're always asking, and by the way, those questions mean something different.
01:31:37.440 Was I a good person means kind of black and white moral choice at 11, maybe even 15.
01:31:44.160 It probably, around your 20s, 30s, or 40s, it's about, am I becoming who I was meant to become?
01:31:48.740 I mean, good has a different meaning, right?
01:31:50.580 It's slightly different.
01:31:51.100 Right, right.
01:31:51.540 It's not so much abiding by the appropriate rules.
01:31:54.140 But while we keep offering these moral choices that allow you to kind of self-rank in different ways, it's not only aptitudes, it's also what's important in life.
01:32:02.320 Because you've got to ask, what's success?
01:32:03.700 It's not how much money you make.
01:32:05.200 Yeah.
01:32:05.760 Making money's great.
01:32:07.020 But that's not the ultimate measure.
01:32:08.480 Is it being how kind you are?
01:32:09.580 Making money's great if it facilitates the other things that you just described, right?
01:32:13.560 Right, right.
01:32:13.860 If it provides you with an expanded horizon of opportunity.
01:32:16.700 It's not so great if it enables your hedonistic impulsivity.
01:32:20.800 In fact, it can just kill you.
01:32:22.300 Right.
01:32:22.360 I had lots of clients who were fine when they were broke.
01:32:25.980 Yeah.
01:32:26.240 But the second, one client in particular, he used to get his unemployment check.
01:32:30.020 He was disabled.
01:32:32.020 Workplace injury.
01:32:32.940 And he was a pretty simple person.
01:32:36.360 And he was easily exploited by psychopaths.
01:32:39.020 And those were his friends.
01:32:40.320 And what would happen to him is he'd get his unemployment check, you know, once a month.
01:32:45.060 And so he'd have lots of money for three days.
01:32:47.740 And it was off to the bar and nose deep in cocaine and face down in a ditch.
01:32:51.640 And all his terrible parasitical friends would gather around him until his bones were plucked dry.
01:32:57.240 And eventually that killed him.
01:32:59.080 Wow.
01:32:59.140 Yeah, yeah.
01:32:59.760 And so money is an enabler.
01:33:03.460 But it's also an enabler of vice.
01:33:05.560 Yeah.
01:33:05.800 So be careful, right?
01:33:07.640 Right.
01:33:07.840 Be careful with money.
01:33:09.720 So, yeah, okay.
01:33:10.760 So let's, maybe we should turn.
01:33:13.220 Okay, let's do something practical first.
01:33:15.240 Okay.
01:33:16.080 If people are interested in these Acton schools.
01:33:19.640 Yes.
01:33:20.060 Where can they find more information?
01:33:21.980 Sure.
01:33:22.740 Acton, like A-C-T-O-N, academy.org is where the schools are featured.
01:33:29.140 There's also something fascinating we do if you want to take a mini step.
01:33:32.160 It's called the Children's Business Fair, where children will come and for one day pitch a business.
01:33:37.600 They'll have a business where they sell things.
01:33:39.440 Oh, yeah.
01:33:39.820 We will have this year 1,000 of those fairs across the United States and across the world.
01:33:46.220 And we'll serve about 50,000 young people.
01:33:48.940 And all you have to do if you want to start one of those, that's kind of a stepping stone to an Acton.
01:33:53.980 Yeah.
01:33:54.420 Is put out seven tables in your front yard and have your kids tell their friends.
01:33:58.340 And we have a whole system that we pay for everything.
01:34:00.600 We provide prize money.
01:34:03.960 It's just the thing our family wants to do.
01:34:05.900 Uh-huh.
01:34:06.140 And where can people find information about that?
01:34:09.140 Children's Business Fair.
01:34:10.420 Just Google that or childrensbusinessfair.org.
01:34:12.940 There's a two-minute video that shows how you can start one in your backyard.
01:34:16.840 Or actonacademy.org if people are interested in the school.
01:34:19.740 Okay, okay.
01:34:20.280 Well, we'll make sure we put those links in the description.
01:34:22.420 Now, we haven't talked at all about higher education.
01:34:25.700 Maybe we should diverge into that momentarily.
01:34:28.480 So, we could talk about my misadventures in reform under Governor Perry, Texas Governor Perry.
01:34:36.880 I think I'll leave those for something more positive and just talk about what are we seeing from our super competent high schoolers who we call launch patterns because they're launching out in the world.
01:34:47.880 And what we're seeing increasingly is a belief that many colleges are about prestige and what they're about is competence.
01:34:57.020 Yeah.
01:34:57.200 And so, of course, if you get a free ride to MIT and you're a gifted engineer, you go to MIT, right?
01:35:03.940 I mean, of course you would do that.
01:35:05.160 Yeah.
01:35:06.340 Would you pay $400,000?
01:35:07.380 So far.
01:35:07.980 So far.
01:35:08.920 Right?
01:35:09.560 No, no, no.
01:35:09.820 That could all change.
01:35:10.720 Yeah.
01:35:12.340 If you're, you know, from, well, doesn't matter who you are, should you pay $400,000 from a no-name degree that won't get you a job from a place no one's ever heard of?
01:35:23.200 No, that's a terrible idea.
01:35:24.400 Yeah.
01:35:24.640 So we're seeing that with all of these apprenticeships, our launch patterns are coming out and they can get into whatever competitive college their scores are high enough to get into.
01:35:33.300 Yeah.
01:35:34.060 But about four out of 10 are going directly into industry and maybe hacking a degree somewhere on the side.
01:35:40.340 But they've realized, so I think we're seeing our best and brightest begin to vote with their feet.
01:35:46.780 Yeah.
01:35:47.140 And began to think of college as a tool that may or may not be necessary.
01:35:51.780 Think that's more true of the boys?
01:35:54.100 No.
01:35:54.620 I think it's pretty equally true.
01:35:56.380 Now, I will say there is something to be said for college if you want to go to football games, paint your face, be in a tribe, and chase girls or guys.
01:36:06.920 Yeah, yeah, right.
01:36:07.500 That's kind of what college has left.
01:36:08.880 And so there's nothing bad about that.
01:36:11.220 Well, we should also, again, give the devil his due.
01:36:13.740 I mean, I've been trying to sort out why people will pay, let's say, $200,000 for a four-year degree.
01:36:19.740 And here's a couple of reasons.
01:36:21.380 You get away from your parents.
01:36:23.140 You have a transition point.
01:36:24.440 You establish a new group of peers and maybe you find a mate.
01:36:26.940 And especially the last one, if that's your $200,000 investment and you have pooled around you eligible young people of a certain degree of, let's say, intellectual capability and discipline, somewhat selected, that's not such a bad deal.
01:36:44.360 That's not exactly the fundamental purpose of an educational institution.
01:36:48.800 But it's not trivial and it's not easy to replace.
01:36:50.820 Right.
01:36:50.840 And I think that's why the game's continuing to go.
01:36:54.160 Yes, yes.
01:36:54.720 So we're going to have to find a way to replace that or it's going to continue to be, in essence, a very expensive country club.
01:37:01.240 Right.
01:37:01.740 Yeah.
01:37:02.020 I mean, it's a very expensive country club and speed dating.
01:37:05.320 Now it's a very expensive country cult.
01:37:07.320 Yes.
01:37:07.760 And that's definitely a problem.
01:37:09.980 And I think my friends that are in higher ed and that are thoughtful have seen this coming.
01:37:16.620 The other issue that higher ed faces is, as you well know, they make all their money on the freshmen and sophomores teaching them with adjuncts.
01:37:24.080 Yes, right.
01:37:24.720 And so then the upper division courses are very expensive, taught by tenured faculty.
01:37:31.240 Right.
01:37:31.460 But it's the internet that's threatening, it's all the, you know, it's all the, the distance learning is threatening the freshmen and sophomore group.
01:37:38.480 But if they lose enough of that group or have to discount, then the whole model turns upside down and higher ed has no way to cut costs.
01:37:46.120 Yeah.
01:37:46.480 They can't because they can't cut costs.
01:37:47.940 Also, let's talk about costs.
01:37:49.860 Yes.
01:37:50.120 So we were talking last night, you said in Austin, it's $32,000 a year per student.
01:37:55.980 That's the public education cost.
01:37:57.460 Right, for K-12.
01:37:58.000 But that's also a, that's an underestimate.
01:38:00.480 So let's walk.
01:38:00.800 Well, yeah, yeah.
01:38:01.240 So my belief and what I've seen is that doesn't include all the facility costs properly accounted for.
01:38:06.480 Right.
01:38:06.660 So the number's somewhere north of 32,000 I last saw.
01:38:11.100 And, you know, that ranges from 20,000 around the country to much more than that.
01:38:16.840 And you were going to ask, I think you were saying cost at Acton Academy.
01:38:19.380 You know, we've got some incredibly successful campuses that now are running at anywhere from $1,000 per student per year to maybe $2,500 per student per year.
01:38:33.340 Now, we have some that have tuition as high as $35,000 a year.
01:38:36.820 So it varies.
01:38:37.720 Yeah, yeah.
01:38:38.280 But we're managing by the fact these young people are so super capable on their own, we're managing to create alternatives that deliver extraordinary, both academic and everything else.
01:38:49.040 Right, so that's 5% of the cost, fundamentally.
01:38:52.080 Well, and we should, let's delve into those numbers a little bit.
01:38:54.900 I mean, a pretty decent teacher's salary is $60,000.
01:38:58.680 I don't think that's unfair.
01:38:59.940 Right.
01:39:00.420 Okay.
01:39:01.140 So that means if, that means each two students could, in principle, hire a teacher just for them.
01:39:06.660 Now, maybe you could double that if you had to include the cost of a building, because generally, the infrastructure costs in the typical organization are about equivalent to the staffing costs, if you need a rule of thumb.
01:39:18.820 And so that means that, in principle, what the education system is spending now would allow each group of four students to hire a full-time teacher.
01:39:27.640 Yes.
01:39:28.040 Right.
01:39:28.380 And so this is not an efficient system, obviously.
01:39:30.960 Well, and if you look at the head count, and this is true for all bureaucracies, by the way, not just public education, but it's about a five-to-one adult-to-learner-to-student ratio.
01:39:44.060 Now, it's not five-to-one per teacher, but there's so many admin people.
01:39:48.100 Five-to-one per student.
01:39:49.600 Yeah, there's five, there's one adult for every five students.
01:39:52.980 Right, right.
01:39:53.440 That's the cross.
01:39:55.540 And our rate is more like one adult for every 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 students.
01:40:01.320 Right.
01:40:01.760 And that's so interesting, too, because one of the claims that's constantly put forward by teachers' unions, in particular, is that, well, the only thing that really matters in education is teacher-to-student ratio.
01:40:12.660 Right.
01:40:12.900 There should be more, like, there shouldn't be more than 10 students per teacher.
01:40:16.340 And you can understand that to some degree if you believe that teacher attention to a given student is a marker for academic movement forward.
01:40:27.480 But your model is more the idea that, no, if the institution is well-constituted, then you produce maximal autonomy on the part of the participants, and while they pick up the work, they do the learning that goes along with picking up the work.
01:40:42.700 Right, well, and the thing I say is fundamental is education is not the same as learning.
01:40:48.200 Education is something you do to someone.
01:40:50.680 You educate them.
01:40:51.620 Now, you can self-educate, but if you're educating someone, learning is what the person experiences.
01:40:56.420 Right, it's like the delivery of a product.
01:40:58.360 Right, and so I want to be careful here because our model is just one model.
01:41:02.140 There's going to be 50 fun models and interesting models come out for learning as the world changes.
01:41:08.540 And, you know, my great-grandfather was president of a university.
01:41:11.780 He's buried on their campus.
01:41:13.240 I mean, I came from a—my wife's mother, Joanna, was one of the incredible teachers in Oklahoma City.
01:41:21.480 In fact, a quick story that's worth telling about that, we were 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,
01:41:30.420 you know, this reminds me of my eighth-grade science teacher.
01:41:36.300 And she said, I live in Oklahoma City.
01:41:37.860 I came to see this, and it reminds me of her.
01:41:40.460 And she started describing this wonderful teacher who was Socratic and who did all the things.
01:41:45.200 And she said—she got finished, and I said, and her name was Joanna Anderson.
01:41:49.900 Oh.
01:41:50.920 And the lady said, how in the world could you have known that?
01:41:53.460 And I said, because that's her daughter, Laura.
01:41:57.020 And the woman just started crying.
01:41:58.540 And she said, that lady changed my life.
01:42:00.480 Right.
01:42:00.600 So adults have an important role to play in a child's life.
01:42:04.060 Yeah.
01:42:04.260 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.
01:42:13.300 Yeah.
01:42:13.760 That's not the teacher's fault.
01:42:15.420 That's the system.
01:42:16.340 Mm-hmm.
01:42:16.720 Right?
01:42:17.100 It's the system.
01:42:17.960 Now, you're participating in the system.
01:42:19.740 Yeah.
01:42:20.180 But I always try to—you know, I try to divide the teachers are often the heroes, and sometimes not.
01:42:25.700 The system's the problem.
01:42:26.960 Mm-hmm.
01:42:27.520 And I don't think there's anyone that doesn't think the system is broken.
01:42:30.340 Mm-hmm.
01:42:30.620 There are going to be a lot of different recipes.
01:42:33.100 We've got a recipe that happens to be very low cost and seems to be powerful, and it's a work in progress.
01:42:38.000 Also scalable.
01:42:39.220 And scalable.
01:42:39.960 Which is—
01:42:40.240 We have one employee, and our whole network, our staff, is one.
01:42:46.080 One employee.
01:42:47.100 For 300 campuses.
01:42:49.140 Mm.
01:42:49.820 Because—
01:42:50.180 How do you facilitate communication between the campuses and exchange, let's say, best practices?
01:42:55.040 There's a forum where people are exchanging.
01:42:57.100 Since we've been sitting here, we've probably gotten four new experiments on the forum.
01:43:01.100 When I get off, I'll read them.
01:43:02.200 Oh, yeah, okay.
01:43:02.780 So people are—and so there's a way—it's like Legos.
01:43:05.060 There's a way to share experiments.
01:43:07.060 Yep, yep.
01:43:07.740 And there's a way to report on them.
01:43:09.260 There's a central place.
01:43:10.960 It's almost like Unix code to store.
01:43:13.480 And we've been very careful how the modules fit together so they were defined so you can swap out modules.
01:43:18.540 Uh-huh.
01:43:18.960 And so people are running all across the world.
01:43:20.840 So you have areas that you're—we just touched upon this a little bit last night.
01:43:26.560 You have domains.
01:43:27.940 Is that the right way of thinking about them?
01:43:29.860 Like domains of learning?
01:43:31.740 Yes.
01:43:32.240 Yeah, yeah.
01:43:32.480 How do you structure the—?
01:43:34.860 Yeah, so you would think about the typical reading, writing, math.
01:43:38.240 I mean, there's ways to do that.
01:43:39.480 But what we have are these six-week quests.
01:43:42.000 And you might do for biology the medical quest we talked about where you're diagnosing disease.
01:43:46.920 We have a great quest on living well and dying well.
01:43:50.460 It's all about death.
01:43:51.880 And so those quests last for six weeks.
01:43:54.300 They're integrative, and they'll teach you something about life, personal finance, biology, applied chemistry, things you're going to really do.
01:44:02.040 And then you have genres, which are much like your essay product, except they're different recipes for writing a white paper, a poem.
01:44:10.220 And so you're actually practicing something you're going to write and use in the real world and display in front of an audience.
01:44:17.020 It might be a speech.
01:44:18.000 So those chunks are well-defined, and you could create one.
01:44:22.560 I could create one.
01:44:23.440 We can present it to the crowd, and the crowd votes them up.
01:44:26.820 Right.
01:44:27.460 And then that's shared among the group, and it becomes the standard until something replaces it.
01:44:31.620 Right.
01:44:31.800 How do you stop or how have you dealt with the problem of ideological capture, let's say, on whatever side of the political spectrum?
01:44:41.580 Well, I think we're agnostic.
01:44:44.080 I mean, we have a series of promises, like we believe that economic freedom, religious freedom, and political freedom are one of our core beliefs.
01:44:55.120 Right.
01:44:55.320 So that's non-negotiable.
01:44:56.340 Right.
01:44:56.540 So that's non-negotiable.
01:44:57.420 So there's a series of things like that.
01:44:58.720 We believe every child's a genius who was destined to change the world.
01:45:02.080 So there's a set of those you agree to.
01:45:04.440 And everything else is up for fair debate.
01:45:06.680 If you can make a—and we've had—
01:45:08.460 Right, so you have a limited number of core principles.
01:45:10.240 I had committed communists, you know, in my group of high schoolers, that would debate why Marx was right.
01:45:18.320 And it's fascinating to listen to me.
01:45:19.780 In fact, there were times I was like, that's a pretty daggum good point.
01:45:23.640 I'm a committed capitalist.
01:45:24.900 It's like, you know, that's market fair.
01:45:26.480 That's an—so everything's up for debate.
01:45:29.820 Nothing is up for not saying something about the truth, and it's all to be tested.
01:45:33.200 So there is no ideological capture from the left or right when you have to actually test things in the real world and debate them.
01:45:41.560 And can you be wrong?
01:45:42.420 Of course you can.
01:45:43.060 And has the spread of, let's say, woke culture, to use a somewhat awkward phrase,
01:45:50.780 has that produced a challenge to the operation of your institutions?
01:45:55.260 Or are people just sidestepping that problem altogether within the confines of your organization?
01:46:00.760 Well, so if you came from—let's see, let's say you came from one of the protected woke classes that people talk about.
01:46:11.500 If you want to be gay, that's—I mean, that's—I'm going to be tolerant of that.
01:46:17.800 That's not—I mean, that's your choice, right?
01:46:19.900 I'm not going to—now, we could talk about the impacts that's going to have or what that means,
01:46:23.360 but it's just an honest conversation.
01:46:24.960 And so—
01:46:25.500 Right.
01:46:25.700 Well, though, people who are different in their proclivity, like temperamentally or sexually, let's say,
01:46:32.300 are still going to have to contend with the fact that they have to integrate that within a community.
01:46:36.060 Difference is good.
01:46:36.900 Now you stand up and say, I'm a victim.
01:46:40.300 Yeah, right.
01:46:40.900 And it's like, well, okay, well, let's—why are you a victim?
01:46:43.180 Let's explore that because victims aren't okay here, so what are you going to do about it?
01:46:47.300 Well, I'm going to post on Instagram.
01:46:49.040 It's like, well, what else might you do besides that?
01:46:51.460 I really care about this.
01:46:53.140 I'm going to post twice on Instagram.
01:46:54.460 The problem with the victim narrative isn't so much the observation that unfair things happen to people,
01:46:59.920 and sometimes even systematically.
01:47:01.740 It's like, for sure, that's the case.
01:47:04.520 The issue is, do you remove from yourself all sense of agency and competent power
01:47:14.200 by construing yourself as the tragic victim of, like, hyper-powerful and irresistible forces?
01:47:22.020 And if the answer to that is, yes, all my agency is removed, then the victim narrative is actually what's victimizing you.
01:47:30.840 Right.
01:47:31.380 And so if you said life's unfair, the answer would be, of course it is.
01:47:36.460 What are you going to do about it?
01:47:37.760 If you're not willing to do something about it personally, then it must not be that big an issue.
01:47:41.860 Well, it's also the case that life is unfair in weird ways, you know?
01:47:45.480 I mean, one of the things that the Marxist types, for example, point to is the fact that, well, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few.
01:47:52.200 And that tends to be the case.
01:47:53.620 Yeah.
01:47:53.800 And they tend to be older.
01:47:56.100 It's like, yeah, okay, older people, one of the best predictors of wealth is age.
01:48:02.720 Right.
01:48:03.160 So, but then you think, well, wait a second, are we really so upset about that?
01:48:07.400 First of all, it isn't obvious to me at all that, like, the typical 75-year-old wealthy white male
01:48:15.120 would probably give up 99% of his fortune to be an attractive 18-year-old male, right?
01:48:23.680 And so there is biological capital.
01:48:26.460 Right.
01:48:26.600 And when you're young, you have a lot of biological capital.
01:48:30.220 And then possibly what you do is you exchange some of that biological capital for monetary capital as the biological capital deteriorates.
01:48:40.920 And it doesn't look to me, like, it's not self-evident at all that that produces all the advantage on the side of the people with the monetary capital.
01:48:52.040 Right.
01:48:52.220 Not at all.
01:48:52.600 Right.
01:48:52.780 In fact, a lot of what you spend your money on, if you have monetary capital, is the attempt to regain biological capital.
01:48:59.280 Right, right.
01:48:59.740 So the analysis of where the Pareto distribution advantage lies is very unsophisticated.
01:49:07.820 Well, and that's why, I mean, we'll have these kind of debates, and the question is, if you're concerned about an injustice, is there injustice?
01:49:15.120 Absolutely.
01:49:16.460 What are you going to do about it?
01:49:17.220 Yeah.
01:49:17.820 Like, what are you going to do?
01:49:19.000 Is there injustice?
01:49:19.900 Of course there is.
01:49:20.620 Let's go do something about it.
01:49:21.640 There's either incredible opportunity or extremely unfair injustice.
01:49:25.900 Go pick something to do.
01:49:26.940 Well, if you're not willing to go get an apprenticeship or go do work or go save one person, then that's the other problem, too,
01:49:32.880 is that I think that the universities have offered young people a really easy way out because they're looking for a pathway to virtue.
01:49:40.140 Right.
01:49:40.340 That's part of the messianic impulse of late adolescence.
01:49:43.360 And the universities say, well, all you have to do is identify the problem, one problem, when there's actually like a thousand problems.
01:49:50.800 Right, right.
01:49:50.940 And not obviously reducible to a single problem.
01:49:55.060 And then all you have to do is oppose the problem.
01:49:58.620 And that's not right.
01:50:00.920 Right.
01:50:01.260 Like, I talked to this woman, Temple Grandin, who has redesigned all the cattle handling facilities in slaughterhouses across the world.
01:50:10.200 Autistic woman from the University of Chicago.
01:50:12.540 Absolute genius.
01:50:13.600 Amazing person.
01:50:14.820 Amazing person.
01:50:15.560 And, you know, she cared about animal welfare, but she was a realistic girl.
01:50:21.420 She grew up on a farm.
01:50:22.560 She knew what animals were like.
01:50:23.860 She's no pie-in-the-sky dreamer.
01:50:25.800 Autistic people tend not to be.
01:50:27.440 Right.
01:50:27.760 And she spent her whole life working on that problem.
01:50:32.740 And she's ameliorated a tremendous amount of animal suffering, but not because she was concerned about it.
01:50:38.220 Right.
01:50:38.540 Because she was concerned about it, and then she devoted her whole life to it.
01:50:42.300 Yes.
01:50:42.640 Right.
01:50:42.900 And so, and that's how you accrue genuine moral virtue.
01:50:46.680 Well, think of it.
01:50:47.200 We would tell her story as a hero story.
01:50:49.260 Yeah, definitely.
01:50:49.720 Like, this is what you go do.
01:50:51.660 Oh, and by the way, it's going to cost you your whole life.
01:50:54.300 Yeah, right.
01:50:54.880 Oh, and the other question is, if you're not going to spend your life on that, you're going to spend it on something.
01:50:59.440 Oh, yes, absolutely.
01:51:00.260 Right, and so let's take one step.
01:51:02.540 Yes.
01:51:02.940 Let's go help one cow at the—I mean, you know, like, if you're going to help animal cruelty, let's go do something about one animal to rescue it in a systematic way you could build.
01:51:13.240 So we have people from the left, lots of left, right, and the active network.
01:51:19.320 Yeah.
01:51:19.560 But they believe in principles of fair play and freedom, and they sign off, and they say, and then you have a debate.
01:51:26.140 Right.
01:51:26.240 And that's what reasonably competent people who want to fix something actually do.
01:51:31.500 So you've talked about what you're doing in preschool, elementary, junior high, high school, et cetera.
01:51:37.520 Yeah.
01:51:37.940 Talked about the apprenticeship programs and the distributed games and the multiplicity of games and the idea that each person has something valid to contribute without that degenerating into a, you know, mindless equity outcome game.
01:51:51.920 What's happening at—what are you doing on the higher education front?
01:51:54.660 Well, so we have kind of a moonshot project that probably won't work, but we're working hard on it.
01:52:00.280 And it's this question of how do people discover their calling?
01:52:03.120 Now, at the academy, because we start so young and they're in it all the time, people will find not their calling because when you're young, that's too big, but their next great adventure in life.
01:52:13.380 Like, what am I going to do for two years?
01:52:15.180 And so we think we've developed the right questions to ask, and we've actually given back our MBA accreditation and closed the MBA school, successful as it was,
01:52:23.760 because we could only serve 50 people a year, and that wasn't enough.
01:52:28.700 And so we've created a series of challenges you can do in the real world with a group or alone that are out in the world doing it that will help you figure out what you should do with your next great adventure in life.
01:52:41.800 We've—we're going to run probably 100 people through it.
01:52:47.420 We're running 100 people through it now.
01:52:49.580 And the end of this process is to be able to stand in a room full of people you've invited and say,
01:52:55.040 this is what I'm going to do next.
01:52:57.200 Yeah.
01:52:57.640 Here's how I'm going to measure it.
01:52:58.700 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:52:59.340 Here's who I am and where I come from.
01:53:01.140 Yeah.
01:53:02.160 Will you help me?
01:53:03.920 I need not money, but I need an introduction.
01:53:07.140 I need a piece of factory floor.
01:53:08.440 I need something.
01:53:09.800 If you will, here's what I promise to give back in return.
01:53:12.440 Right, right.
01:53:13.020 So it's like an investor pitch in some sense.
01:53:14.700 It's like an investor pitch for your life.
01:53:16.420 Right, right.
01:53:17.700 And our foundation is willing to give up to $100,000 per pitch.
01:53:22.180 Now, a lot of them are $1,000, right?
01:53:24.320 Yeah.
01:53:24.500 And $100,000 has to be extraordinary.
01:53:25.980 Yeah.
01:53:26.120 It's tied to you actually following through.
01:53:28.040 And the idea is if we can get this delivered out in the world,
01:53:33.360 and you're using a phone, it's not distance learning.
01:53:35.600 It's like a GPS.
01:53:36.860 Like it's something you can communicate with with your friends and get together.
01:53:40.720 We're trying to see if we can find the patterns of how people actually stumble into an adventure or calling.
01:53:46.760 And then by these talks, having them like TED Talks all around the country.
01:53:50.180 Yeah.
01:53:50.680 And we're going to use that for our high schoolers,
01:53:52.940 but also use that to attract people of that age and college age
01:53:56.500 to try to find what they want to do in their lives.
01:53:58.860 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:53:58.940 So that's a grand experiment.
01:54:00.600 It's in the early stages.
01:54:01.880 Well, we tried that, as you know, we tried that a bit with our future authoring program.
01:54:05.580 And one of the ways that we've helped people narrow in on that,
01:54:09.460 it's like, well, what do you want to do?
01:54:11.200 Well, that's a pretty vague question, and it's very global.
01:54:13.500 And so it's complex and daunting.
01:54:15.000 And so we broke that down into eight things that people generally do.
01:54:19.440 You know, what's your vision for an intimate relationship, family, friendship, job and career,
01:54:24.480 education, use of time outside work, civic responsibility, and regulation of temptation.
01:54:30.700 That's sort of, the big problem is, what's the purpose of my life?
01:54:34.680 That's broken down into a set of domains of probable problems.
01:54:39.540 And it's easier for people to answer those questions generally than the meta question.
01:54:43.820 I'm nodding because we subscribe and use, I mean, at Acton, we use self-authoring as a tool.
01:54:49.580 And also, in this project, we've looked at those individual areas
01:54:53.760 and broken them into something you might do.
01:54:55.800 So, example, for the family, you might have with your friends a Socratic discussion.
01:55:00.060 It's your daughter's first dance recital.
01:55:03.180 But your biggest customer just called, there's been a factory.
01:55:06.460 There's been a fire at his factory.
01:55:08.100 So you go to the dance recital or the factory.
01:55:10.360 Whichever you choose, it gets harder.
01:55:11.880 It's her wedding or it's your only customer.
01:55:15.560 Or, you know, so now I'm going to do that with friends.
01:55:18.480 But then I might actually have to write a spousal contract with my spouse or significant other
01:55:23.780 and submit that to the group of, this is what we've each promised each other
01:55:27.620 and here's how we're going to measure it.
01:55:28.920 And so, think of this as 300 challenges that are hard to do and require courage.
01:55:35.380 And sometimes it might be going out and haggling for a discount
01:55:37.640 to see what your relationship with money is.
01:55:39.940 But we're testing those with groups and then asking how is this going to help you,
01:55:45.520 like self-authoring, take the next step towards a target you've picked
01:55:49.620 of where you can spend your valuable life.
01:55:52.740 And so that's the experiment.
01:55:53.920 That's fun.
01:55:54.600 We'll see how it's going to go.
01:55:55.280 It's going to be fun.
01:55:55.800 It's going to be fun.
01:55:56.260 Yeah, yeah.
01:55:56.540 Well, you should learn a lot conducting that experiment.
01:55:58.480 Yeah, well, it's so nice that it's so fulfilling to provide people with methods to develop a
01:56:07.000 vision for their life.
01:56:07.800 I mean, we've been stunned by what the future authoring program was capable of doing.
01:56:11.800 I mean, our research indicated that it raised grade point average among students in high
01:56:17.980 level universities, 35 percent.
01:56:20.620 This was a 90-minute intervention.
01:56:22.440 That's crazy.
01:56:23.520 And dropped the dropout rate 50 percent.
01:56:27.040 And most effectively among minority men who had a poor academic record.
01:56:31.940 So it was even better at eliminating their dropout rates.
01:56:34.440 Because they have a story of their life.
01:56:36.340 They're an actionable story.
01:56:37.200 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:56:37.860 And then they started to develop both a vision and a strategy.
01:56:40.220 And also to see themselves as visionary strategists, which is a metacognitive shift.
01:56:46.780 Now, imagine this as there's 300 high schoolers or college kids coming together to do this
01:56:52.700 program.
01:56:53.960 You're invited by a friend to come to some mysterious party where it all gets kicked off.
01:56:59.280 And you start doing these challenges and sampling them.
01:57:02.200 Well, that's where you may meet your mate.
01:57:04.460 Yeah, right.
01:57:05.040 So that's where you're going to paint your face and go to the football game.
01:57:07.460 So we're trying to see is, can we create that in a bottom-up way?
01:57:11.140 And will we be successful?
01:57:12.700 Nah, we'll mess it up and we'll experiment.
01:57:14.360 But it's a cool, it's an interesting experiment to see if that's the replacement.
01:57:17.700 Because colleges are not helping people find their calling.
01:57:20.980 They don't do that anymore.
01:57:22.120 I mean, and so we're really trying to say, can we get people off on an adventure?
01:57:25.820 So that's the experiment.
01:57:26.780 All right, all right.
01:57:27.980 All right, well, that's probably a good place to wrap up.
01:57:30.700 Unless there is anything you can think of that we should have touched on in this part of the discussion.
01:57:35.860 And I'm going to move, for everyone watching and listening, I do an extra 30 minutes with my guests.
01:57:40.960 I'm very interested in how people's destiny makes itself manifest to them in the course of their life.
01:57:47.180 Particularly if they've been successful.
01:57:49.140 Because, well, why wouldn't you want to hear about multiple pathways to success?
01:57:56.740 Assuming that you're trying to accomplish something like that for yourself.
01:57:59.800 It seems preferable to the alternative, by the way.
01:58:02.440 And so we'll switch to the Daily Wire Plus platform.
01:58:04.640 Is there anything else that we didn't cover today that you think would be...
01:58:09.040 No, I just want to thank you because your focus on story and listening to you and the archetypes and how story matters
01:58:17.680 has greatly impacted all the decisions we've made over the last 10 years
01:58:22.660 to be able to pry those same kinds of patterns for young people all around the world.
01:58:27.540 And it would not have happened in the same way without you.
01:58:30.000 So thank you.
01:58:30.500 Oh, hey, man.
01:58:31.660 Well, when I hear you say that, I think, yeah, well, and that wouldn't have happened without all the great people that I read who knew that sort of...
01:58:41.560 Who knew that...
01:58:43.400 Who were able to provide me with that knowledge.
01:58:46.320 You know, I mean, I had great instructors.
01:58:49.700 Practically, my mentors, people like Robert Peel, and then also the people I was fortunate enough to be introduced to in various ways while I was in university.
01:58:59.540 And so it's great to see this sort of information make itself manifest.
01:59:03.400 You know, Camille Paglia, a great literary critic, suggested to me at one point that had the universities turned to the Jungian school,
01:59:13.300 Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade and Eric Neumann, then deep narrative analysts, instead of Derrida and Foucault,
01:59:21.200 that the entire history of the development of higher education would have been different for the last 40 years.
01:59:27.040 It's very interesting to see that starting to happen.
01:59:29.100 And I really see it is spreading like mad, the idea that there are these fundamental unifying narratives,
01:59:34.960 contra the postmodernist viewpoint, that they don't point to power as the fundamental human motivation.
01:59:40.660 But there's something like the ongoing humble search for continued enlightenment, something like that.
01:59:46.160 Yeah, it's a wonderful thing to see that all unfold.
01:59:48.100 That is the battle between good and evil.
01:59:49.880 Yeah.
01:59:50.040 It really is.
01:59:50.980 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:59:51.580 So, all right.
01:59:52.820 Well, to everybody watching and listening on YouTube and the associated platforms, thanks for your time and attention.
01:59:58.360 Thank you to the Daily Wire Plus people for facilitating this conversation, making it possible.
02:00:03.420 Practically, that's much appreciated to the film crew here in Fort Worth, Texas, because that's where we are today.
02:00:08.680 Thank you guys for your help today.
02:00:10.860 And join us on the Daily Wire Plus platform for an additional half an hour of discussion with Jeff Sandefur.
02:00:17.980 Thanks very much, everyone.
02:00:19.140 Hello, everyone.
02:00:21.380 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.