Education Without Woke Ideology: Mikhaila Peterson Explains Peterson Academy

Part of the reason we put this together was to try and give people what you're supposed to be learning in history and in humanities and in science, math, etc., just basic education. As part of our new series on alternative educational institutions, today I sit down with Michaela Fuller, host of the Michaela Peterson podcast and co-founder of the Peterson Academy with her father Jordan Peterson. We're getting top professors from institutions, and we're not telling them how to teach. We're saying, teach this course if it was exactly the way you'd want to teach it. And we have chosen professors carefully that don't have a political bent. It's mostly trying to avoid woke ideology and politics in courses that shouldn't necessarily be political. That's how we're trying to navigate it. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Michaela Peterson, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you very much for inviting me on. There's been a lot of talk about parallel structures in education, new educational models, and of course, Peterson Academy is right in the thick of that. But what do you see as the problem, though, in the education system today? Oh man, there are so many problems in the education system today. In America, one of the main problems is it's completely unaffordable. A degree at Harvard has doubled in the last 20 years. It costs about $307,000, which is insane. So that's one of the main problems is it's just not affordable. And then the other problem is there's a veil of wokeness that has infiltrated most of the courses taught in university. So part of the reason I wanted to work towards building an alternative education system was because when I went to university, and I went to university in Canada, went to Concordia, which was an art school in 2012, and I was taking classics in psychology, and I was learning courses through a feminist lens. And this is before wokeness had infiltrated most of the disciplines. I was like, I didn't sign up. I don't want to pay for Homer through a feminist lens. What does that even mean? So part of the reason we put this together was to try and give people an education that's just true, we hope. So what you're supposed to be learning in history, and in humanities, and in science, math, et cetera, just basic education without woke ideology, and something that is affordable. Because you can basically learn everything you need from a degree from YouTube online for free now. And the number of corporations and companies that aren't even looking towards a bachelor's degree for their employees is growing. And so I don't know what's going to happen with universities in the future, but they're in dire shape right now. Many of the people in the academy today would say, everything is taught through a lens. What do you mean by trying to teach it in a way that's true? So explain that to me. I mean, that's true. We're getting taught professors from institutions, and we're not telling them how to teach. We're saying, you know, teach this course, if it was exactly the way you'd want to teach it without guidelines from somebody else put on you. And we have chosen professors carefully, that don't have a political bent. So it's mostly trying to avoid woke ideology and politics in courses that shouldn't necessarily be political. That's how we're trying to navigate it. Well, so it's interesting. I saw you have at least two courses focused on very well-known philosophers. One is Plato, another one is Nietzsche, and your father teaches Nietzsche. And I'm curious, why did you pick these of all people? We were kind of letting professors go with what they think students should be taught based on their 30 years or 40 years of teaching experience. So part of how we designed the curriculum was looking at great, great curriculums from, say, Chicago University or liberal arts universities, and kind of taking the average of what people were taught, focused on the literature more than on the politics. So Plato was chosen because James Orr wanted to teach about Plato, and because I think Plato is one of the fundamental philosophers everybody should know about just to be a sophisticated person. And then dad chose Nietzsche, because he's inspired by Nietzsche. I forget the title, but it's something about teaching with a hammer. How to philosophize with a hammer. That one was the one that caught my eye. I actually started taking that one. Well, this is interesting. So I noticed you have an audience that's taking the course in the video itself. I'm going to get you to explain to me how all this works, but who are these people that are actually taking the course live? Our assumption when we started marketing that was, are there people interested in going to see eight-hour lectures taught by brilliant people just for the sake of learning? And it turns out there's a massive audience for that. I mean, education can be fascinating. It's fascinating learning from brilliant people. And so we basically offer free tickets to people who want to take part in the course filming, and then the professor can interact with the audience. There's a Q&A portion, but we thought that would be a lot easier than a professor lecturing straight to a camera. It'd be more natural. And there's actually a number of the people, John Verbeke, you have Warren Farrell teaching a course. People have been on the show, so I know how important the work that they do is and how much I've learned personally from them. But tell me a bit how it works, because basically when you join the Peterson Academy, you don't really get to interact with the teacher. And for me personally, that was incredibly important in college. Yeah. Okay. So we're building on that. So right now we have 20 courses up. We release three new ones a month. We're cranking that up to four, hopefully in the next three months. So that's a new course a week. You can interact with other students watching the course. What's missing is interacting with the professors, but we're building that on the back end so professors will be able to interact. Now it's not going to be in-person interactions, but we are building out live capabilities. So I think when we premiere an episode, because we will be releasing new, not new episodes, new courses on Fridays, there will be a live premiere and you'll be able to interact with the professor then. So it's different than what you would get in class, which is kind of a constant interaction. And professors have profiles on the platform, so we're not forcing any of them to interact with students. But if they're interested, then they're more than welcome to. Hello, everyone. We're on the cusp of the US presidential election. Whatever the result, it will have major consequences for the US, for Canada, and frankly, the whole world. On election day, I'll be sitting down for a live discussion with some brilliant thinkers, including my good friend, economist Jeffrey Tucker, Brownstone Institute fellow Tom Harrington, and Cooper Davis with the Inner Compass Initiative. This all starts at 2pm Eastern. Join our live stream right here on YouTube or on Epoch TV. In the evening, I'll be joining NTD's special live coverage of the election from our Brownstone Institute watch party. Our live coverage will begin at 6pm Eastern and continue into the night as results come in. Get straightforward, firsthand live updates on what's happening from the reporters on the ground without the bias, hyperbole, or hidden agendas. We'll see you all there. Now, back to the interview. Basically, you've launched this while you're still building in capability, so what you have today is not what you're going to have a few months down the line. Yeah. That's what's exciting about it. We wanted to get it out. We've been building it for three years, built up quite a large team, and we thought that the product we have now, which is three new courses a month, social media platform, quizzes, exams, and then the ability to watch courses and comment on them, that was good. People are thrilled with that. I think we wanted to capitalize on the fact that universities are in rough shape. We could have waited a year and come out with notes, essays, direct messaging, which is going to be available in a number of weeks. We could have waited, but I thought the most important part of the platform is the content, and that was already ready. You get the social media, you get the commenting, you get the courses, you get the recommended reading, and you get interaction. I was like, that's already a product. The fact that we're building on it just means it's going to get better. Kayla, just one quick sec. We're going to take a break, and we'll be right back. We're back with Michaela Peterson, CEO of the Peterson Academy. I'm very excited to see that you have this course with Gail Pooley and someone else who's been on the show on the economics of human flourishing. The reason I'm saying this is there's this kind of idea in our society, but certainly I was in a biology department for a really long time in university. You get this idea that the pie, or the economic pie, is limited. You have to take from someone else to get it yourself, but what Gail Pooley, through this type of education, would tell you is, no, actually, that's what human ingenuity is. You can actually increase the pie. That's the whole thing that we humans do. It took me years to figure that out. That's why I was so excited to see that course available. I think I was lucky having my dad as a dad because I grew up knowing that. I'm sure that was just from him. It wasn't from anything I learned in school, which was we have problems in society, but if humans are flourishing and if they're taken care of, then there are brilliant people out there that can help solve problems. I love that about Gail Pooley and Marion's course. Then we have, in the works, a number of Austrian economics courses that are upcoming, too, which I think we need people to know about that. I think I have some good teachers for you, too, that I could recommend. Oh, that would be helpful. Tell me a little bit about your background. Obviously, we know who your dad is. You've mentioned him a few times now. Trace your trajectory to getting here today, doing this work. I was pretty sick as a kid. I think most of my life was about being sick. Fortunately, having my dad as a dad, he didn't let me use that as an excuse. I know a lot of people who are chronically ill, because it's horrible, end up, and no wonder, feeling sorry for themselves and succumbing to it. I get it, for sure, but dad, when I was in grade two, sat me down and said, you have a reason for excuses, but you can never use this as an excuse or it's going to ruin your life. That was when I was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in grade two. It was in 37 joints. I was pretty crippled when I was a kid. I remember a lot of my childhood as trying to manage being chronically ill and being crazy. I was on antidepressants for depression. I ended up taking Adderall for chronic fatigue. I was on immune suppressants for arthritis. I had my hip and ankle replaced when I was 17. From the arthritis, I wasn't kept in check with the immunosuppressants. I was in rough shape. My dad was really good at instilling a life plan. He was very big on plans. I had a number of plans that went sideways. Originally, I wanted to be a surgeon. I was like, I have arthritis in all my fingers. How am I going to do surgery? Then, I had goals. I wanted to have kids young, but I wanted to get a PhD because my dad always told me, basically, the best thing you could do as a person was to go to university and get educated up to the highest degree, which is a PhD. I was like, how am I going to balance that with having kids? If a PhD takes until you're 28, how am I going to have kids young? It mostly started with trying to figure out my health. I left Concordia where I was taking classics in psychology because I was really unhappy with the quality of education. I had a psychology professor that told me rats weren't social creatures because they lived in cages. In an intro to psych course, I remember turning to the person next to me saying, he just said that. She was like, yeah, he just said that, writing it down. I was like, oh my gosh. I'm not traveling 40 minutes to the psychology department to learn that rats are solitary creatures because they live in cages. I dropped out of that school and I went back to school in Toronto for biomedical science to try and figure out why I was sick and ended up stumbling across diet as a potential intervention for chronic illness. I managed to put myself into remission once I set my mind to it when I was 23 mostly by cutting out everything I thought a person could be allergic to, like eggs, grains, dairy, processed foods, soy, nuts. I was like, what's the least I can survive on to see if this is causing my problems? It turned out it was causing my problems. Once I managed to get off of the medications, which was really unpleasant, and put myself into remission, then things got more interesting. Then at least my life wasn't just revolving around trying to survive. Then dad blew up online. That happened in 2016. I started running his brand, and by that I mean making sure his podcast was being put out and growing Instagram and Facebook and the social media platforms. That job initially started because my parents were so overwhelmed with going viral and all the controversy that was surrounding them that it caused a lot of stress. It was not fun. There was nothing fun about it. I was trying to take things off of their plate, like I'll take on the scheduling. I just started with scheduling. I'll take on the scheduling. Then I was like, I'll grow the social media. Then I started negotiating deals, and I tried to make sure he wasn't being taken advantage of because people came in. I was like, who are you? Oh, I'm your dad's new best friend. I was like, oh, okay. It kind of blossomed from that. I got a number of years of very unpleasant experience dealing with legal and business and touring and social media, managing my dad, then started my own podcast and another company, and then started working on Peterson Academy. As you're talking now, I'm thinking back to those lectures that he was doing at University of Toronto, which then were put on YouTube. This is actually when I first became aware of him. It was kind of a Peterson Academy, the beginnings of Peterson Academy. YouTube, he started a long time ago. He was recording himself at Harvard before the age of 30, which nobody was doing that. He has his lectures from Harvard. When YouTube came around, he started uploading those and then uploaded his university classes, which was really helpful when all the controversy hit because people were trying to paint him as a right-wing fanatic. He was like, I have I don't know how many thousands of hours of lecture content online. Find something there. There was nothing. Dad gets credit for that. I built the social medias, but he built YouTube. Just give me the picture of where it is today, the academy as it looks today, and then the final stage, or at least as you're imagining it right now as you're going to develop it. We're implementing more educational tools on the platform. Right now, you can watch the courses. You can comment on the courses. There's a transcript you can follow along on. You can click on it if you want to go to an area in the lecture. That's all fun. We're going to have note-taking, so you'll be able to look at the transcript, take notes off of the transcript, link your notes to a transcript, which I thought would be useful. That'll be rolling out. We'll have an essay feature. All these educational tools aren't meant for everyone necessarily. A lot of people who are interested in enrolling really just want to watch the content and educate themselves. They don't want to be forced to do assignments or take notes. They just want to watch videos, which is totally fine. That's a huge portion of the people who are on there. For people who are trying to get a certification or become accredited or get a degree if or when we become accredited, then we'll have more educational tools for them. We'll have essays, note-taking. Like I said, our professors are going to go live. We'll be launching courses and have premier parties. The other thing that we're working on is in-depth psychometric testing. That's fun. That's what I'm really excited about. Now that the platform is up, the educational tools are great. They'll be very useful for people, but psychometric testing so that you can test your IQ and your personality and your ability to work and your conscientiousness, that's what we'll be rolling out in the future. Something that just struck me. Courses that help you delay gratification for our society. If there was something that was actually effective this way, I think it would blow up like nothing else. That would be incredibly effective. That's something that dad could speak more on. In order to increase conscientiousness, it's tricky. I was just talking to my dad about this, about a course for people who take a personality test, find out they're not the most conscientious person, which is really highly linked to success. It's a really helpful personality trait to have. There are things people can do. Keep a schedule. Most people don't even have a schedule. Keep a to-do list. There's implementable things you can do to train yourself to act more conscientious, but I haven't read anything about actually changing the personality trait. I think if you try though and implement some of these techniques, then it works out anyway. I'm just thinking about Jordan's thing. Point number one, go make your bed. This would fit very well into the ethos of the academy. That's so funny. He just went to Miami to film a personality course, which is an overview on personality traits and the different ways of viewing them. I haven't seen it yet because he just filmed it, but the historical perspective, Jungian, Freud. I was saying it would be helpful for people who are extremely agreeable to know where the faults lie with that so that they can negotiate better on their behalf, or if they're not conscientious, to figure out how to be more conscientious. The make your bed fits really well into that. I'll be looking for that one, for sure. A little anecdote. I went to the University of Alberta for my graduate work. The one course that I took, I was studying evolutionary biology. I took one course, which they absolutely refused to give me credit for, but I was determined that they should give me credit for. That was storytelling. I saw in your deck, you've got a storytelling course. Why do you have a storytelling course? The Art of Storytelling, that's done by Greg Hurwitz, who was one of dad's graduate students at Harvard, best-selling author, incredible storyteller. He's done graphic novels, scripts, thrillers. He's written hordes of books. We knew we wanted him on board. What we're doing is we have a curriculum design in mind that we're rolling out over the next 18 months to two years. It was a lot of courses, like 100 courses, but we also wanted to capitalize on the people we knew who were brilliant, who could just offer something that they were excited to teach about. We knew we wanted Greg Hurwitz to teach something. What do you want to teach? The most important thing I could teach people was the art of storytelling, just how to write a story. I absolutely love that. Another little anecdote. Years ago, I read a scientific paper that was trying to assess which methods of psychotherapy actually work. What are the factors? They looked at existential psychoanalysis, they looked at classical Freudian, they looked at a whole range. Jungian looked across range. There was only one thing that actually determined success or not, and that was the identity of the psychotherapist. In other words, the good psychotherapists would always help people, and the bad ones, it didn't matter what method they used, they didn't help people. Your logic here sounds pretty sound to me based on that. That was my experience in university. I had two professors that I thought were pretty good. They weren't mind-blowing. I think I probably had a high bar because of who my dad was. When I expected to go to university, I was like, it's a bunch of my dads, and that is not what happened. I had two that were pretty good. Those courses weren't the courses I would have chosen to be my favorite courses, but they ended up being my favorite because the professors were good. A lot of it is the quality of the professors. Any final thoughts as we finish? The goal of it was to give people the ability to become educated by the most brilliant people we can find for an incredibly affordable price. I think it's sad that university is so expensive that people can't afford it. If I dare say, they can think better. Of course. That's key. I just don't think people understand that. The value of the classics, the value of the great books, the value of reading. Michaela Peterson, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you very much for the opportunity. This was fun. Thank you all for joining Michaela Peterson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.