COWEN: The alternative vision — is there anything to that you would care to describe? Or are your thoughts too preliminary?

PETERSON: No, there’s some things I would like to describe. I can tell you the problems that we’re trying to solve. The first problem we ran into was that — because the original idea was to build an online university — but as soon as we started thinking about that deeply, we thought, “Well, that’s like building a horseless carriage.” Because when cars first came out, that’s how people conceptualized them, but they weren’t horseless carriages. They were something else. Right?

And whatever you do online to educate people isn’t going to be a university because you don’t know what a university is. And it isn’t obvious that it can be duplicated in the virtual world. One of the things we immediately ran into was the problem of, “Okay, well, what does the university do?” And the answer to that was, “Well, we don’t know.”

You might say, “University educates people and accredits people.” It’s not that obvious that it educates people. It is obvious that it accredits and that the accreditation has some value, and it might be that the primary goal of university is, in fact, accreditation.

But universities give young people a four-year, socially sanctioned identity that they can adopt while they’re experimenting and trying to mature. That’s a big function. Universities give students, young people something to do when they leave home first while they grow up. Right? Universities give people a chance to reconstitute their peer network and emerge as different people.

Universities give people a chance to contend with the great thought of the past — that would be the educational element. To find mentors, to become disciplined, to work towards a single goal. And almost none of that has to do with content provision. Because you might think, how do you duplicate a university online? Well, you take lectures and you put them online, and you deliver multiple-choice questions. It’s like, yeah, but that’s one-fiftieth of what a university is doing.

So we’ve just scrapped that idea, and what we’re trying to do instead is to figure out, how can you teach people to write in a manner that’s scalable? That’s a big problem because teaching people to write is very, very difficult, and it’s very labor intensive and expensive. So that’s one problem we’d really like to crack. How can you teach people to speak? And can you do that in a scalable manner as well?

Then we’re trying to figure out how we could bring content to the largest number of people in the most efficient manner possible, so one of the projects that we’re working on right now is, we’d like to do an introductory overview. We’re going to start by concentrating on humanities courses.

Our vision at the moment is that we’re going to make a history humanities timeline, something like that. Maybe that might encompass somewhere between 50 and 100 topics. We start 10,000 years ago, and move forward up to the present time. And we’re going to commission contests, to have people generate three- to five-minute videos for all 500 topics, and that would give people a walk through the entire course of Western civilization.

The people that we’re aiming at — my target market — would be intelligent, working-class people. That’s the target market. That’s the right level of focus, as far as I’m concerned.

COWEN: Does this online university . . . does it need virtual reality? After all, we’re here talking to people live. We’re not doing this by Skype. Will online education solve that problem? Are we waiting for the tech world to solve it for us?

PETERSON: No, I can’t see, at the moment, any particular reason for virtual reality. But the dividing line between animation, say, and virtual reality is somewhat blurred. We use virtual artificial realities all the time.

COWEN: But it’s very important to meet people, right? You give live talks all around the world. They see you maybe from some distance.

PETERSON: Yeah.

COWEN: They would have a clearer view of you on YouTube, but there’s something emotionally vivid about the imprinting, psychologically speaking.

PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s right. That’s one of the things that’s hard to duplicate in a virtual world. I don’t know the degree to which occurrences like this are necessary. There’s something about the personal immediacy of live interaction that can’t be fully duplicated online, and we’re not exactly sure what to do about that. But we might be able to solve 90 percent of the problem of educating people in a virtual environment —

COWEN: Will the role of personal tutors go up or down in your vision?

PETERSON: Oh, I think it’ll go up.

COWEN: It’ll go up?

PETERSON: I think so. One of the things that we want to do is accredit people for serving as tutors because part of the process of getting educated in our online system will be educating other people. So we want to give people credit for doing things like grading and for peer assessment. What we envision is that your power as an operator in the online education system will increase in proportion to the amount of the material that you’ve mastered.

We want to make people responsible for the education of others as rapidly as possible. Now, that happens in the universities too, right? It’s slightly slower. Once you’re an undergraduate, you’re a graduate student, and then you’re immediately involved in teaching. We’d like to speed that process along. On becoming a good educator

COWEN: Two final questions. Let’s say a young person comes to you and says something like, “I’d like to be Jordan Peterson of the next generation, not doing exactly what you’ve done, but something broadly analogous.” I’m sure this happens to you. What advice do you give that person? Let’s say you think they’re quite smart. Maybe there’s some chance they could aspire to this. What do you say?

PETERSON: Well, don’t underestimate the utility of reading. Look, one of the things I did when I went to university was, I chose my peer group. And partly that was a network of friends. I picked people who are ambitious, who wanted to become educated, and who felt that was important, so that was very helpful. And it was very liberating to me to have that happen.

But then I started reading people. Every time I read something that I thought was great, I tried to read as much as I could of everything that person had read. I’d read everything they wrote and then I looked for their sources.

COWEN: Yes, that’s what I did.

PETERSON: Yeah, that was unbelievably useful.

COWEN: I reread some Jung to have this talk with you.

PETERSON: Aha. So when you go to university, you can pick your peers, and you can pick peers throughout history. Or mentors, let’s say, because they’re certainly not peers, but they at least serve as a peer group. So I would say you go to university to familiarize yourself with what’s great about the past. Maybe you go to university with the attitude that there was something great about the past, too. That’d be a good start.

And that’s one of the things that I think the universities have fallen down on in a terrible way. Because they don’t separate the wheat from the chaff. And they make the presumption that the past is nothing but brutality. And believe me, the past is brutal. There’s no doubt about it. But to think about it as nothing but brutality is a major error.

I think it’s unbelievably useful to take time to write. The reason that I’m able to speak fluently, I would say, and to lecture the way I do is because I spent a tremendous amount of time writing. And that’s given me a corpus of knowledge that I have at hand. It’s not just recognition knowledge, right? It’s a recall. I know the stories. And then, of course, I’ve practiced that a lot.

So I would say if you want to become a good educator, which perhaps might mean that you were following in my footsteps, for better or worse, is like, well, you have to learn to read, and you have to learn to think critically, and you have to learn to write, and then you have to learn to speak. You have to get good at all those things. And they’re all worth getting good at. They’re unbelievably powerful skills.

This is one of the things that’s so sad, in some sense, about the degeneration of the humanities, is that pragmatic people, practical people, think that there’s nothing more useless, in some sense, than a Bachelor of Arts degree. And that’s exactly wrong. If you can communicate, there’s nothing more powerful than the ability to communicate, period.

So what a Bachelor of Arts degree should do is make you a great communicator, someone who can really formulate an argument, and who can do that in writing, and who can do that in speaking. And that makes you — powerful isn’t the right word — it makes you authoritative and competent. And that’s a good thing to be. I mean, how is that going to not work out well?