Jordan Peterson: How To Become The Person You’ve Always Wanted To Be | E113

Steven Bartlett interviews Jordan Peterson about becoming the person you want to be by committing to truth and shedding the inauthentic personas people hide behind. Peterson lays out practical strategies for escaping a dead-end job or feeling trapped, building self-awareness through honest self-examination, and paying for one's unearned privilege through virtue. He argues meaning comes from climbing uphill toward an unattainable transcendent goal rather than from chasing happiness or comfort. The conversation also covers remote work and virtualization, the pandemic response and his critique of policy driven by fear, and how to truly help others by listening rather than giving advice. It ends on an emotional reflection on his global encounters with suffering and transformation.

• Bartlett says being truthful in his relationship, even as he was leaving it, made the connection the strongest he had ever experienced.
  00:03:35
• Peterson describes a 'prayer' exercise: sit on your bed and ask what one thing you are doing wrong that you could and would fix.
  00:15:02
• Peterson reframes envy, arguing you never want someone else's fate because your own adventure is more than enough.
  00:21:45
• Peterson claims 50% of Democrats and 25% of Republicans believed they had a 50% chance of being hospitalized with COVID.
  00:38:51
• Peterson says high-level sources told him Canadian COVID policy was driven by opinion polls, not science.
  00:39:21
• Peterson predicts the pandemic response will be judged to have caused more death and misery than the pandemic itself.
  00:39:54
• The previous guest's diary question that changed his life was 'Are you happy?'; Peterson reframes it as 'aim to be good and pray for happiness.'
  00:55:59
• Asked how he is doing, Peterson answers 'brilliantly and terribly,' describing meaning as better than happiness yet almost unbearable.
  00:56:30

• Carl Jung argued you are not better off never forming a persona; it is a necessary stage toward authenticity.
  00:04:37
• Peterson cites Jung: people in the modern world don't see God because they don't look low enough.
  00:16:04
• 'Thrownness' is a Heideggerian term for experiencing life as if tossed into it with cards you didn't choose.
  00:17:38
• Peterson notes 'enthusiasm' etymologically means to be filled with the spirit of God.
  00:23:17
• Peterson argues much of university's value may be the reformulation of one's peer network rather than formal classes.
  00:27:27
• Karl Marx developed the concept of alienation, disliking factories for destroying our artisanal relationship with what we produce.
  00:35:12
• Peterson links conservatives to high conscientiousness and liberals to high openness/creativity in personality temperament.
  00:45:36
• Comedians refine material by performing roughly 200 small shows and keeping only the jokes that get laughs.
  00:54:27
• Peterson cites Hank Williams, who died of alcoholism at 27 with a voice sounding like an 80-year-old man.
  00:57:34
• Peterson defines faith not as believing the ridiculous but as a decision that truth, beauty, and love will save the world.
  01:02:16