Jordan Peterson
Appearances
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
Well, I think the most important thing to do first is to draw a distinction between the political and the psychological and not to collapse them together. So imagine this. Imagine that there's a group of individuals, about 4% of the population, who have a set of personality characteristics that have been described as dark tetrad. So they're Machiavellian. They use their language to manipulate.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
They're narcissistic. They want unearned social status and reputation. They're psychopathic, which makes them free of empathy and parasitical and predatory. And they're sadistic. So they take positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others. Now, those people also use false cries of victimization, let's say, to manipulate, and they're entitled.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
They seek vengeance when it's unwarranted, and they protest loudly and make very public cries for reparations that would be self-serving. Now, the way those people operate is they look for what patterns of belief form groups that they can infiltrate and then capitalize on. And that happens on the right.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
We did a report, the same group, on the use of Christ as king as a manipulative strategy by bad actors, hypothetically, on the right. And this report identified the same sort of people on the left. But it's not primarily political.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
They're wolves in sheep's clothing who look for where there's power and value and then adopt those beliefs as a surface camouflage so that they can elevate their moral status. And this has become worse in recent years, as far as I'm concerned, because the evolved strategies that we have for dealing with these psychopathic types, psychopathic narcissistic types, don't work well online.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
And so the psychopaths can get away with their terrible manipulations online, and they can find like-minded people, and they can escape from any reputational consequences. And so there's always been psychopaths. Those are the Pharisees, for example, that Christ points to, the religious pretenders. Those are the people who use God's name in vain. claim moral virtue and even religious devotion.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
Well, all they're doing is feathering their own nests and furthering their own narrow interests. And the web, social media, anonymity enables them to organize and also hides them much more effectively. And this is a problem in religious organizations. It's a problem in political organizations, and it pathologizes the whole culture.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
You know, most people, 80% of Americans agree on virtually everything. And then there's these fringe people, and they're not political. They're psychopathological narcissists who cloak themselves in political guise. And we all have to learn to distinguish between the political and the psychological.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
What I've recommended to people is clean up your room. That's a good start. Organize your local landscape. Schedule your time. Start taking control of yourself. See if you can stop saying things you know to be lies. That's not the same as telling the truth. You don't get to do that to begin with because you're not good enough at it to even attempt it in some sense.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
But everyone can stop saying things they know to be falsehoods.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
Well, I don't know why you would expect to be sure about what someone believes. Do you think that any one of you are capable of fully articulating what you believe? You certainly aren't.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
That's completely ridiculous. You're not transparent to yourself by any stretch of the imagination.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
You act out all sorts of things that you can't articulate.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
You know, if you... Look, let's go all cognitive neuroscience on this, shall we? 99% of your processing is unconscious. You're not capable of articulating yourselves. If you were, you'd be omniscient. Don't give me any nonsense about that.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
One of the things that both Michaela and I noticed was that when we restricted our diet and then ate something we weren't supposed to, the reaction to eating what we weren't supposed to was absolutely catastrophic.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
Well, the worst response, I think we're allergic to, or allergic, whatever the hell this is, having an inflammatory response to something called sulfites. And we had some apple cider that had sulfites in it. And that was really not good. Like I was done for a month. That was the first time I talked to Sam Harris. You were done for a month. Oh, yeah. It took me out for a month. It was awful.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
I think the day I talked to Sam was like the worst day of my life, not because of talking to Sam. Just physically. Oh, Jesus. I was so dead. But I didn't want to not do it. Apple cider.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
Oh, it produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom. And I seriously mean overwhelming. Like, there's no way I could have lived like that if that would have lasted for... See, Michaela knew by that point that it would probably only last a month, and I was like— A month? Yeah, a month. From f***ing cider? I didn't sleep that month. I didn't sleep for 25 days. I didn't sleep at all.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
I didn't sleep at all for 25 days. How is that possible? I'll tell you how it's possible. You lay in bed, frozen in something approximating terror for eight hours, and then you get up. Oh, my God.
Candace
ENOUGH! It’s Time For Jordan Peterson To Clean His Own Room | Candace Ep 181
And this is from f***ing cider. From cider. That's what we thought, yeah.
Global News Podcast
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Hello everybody. I want to share an announcement concerning some of my recent work exploring the biblical texts that sit at the foundation of our culture. All of this initially exploded on the public front with the Genesis lectures I recorded in 2017.
Global News Podcast
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So I think part of the reason that we're in a crucial moment is because the enlightenment doctrines that have savaged Christianity have also now turned upon themselves. And partly conceptually, but also scientifically, one of the things I've come to understand as a practicing research psychologist is that we see the world through a story. In fact, that's a technical description.
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A description of the structure through which someone sees the world is a story. It's their story. And we have to see the world through a story because we have to direct our attention. And I think that's been revealed on the scientific side as incontrovertible. I've interviewed many top cognitive scientists pushing on this issue.
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And the best of the best of them now understand that even our perceptions of objects are micro narratives. We see the world through a story. All right, so that's radical. That's a radical realization. We can't derive the world from a simple list of facts. That's become starkly evident. We don't even train our AI systems that way. It's just not the case. Okay, so then what's the story exactly?
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That's the crucial issue. What's the story? Well, maybe there is no story, but if there's no story, there's no point and there's no aim and there's no way of organizing attention and action. And in that chaos, there's nothing but despair. And I think that's also evident, say, neuropsychologically, neurophysiologically. No aim, no hope, and despair. What are candidates for this story?
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Well, the big candidates that have emerged since Nietzsche announced the death of God is the story of power and the story of sex. And those are good contenders for the throne. But power is the most dismal of stories, except for perhaps the story of hedonism. Right? Those two things compete. These two great stories, power and sex, they lead to catastrophic ends. They play with each other.
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They rotate around each other. They drive us either towards a remarkably unproductive and bitter hedonism that cannot sustain itself psychologically or socially. And then on the power side, well, if everything's about power, then... That claim to me is no different than the claim that like the spirit of Lucifer rules the world. It's the same claim in a different guise. There's nothing but power.
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All right, so there's no basis for marriage that isn't power. There's no basis for friendship that isn't power. There's no description of human society that isn't power. It's just all against all, right? And for what? And not only is that a stunningly hellish and dismal story, I think there's absolutely no evidence that it's true and plenty of evidence that it's not.
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The religious question, the monotheistic question could be conceptualized as what could unite even power and sex and something higher and harmonious psychologically and societally. And I think that's what the biblical corpus is about. I think that's what the gospels focus on.
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And I've come to realize, to understand, not just to believe, but also to understand that it has something to do with sacrifice. And so to mature is to sacrifice. To mature is to sacrifice the immediate delights of power in the present for the long term psychologically and the communal broadly. That's the definition of maturation.
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And there's a spirit that underlies that movement towards integration and community. And that spirit is the spirit of progressive sacrifice. And the gospel story is the culmination of the sacrificial story. And so, I don't understand how it can be true
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The Exodus story is arguably the central narrative in the Old Testament. Now, there are many profound narratives in the Old Testament, some which are equivalent depth, but there's none that have that combination of depth, narrative integrity, and detailed length. And so... And Moses is a great prophet who establishes the law. He's a central figure.
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I don't understand how it can be right, but I now don't understand how it cannot be true because the converging evidence that something like the spirit of divine sacrifice animates the world, I think that's, I think we're there. I think that's the realization.
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Now, what I hope to accomplish in this seminar is to further my understanding of that because the story upon which our culture is based, the gospel story, let's say, is deeply mysterious and dramatically peculiar and hallucinogenic. It's a trip, and it's not understandable from the purely rational perspective, yet it seems to be right, and I don't know what that means.
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It's a terrifying thought, that's for sure. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. That's for sure. If you understand that... The gospels call to you to bear the weight of tragedy and malevolence on your shoulders along with the divine spirit that guides you. There is nothing more terrifying and no greater field of opportunity than that. And so we've got our work cut out for us, gentlemen.
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This is one peculiar time and one peculiar text, and I sure hope we're up to the task.
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That was followed some years later by the four-part documentary series I recorded with Daily Wire Plus on the foundations of the West, examining the contributions of Rome, Jerusalem, and Athens. That, in turn, expanded into our very successful seminar on Exodus, and then, most recently, on the Gospels.
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Well, it's a hard thing to... what would you say, to come to terms with when that's the claim, but the arc of the narrative of Christ is the worst possible death for the least possibly deserving person and the full encounter with malevolence, right?
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So I thought I'd start, if you gentlemen are in accordance with John 1 to 4, and because it's one of the most peculiar paragraphs, let's say, in the Gospel account, we could talk about it for 10 hours, which we won't, but it'll set us up to start to investigate the metaphysical foundations of the text as well as the autobiographical foundations.
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One other thing I'd like to point out to people, perhaps, before we get going from a conceptual perspective, is that Dr. Headley, for example, pointed to the philosophical as part of the understructure of the cultural and made the claim that perhaps underneath that is the theological. And I think that's a nice pattern. It's a nice description of the pattern of conceptualization itself.
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It appears as though philosophy is nested inside drama. That's a good way of thinking about it. And a verbally portrayed drama is a story. And a story isn't philosophy. It's got a dreamlike quality to it. It's still something embodied and dramatized.
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If philosophy emerges from the story, and then our other cultural concepts emerge from philosophy, you can see kind of an inverted pyramid with something at the foundation. And the foundation is the story itself. And at the base of that foundation is something like sacrifice in love. And that's the claim that's being made in the Christian context. Now, John opens up with...
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And Christ plays the same role in the New Testament. And his passion story has the same delineation of narrative detail combined with profound depth. And so it's very useful to understand the Exodus story and to understand the gospel story and to know both of them in relationship to one another.
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an allusion to that whole set of claims because John does this extremely strange parallel by making the radical and improbable claim that Christ
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the Christ of the Bible, who was born in a particular time and in a particular place, a no account place in the middle of nowhere, in an equally nondescript time in some ways, is equivalent to the spirit that gave rise to the cosmos at the beginning of time and has always existed. It's an unbelievably radical way of starting a book, and I'll read the words. In the beginning was the Word,
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The word was with God and the word was God. The word existed in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and God created nothing except through him. In him was life. And this life brings light to all mankind. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of truth and kindness.
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We have beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten Son of the Father. And from the abundance of Jesus' grace, we have all received blessing upon blessing. For the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time, but the only Son who is closest to the Father's heart has made him known to us.
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So I structured this seminar in relationship to a book called The Single Gospel, and he describes it as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John consolidated into a single narrative. That's not an approach without its pitfalls. He compresses and retranslates many of the verses. So I'm sure there'll be something in that to offend everyone who's listening. For me, it allowed me to enter the
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single narrative of the gospels relatively rapidly and to make sure that we had the appropriate narrative through line jonathan maybe you could start with that terribly complicated piece of writing yeah well the first thing i think it's important to see is that it is definitely referring back to genesis 1. it's it's basically giving us a type of account of genesis 1 which is god spoke
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So that's the purpose of the investigation, is to bring people to the story, including ourselves, and to further our understanding of the text upon which, for better or worse, the West is founded. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Gospel Seminars and welcome to all the panelists, all of you who were here before for the Exodus Seminar. and those of you who have newly joined us.
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And you would understand this in the Genesis context, is that there's an insistence on something like the primacy of the process that extracts the order that's good out of potential and chaos. And that's the word. And the Christian insistence is that Christ embodies the pattern of loving sacrifice that characterizes that word. And so that idea is something like the foundation of God
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existence itself is the spirit of loving sacrifice and that's equivalent it's the same thing as the word that extracts the order that's good out of potential at the beginning of time and one way of understanding that more prosaically i would say is that imagine the order that you establish in your family
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if that little microcosm of the walled garden, your family, to the degree that you embody the spirit of loving sacrifice as a father, then you'll create, out of the potential that's your family relationships, the order that's good. And it's sacrifice because, well, that's what you do on behalf of your children, right? You put them first, not you. You certainly put them first before your whims,
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You put what's best for them before their whims, too. And so there's an upward aim in that, and all that upward aim is sacrificial. And then, well, then we get to the issue of what constitutes the ultimate sacrifice, which is partly what's explored in the gospel accounts. It's obviously explored in Abraham, because Abraham is called upon to make an ultimate sacrifice.
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But this is an extension in a different direction.
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I'm very excited about this. It's the day after Easter Sunday. It's a good time to do it. There's a lot of buzz in the world at large about the state of Western civilization and the dependence or lack thereof of that civilization on the fundamental stories from which it emerged historically and conceptually and It's a wonderful time to be investigating that.
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It seems to me that John is establishing a radically, extending a radically non-materialist axiom. He's trying to identify what the core phenomenon of being is and it's in this story. It's not material. It's being itself. It's very fundamentally associated, I think, with what modern people would call consciousness, which is a complete opaque mystery in and of itself, right?
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And so we've all come together to take all of you who are watching and listening through that and to learn as much as we possibly can simultaneously. And we're going to open this. I'll have everybody go around the table and introduce themselves, tell who they are, and also...
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John is attempting to characterize the spirit of being itself. And he's making a claim. The claim is it's embodied in Christ. It's the same as the divine principle that generated order at the beginning of time. It's apprehensible. It's foundational. And
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And it's also the fullest expression, this isn't directly in this text, but it emerges, it's the fullest expression of the tradition that's made manifest in the Old Testament. It emerges out of our primordial stories and announces itself as the principle of being itself. And it seems to me irrefutable that the principle of sacrifice is the basis of sophisticated thinking.
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psychological integrity and community. I just can't see how that cannot be true. And that's being pointed to here as well. Sacrificial love, it's something like that.
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why they're here and why they think this is both interesting and necessary for themselves personally and then perhaps also at the broader cultural level. So, Bishop Barron, thank you very much for coming today. My great pleasure.
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You made a comment about this, James, it was you, about this being a meta-scientific claim, and So I want to add a couple of things to that. So I watched Richard Dawkins yesterday talk about his existence as a cultural Christian. And he's also, he's not just a cultural Christian ethically.
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He's a cultural Christian scientifically because the scientific program itself, which is a very particular sort of program and only emerged in the context of a Judeo-Christian society. And that wasn't accidental. It is predicated on a variety of meta-scientific claims. One is that the Logos characterizes the cosmos, which means it's intelligible.
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Also that that intelligibility is good, because otherwise a scientist studying the intelligibility of the cosmos could be a terribly destructive force, which is of course something that we're afraid of, and is also true if the aim of the scientist isn't proper.
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right and that and that there it is possible for us to exist in a relationship with the cosmos such that its intelligibility will reveal itself to us if we participate in that investigation both in the spirit of truth which is core to the scientific enterprise but also in relationship to our upward aim because scientists don't ever have to say we're conducting this research to further the good.
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That's just axiomatic. But the reason it's axiomatic is because it's nested in this underlying ethos. I mean, you can easily imagine a science that serves totalitarian claims. I don't think it would last long as a science because it would eat itself. But we've certainly seen that enterprise perverted in directions that take it away from what it is and
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and what it has to be nested in in order to be genuine science and to serve psyche and society.
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Right, right. That's an interesting point, the idea that you can't be scientific if you worship nature. We're actually seeing that played out in the academy now because as the academy decolonizes, there are claims by the decolonizers that the scientific enterprise itself violates the sacred.
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Okay, so I'm going to move us now to the first biographical detail, let's say, out of the realm of high metaphysics, and to the story of Zechariah. And so this is the announcement of the impending birth of John the Baptist, and this is really where Christ's story starts on the biographical side. It doesn't start with Christ himself in the Gospels, it starts with John the Baptist,
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interesting and complicated figure, assimilated by Jesus himself to Elijah, who is the prophet of conscience, I would say, above all, and also, by the way, the figure in the Old Testament who brings the worship of nature to a halt. And so I'm going to read this. This is the Annunciation to Zechariah. One day, this is John the Baptist's father.
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One day when Zechariah's group was on duty and he was serving as a priest before God, he was chosen.
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Luke, beginning of Luke. Luke 1, 5 to 25. I'm hoping that's where it is. I'm using the single gospels, by the way, in this journey forward.
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One day when Zechariah's group was on duty and he was serving as a priest before God, he was chosen by lot randomly, according to the custom among the priests, to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. At the time for this burning, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside. Then an angel of the Lord appeared to Zechariah standing on the right-hand side of the incense altar.
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Zechariah was shaken when he saw the angel and fear fell upon him. But the angel said, Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. And you shall have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice that he was born, for he will be great in the eyes of the Lord. And he shall drink neither wine nor strong drink.
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And he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb. And he will turn many of the children of Israel back to the Lord their God. He will go as a forerunner before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of fathers to the children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous and to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.
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So Elijah calls the Israelites back to conscience. John the Baptist is the forerunner and the announcer of Christ. This is the announcement of his conception and birth. And so, what do we make of John the Baptist? Why is it necessary? Greg, maybe you can start us off here.
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Why do you think it's necessary in the narrative flow of things for there to be an unroller of the red carpet, let's say, for someone to make the way ready?
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So you're making two points. One is that one's a psychological point or a theological point, which is that It might be that it's conscience that alerts us when our sacrifices are insufficient or something like that. It's conscience that alerts us to the necessity for a higher form of sacrifice than what we're currently performing. And so conscience is continually the forerunner of the sacred.
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But then there's a dramatic level here too where you need to prepare the ground for the introduction of a major character.
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Well that touches on something, Peugeot, maybe you can speak to this. There's a very deep mystery there because the story of Christ doesn't really get going apart from some description of birth and youth, which we'll cover, until the baptism. And so that question immediately arises, well if Christ is the Son of God from birth, why the necessity of the baptism? What does the baptism represent?
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All of those, 17 for the former, Exodus, and 10 for the latter, the Gospels, are now available exclusively on Daily Wire+. Joining me for the Gospel Seminar were many of the same stellar intellectual scientists, authors, and philosophers who journeyed through Exodus and the cities of the Foundations of the West series, along with some exceptionally insightful newcomers.
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Why is John a Baptist? What does it mean for him to be a Baptist, and what does baptism signify? Now, there's a lot of work on the anthropology of religion that's focused on this issue, and it's very frequently the case across cultures anthropologically distributed that men in particular must undergo an initiation ceremony, which generally bears some symbolic relationship to the modern church.
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to the Judeo-Christian concept of baptism before they can adopt their full individuality. And it's often associated with something like a passage or re-immersion into the sacred waters or into the chaos. And it's a dissolution into chaos and then a restructuring, right? That would be the neurophysiological take on it.
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So he's a radical, is he doing the same thing, do you think, with the temple that Moses is doing after the Israelites leave God with the golden calf and he sets up the tabernacle outside the center of the community? Is that associated with Jonathan's claim that John the Baptist is signifying the end of the old world?
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So what happens, the way I understand the baptismal event, let's say, if we can jump to that momentarily, is that it recapitulates the time at the beginning of time. You have the water, which is the tohu vabohu, right? I would say that's the deep pool of possibility. And you have the spirit descend that sets on the water, and that's a recapitulation of the initial state.
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You can think about that as a neurophysiological transformation writ large, right? It's the dissolution of the old personality, the re-instantiation of the process that brings order out of chaos and the generation of a new order. And so, and it's new in the sense that you said, but it's very, very archaic. The baptismal idea is unbelievably old, right?
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That initiatory idea, tens of thousands of years old. But that is the forgiveness of sins. Right, but... Right, because the, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Well, my sense is that they're comparatively forgiven because the Israelites and the Egyptians both have to face the chaos of the Red Sea. But the Egyptians are so tyrannical and so bent beyond redemption that that Flood of chaos destroys them. Now, that doesn't mean the Israelites are finally saved, but they at least managed to pass through the chaos alive. And so, there's an... And what?
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They established themselves as a new people on the opposite shore, right? There is a new beginning there. And... That doesn't necessarily signify that they've been washed clean by the chaotic Red Sea, but it does mean that the tyranny that held them back has been demolished by the chaos. Well, they've been washed clean of the Egyptians. Right. And if you view them as one organism in a way,
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It's only partial. That's right. Well, we do, there are psychological investigations that show, for example, that if people take a bath or a shower, they feel, they declare themselves more morally pure.
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Right, and it's a removal of contamination, but it's not as profound a removal as could conceivably be imagined. So, okay, so now for the Christians again, why does Christ require a baptism?
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So is the baptism... The baptism seems to precipitate two events. One is the sojourn in the desert, and one is the onset of the ministry. So what's your reading?
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But to Jonathan's point... How do you read that from the human side? I mean, is Christ as a man... Does Christ as a man... He obviously matures. He matures from infant onward. Does Christ as a man... reveal his relationship with God more and more deeply as he progresses even to himself?
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So another very strange occurrence happens. So after the annunciation to John's father and mother, we have the annunciation to Mary. And I'll read that because it's worth going into, I would say.
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In the sixth month of Elizabeth's term, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, a nowhere town, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph of the lineage of David. This maiden's name was Mary. Gabriel came to her and said, Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with thee. Mary was greatly troubled at these words and wondered what this greeting might mean.
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But the angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great. He will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will have no end.
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Mary said to the angel, How can this be, since I have never known a man? And the angel replied, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be holy and he will be called the son of God. And Mary agrees to that. Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.
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Okay, so I want to unpack a couple of things in that from a psychological perspective and then I'll let the people who are more biblically oriented take it from there. So the first thing I would, I've got two things to say on that front. The image of mother and child is an ancient image. It predates Christianity.
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And the reason for that is that, well, any culture that doesn't hold the image of mother and infant sacred is done because that's the very image of love, maternal love, life, reproduction, continuity, sacrifice, all of that. And so, I think it's either Mary and the infant or the whore of Babylon. I think those are the directions for women fundamentally.
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And so there's that from the psychological perspective is that the sacrificial relationship of mother to infant is core. It's fundamental. Then the next issue is possibly that The very definition of feminine, of female, biologically isn't chromosomal difference. Chromosomal difference is a reflection of a more fundamental difference.
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What female means biologically is that sex which contributes more to the reproductive process. And so right from fractally, right from the level of sperm and egg upward, the bulk of the reproductive responsibility, especially in its initial phases, is clearly feminine. And so it is as if, at least as if, It's mother and God producing child with the father donating a trifle to the process.
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Now, in Mary's case, that's obviously taken to the ultimate degree. But at minimum, it reflects this underlying biological reality. It's also the case that Mary... embodying as she does the spirit of motherhood, says yes to the fact of the child. Now, we don't know what Mary's informed of by the angel with regard to the destiny of her child, which is a very brutal and great destiny.
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But that's the destiny of all children, right? And part of the reason we have a birth crisis in the modern world is because women now look at the world, A, they're unwilling to make the sacrifice, and B, they think, Who would dare to bring a child into a world such as this? And the answer is, well, we've always brought children into a world of death and malevolence.
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And there isn't a deeper reflection of fundamental faith in the goodness of being and becoming than the decision a woman takes to throw herself wholeheartedly and without reservation into into the relationship with her infant. And that's all, as far as I can tell, that's all packed into this story and more. So that's what I have to say.
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Do you think that's, it seems to me arguably that that's implicit in two parts. Son of the Most High, say three parts, Son of the Most High, kingdom will have no end, and the intermediation of the Holy Spirit. So there's strong pointers in that direction.
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You see it more clearly in the Annunciation to Joseph, right, in Matthew 1.18. So let's refer to that again. I'll read through that and then we'll go to the birth of Christ. So this is the Annunciation. After Mary has been betrothed to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.
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And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to public disgrace... resolved to send her away quietly. But as he considered these things, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for the child within her is conceived of the Holy Spirit.
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She will bear a son, you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken through the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall conceive, shall bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God is with us. That's a bit clearer.
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Now, I'm going to speak about that biologically too, and I think the easiest explanation on the biological side is that of paternal uncertainty. And so, in any relationship between a man and a woman, there is always, until DNA testing became possible, but there's always an element of paternal uncertainty, and one of the
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One of the things that a man has to contend with when his wife is pregnant is that paternal uncertainty. And his willingness to act in good faith is, of course, dependent on the integrity of the marriage. But it's that willingness to act in good faith that actually makes for the solidity of the family. That's a terrible place for doubt to emerge.
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And so, at minimum, that's part of what's happening in that story. And so, I'll turn, unless anybody has a comment on that, I'll turn to the birth.
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It's a good criticism, John, but one of the things that's interesting, because your criticism is if it's so central, why isn't it replicated? And people have addressed that, but interestingly, Despite the fact that it's not replicated, it's also become a really fundamental part of the culture of Christianity, right?
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Because there's nothing in many ways that people know more about Christ's life than the birth, right? And so it does seem to speak to something that's very, very deep, despite the fact that those other Gospels also, they say very little about Christ at all until...
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So I think there's quite a strong case for... Your point is that if Christ is God, then his patrimony is God. Right. And that's implicit in the other stories.
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referring to there, perhaps, it's an analog of what we pointed to before. It's like, well, how much can you spring on one person at once? Yes, yes. Right, okay.
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The lack of presumption. Mary's pride. Right. Well, when women in the throes of pregnancy do have to throw themselves over to a process that's really outside of them, right? Right. in a way that men can't understand. I'm going to read the birth of Jesus and the angels' proclamation to the shepherds. Now, the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way.
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In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. all went to be enrolled, each to his own city.
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And Joseph went up from Galilee, out of the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was great with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered.
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And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. Then Luke 2, 8 to 20. In the same region there were shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks.
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By night, and lo, an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were very afraid. But the angel said to them, Be not afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior who is Christ the Lord. And this is how you shall know him.
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You will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. All right. So there's a variety of things happening there. I'll unpack them briefly and then we can discuss them. So the first is that Christ is born under the dominion of the state. That's the point of the
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census and the forced movement of people the state has a tyrannical element every person even the savior of the world is born into a situation where they have to contend with the background tyranny of the state and then the next part is that
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Right, right. So that's amplified, that fact, right? Because the Roman state is also degenerating towards a theocracy, right? Isn't he called Weos Tuteu?
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So we have the genuine God being born at a time when there's a false God who's emerged in the tyrannical state. Classic, that's a classic hero story. Okay, so who's the true God here? Well, it's a babe, right? So is that every human baby with the potential to be...
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to participate in the redemption of the world, born in a very lowly place, well, that's a biological reality as well because all human infants are incredibly threatened, right? Our infants are extremely dependent, they're very, very vulnerable, we're born under the tyranny of the state, we're born in relationship to nature and even low nature and that's associated with the manger,
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So it's the emergence of the highest and the lowest as a counter position to the false highest that's Augustus. And then that's reiterated to some degree with the proclamation to the shepherds. It's like, well, who gets wind of this? Well, it's not Augustus. the people of the court, it's the shepherds, right?
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And the shepherds are an interesting choice too because, of course, shepherds, there's a kinship between the shepherd and the prophet all the way through the Old Testament and that imagery is replicated continually in the New Testament. And shepherds take care of the vulnerable. That's essentially what they do and they do that independently and responsibly.
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And so even though they're lowly, they're not because they're types of something much greater and And even though they are low on the socioeconomic totem pole, The fact that Christ's birth is announced to them is an indication of the universally salvific nature of his birth and mission, right? So that's all happening in those little stories.
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We wrestled through the stories told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, examining their historical, existential, and literary significance, deriving from those texts as well a wealth of deep and immediately applicable practical knowledge. Today you're joining me for episode one of this new revolutionary but tradition-grounded series. The episode stands on its own.
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I totally agree. And some of that's associated with the glorification of the infant. as a center of attention, which is a proper center of attention.
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Dennis, let's let that hang and get that back into that when we talk about the Pharisees.
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Well, but I think the question is specifically addressed in some of the stories of Christ's conflict, let's say, with religious authorities per se. And I think we should address that.
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We'll spend a whole session on that question in some ways. Okay, so I'm going to go through... the lead up to the baptism here, and we'll conclude with that. So what happens in the next few stories, essentially, and I'll compress them, is that Mary and Joseph and the people around Christ are presented with evidence of various sorts that something particularly special is going on here.
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So we have, we first of all have the the naming and events in the temple when Jesus is presented in the temple. And there's a prophetess there who describes his eventual destiny and a prophet there too, Simeon. And so he tells Mary that her son is destined to do spectacular things. And then after that, we have the gifts of the Magi. And these are magicians.
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magi from the east who have seen who have analyzed the patterns of the stars in heaven because they're astrologers and have determined that an old age has ended and that would be the age of the ram and a new age pisces is about to begin and so there's there's signs in the stars so to speak that something new is about to be born and the magi come and find christ and
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represent and regard him as the fulfillment of their prophetic intuition. And so that's another. And then we have the parallel. This is a Old Testament parallel with the flight into Egypt and massacre of the innocents. Do you want to speak about that?
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So the Magi tell Herod that a king will arise and Herod determines to kill all the
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Right, all the babies. And so that's equivalent to what happens in Moses' time.
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Shepherds and foreigners are the people who mark it. They want to come and see him. Then they don't go back the same way they came. I'm going to close, gentlemen, with this last story, I think, because this sets us up for the baptism and then the flight into the desert, which is where we can start our second session. So this is... the story of the culmination in some ways of Christ's youth.
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And this is Luke 2, 40 to 50. The young Jesus confers with the teachers, Luke 2, 40 to 50. The child Jesus grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him. Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year for the feast of the Passover. When Jesus was 12 years old, they took him with them when they went up, according to the custom of the feast.
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But after the celebration was over, and they were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know this, but supposing him to be in their traveling party, they went a day's journey, and then they looked for him among their kinsfolk and acquaintances. When they did not find him, They returned to Jerusalem to search for him.
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After three days, they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his responses. When his parents saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, son, why have you treated us this way? Your father and I have been anxiously looking for you.
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And Jesus said to them, why did you need to search for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father's house? But they did not understand the significance of these words. So we see a variety of intimations there. We see the young Jesus first taking his place with the learned men in discussion. And that's a prodroma for much of what happens in the remainder of the Gospels.
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We see the fact that he's exceptionally good at it, enough to hold his own even as a 12-year-old with the learned adults. And that he is also pointing out to his parents, who still don't understand this, that he's marked out for a very particular form of destiny. And so it's after that that that seriously starts to unfold, and that's where we'll pick up when we reconvene.
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Thank you very much, everyone.
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It also serves as an introduction to the whole series of ten available at dailywire.com. Consider a subscription there. granting you access not only to the Gospel Seminar in its totality, but to Exodus, Foundations of the West, and to the many specials I've recorded for The Daily Wire Plus, addressing marriage, success, vision, masculinity, and mental health, among other topics.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It reveals... And it's the same thing. Right.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, this is an important thing to return to because people are often curious... about what to do practically. It's like, okay, first, this is what Jacob does. Jacob in the Old Testament stories, he eventually becomes Israel, right? And so that's his name. And Israel means we who wrestle with God. Now, Jacob is a bad guy when the story starts.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And he leaves his home and the perverse influence of his mother and his criminal betraying past behind. And he decides that he's going to aim up. And that night, He makes an altar and he makes a sacrifice. And that night he has a dream of a staircase that reaches up to heaven, which is now what he's walking up, right? And so he finds his purpose.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
He finds his adventure as a consequence of his decision to be better. Okay, so now you want to find your purpose. Okay, first thing you have to do. You have to review how wretched and miserable you actually are. And you have to face that. And then you have to think, I'd rather not have that. And it has to be true. And then you have to aim up.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Now, you don't know what that means because you're pretty scattered and dissolute. But at least you got the damn intent in mind. And then you have to be willing to make the sacrifices. Right, along the way. Okay, then what happens? Well, then the pathway will reveal itself to you in increments. Calling, is there something around here that I could fix, that I would fix? That's a great question.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Is there something at hand that I could fix, that I would fix? It might be something low, because especially when you first get going, you're not good for anything. So you might have to start with something pretty trivial, but it doesn't matter because you start getting better. Is there something that bothers me? That's conscience, that I could set right in some small way.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, that's there for everyone, right? In the midst of the most catastrophic mess, that pathway, you might even say, look, the more mess around you, the more unstructured possibility you have at hand. And it's true, you know, it's like, I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna about this.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
We know a lot of that is mediated by the hypothalamus, for example, the amygdala and these lower-order, biologically to some degree pre-programmed systems.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I know how difficult that is, but it is the case that the more mess at hand that you can see, the more opportunity that's there. Because, well, if you can see that it's a mess, then you can see the pathway to cleaning it up. Well, so do it. Do it. See what happens. That's the adventure. What's going to happen? In my class, my Maps of Meaning class, I used to have students do this as a project.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And one of the projects was, find something around you in your neighborhood, wherever, in your family that isn't set right, and see if you could set it right. Just write down what happens. Well, one student in particular, he decided his mother had died and the family kind of fragmented. And so he decided he would try to take on the role of mother, you know,
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
be responsible for the household operating. Well, it grew him up like mad, as you can imagine. He ran into all sorts of weird resistances, right? Because his family was upset that he was doing what mom used to do. And like, he just had a tremendously complex adventure as a consequence of his willingness to pursue this.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It was obviously necessary because the alternative was that his family was going to fall apart. It's like, that's there for everyone. You say, well, my circumstances are so difficult. It's like, fair enough. So are everybody else's, by the way. But that means there's a lot of mess. Fix it a bit. And that's ridiculously entertaining and unpredictable. And that in itself is a great deal.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
You have no idea what's going to happen. Just like you didn't know what happened when you started the podcast. Why did you start it?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Now, the specific manner in which those systems should find their expression and the specific way that they're going to be hierarchically integrated is going to depend to a tremendous degree on the particulars of the society at that moment, which is why you need that 18-year framework to hone the manner in which those systems make themselves manifest. But I think the best way to
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Right. Okay. So it's a logical... That was it.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, that's a perfectly, you know, you can think, well, that's a logical extension of your subsidiary calling to be a teacher and a professor, you're already a researcher, you're already a professor, so you're investigating and transmitting knowledge, like, well, looks like you could do that on a broader scale, and the technology's there, why not explore that?
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
That's a perfectly reasonable, and you can see the interplay of calling and conscience there. That's a lovely way of characterizing the voice of the divine, which is how it's characterized. Elijah is the prophet who appears with Christ when he's transfigured on the mount in the New Testament. It's Elijah and Moses.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Elijah is the first person in human history who identifies the divine with conscience. That's his contribution. That's a major psychological revolution, right? It's an unheralded transformation in understanding. It's like it's not the storm. It's not the forest fire. It's not the earthquake. It's not the God of nature. He's the originator of the phrase, the still small voice, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's like that's a, That the notion that your conscience is the voice of the divine, my God, there's virtually no discovery. There's no proposition more revolutionary than that. And so that's why Elijah is a prophet of primary status. And I just see no reason at all not to take that claim seriously. It's like you come up with an explanation for your conscience.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It tells you things you don't want to hear. So how is that you? I mean, you have to gerrymander the definition of you for that to be you.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
conceptualize that is that it's it's the hierarchical integration of the motivational states within an overarching superordinate personality and that personality is not bound to the moment it takes the medium and long term into account and it's not self-serving like a two-year-old would be because you have to take other people into account if you're going to be successful so
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, that's a very precise and properly formulated prayer.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Why did you decide to do that?
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, proper prayer establishes aim.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, why wouldn't you establish your aim? Like, why wouldn't you take a moment before you start your podcast to remember what the hell you're trying to accomplish and to have it firmly in mind?
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I don't think there's any real difference between that and revelation. So imagine that What speaks to you in intuition is the voice of your aim. Now this would be true if your thoughts and the images that appear to you are tools, so to speak, to orient you towards your destination. Well, obviously they have to be that because
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
If your thoughts and your visions, let's say, didn't orient you towards your destination, they would be useless and you'd never get anywhere. Okay, so now you specify your aim and It is the voice of that aim that will make itself manifest to you. That is what a revelation is.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And one of these days when we have a podcast, I'd like to sit down and talk to you about the relationship, the formal relationship between thought and prayer. Because I think thought is secularized prayer. I've looked at its history because, like, when did we start to think? That's not so obvious, you know, I mean... We started to think in words after we developed the ability to use language.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
What's that, 150,000 years? Maybe it's longer than that. No one really knows. But thought has its historical origins. The probability that it emerged from something like prayer, as far as I can tell, is 100%. But I'd like to, at some point, it's complicated, but I'd like to have a discussion with you about that. So imagine that to have an informative intuition means that you posit a question.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And this is where the cortex comes in as far as I'm concerned. This is what it's doing. It's stretching the... It's integrating the lower order, temporally bound motivational states that are specifically self-serving to a much broader vision of the world that takes the future into account and other people. And that's hard. It's very hard.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And that's a form of humility. It's like, there's something I need to know that I don't know, that I could know, that I'd like to know. It's like, so you set the stage. Well, once you set the stage, the probability that a creative idea will enter the theater of your imagination is much enhanced. That's the first stage of revelation. Then you have to assess that.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
That's discriminating the spirits, you might say. You're separating the wheat from the chaff. That's critical thinking. But All of that, as far as I can tell, is something approximating secularized prayer. Set your aim. Then observe the manifestation of that aim. It's not even magical. It's how your perception works.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Now, there's a magic to it because I suppose the magic is that you can think up something you never thought up before. How the hell do you do that? It's more like you experience it, right? You set your aim. You have a question. So you're on your knees, hoping for an answer. The light bulb goes on. Well, if that's not revelation, then what the hell is it? It's the same thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, I think they converge substantively. I mean, I think the best, I talked to Camille Paglia about this a few years ago. Maybe she's one of the world's foremost literary theorists. And she said something very interesting to me that was quite surprising. She said that had the academy turned to
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Eric Neumann, who is Jung's greatest student, by the way, instead of Foucault, the whole history of the university and the intellectual enterprise over the last five decades would have been entirely different.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, Foucault is the most cited scholar who ever lived. And Foucault believes that the story that we act out is one of power. And that's wrong. And it's not just wrong, it's like perversely and dangerously wrong. I think it's technically wrong as well as being ethically wrong. Partly because power does not provide a stable basis for psychological integration or social unity. It's just, it's not.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Power might be more effective adaptively than capitulation and dependence. But it's not an optimized solution, not by any stretch of the imagination. And I think the data demonstrating that, I think it's incontrovertible. And I outline that in this book, Will You Wrestle With God? Eric Neumann, Carl Jung, Michele Eliade, a host of others outlined the patterns of religious thinking.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Right. Context dependent.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It took them most of the 20th century to do that, and they found recurring themes that are profound. So one example, the ancient Egyptians worshipped a god, Horus. Everyone knows the god Horus because his emblem is the eye, the open eye. Well, what does that mean? It means in part that the ancient Egyptians worshipped attention, and they felt that the god of attention,
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
was the antidote to the pathological state. And they were right about that. I mean, they had a god of the pathological state. That was Seth. The god Seth, the name Seth, became Satan through the Coptic Christians. So they believed that the degenerate state had a spirit. And the antidote to the spirit of the degenerate state was the all-seeing God. the all-seeing, upward-striving eye.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, and there's a difference between attention and thinking. Like, attention is a quest. If you're paying attention, you're looking, you're seeking, you're knocking, you're asking. Right? And the
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
eternal promise is that if you ask, you'll be answered, and if you seek, you'll find, and the eye is the gateway to that, and it's the antidote to the degenerate state, because the degenerate state, the totalitarian state, insists and tyrannizes, and the open eye seeks. Well, the Egyptians figured this out, and the Egyptian theology had a walloping impact on Jewish theology.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I mean, the Jews came out of Egypt. There are concept, that's a conception. There are consequences of that conceptually as well as historically. The pattern of the hero's journey, that's replicated. I would say that's the central pattern of story per se. And that makes itself manifest in perhaps all cultures that have managed any unity and any progress whatsoever.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Is there a hierarchy of religious truth? Yes, just as there's a hierarchy in literary depth. We understand that a dime store romance is not as profound as a Dostoevsky novel. We know there's a hierarchy of depth. And you can arrange religious apprehension in terms of a hierarchy of quality. And I think the Jungian school did that brilliantly.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
brilliantly, and biologists should know it in far more depth. The best neuroscientists of emotion and motivation that I knew, and that includes Jaak Panksepp, they knew the work of Iliad, for example.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I would start with The Sacred and the Profane by Iliad, and also Eric Neumann's book, The Origins and history of consciousness. That's a harder one because unless you know the lingo of that school, it's hard to understand what he's aiming at. If you understand that he's aiming at, he's elaborating on the symbolism of the adventurous spirit. That's a good way of thinking about it.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's a technical analysis of the structure of heroic expansion of personality. But an easier way in is through Iliad, Sacred and the Profane, short book. You would read it now knowing that the gods that Iliad described as warring in the pagan world are in part manifestations of the personality of motivational drive.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And the mapping of that war across times, that's the war of the gods in heaven, which is a very common mythological trope. There's a war that integrates towards a monotheism, and Iliad tracked that in multiple cultures. And that's very much worth knowing. Because it explains the symbolism of the emergence of the integrated literate human psyche across tens of thousands of years.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
That's captured in story. So imagine this. Here's a way of thinking about it. So tribe A, tribe B, tribe C. Now they all have their highest deity or their panoply of deities. Now they unite. Okay, so as they unite, they fight, they compete, and they cooperate. They kill each other, they cooperate and trade.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
At the same time that's happening, there's a war in the space of ideas between their respective deities. And you could think about the human beings acting out that war just as you could think about the war, the abstraction reflecting the conflict on Earth. Well, there's a pattern to that conflict. That pattern is quite stable across cultures.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It tilts towards a monotheistic unity insofar as the multiplicity of cultures unifies. Well, obviously. Like, what are they going to unify in the absence of conceptual unity? I don't think so.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And why wouldn't it be that the movement towards that conceptual unity, which is the establishment of a larger scale civilization, would involve the battle between ideas of the divine and their integration into something resembling a unity? Like, clearly. Well, that's part of the proclamation, let's say, of the analytic psychologists that were all part of Carl Jung's school.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And the academy just ignored that entirely, except for Camille Pellia, who understands this quite profoundly, and went in the direction of Foucault.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Like all the people that advised me as a graduate student, even those who had my best interest firmly in mind, told me to never talk about my interest in union psychology. Really?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, and like, it's not surprising. I mean, I always did when I went for job interviews. And that definitely was part of what scuttled at me at some of the places I interviewed. Now, fortunately, they hired me at Harvard. And so... I was—what I was discussing was verboten in many places, but not there. So, you know, that worked out quite nicely for me.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, Adler's very practical.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yes, well, Adler was the most practical of the small crowd that aggregated around Freud. And so Jung's take was that Freud focused on sex and Adler focused on power and Jung focused on what transcended both. And I think that's right. Now, Adler is a good riposte to Freud in exactly the way you described.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
If you like that book and you're interested in all three of them, let's say, there's a great book called Discovery of the Unconscious, which was written by a man named Henri Ellenberger, who was the foremost exponent of existential psychology in the 1950s. Brilliant, brilliant scholar. And it is the best analysis of Freud, Jung, and Adler that's ever been written by a lot.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And it's a truly great book. He also traces the idea of the unconscious back 350 years before Freud. So it's a masterful study. But I liked Adler, and he was much less charismatic than Freud and Jung, and so his star didn't shine as brightly. But he's very practically oriented, and much of his thinking
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
what would you say, fits quite nicely with the same kind of bottom-up approach that a more behaviorally oriented psychotherapist would employ. So, look, there are some people, if you're engaging in a therapeutic process with someone, there are people who are best engaged with at the level of concept. Those are people who are high in trait openness. Not everyone's like that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
In fact, most people aren't like that. Jungian psychology works really well on highly creative people. And almost all Jung's clients were creative because they wouldn't have come to him otherwise. And there's also people for whom sexual dysfunction and trauma are the primary, what would you say, the primary preoccupation of their life and the past. And Freud serves them well.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Adler's very practical. And if you're looking for a psychologist to help you figure out how you could advance from where you are now, he's got plenty of things to say that are good. He also wasn't as good a literary stylist as Jung or Freud. So that also put him off to the side to some degree. But anyways, a deeper investigation can certainly be found in Discovery of the Unconscious.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And for anybody listening and watching who's interested in psychological ideas broadly and would like familiarity with the psychoanalytic tradition, Freud, Jung, and Adler, let's say primary, there is not a better book than Discovery of the Unconscious. It's really a work of genius.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's nice.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Even for him to thrive, right? It's not merely a sacrifice of his own desire for the sake of others. It's like, no, no, look, kid, we know this. If you have the same orientation towards other people at four that you did when you were two, especially if you're tilted a little in the aggressive direction, you will not make friends and you will be isolated and alienated for the rest of your life.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And that fit, by the way, that fit perfectly with Piaget's observations of childhood socialization. It's like I came across Panksepp and I thought, oh, that's so cool. Now we have the psychophysiological basis for Piagetian developmental theory. It was perfect. Yeah, so that was lovely concordance.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, I don't know how he was as a lecturer. He's a great writer. And man, he had an unerring eye for the right problems in terms of psychological investigation and very brave in that regard. I mean, he studied laughter in rats. And you think, oh, of all the absurd things to focus on, it's like, no, you just don't understand where the gold is or play among rats. Who cares that rats play?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, like that would be the sort of research proposal that would be pilloried by sensible Republicans looking to trim government waste. It's like, no, that was the heart of the matter, right? Rats organize their social hierarchy through play, not through force. Right. That's a big discovery. I think he should have won a Nobel Prize. I do too.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, he should have won a Nobel Prize for a variety of his discoveries, but that one in particular. Rats have an implicit morality. That's a major league discovery, and it's based on play. Wow. Stunning.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, we see the same thing in chimpanzees. It's pretty strange to understand that dominance hierarchies if they're functional, are often organized in consequence of play, not force. So much for Foucault.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I think that there is... I think that the antithesis of tyranny is play. It took me a long time to realize that. Like, I've been studying evil intensely since I was about 13. And evil is easier to define than good. It's hard to find a category that integrates all that's good, that you can point to simply. But it has...
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
The fact that play is the antithesis of tyranny seems to be a pretty good summation. Like Panksepp showed, for example, that play wouldn't emerge among animals if they were possessed by any other motivational state. Things have to be set up very carefully before play will emerge. Your house is optimally structured if your children can play.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Your marriage is optimally structured if you're playing house with your wife. And I think that that reality of the, what would you say, the optimally superordinate nature of play that makes itself manifest when you're watching someone who's a master at their task. And Musk is playing. And hopefully that will... You know, and Trump plays too.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's one of the things that made me less uncertain about him. He's deadly funny. Now, it's rough. He plays rough, no doubt about it. But he's ridiculously, he's got a ridiculously comic touch. And that's not something that's generally characteristic of, you know, psychopathic dictators. Hitler wasn't known for his sense of humor.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So that two-year-old impulsiveness, that has its place. Two, it starts to modify radically at three, and it better be fixed by four. And the reason for that is that you have to integrate yourself into the social world, which means, in the case of children, it means you want to have friends.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Oh, yeah, that's a typical Hollywood version.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, you know, I guess the optimistic repost to that would be the fact that the people that you're pointing to, like Rogan, who is a comedian, like many of the people who've become extremely successful as podcasters. Constantine Kissen, Russell Brand, Dave Rubin, Crowder, Stephen Crowder, Theo Vaughan. That's a lot of comedians.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So there's a lot of play in the alternative media and a lot of young people are being informed by the alternative media. So I think there's genuine room for optimism there. And there's plenty of play in those podcasts. Now, a group of us eight years ago, seven years ago, put out an offer to the Democratic powers that be to invite the Democrats to come and talk to us. Rubin was part of that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And so the reason you're disciplining your child isn't to teach them that what they're doing is bad, you know, in that simple way. in that simple sense that you might interpret punishment. It's like, no, you need to be more sophisticated. Well, why? Well, you have to be able to take turns. Well, why? Well, because no one will like you otherwise. Well, what's the problem with that? Well...
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Rogan was part of that, if I remember correctly. I'm quite certain of it. I was part of that. Shapiro was part of that. This was a genuine invitation, which was extended many times in serious ways by people who were very well connected among the Democratic elite. And that came to nothing.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Nope. They'd speak to me, for example, privately. Never publicly. Virtually never. Almost without exception. All the while, the... Alternative media was gaining more and more power. All the while, we were telling them, this isn't optional. Your legacy media foothold is dying. Wake up.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, Rogan, for example, you could imagine that he would be on board with such a thing because he's not precisely your stereotypical Republican. No, not at all.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, it's just not true at all. No, that's not true. Yeah, so there is plenty of play. And so I think we can be positive about that. And I think young people, too, have seen how successful that could be. I mean, Rogan and his coterie, let's say, wiped out the legacy media. Well, so you can see what the spirit of playful adventure can do in a very short period of time.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Now, there's technological reasons for that, too, but... Technological reasons or not, it's still a stunning phenomenon and a stunning accomplishment and a very positive one as far as I'm concerned. And hopefully it will continue.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, that became stark, starkly obvious when Rogan interviewed Trump. That was the death knell of the legacy media.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, I think it demonstrated the fact that they had been elevated. It was evidence that was so conclusive that there was no longer any way of questioning it. Even the CNN pundits and so forth, who were very resistant to that as a hypothesis, changed their tune very rapidly.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Theo's so great because Theo is... Like he's backwoods hip to the core, right? Seriously. Underclass background. And it's real. And he's so bloody smart. And so it's such a fun combination because he's got this... It's pretty easy if you're elitist to...
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
know be be what derisive about theo and his back woodsy stick but man there's a sec there's a first-rate mind lurking behind that that it's not a persona because it's actually him too you know i can relate to that to a large degree because you know i came from a very small town way the hell out in the middle of nowhere and so i have plenty in common with theo But it's it's very funny to watch.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's very funny to see him do this successfully. It's ridiculously and preposterously comical that he got to sit down with Trump. I mean, I just thought that was that's so funny and that it was successful and playful. You know, that's great. And there's plenty of play in the Republican Renaissance at the moment, whatever that is. I mean, Republican to call it that is like that's.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Whatever the hell's happening, it's not conceptualizable in terms of our normal political dichotomy, right? I mean, we're in uncharted water. Now, hopefully, this is why I hope the Democrats get their act together, because every administration needs an opposition.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
First of all, we're hyper social like you can punish psychopaths by putting them in isolation That's how social human beings are you take the most antisocial human beings there are and you can punish them by making them be alone Right. So that's how social we are. So you want to you you're you're modeling for your child a strategy of
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And if the Democrats continue with this woke idiocy, they're not going to be able to serve as the proper corrective to the excesses that will definitely emerge in the Trump administration. especially if they face no credible opposition.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Oh, yes. Well, of course it will. It always does. You know, and that the Republicans themselves, whom I wish well, this remarkable group of people that's aggregated around Trump, it's like they should hope for themselves that they have an effective opposition because someone's got to be telling you where you're stupid.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And if the Democrats, so this is another public invitation to the Democrats, which is like, must be the 50th one that I've issued, if you have something to say, you know, I'd be happy to talk. And so would many people who've expressed similar sentiment to me in the alternative media world. And that offer has been on the table for years.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So I hope that, I'm afraid that all the people with any real courage, or virtually all of them being chased out of the Democratic Party, They're all afraid of being canceled, which is why they wouldn't appear on my podcast to begin with. It's like, why does Peterson always interview conservatives? It's like, well, how about because they'll talk to me?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
You know, there's a simple explanation and definitely a true one. So maybe that can shift. And there's got to be somebody in the Democrats who's got enough courage to forge a new direction. And if they want to continue with this Same old pattern of woke idiocy. Well, go right ahead. It's not going to work. The tide's already turned in that regard.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Joe didn't emerge by accident. Joe is very, very, very smart. Very. And if you think... And it's what? It's like, Joe built this? It's like, not the way that a political party would build it. First of all, he didn't build it. Not that way. Not through a priori planning so that the Democrats could have a voice.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
No, they'll do that by trying to figure out what the opposition to this new peculiar band of Republicans should be and what sort of vision could be put forward that would be attractive. You know, I read today some Democrat claiming that the Democrats are the true voice of the working class. It's like, I don't think so. I think that ship has sailed.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And maybe the Democrats should be the true voice of the working class, but they're certainly not. And in principle, that would mean that there's an opportunity there on the Democrat side to forge a new path. I mean, Clinton managed that in the 90s. This has happened many times. It could happen again. But there's a lot of learning that's going to have to take place before that happens.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
of even satisfaction for his own basic drives that takes context in the most sophisticated possible way into account, right? And that is, see, As soon as you understand that that's the fostering of like a meta personality in the child, which would really be the personality of that child, the integrated personality, you start to understand how that might be related to religious thinking.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So certainly learning about this new alternative media environment You can't sit down for three hours and say what you actually think, actually what you think, right? Regardless of what might do to your reputation, let's say, you're not going to be successful in the podcast world.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
That's why Jung said the fool is the precursor to the redeemer. You have to accept the role of fool voluntarily before you can improve. Of course, when you start something new, you're going to be an idiot. Like, what do you know? So that's the price of entry is to be a fool. Well, you can be a voluntary fool. And then you have a bit of a sense of humor about yourself.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And that takes the sting out of it. And maybe even makes you an attractive character. Despite your ignorance, people will make tremendous allowances for ignorance that's voluntarily admitted to.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, I've suffered from a proclivity towards depression my whole life, I would say. And I would say the roughest part of the day for me is morning, although it's way better than it once was. So when I get up, I have a shower and make my bed and do something useful, and then I'm pretty much done. I'm on my way.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And I still have quite a lot of pain from whatever happened to me a couple of years ago. And so that's annoying.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but psychologically, my life is ridiculously, it's absurdly interesting. It's crazily and absurdly interesting all the time. And so anyone with any sense would be like,
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Because religious thinking is the attempt to formulate something approximating an ideal personality. Now, that's often attributed elements of the divine, but there's reasons for that that we could go into. But as soon as you know that the basic structure, even at the lower motivational level, is personality, well, then that changes the way you view the brain.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Dress up. Look respectable. So my wife and I are touring from January through June. And much of that's in the United States. And then two months in Europe. And so that's great because Europe is in trouble. And Going there to speak is a privilege and an honor, and so that's ridiculously exciting. And people can find more out about the tour at jordanbpeterson.com.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
The dates and so forth are all listed there. We launched Peterson Academy, where we want you to teach, and that's going spectacularly well.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yep, yep, yep. We have 35 lectures online already, each of them
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
sequenced over six to eight hours which compacts I would say the equivalent of a full university course into that span of time we're pursuing accreditation which I think is a high probability in the relatively not too distant future so that's ridiculously exciting because we can take the best lectures in the world and we can make them available to everyone and we built a social media element into it we took the best of the social media networks and people are using it like mad and it's
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
100% positive. It's philosophically oriented. It's mutually encouraging. We threw four people off the platform out of 40,000. Well, three, because we put one guy on probation because he said he'd improve. And we established a positive culture. There's no bots. There's no trolls. No one's playing games. And we watch. And now, you know, the community has settled into a, it's got an ethos already.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And I think that'll be self-sustaining.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
and to support each other learning. Got it. It launched out of the gate better than we thought it would, even though we were optimistic. And I would say the quality of what we're offering exceeded, it certainly exceeded my expectations. Well, we showed Michael Malice. Michael Malice did a course for us on totalitarianism, and he takes that rather personally, given his family background.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And he said that the trailer brought him to tears. And that's my... Now, I can be easily brought to tears, so I don't know if I'm the best.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, it's good to know I'm not alone in that. I'm less susceptible now that I'm more healthy, but I feel the same way about what we're producing because it's exactly... If you were a professor and you wanted the best possible courses to... be available to people, and you saw these, you'd think, target, hit. And that's ridiculously fun.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And I have a great relationship with my wife and my kids.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I do, and two more on the way. And so, you know, and I have an endless field of stellar opportunity in front of me. So hopefully I have enough sense to appreciate that. And I do. I do appreciate it. And I know it's unlikely.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Look, a lot of archaic deities are motivational systems.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It was probably mostly calling because the fundamental motivation was, and I think it is my fundamental motivation, is curiosity. You know, I watched YouTube and I thought, hmm, what the hell is this? Video on demand worldwide. What does that mean? It means the spoken word is now as permanent as the written word and more easily disseminated.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I thought, oh, that's a spectacular and world-altering revolution. That's what it looks like to me. This was like in 2010, you know, when it was mostly cat videos. I thought, might as well put my videos up there and see what happens. And so, see what happens, right? That's an adventure. And so, I did that for...
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
The god of war, Mars, that's rage. That was a god that the Vikings invoked before they went into battle. They would use Amanita muscaria, and they imitated predators from an early age.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
maybe seven years, somewhere between five and seven years before things exploded around me. And that was also extremely helpful because when I opposed the Trudeau government's attempt to compel my speech in the form of Bill C-16, I was immediately pilloried as a right-wing Nazi, even though I'd spent my whole career
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
publicizing the horrors of the Nazi administration and teaching my students how not to fall prey to totalitarian temptation. Like that was the core of my career. I had like 200 hours of lectures up on YouTube already.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So when all that negative attention was drawn to me, people started looking at the lectures and the huge advantage there was that there wasn't a single, really there wasn't a single important word I'd said to students in the last 20 years that wasn't recorded. And the people who decided that
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
you know, I was a reprehensible character, had every opportunity to go through everything I'd said with a fine-tooth comb, which you can be absolutely certain they did, and they couldn't find one thing I ever said that led any credence whatsoever to their accusations. And so that was a breaking point in some ways for cancel culture because there were very...
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
forceful attempts to cancel me and so people went and checked me out and they thought huh nothing he says falls into alignment with what he's being accused about well you know that what would you say that was part of the dam breaking with regards to the corruption of the legacy media
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So not only was what I was accused of a lie, it was exactly the opposite of the truth, which is the most profound kind of lie. So YouTube helped me out a lot there.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, it's been unbelievably rewarding. I mean, part of the reason that my wife and I keep touring is because we meet all these people and they put their lives together. It's thousands and thousands of people. It's so gratifying. You know, wherever we go, the probability that someone will come up and say, Thank you. But then when I ask, like, for what? What do you mean exactly? What changed?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
They tell me. And there isn't anything better that can happen to you than to travel around the world and have perfect strangers come up to you as friends and tell you that their lives are far better than they would have been because of their efforts and because of their encounter with what you've been doing.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Like if you could pray for anything to happen to you, there is not a possibility that you could come up with a better wish than that. And so it's great. It's great. And it's fascinating to explore its continuation and to observe the consequences. And it's a privilege to be in it. It's an immense what would you say? It's unspeakably immense privilege to be in that position.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And it's so great to see people like you and Friedman and Chris Williamson and all these other podcasters who are pursuing the same vision and so successfully and to see the massive effect that's having on people. That's such a good deal. So, and I do believe it's the sort of thing that's in a deeply personalized way, available to anyone who follows their calling and conscience.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Hey, anytime. I appreciate the invitation very much. It's a pleasure watching your progress forward and seeing you propagate all the remarkable discoveries that have been made in the field of neuroscience because it's quite the credible enterprise. And people need to know the biology of motivation, let's say, and the biology of emotion.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And it's great to see you managing that in a sophisticated way with so many people. It's a good deal for everybody.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's a radically atypical psychedelic.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's outside the LSD, psilocybin, mescaline domain.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Sure, because what they were trying to do is make the personality of rage superordinate with no pain. Right, and they practiced that from a very early age. So the Vikings worked themselves up. They went berserk. That means to wear the bear shirt. Right, they transformed themselves. so to speak, into predators.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And give full reign. Give full reign. Right. They were experts at that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, then you could imagine in a way that what they were doing was bringing the full resources of the cortex to... And placing them at the service of the rage circuits in the hypothalamus. Like we have no idea what that would be like. No, there aren't. We don't do that. We have no idea what a human being who does that is like if they're expert at it.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
You would give you nightmares to think about it deeply.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So it's still somewhat context-dependent.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, that's because they're collapsing your domain of of apprehension to the moment, so you will act. You have to collapse to the moment to act, right? And so we should also point out for everyone that You don't want to underestimate the sophistication of the hypothalamus, and this is partly why conceptualizing its various states as subpersonalities is so useful.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I mean, it's not unsophisticated. You can take a female cat and take out its whole brain, except for the hypothalamus. So it's like 95% of its brain is gone, and in a relatively controlled environment, it's indistinguishable from a normal cat. It can do cat things and live. And it's hyper exploratory. Now that's a That's a very strange thing. A cat with no brain is hyper exploratory.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's not what you think at all, but it shows you how sophisticated the hypothalamus is. It can run these programs, but they're programs of personality because they have perceptions. It can run them and it can do that quite successfully. Now all the higher order
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
subcortical and cortical systems are, well, I think they are to your point, they're ways of expanding the apprehension of those fundamental motivational systems across broader and broader spans of time, incorporating more and more people, but also solving the problem of the conflict that emerges between those fundamental motivational states, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's like, well, what do you do when you're hungry and tired? Right. Well, you have to mediate between the states to some degree. What do you do if you want to solve the problem of being hungry and tired over a long period of time with other people? Right. Well, you need more and more brain to calculate that. Right.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And so a huge part of what maturation is, is when we think about it as the capacity to forego gratification. Actually, what's happening is that as you mature and your cortex comes online, let's say, you're able to regulate your behavior with more and more other things taken into account. Right, right. And, you know, there has to be some war there, which is why you're wrestling with God, let's say.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
There has to be some war there because... It's also the case that you do have to satiate yourself in relationship to your basic biological needs or you die. And so there's going to be tension. That is something like the tension between the individual and the group, you might say. That's how the Rousseauians or the Freudians would think about it.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So the weird thing about that is that it's not useful to identify your individuality with the dominion of a whim. And that's what hedonists do, and that's what immature people do. They think, well, why shouldn't I get what I want? It's like, I see, so your claim is that the you that's superordinate is what you want. That isn't, that means you're subjugated to these low-order personalities.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And you might say, well, why is that wrong? It's like, well, you're a two-year-old. It doesn't work. You know, if it's all about you and your immediate gratification, Well, first of all, you're rather psychopathic because you could think of psychopathy as the extension of immaturity into adulthood. That's a pretty good default way of conceptualizing it. It's an unsophisticated strategy.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
See, one of the ways I caught on to this relationship was because I studied antisocial behavior for a very long time. Psychopaths in particular are notorious for their inability to learn from experience. Okay, so what does that mean? It means that if they do something impulsive that causes them trouble in the future, the fact of that future trouble has no bearing on their continued behavior.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
What that means is that they are so non-communitarian that they're willing to even betray their own future selves. There's no difference between that and betraying someone else. It's exactly the same mechanism.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So here's something I learned in Montreal. I worked with a man named Richard Tremblay there, and Richard, I think Richard's lab used up one-third of all social science funding for Quebec at one time. He was a radically successful researcher, and he was really interested in antisocial behavior and was trying to get to the roots.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And one of the conclusions that our lab enterprise moved towards was that one observation was that If you take two-year-olds, if you take kids at different ages, you could imagine you made a group of two-year-olds, three-year-olds, group of four-year-olds, all the way up to 15. You just let them interact. The two-year-olds are the most aggressive.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
But if you analyze the two-year-olds themselves, you find that all the aggressive Kids are boys, and it's only a fraction of them, about 5%. So if you group two-year-olds together, 5% of the boys will kick, steal, hit, and bite, which was our definition of early-onset antisocial behavior. Almost all of those kids are socialized by the age of four, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
The remnant that aren't get alienated because they have no friends, and they're the ones who become juvenile delinquents and then early-onset criminals and then repeat offenders, right? Right. And so what it is, is imagine there are some kids whose default Their rage circuits are a little bit more dominant than the typical kid. They're often bigger physically.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
and so much more primitive than than even hitting or spitting or something exactly it's it's the indication of a virtual absence of sophisticated socialization they are truly in their hypothalamus yeah yeah right exactly and that's well especially if you have a hypothalamus that's tilted towards rage let's say and defensive or predatory aggression that's bad news now so so
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So what's the upshot of that? Well, the upshot is that there is a subset of kids whose default reactions aren't socialized, and we associate that with psychopathy and long-term criminality. It's a really useful thing to understand that much of what we see as pathology, and I would say the same thing about narcissism and certain forms of hedonism,
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Essentially what it is is failure of socialization, right? And this has very interesting political implications because it also implies that, imagine that impulsive self-gratification is a personality, the desire for impulsive self-gratification is a personality with its own political opinions. Nietzsche said in the late 1800s that every drive attempts to philosophize in its spirit.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Brilliant, brilliant observation. Far different than conceiving of the, say, hypothalamic drives as deterministic chains of only impulses. And another thing to consider, too, with regards to the effect of hypothalamic motivation on perception, that mouse that you talked about whose attack system is activated electronically.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
See, when that glove is dropped, you can see that there's a relationship with perception. Because if there's no target for attack that's biologically relevant in the environment, there's no impulse. So you could imagine that what happens is when you activate those neurons is that there's a set of perceptual stimuli that are much more likely to be classified as a defeatable enemy.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Now, even a glove will do it. Right, right. So you drop in a glove and that's now perceived as defeatable enemy or perhaps threat because we don't know exactly what the perception would be. But then you see, then it's the perception driving the behavior. That's not an impulse. Right. That's more like a strategy.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And I really started to understand some of the literature on the evolution of religious thinking when I started to understand motivational states as personalities. Because one of the things that you see, this is so cool, something I tried to talk to Dawkins about. The greatest historian of religions who ever lived was Mircea Eliade. And he wrote a sequence of brilliant books.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
The Sacred and the Profane is the best one to start with. Very short book. Very elegant book. And what Eliade documented across the world was the pattern by which polytheistic belief systems turned into monotheistic belief systems. That parallels maturation. It's the same thing. And so the polytheistic gods tend to be representations of motivational states.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Exactly, exactly that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, why wouldn't they be gods? You know, beware of falling under their dominion. Beware of becoming their playthings. And the other thing that's very interesting, you see, is that You have to also understand that these don't exist independently of historical context. So let's say rage. It's like there's a literature of rage. There's a culture of rage.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
There are patterns of rage that are played out in drama and literature. Like it's not only that the motivational impulse is a personality, it's a personality with a history and a philosophy. And if you don't think it can possess you, you don't know very much about possession.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So like, for example, if you're fighting with someone and you become enraged, as you said, your temporal purview shrinks and your notion of what constitutes victory is radically transfigured. So if you're fighting with someone you love, you might want to defeat them or even hurt them, independently of the fact that you actually love them.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, then you think, well, you're gripped by these impulses. No, no, you're inhabited by the spirit of rage. And if you're a sophisticated person, there's going to be an endless stream of sophisticated intellectual rationalizations that come along with that possession, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's full-fledged personality and it's... One of the things you see with people who are psychotic, you know, who drift off into the landscape of their imagination is that they dwell on such states of possession. So, for example, these kids that shoot up high schools, Like they're fantasizing under the influence of rage and resentment for thousands of hours. That just takes control of them.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And it's not a simple impulse. It's like, no, they've inverted the, you could think they've inverted the neurological order and the god of rage is now the, what would you say, the leading personality of integration or the god of resentful rage, even worse.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
That's what happens in addiction. So you hit that circuit that's seeking the drug with repeated doses of dopamine. you know, people say they have a monkey on their back. It's like, no, they have a monster in their brain and it's, and they grew it and it grows because it's reinforced with dopaminergic hits. And as it grows, its capacity to dominate increases.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And so when there's a cue for the addiction, this is why people relapse when they get out of a treatment center, they'll go back to their normal environment after having dealt with the physiological withdrawal, let's say, and acute craving will make itself manifest, like a friend they freebase with, and it's all of a sudden, that monster is alive, and it just shuts everything else down.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And it's got a personality. It can lie. You know, one of the hallmarks of addictive behavior is lying. And the lies are the rationalizations of that sub-circuit, sub-personality, for its own pathological behavior. And so, and that's all reinforced too by the dopaminergic hits.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Polytheistic paganism.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, that's the default condition. Right, right. That's the condition of the two-year-old.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, that's not a bad way of thinking about what it is that people are trying to do when they, say, pray. So... You can invite in spirits to possess you. That's a good way of thinking about it. I know that's odd terminology, but that's what you do when you dwell on your rage. Right, right. Now imagine that you're doing that in the most positive possible direction.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So what you're doing is you're generating a hypothesis about the mode of conduct and perception that would best typify you if you were ideal. And then establishing a relationship with that and inviting it in. That's what the evangelical Protestants are doing when they formulate a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That's exactly what they're doing.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Now on the addiction side, so I studied alcoholism for years. That was the target of my dissertation in the first year. 20 papers that I published, I knew the alcoholism literature very well, and the neurological end of it as well. And it was known among alcohol researchers, it's been known for 60 years, more even, that the most reliable treatment for alcoholism was religious transformation.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And this is well accepted among researchers in the field who have no religious affiliation whatsoever. And I do believe that A huge part of that is a consequence of incentive restructuring. So you said, for example, with your friend, that fear wouldn't work.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, alcohol is a pretty good anxiolytic drug, but it's also, for people who are prone to alcoholism, it's a good incentive reward source, like cocaine. If you're going to... You can't get rats addicted to cocaine if they live in a natural environment. They have to be isolated in a cage before they'll bar press to their own death for cocaine.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So one of the things you want to do when you treat addiction is you want to substitute a new incentive structure, right? Because the part of the addictive process is you fall into a false incentive pattern, right? Because cocaine makes you feel like you're doing something useful in respect to an important goal, even though you're not. It mimics that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Right? See, this is another insistence that's derived from the religious literature. So, because the idea there is that if your aim is upward, the pathway forward to that will make itself manifest. And that's true. You just pointed out that it was true in relationship to addiction. Right. Is that if once that... Once you're in that realm of possessed personality...
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
The pathway forward will show itself to you even under straitened circumstances. Right. And it's partly because you can think of our perceptual systems and our emotional systems, for that matter, as navigating tools. Right. So now the addiction, the addicted brain, like they say, the aim is possessed by the substance of addiction. Right. So now the highest God is God. Cocaine, let's say.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And so now all pathways in the world are pathways to cocaine. All objects in the world are markers on the pathway to cocaine. Because it just dominates. But it's not just an impulse. It dominates the perceptual landscape as well. And the emotional landscape. And it comes with all these rationalizations. That's all those lies. Right? The whole thing. It's a whole personality.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's a necessary precondition.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, and it's been compulsively rewarded. So, you know, when a... When you see yourself moving towards the culmination of a desired goal, a dopamine, that's accompanied by dopamine release, okay? And so two things, you know this, but everybody who's listening might not. There's two elements to that dopamine release.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
One is pleasure, but the other is that the dopamine, imagine that there are circuits activated as you're acting. What the dopamine does is increase the probability that the circuits that were activated just before the positive experience happened grow.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Okay, so now if you're engaged with pornography and that culminates in successful sexual satiation, which it can, that's what masturbation does, then the whole personality that's oriented toward that set of stimuli is going to come to dominate. It's very much like an addiction, except it's... You know, there has been work done with generally simpler animals on these phenomena called super stimuli.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I think it's stickleback fish where this was first observed. So males, I hope I get this right, but I've got it approximately right. I believe it's male sticklebacks will, they're very aggressive towards other male sticklebacks. And the reason they're aggressive is because the other male sticklebacks have a red dot on their bellies. So they don't like red dots at all.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And so you could really enrage a stickleback with a red dot. And if you use a red dot that's a little bigger and a little brighter than the typical red dot, you get a super stimulus. It's virtually irresistible to the stickleback. And it's weird because the maximal activation is produced by a stimulus that they wouldn't see in nature. It slightly exceeds. That's exactly what pornography does.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's a super stimulus. Right, and it's not surprising that young males in particular are susceptible to that because male sexuality in human beings is very visually oriented. Very. And a lot of our brain is visual, way more than virtually every other animal. Certainly every other primate and every other mammal.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And so we have a situation where any 13 year old boy can see more hyper attractive, super stimulus women in one day than the most successful man who ever lived 100 years ago would have ever seen in his whole life. Yeah, well, that's like an evolutionary, ecological, radical ecological transformation. And it's worse because it's easily accessible, so it takes no work, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So not only is it a super stimulus, it's one that's at hand, so to speak. And the...
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, sugar-fat combination.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
But it just occurred to me that... There isn't much difference between manufacturing sugar and manufacturing cocaine. I mean, you take something that's available in its natural form in relatively low concentrations and purify it. I mean, coca leaves, the natives used coca leaves forever as mild stimulant. Didn't seem to cause them any trouble. But that's way different than cocaine, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And sugar has the same... arguably the same pathological properties.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Explain why you think that link about satiation can't be learned in the case of these processed foods.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, that's because there's also a novelty kick in dopaminergic striving, right? I mean, so with any basic appetitive pleasure, there's a dopaminergic kick. But with any novelty, there's also a dopaminergic kick. So there's an optimized threshold for novelty and appetitive striving that plays out in pornography.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So there's the direct effect of the stimulus as such, but there's variation in the stimulus that's also novel. And so it's a common pattern for pornographic usage to become more, what would you say, Fetishistic, that's one way of thinking about it as it progresses because that keeps the novelty alive. That's very dangerous. That's a very dangerous development.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, it also, it's also, there is some evidence suggesting too that if you've been socialized into pornography sexuality, it's actually quite difficult to establish a sexual relationship with an actual partner. Now, I would say to some degree that's always been difficult because it's a complex form of behavior, but the introduction of pornography
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
We should talk about the idea of impulse in relationship to that characterization. Okay. Because there's an important point to be made on the... You pay a price for characterizing that as impulse, and I'd like to explore that with you because it's crucial.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, it sets up a whole landscape of expectation, for example, that's not necessarily going to play out that well in the real world, let's say.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Right, you're basically learning to be a voyeur. Right, right.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So the returning... Yeah, we have no idea what to make of that, especially for young men, because when they hit puberty, sexuality becomes a very insistent force. And we have no idea what effect pornography has on the development of male sexuality. None.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
We're built on a throwing platform.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
The word sin in many languages means to miss the target. Right. And it speaks to exactly what you're describing like that, that the cachet of action at a distance, that's unbelievably deeply embedded in us. That's why I made that throwing gesture. Like, human beings throw. That's our physiology, right? We can throw something at a distant target. Well, that's structured our cognition.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
We're using our thoughts to hit distant targets. That's what we do. All the games that young men play, so many of those games are target games. All of the sports spectacles that people want to participate in vicariously, even vicariously. They're target hitting games. Like our gaze specifies is the center of a target. There's targets everywhere.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And we're unbelievably focused on bridging the gap between where we are and where we're going. Yeah, that's the whole perceptual landscape.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
We should talk about that too, the suppression idea and the inhibition idea in general.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, that's a failure to venture, I would say, in the terminology that I've been developing. So, for example, in this book, We Who Wrestle With God, I'm... One of the stories I analyze is the story of Abraham, and it's a very interesting story psychologically. I mean, I think it's stunning, actually, and I'll lay some of that out for you and tell me what you think about it.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So the divine is characterized in the classic stories of our culture as the ultimate up. So you can think about the divine as the target as such, rather than any particular target. So here's a way of thinking about it. So an ambition will seize you, and then you'll aim at fulfilling that ambition.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
But once the ambition is fulfilled, a new ambition makes itself manifest, which might be a greater ambition, let's say, if your personality is expansive. And then if you fulfill that, the same thing will happen. So then you could imagine that there's a meta-ambition behind all proximal ambitions. Okay, now the divine... Characterization of the divine is a characterization of that meta-ambition.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Because I think there's a parallel problem there to the notion of impulse that's very much worth delving into.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
That's a good way of thinking about it. So it's something that recedes as you approach it. But it's also the thing that all ambitions have in common. And we know there is such a thing because otherwise we wouldn't have a concept of ambition, right? Which speaks to a commonality among ambitions. Okay. In the story of Abraham, The divine is characterized in relationship to something like ambition.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So Abraham has the, he's already immersed in a situation that's akin in a way to the scenario of a wealthy and a person in the modern world who's in a situation of abundance. Abraham's parents are wealthy and they provide for him. There's nothing he needs to do. And in consequence, so he's attained the socialist utopia or the consumerist utopia. You can look at it either way.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And there's no reason for him to move forward. So he doesn't. He doesn't do anything until he's 75. And then the voice comes to him, which is the voice of adventure. And it's God in this story. That's how God is defined, right? And God says to Abraham, you have to leave... all this comfort, which is a very interesting proposition to begin with.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's like, why the hell would you leave that when you have everything you need? Well, the implication is that you don't have everything you need when you're being delivered everything you need. That isn't how life works. Okay, so God says you have to leave your father's tent. You have to leave your tribe. You have to leave those who speak your language. You have to venture out into the world.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So God is conceptualized in this story as the impulse, the voice that compels you out into the world and that encourages you to do so. So that's a hypothesis about what the ultimate up is. And Abraham agrees and he does so in two ways. He builds an altar signifying his aim that he's going to abide by the
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
command of this voice or the invitation of this voice and that he'll make the appropriate sacrifices. It's a crucial point to understand because the process of transformation requires sacrifice. To be more than you are means you have to let go of that which you were. You have to make sacrifices. Now, Abraham's life is punctuated by a sequence of reaffirmations of his upward aim and
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
declamations of his willingness to sacrifice. Every time he finishes an adventure, he reconstitutes the covenant, right? So this is this agreement to follow the voice of adventure. Okay. God makes him a deal. That's the covenant. It's a very interesting deal. So now imagine, biologically speaking, that there is an instinct to integrate that operates within us. Okay, so now it's not
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's just as fundamental as the hypothalamic motivational states, let's say, but it's more sophisticated. And what it's trying to do is to integrate all the motivational states across time and socially, right? And then imagine it manifests itself as an instinct to be something like the instinct to mature. Right. To move forward. Right. To leave your zone of comfort. Right.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And maybe there have been people like Csikszentmihalyi who've characterized that as the attractiveness of flow. And maybe it's associated with the exploratory circuit in the hypothalamus that's mediated by dopamine. Okay. But it's got its character. Now, the character of that instinct in this story is... The way it's characterized is as the voice of adventure.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So it's the thing that asks you to move beyond your zone of comfort and go into the foreign world. Now, the advantage to that is that you fortify yourself and you develop, right? So no matter how good you are now, if you push yourself to the edge, you're going to be better than you are. And that's a better... win than merely being good like you are now.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So that would be participation in that transformative process is a higher form of attainment than mere attainment of any specific goal. Okay. So that's the call to adventure. That's the call to a quest. That's what Gandalf offers Bilbo, for example. Okay. God characterizes the consequences of that, and this is so cool. When I figured this out, it just flattened me. It's so interesting.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
God says, okay, if you, God is defined as that which says this, by the way. If you push yourself beyond your zone of comfort, even if it's functioning for you, that's Abraham's situation, here's what'll happen. You'll live your life in a manner that's a blessing to you. So that's a good deal, eh?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Because the miserable people you're talking about, the depressed people, the trapped people, their life isn't a blessing to themselves. So what's a pathway to blessing? Well, it's not satiation, not in this formulation. It's the voluntary quest, and it's characterized by adventure. So that's deal number one. You'll live in a life that'll be a blessing to you, okay?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And then God says, that's not all that'll happen. You'll be a blessing to yourself in a manner that will make you renowned among other people justly. So that's a good deal because we know that people, men in particular, are very status-oriented, partly because their reproductive success is highly correlated with their social status.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And, you know, the psychopaths game that, but still it's like renown is crucially important. You want to be the quarterback on the shoulders of your teammates, you know, so... That'll be the second thing that happens. And then the same voice says, and that's not all.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
You'll be a blessing to yourself and be renowned in a manner that will maximize the probability that you will establish something of lasting value. That's a good deal. So that's stretching across time. Multi-generationally, because God tells Abraham that if he follows the pathway of adventure, he'll be the father of nations.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So what that means is that he'll establish the pattern of paternal conduct that will maximally that will maximize the success of his offspring in the longest possible run. That's so cool.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Exactly. And then the final offer is you'll do that in a way that'll bring abundance to everyone else too. Now, so think about what that means biologically. This is so cool. And I can't see how it can be wrong.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It means that if you hearken to the voice that calls you out of your zone of comfort, you do that voluntarily, so you put yourself on the edge of adventure, you will be following the instinct that has already evolved to make your life a blessing to yourself, to make you successful among other people, to maximize your probability of long-term success, and to do that in a way that brings abundance to your community.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And then you think, look, let's take the contrary hypothesis. The contrary hypothesis would be twofold. There is no compulsion to adventure. It's like, that seems highly improbable. Or that the compulsion to adventure isn't aligned with psychological and social well-being.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, what's the chance that the fundamental drive that would facilitate your transformation across time would not be aligned with your psychological integrity and the success of the community? Like, we wouldn't be social animals if that was the case. So as far as I can tell... That has to be true. Now, that doesn't mean you can get lost in false adventures. That can happen.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
That's what an addiction is. Or that's what pornography is. It's a false adventure, right? It's failure to hit the proper target, you might say. But that central drive to integration across time and communally, why wouldn't that be an instinct? And then we could cap that with an observation that I also think is self-evidently true once you understand it. So imagine that you're a father.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Now this spirit of adventure is often characterized paternally, right? Insofar as God's the father in these ancient stories. So think about this. So when you see your son, now it's also true of your daughter, but I'll focus on sons for the moment. When you see your son, and you love your son, when you see your son pushing himself beyond his own limits,
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
in an adventurous manner, if you're a good father, you definitely encourage that, right? And I would say, insofar as you encourage that, you are a good father. And that would mean that you're the embodiment of that spirit that calls to adventure. That's why Abraham is characterized, for example, in this story as forging an alliance with the spirit of his ancestors, with the deity of his ancestors.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
He's embodying the call to adventure, and that's what makes him the father whose reproductive enterprise is successful across the broadest possible span of time. I think that's, I just can't see how that can be wrong. And that's a characterization of the divine.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
There's other, it complexifies it because what the stories are trying to do is to give you an image of what that integrating personality might be like. And it's sophisticated. So a single characterization is insufficient. So in the story of Noah, God is, this personality is characterized quite differently.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So Noah is presented as a man who's wise in his generations, which means that for his time and place, he's moral and reputable. So he's the sort of guy that people would go to for advice because he's lived a life that's emblematic of his wisdom, let's say. Okay, now a voice comes to him and says, batten down the hatches there, mate. Trouble's coming. Okay, so here's the hypothesis.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
The hypothesis is the voice that calls to the wise to prepare in times of trouble is a manifestation of the divine, and it's the same as the voice that calls the unwilling to adventure. That's the monotheistic hypothesis. And so you can see what the imagination is doing is agglomerating these different characterizations of high aim, insisting that there's an integrated unity behind them,
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
and then trying to conceptualize that integrated unity across time. And I think that's done with radical success in the biblical library, that the culmination of the library of stories is the impressionistic representation of this integrating pattern.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And I think that's what people call on when they're engaging in a religious enterprise that is radically successful, like that happened in the case of your friend, right? So he got a new personality and that new personality had different incentive structure. And so that just superseded the addiction.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
How does he account for it? Like, if you asked him, like, okay, you had every reason to change, and yet you didn't, and then all of a sudden you did. Like, how does he understand that?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So there's a mystery there that's kind of threefold. One is... what the hell did he mean that he realized that Jesus Christ loved him, right? That's okay. What do you mean by that? And then somehow that's associated with the vision he developed of who he could be if he was everything he could be. There's a relationship between those two things.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And then there's this third mystery is the culmination of those two phenomena, freedom of his addiction, even out of the context of the center. That's right. Very difficult to understand that. But, you know, We know, think about it this way. If you're possessed by rage, different phenomena have dopaminergic cachet to you than if you're possessed by, like, sexual desire. Like, obviously, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Right, so the idea that a given stimuli produces a given motivational response is incorrect because that's framework dependent, right? And most... So I think one of the best ways to understand a motivational drive is that a motivational drive grips the target. It establishes the target, right? And it may increase the probability that certain action patterns will make themselves manifest.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
That would be the kind of a compulsive element. But fundamentally what it's doing is changing the target. That rearranges the perceptual landscape and it transforms the emotions. Because now, if your target is there, things that lead you there are dopaminergically relevant. If your target is there, things that lead you there are relevant.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Same underlying emotion, but the stimuli, so to speak, that give rise to the emotion are radically different. So now he has a different orientation and aim, and so the incentive structure of his psyche is radically transformed. Now we know that can happen because that happens to you when you move from one motivated state to another.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Not least because as you approach successfully, the probability of ultimate success is obviously increasing. So it makes perfect sense that you would narrow and focus.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Hamartia is the Greek word, and it's literally an archery term, but it's also the word for sin in ancient Hebrew is also an archery term. And there's other languages where that's the case, but it's really important to understand that that notion is predicated on this target-seeking psychophysiology, and that that's unbelievably deeply built into us, as you pointed out.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Our eyes are target-established. Well, it's so important to us that we infer aim from gaze, right? And it's more than that. Not only do we infer aim from gaze, we mimic the psychophysiological state of the target that we're watching as a consequence of our inference of aim from gaze. So if I can see what you're looking at,
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
then I can occupy the same psychophysiological state that you do, and that's the basis of my understanding.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
In humans, we have an area- That's why a cat with no brain is hyper-exploratory, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
With the appropriate facial response.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Right. This is a big deal because it means that you can concentrate on the distal, let's say, the temporally distal, at the expense of the proximal. So, you know, if... If you're walking down the street and you hear a loud and sudden noise behind you, you'll do an anti-predator crouch and then turn, and you'll do that essentially automatically.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And you turn to the place where your stereoscopic audition has indicated that the noise emanated from, right? And that's automatic. That's the control of the eye gaze and bodily posture by those underlying... Yeah, this is a superior colloquial.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And you do that before you think. Absolutely. Okay, so that's an activation of the eye fields, let's say, by these underlying motivational systems that have this personality-like autonomy. But you can orient your... Part of the religious enterprise is to orient your eyes heavenward. Well, what does that mean? Well, you can think about it.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It means to search out the North Star that navigates for you unerringly, regardless of the situation at hand. Imagine you could progress towards a target in a manner that made all the potential targets that you could progress toward more likely. It's a meta target. You said that's what happened to your friend.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
is not only did he dispense with his addiction, but all of the other enterprises that he was pursuing in his life became more effective.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Okay. So let me put that into context. context of, let's say, an archetypal story. Okay, so I did a course for Peterson Academy on the Sermon on the Mount. And the Sermon on the Mount is a meta-goal strategy. It's very practical. It's very, very practical. And it emerges out of the biblical tradition in a very grounded manner. It's a logical extension of the biblical ethical precursors.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So what Christ says to his followers in the course of the Sermon on the Mount is First, orient your eyes upward. Okay, so that's in alignment with the notion that the firstborn is to be consecrated to God. There's a meaning to that, and the meaning is something like this. Imagine that your life consists of a sequence of episodes. Okay, an episode has a beginning and a middle and an end.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
The beginning sets the frame for the episode. So at the beginning of an enterprise, you want to lift your eyes heavenward so you establish the highest possible goal so that that constitutes the frame of perception for that episode. That's the idea. That's why the firstborn should be consecrated to God.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
We kind of know that we need a rule book. You admitted that in some ways implicitly when you discussed the fact that we have a 25-year socialization window. And what that means is that we have to interact with other people and our traditions in order to set us right. And that's so complex it takes 25 years. And so we're learning something from that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So, for example, to think about it prosaically, before we sat down for our podcast, because we've done many podcasts, we strive to inhabit the framework that will make the podcast most radically successful. Now, you could imagine that that could be subordinated to either of our
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
proximal desire for an increase in short-term personal fame right or we could try to dominate each other in the conversation or we could orient ourselves properly and we could do what we could to pursue the track towards revelation so to speak and we could elevate our conversation in that manner okay and that would set the frame for the conversation and the good podcasters always do that right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
They're not playing games. Or if they're playing games, it's of the highest possible order. It's a quest. Yeah, okay. Quest for what? Enlightenment, for truth, right? For mutual understanding. And then maybe for the education of those who are participating. Alright, so Christ says first, orient your eyes upward, right? That's to love God above all.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So whatever that upward divinity is, you establish an allegiance with that, and you allow that to determine your perceptions and your motivations. Next, Operate under the assumption that other people like you participate in that nature of that utmost aim and treat them that way. Next, concentrate on the moment. Right. Right. And that's exactly right because it's exactly right because
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
When you specify your aim, the pathway makes itself manifest. Otherwise, you could never use your senses to orient. You'd never get anywhere, right? So if you aim upward to the best of your ability, then the pathway upward is what will make itself manifest in front of you. Then you have to attend to it. And so then you get this weird perverse optimality, which is you're focused on the
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
longest temporal scale and the highest possible elevation and you can make most use of what's right in front of you. And that the implication in the Sermon on the Mount is that there's no difference between that and participating in life eternal as it unfolds in the moment. And I think that seems to me to be exactly right. It's exactly right.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And so, you know, I was thinking of that because you said your friends, all of your friends' endeavors had become elevated. So imagine that... one probably might want to solve is what your goals should be.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
But a much deeper problem would be how do you conceptualize your goals in relationship to one another across the broadest span of time and person so that every goal has the highest probability of succeeding? So that would be like the pursuit of a meta-goal. I would say that's what defines the religious enterprise. There's another variant of that, for example. So a variant of that would be
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Not how do you solve the problem of any given thing that terrifies you, but how do you solve the problem of the class of things that terrify you. And the dragon fight mythology is the solution to that problem. So the attitude there is you adopt the stance of voluntary, what? A voluntary approach in the face of terror because that's the best meta strategy, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And that's the strategy that works to protect you across the largest possible array of dangerous situations. This is what we learned in as clinical psychologists with exposure therapy. You find the particulars of what someone is afraid of, that turns out to be somewhat irrelevant. You teach people to voluntarily confront what they're avoiding, and that doesn't make them less afraid.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And that's indication that our, let's say, default biological settings are insufficient to guide us into the future, right? And so then the question is, well, what is it that you're learning as a consequence of that socialization process? And you can think about it. And people have thought about it as a series of complex inhibitions of lower order motivational states, impulses.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It makes them more competent and braver, and that generalizes. The religious pursuit is the pursuit of meta-goals in relationship to positive and negative emotion. That's a good way of thinking about it.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, that's life more abundant, or that's the symbolic terminology, or life in eternity. Both of those are the same thing. So imagine you're fighting with your wife. Okay, now you're dominated by rage. Now, the advantage to that is you're ready. But the disadvantage is you're going to strive for proximal victory. Okay, now, you don't want to be a pushover. That's a mistake.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So then what could you do instead? You could pause and you could remember, okay, if this could rectify itself in the best possible manner, what would that look like? Well, it's complicated, right? You don't want your wife to be defeated and you don't want to be defeated and you want to solve the problem. But you don't want to sweep it under the rug.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
You want to solve it in a way that's solved, that works across time, that benefits your relationship in an upward manner.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
You will be. If you don't alter your aim, you will be. Because you need to substitute. You've got to think, I'd really like to win this. Like, I'd seriously like to win this battle. It's like, no, you need something better than that victory. And that would be... a victory that would deepen and enrich your relationship and help it grow across time. And then you can remember that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's like, I'm gonna listen, even though I think my wife is wrong, I'm going to listen and I'm going to see if I can find a pathway in the argument that makes our relationship better. And then you think, now you have to really want that because if you really want that, if you got that vision fleshed out properly, you'll want that more than you'll want to win. And then you might say, well, why?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's like, because it's a better deal. So there's one of Christ's parables where he talks about a pearl of great price, which is the pearl that a rich man would sell everything he owns to possess. And it's something like a reference to that. It's like, why would you ever attain a proximal victory if you could attain an ultimate victory?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
That's the battle, let's say, between the salvation of the soul and the victory in sin. That's how the religious language would portray it. Well, you can win a local victory, and it looks like you win. But if you forego the ultimate game... That's not a victory, that's a defeat, obviously. It might even be a worse defeat than if you lost.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
But I'm not very happy with the inhibition model because inhibition is unsophisticated socialization. Integration is sophisticated socialization. So here's a way of... I really learned this, I think, from contrasting Freud with Piaget. Because Freud's model, superego, is really an inhibition model. And Freud was a neurologist. Piaget's model was very different.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
No reward without commensurate sacrifice. That's right.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Complete with intermittent random reinforcement, which is what happens when something goes viral unpredictably.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, that's also a hallmark of maturity.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I think you can ask even a better question than that. The better question would be, and this is kind of what's referred to in the Sermon on the Mount, is how could I optimize my long-term view while maximizing my focus on the moment? Because then you get both. That's a really good deal, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Because now you're conducting yourself in a manner that works in an iterated way, that's socially productive, And maybe intergenerationally socially productive, that would be the best thing to establish. That's kind of what you're doing as a good father. But you're doing that in a manner that enables you to also derive maximal impact from each step you take forward in the present. So
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Carl Friston told me we were talking about entropy and emotion. And I'd figured out a few years ago with a couple of my students that anxiety signifies the emergence of entropy, like technically, which I was really thrilled about because it gives emotion a physical grounding, like a real physical grounding. And Friston surprised me because he said,
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
He thought of the properly socialized person as someone who had integrated their lower order, we'll call them impulses for now, into a sustainable voluntary structure that regulated them and gave them all their proper place. That's very different than an inhibitory model. So for example, I'll give you an example from my own life. My son was quite a willful, Young child.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
He has a theory of positive emotion that's analogous. He also knew the negative emotion. He'd also been working in that domain. He said that you get a dopamine kick when you reduce the entropy in relationship to a goal. And I thought, oh my God, that's so cool because it means that uncertainty is entropy. When it emerges, you get anxious.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
But when you see yourself stepping towards a goal, you get a dopamine kick. And the reason that's related to entropy is because With each step, successful step you take towards a goal, you reduce the uncertainty of the pursuit, which is manifested in that phenomena you described, which is when you see the finish line, you start running faster. Right. So they're both related to entropy.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Okay, so that was exactly the thread. So there's two corollaries of that. One is that the more valuable the goal towards which you're progressing, the higher the dopamine kick per unit of advancement. So what that means is you want an ultimate goal operating in the domain of each proximal sub-goal. And that's what happens with this upward orientation.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's like, what you're trying to do is to make things as good as they could be, whatever that means, over the longest possible span of time for the largest number of people, you included. Now, you're not going to know exactly how to do that, but that can be your goal.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Okay, now that's going to inform your perceptions and your perceptions of pathway, but it's also going to modify your reward system because now, every proximal step forward is an indicator of entropy reduction in regard to that meta goal. Well, there isn't any, by definition, there isn't anything you can do that's more exciting than that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
See, that kind of explains why your friend was able to pop out of his addictive frame because now he's doing something that's so worthwhile that the temptation of alcohol, let's say, pales in comparison.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right, exactly. And now you can imagine that You can imagine a situation where a culture explores across time to find out how to characterize that goal such that if that goal is pursued, people integrate psychologically in a manner that integrates them socially across large spans of time. I think that's what happens when the monotheistic revelation emerges. That's what's happening.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
from a biological perspective is that we're starting to characterize the longest term goal. Yeah, something like that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
That's also extremely salutary because if you're being rejected, like say you're a foraging male and you're being rejected all the time. and you forego that for pornography, what you're foregoing is the corrective that all those women are offering you. Like they're rejecting you because there is something wrong. Like seriously, there's something wrong. And now you escape from that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
You think, well, that's a relief because no more rejection. It's like, yeah, no more rejection, no more learning, no more improvement, and no possibility of of an actual life.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No distal, no distal accomplishment.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's worse than that. Yeah. because it's more pornography in a degenerating game, because as you said, you have to chase that novelty edge.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, fair enough. And my father was, you know, a formidable character. And so my son liked to do what he liked to do. And it took him quite a bit of tussling with him to help him, I wouldn't say inhibit that or regulate it, to integrate it. And one of the consequences of that was he became a very good athlete. And so why is that relevant?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, and that means what? It's going to get more and more extreme? Well, that's not a good scenario. That's not a good... Like, what do you mean more and more extreme exactly? Like, where does that end? Well, you know, a casual glance at online pornography can give you some real insight into where that ends. Like, there's... That's a bottomless pit, and...
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And in the most pernicious possible manner, because sexuality can definitely twist itself into pathological forms that undermine psychological integrity and demolish society.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yes, well, time is the problem, as we've been pointing out. Let me tell you another story. This is from Revelation. So Revelation is a vision of the end of time. Okay, now Time ends all the time, like our adventures end, our lives end, our relationships end. So the end has a pattern. Revelation is a vision of the eternal pattern of the end. So here's an element of the vision. It's so remarkable.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I figured this out with my friend Jonathan Paggio. So there's a vision, a sub-vision in the sequential dream of Revelation. of the scarlet beast and the whore of Babylon. And it's very relevant to our discussion on pornography. You'll understand it right away. So it's a vision of how society disintegrates.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Now imagine when society disintegrates, men disintegrate according to their pattern, and women disintegrate according to their pattern. That makes perfect sense, right? Because if society disintegrates, it's going to be men and women who disintegrate. There's no reason to assume that their pattern of disintegration would be identical. Okay.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Scarlet Beast is... That's the Scarlet Beast of the state. That's Babylon, let's say. That's the degenerate tyrannical state. It has multiple heads. Why? Because whatever united it has vanished. That's like the death of God. It's vanished. And so now it's got heads in every direction. So it's confused. And it's red, scarlet, because that's... That confusion... that disintegration is the
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
precursor to the river of blood, right? The Red Sea, the swamp of chaos. So when the patriarchal state disintegrates, it loses its unity and then its multiple heads, right? And that's the emblem of descent into diverse chaos.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Precisely, precisely. It's not integrated. Okay. Now, that's the disintegration of the patriarchy, you might say. Atop that is the Whore of Babylon. That's a beautiful woman who's subordinated her psyche to the demands of sexuality. She's the mother of all prostitutes. Right. So she's extremely attractive and she's clad in gold and she holds a cup.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's very graphic imagery that has nothing but the consequences of her fornication in it.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, she seems to be rethinking her plan given the emotional consequences she had to her last success. Yeah, I must say... Her mother is her finance officer.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, because it wasn't like he stopped being assertive or even aggressive. It's that he learned how to put that aggression in its proper place in relationship to a goal that was much more sophisticated than merely getting his own way moment to moment. Okay, so integration's a better, like a very sophisticated athlete, a team athlete in particular, isn't not aggressive.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's way darker than anybody who wanted to hold on to their sanity would possibly imagine.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Okay. So that's a great example. That young woman who's betrayed herself in the deepest possible manner and all of the people that are following her and all the young women who are influenced by her. So you have this... figure on the back of the degenerate state. That's the degenerate feminine. Female sexuality commoditizes when the masculine state degenerates. That's a sign of the end of things.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And that makes perfect sense because, well, why wouldn't female sexuality commoditize when the masculine is no longer reliable? It's exactly what you'd expect. You know how the story ends? There's another element to it. The degenerate state offers the whore of Babylon as enticement for its degeneration. You can have everything you want on the sexual side.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
At the end of that substory, the state, the beast, kills the prostitute. And so what that means is that the long-term consequences of sacrifice-less sexual satiety is that sexuality itself is destroyed. And I think we're seeing that in our society now. 30% of Japanese under the age of 30 are virgins, right? About the same in South Korea, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
The birth rates in those countries have plummeted, like they're way, way below replacement. And increasingly, 50% of women in the West are childless at 30.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And going down as well. 50% are childless. Half of them will never have a child because 30 is already pushing it. And 95% of them will regret it. We're already in a situation in the West where one in four women will be involuntarily childless.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Right, and so it's so, well, that's a good example, as I said earlier, of how these things are characterized in this symbolic language that outlines the starkest, you might say, the starkest of biological realities. You said that there was a problem, you know, your sense was that there was a problem with effortless gratification.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's like, well, the problem, part of the problem with effortless gratification is it destroys itself. And it's so interesting because the promise of the sexual revolution and the pill was an unlimited horizon of sexual opportunity. We know, but the actual consequence of that appears to be that that's the pathway to the demise of sexuality itself.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And they're not inhibiting their aggression on the playing field. They may now and then when they're provoked, let's say, but all things considered, what they've done is subordinate their aggression to a higher order goal that enables them to be more successful, but also to be successful in a maximally social and sustainable way.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Right, right. That promise.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, I mean, in the aftermath of the birth control pill, it was not surprising that people thought maybe that was possible. But that was wrong. It was seriously wrong. And we're going to be dealing with the consequences of that for a very long time.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
No, no, you can't... Men and women degenerate at the same rate, right? I mean, we're involved in feedback processes that are so tight that there's no... Like, there's no oppressing women without oppressing men. There's no oppressing men without oppressing women. It's like we're joined at the hip, so to speak.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
and so you know these cultures that cloak women and silence them you might think well that leads to the domination of men it just turns men into pathological tyrants like There's no victory over one sex that's a victory of any sense at all.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Of course, of course, of course.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I think that's exactly the theme of the story of Abraham. It's like the most, the highest form of potential satiation is risky romantic adventure. It's not satiation, right? That's the wrong frame, right? And so one of the things I've noticed, this is such fun. I've talked in front of, I don't know how many public audiences in the last eight years, independent of my professorial career.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And those are large audiences. Um, you know, they must average about three or 4,000 people. And there's one place I go that always reduces the audience to like dead silence. The audiences are usually quiet in the events. That's one of the ways, I'm sure you know this, you want to listen to the audience. You want to stay in that zone where no one's moving.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And Piaget's point, and he's absolutely right about this, is that that's much better conceptualized as integration. And then with regard to impulse, because I said I would return to that, I spent a lot of time walking through the behavioral literature, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Because then you know their attention is focused. And you can hear that. And you can, I wouldn't say, you can play with it, not manipulatively, but in the proper sense of play. I learned a long while ago that Adventure, let's say, is the highest form of reward. That's a good way of thinking about it. But there's a corollary to that that conservatives need to learn because they don't know this.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Conservatives talk about responsibility, but they're conscientious. And so for them, responsibility is dutiful, orderly productivity. It's conscientiousness. Responsibility is a conscientious duty. What they fail to understand is that there's no difference between responsibility and adventure. They're the same thing. And you can tell young men in particular that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Say, look, you want to have an adventure because you definitely want an adventure. You're like, you're built for that. It will increase your status. It will improve your life. Like it'll improve the probability that you'll accomplish something. You want an adventure. Every fiber of your being is screaming for it. Where do you find it? You find it in the voluntary adoption of responsibility.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And that's like, everyone needs to know that. No young person has been taught that for like five generations.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, it's also a great rich, it's a great morning ritual because it's often the case, especially if you have a bit of a depressive tilt that it's kind of hard to get oriented properly in the morning, you know? And if you take, like I moved into a new house a while back in, in Northern Ontario and, And the garage wasn't set up properly.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And the first thing I did in the morning was I went out in the garage for 10 minutes. And 10 minutes isn't very long, but I would like order one thing, you know, part of the toolbox or whatever. And like if you do that every day, things fall into order pretty quickly. But it was a real relief to me in some way because I didn't have to think about what I was going to do when I woke up.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And a lot of that was derived from animal experiments and it was predicated on the idea that if you could explain something on the basis of a deterministic reflex, you should. And there's something to be said for that hypothesis. Don't make your... Theory any more complex than it needs to be. How far can you get with a theory of chained reflexes, a deterministic theory?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I made my bed. And then I went and fixed the garage for like 10 minutes.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, let's take that apart because it's not immediately obvious. But... Look, when you go, let's say you go see an adventure movie, James Bond movie, you know, classic archetypal action adventure movie with some romance thrown in there. What is he doing? Well, difficult things.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Yeah, he's trying to battle with the forces of chaos that undermine the international order, right? I mean, it's high order adventure. And he's putting himself at substantive risk to do that. That's the sacrificial element to it. But everybody's gripped by it. Well, why? Because the stakes are high. What does it mean for the stakes to be high? It means the outcome matters. What does that mean?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It means it's a life and death situation. Like, none of that makes itself present without the hoisting of a burden. And here's something else I figured out. So remarkable. So, I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, which is the first church that was, the first Christian church that was established. And hypothetically, it was established on the location of the crucifixion, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And so at the center of the church is an altar and at the center of the altar is the image of this crucifixion, right? Which is a sacrificial image. Okay. Crucifixion, sacrificial image, altar, church. Then around the church is the community. And then that becomes the pattern for European towns, right? And all the towns that everyone wants to go visit in Europe have that pattern. Okay, so why?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, Responsible sacrifice is at the core of the community. That's what's dramatized in all that, in that architecture, in that sacred architecture, in the actual, in the structure of the community with its center. Well, of course sacrifice is the center of the community. Obviously, because community is a sacrificial gesture, like
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Insofar as you're not all about what you want right now, you're offering up a sacrifice of what it is that you want right now to the future and the community. Clearly, and now that's going to integrate you psychologically, it's going to integrate the society and make it productive. And it's so interesting that we acted that out for, that proposition out for, well, the whole...
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
at least insofar as you're talking about Christian-oriented civilization for the last 2,000 years, without ever really noticing that we were dramatizing the proposition that sacrifice is at the center of the community. It's like, well, obviously.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
The behaviorists got a long way. They couldn't get to the highest strata of human endeavor with a chained reflex theory, but there was a lot of things they did that were very good. But one of the things they made a big mistake about was to conceptualize motivational states, let's say, as impulses or drives. That's not sufficient because it fails to take
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So you're asking a symbolic question in some ways. Like, you're asking, what is the nature of the relationship between... the state of society in general and the fact that the centers of cities have deteriorated. Well, those aren't unrelated, not in the least. They're very tightly related because the center does not hold, right? What's the famous poem from the 1920s? The center is loosened, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And mere chaos is around, mere chaos is set upon the world. I haven't got the quote precisely right. That was T.S. Eliot. He knew that when the center pillar disintegrates, then everything falls into chaos. That's one of the oldest realizations of humankind. The question might be, what has caused the degeneration of the center? Well, man, you could think about that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
The whole culture war is meditation on exactly that question. You know, there's an insistence on the postmodern side. So the postmodernists, they figured out that we see the world through a story. They were right. And that's a devastating blow to the empiricists and the rationalists because they were wrong. We do not build our knowledge in consequence of an aggregation of facts.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
That's not how it works. And a story is something like the prioritization of the world of facts.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's also, the thing is, the story creeps into science in, what would you say, unavoidably. So here, let me give you an example. So I read a book once that was written by an ex-KGB agent named, who talked about a lab in the Soviet Union where there was a dreadful accident at one point that resulted in the death of about 500 people. They were trying to produce an amalgam of Ebola and smallpox.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And then to aerosolize it. Oh, goodness. Okay, now look, from a strictly scientific perspective... value-free. There's no difference between pursuing that branch of knowledge and pursuing any other. Now you say, well, that's preposterous. It's like, yes, but it's preposterous because we know that you can have an evil scientist.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I mean, Jesus, that's the trope of how many movies is evil scientist, uses evil scientist as a trope. Like the bad guy is almost always an evil scientist, right? So it's not like we don't know this. So that science itself, which is the value-free pursuit of facts, can be an evil enterprise. If you're a good scientist, the story is always lurking in the background.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
into account the effect of those states on perception. So it's much better to think of a motivated state. This is what helped me integrate behavioral theory with psychoanalytic theory, especially the psychoanalytic theory of religious endeavor. It's much better to think of those lower order motivational states as personalities. They're sub-personalities. They have their perceptions.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Like, why are you conducting your investigation? Well, I want to understand more about the human psyche. Well, why? Well, I want to be of aid to the human enterprise. I want to make things better. That's the story. I want to pursue truth in a manner that makes things better. That's the story part. And you might say, well, that's self-evidence.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Like, it's only self-evident when it's working properly. When it's not working properly, things get bad quick. So there were scientists in Unit 731 when the Japanese invaded China. And you cannot read about what they did without traumatizing yourself permanently for the rest of your life, right? What happened with Unit 731, it's the worst human atrocity I've ever seen by a lot.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And that was the scientific enterprise gone astray, let's say, it has to be encapsulated within a value structure. And the question is, well, what's the appropriate value structure? We're starting to figure that out because, you know, I talked to Richard Dawkins about this a little bit.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
One of the things that disheartens Dawkins is that as the humanistic enterprise has progressed and as the atheistic impulse has made itself more manifest, the assault on science and logic at the universities has intensified.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Because his notion was if we could just free ourselves from the superstitions of the past, everyone would become like a hybrid between, let's say, Newton and Bacon and Descartes. It's like, no, it turns out that when you destabilize the underlying story, everybody becomes a narcissistic, immature psychopath, and they don't make good scientists.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And the evidence for that is kind of stark, because I'm sure you've observed, like I've observed, that over the last 20 years, the scientific enterprise has become a lot less reliable than it was.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
They're a little bit intense on the career formulation side of things.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, let's think about that critically. It's like science is a very weird endeavor because in order to actually be a scientist, you have to put discovering that you're wrong before demonstrating that you're right. And that is hard on your career in the short term. Like if you play that game and you're good at it, you can discover something real.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
But that's going to take a while, and it's not certain. It's not at all surprising that people would subvert an enterprise that difficult to the narrow demands of career enhancement. It's exactly what you'd expect, unless there was a stunningly powerful countervailing force. And that force was powerful enough, let's say, from 1550 to...
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
They have their objects of perception. They have their cognitive rationalizations. You certainly see that in addiction, let's say. They have their emotions. They are small personalities, unidimensional, very narrow-minded personalities. But they're personalities. They're not impulses.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
1980 so that science worked but that's a short period of time and it's only happened once and we don't know what conditions had to be in place for people to actually like seriously prioritize the truth seriously because that's what a serious scientist does and so it's not surprising that it would degenerate into something like dynasty and nepotism that's exactly what you'd expect that's the historical norm so then you might think well what are the preconditions that have to be in place
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
as narrative foundation for there to be at least some people that are prioritizing the truth.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Otherwise, well, science is the handmaiden of some story. There's no way around that because motivation is the handmaiden of some story. And so... the motivational framework has to be put in place accurately, and the motivational framework for scientific inquiry is very stringent. Truth above all. Right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So if you stake your whole goddamn career on a particular hypothesis, and you run a critical study, and it turns out that the reason you're famous is invalid, you have to publish that. Why the hell would you do that? Right? And the answer has to be because you hold the truth, in relationship to human flourishing, higher than the integrity of your own, even your own self valuation.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, man, that's a very difficult thing to establish. Now, you can do that with young scientists to some degree, because you can help them understand that as a medium to long-term game, there's nothing better than pursuit of the truth. And so that's worth a risk. it's worth the risk because you can be spectacularly successful if you pursue the truth.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's unlikely, like it's unlikely to be a successful entrepreneur. But if you get it right, man, you, like you've hit the mother load, right? And, You don't want to falsify your data because you want to spend your whole life pursuing something that doesn't exist. Because you will talk yourself into belief that your falsifications are true. And then you'll warp the whole field.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
As you said, you illustrated that in relationship to Alzheimer's disease. Like you can instill love of the truth in your students. But you have to believe that's a story too. You have to believe that the truth will set you free. Right. And that's a religious presumption in the final analysis. Serve truth. It's the best long term strategy. It's the best adventure. That's a good thing to know too.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's the best adventure. So I made a triumvirate of truth, responsibility and adventure saying they're the same thing. And I figured it out with regard to truth too. Truth is an adventure because if you What would you say? Vow to follow the path of the truth. You have to let go of the predictability of the outcome.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Right now, if I wanted to manipulate you in some way, I would craft my strategy for this podcast a priori. And then I would tilt the podcast toward that end, right? And I could be more or less sophisticated than that. Or I could just say, we're going to follow the thread wherever it goes. And I'm going to accept the outcome.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It depends on how integrated you are because you could be nothing but a succession of dominion of sub personalities. That's what a two year old is. Right. And so you have to build an integrating personality on top of those sub personalities, but not in a manner that inhibits them. That means your socialization is in unsophisticated.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And I'm going to presume that the outcome is the best outcome that could possibly have been, even if I don't see why. Okay, why is that an adventure? Because if I let go of my predetermined goal, I don't know what's going to happen. And that's exciting. That's right, because you don't know. Well, that's the essence of adventure.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's like you're bounding over the uncharted sea, let's say, and you don't know what's going to happen next. Well, why would you exchange that for like a kind of banal predictability? Well, to build your career just... I mean, I understand why, but you're foregoing what's truly valuable for something that's second rate, for something that's secure. That's what Abraham did.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's like, yeah, it's better to have the adventure. Why the hell wouldn't you want that?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And dangerous. Like, he ends up as a warrior at one point. He has to raise an army to rescue his nephew from the hands of tyrants. It's like, you know, all the adventures of life get thrown at him. But it turns out that that's what he wants. He wants all the adventures of life to be thrown at him. And that is what everyone wants. And I think that is...
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
You know the idea that when you go watch The Lord of the Rings, for example, or The Hobbit, you're seeing the characterization of human personality dramatized. Obviously, right? That's like a truism. But you have to think about what that means. It's like The Hobbit is Abraham. It's exactly the same story. And that story is the story of the, that's the genuine identity of the individual.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And the promise is, is that if you aim up and you live in the spirit of the truth, you'll have the redemptive adventure of your life. And that'll be of such significance that it'll justify the suffering that's intrinsic to life. And I think that's right. I mean, when you look at your own life, I mean, You're on an adventure. You have this podcast. It's ridiculously successful, right?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
In a way that I'm sure you couldn't have imagined.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Right, okay. And so what's the existential consequence of that? Like, you know, I mean, everyone's life is rife with the possibility of suffering and now you have something exciting, and generative to do. Why is that working? I mean, existentially, why does that work?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
deep deep deep love of finding organizing and disseminating information that i hope will be useful to people okay so that's it okay that's what that's the driving force behind all of it okay so great so so i would say i don't think that that proclamation i don't think is any different any different from the notion of identity with the redeeming word that's the same idea because you said generated generating ideas right information and disseminating it right so that's like
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Even Freud knew this because even though he had basically an inhibitory model of say, super ego regulation, um, He believed that a healthy personality would have the impulse of aggression and the impulse of sexuality to take two major lower order motivational states into account, would have them integrated into the functioning ego. The issue is integration.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's valid inquiry and dissemination of the consequences. Okay, your claim is that that's highly intrinsically motivating.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Okay, so then we might say, well, what's the basis for that intrinsic pleasure? We think about that biologically. Well, you could imagine it as a manifestation of the... instinct that integrates, right? It integrates you across time, it integrates you with other people across time, right? And there's a marker for that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Why wouldn't you find your... How could it be otherwise that you would find your deepest satisfaction in pursuing the course of action that integrates you psychologically and integrates other people socially? Like that would assume that there's a concordance between your deepest self-interest and the interest of your society.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And it better be that way because otherwise you couldn't thrive as an individual in society. So it better be that way. And we've been doing this for a very long time as human beings. So why we wouldn't have an instinct to mark that pathway? And of course, we'd find our deepest satisfaction in that. I mean, once you see these issues through that light, they become, I think, painfully obvious.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Also because the contrary hypothesis is absurd. It's like you're going to find deep satisfaction, what, rejecting knowledge. And if you do happen to stumble across a nugget, you're going to hoard it for yourself. Right, well, right, right, exactly. It's laughable. It's clearly laughable. No one believes that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Two of the most, two of the highest order characterizations of the divine in the biblical library is calling and conscience. And you could think about those, you could think about those as integrated manifestations of positive and negative emotion. So imagine there's a pathway. forward to your aim, okay?
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Your negative emotion tells you when you deviate from the pathway, and your positive emotion tells you when you're progressing along the pathway. Okay, now imagine that there's a voice of your integrated positive emotion, and there's a voice of your integrated negative emotion. Calling, that's what fills you with enthusiasm, and the root word of that is theos, right? Deos, that's God.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Calling, conscience. Okay, so now that beckons you forward. So how do you find that? Some things bother you. Those are your problems. And you might think, I don't want to have any problems. It's like, no, you've got some problems. You can tell that because those things bug you. That's your conscience calling you to your destiny. Those problems, okay? Calling. There's some things that interest you.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And you don't get to pick them exactly. They just sort of make themselves manifest, like the burning bush did to Moses, because that's an example. That's the symbolic representation of calling. It's the dynamism between calling and conscience that orients people upwards. That's the pillar of flame and the pillar of darkness that guides the Israelites across the desert when they're lost.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Calling beckons. Conscience provides disciplinary limitations. That's a good way of thinking about it. So you can see that some things are good. You ask yourself, what bothers me about me? Okay, now you have a domain. You think, well, man, some of those things, I just, I don't know how to fix them. Fine. Don't fix them. Fix some of the things you could fix. We talked about that.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And so what you're doing when you're social, like, okay, when my son, for example, would become willful in a manner that I regarded as counterproductive for him and the household. And the rule would be you can't act that way because if you act that way, people aren't going to approve of you. And that's a bad plan.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Or make your goddamn bed in the morning. You could do that. And it's like you see people, their lives are so chaotic. Their living environment, every single bit of it is a catastrophic mess. Sometimes multiple generations deep. It's just chaos everywhere. It's like, where do you start dealing with chaos? Wherever you can, put something in order by your own standards of order.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And then see what happens. Because what will happen is now you've got a little corner of order. And now you're a little more well-situated. And then you'll be able to see what's the next step. And you might think, well, it looks hopeless because there's just chaos everywhere. It's like, it's okay because the process is exponential.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So even if you start nowhere, if you keep doubling, you're going to get somewhere and faster than you think. And, well, the same thing applies when you're plummeting into the abyss, unfortunately.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, that's an entropic problem. There's way more ways to make something complex worse. than there are to make it better. Right. That's why it's a straight and narrow path.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Look, voluntary, the, what would you say, the evocation of voluntary chaos, that's one thing. The degeneration into chaos through sloth, let's say, that's not an adventure. That's carelessness in all things Masquerading as an adventure. I'm so cool. I don't care.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It's like you're not cool You're just useless and you're covering your uselessness with a veneer of revolutionary morality It's like there's nothing in that that's up like if people want to deviate in the manner they present themselves in dress and they're doing that because they have a inspiration or a purpose and then that's completely different than just being so cool you don't care.
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How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
So you have to control that because it's not going to work out well for you if you don't. Okay, so I use timeout. Now, timeout is an effective disciplinary strategy for social creatures because we don't like isolation. And so timeout basically takes a child, puts the child in isolation. That produces a pain-like response because social isolation produces pain. It's pure inhibition.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And that's not cool. There's nothing about that that's cool. And, you know, you might say, and you had this sense when you were a kid that your dad was overreacting. It's like, yeah, well, if you look, you can see things before other people see them. And he came from a place that had gone through a fair number of very rough times. And so... He could have been perfectly accurate in what he saw.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Highly likely. That's another example of the center disintegrating.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
If I had to hazard a guess, I would say the first thing I would be looking for is pathological narcissism. Disordered thought? Possibly, but... He was quite successful academically. Like the typical pattern for something like schizophrenic dissolution is very, very much difficulty in maintaining. So discipline, striving in a highly intellectual atmosphere, for example.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
I think more Luciferian grandiosity. And the intellect is particularly prone to that. You know, the archetypal representation of the intellect that overreaches is Lucifer. God's highest angel gone most catastrophically wrong, which means that the best thing in its place is the worst thing on the top. That happens with sexuality. It can happen with aggression.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
It certainly happens with the intellect. And so I think he's a worshipper of his own intellect and believed that he was the guy who could make the decision, even of life and death, which means he took onto himself the role of ultimate judge. And that's what the kid who shot up Columbine did too and said in his own writings. He's the judge. And that's like narcissistic beyond comprehension.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, that's the question. You see, that's the question. He had to inhibit his immediate desire, say, to run around because he was gonna sit on the steps. But see, I put a rule in place there. And the rule was, as soon as you get yourself under control, you can leave the stairs. Okay, so now the question is, what does under control mean? One interpretation is inhibition.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And the fact that he's being celebrated, well, that's an echo of that moralizing narcissism that's deeply embedded in our culture. Deeply embedded. And so, yeah, it's a very ugly, it's very ugly. I see, so we're going to, what, we're now vigilantes in relationship to the corporate world, judge, jury, and executioner.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And the reason we've taken on that role is because we, unlike, let's say, the people who run healthcare enterprises, we truly care for the sick and oppressed. It's like, do you now? Do you now? There's so much moralizing in our culture. It's really beyond belief.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Short-term route to high status. So... Ignored or notorious, there's a hard choice for young men. They'll pick notorious. Many of them will. And no wonder, because status is everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, and he can clearly do them. Neuralink. He's been insanely successful doing five impossible things simultaneously. Right. That's not fluke. No. Right. Once. Probably not fluke even once. But, you know, the probability that it's fluke once is higher. Five times? No, that's a reputation. Right. And so he's a from first principle sort of guy. So, yeah, I wouldn't bet against Elon Musk.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And that is independent of his political stance. And is it difficult to do good things?
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Right. But it's also intensely. The thing is, it's also this is that back to that issue of the relationship between responsibility and adventure. It's like if the aim is true, the voyage is worthwhile. And so and that happens right away. Like, you know, you're very successful with your podcast, but my suspicions are you've deeply enjoyed it since its onset.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Well, that means that some of your pleasure is satiation-related. You've become successful, but if that was your aim, you would have failed as a podcaster.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Right, right, right. Well, that's the prioritization of the short term over the long run. I mean... Rogan's a perfectly appropriate example because he's sort of like the archetype of the successful podcaster. It's like, What's Joe doing? Well, he's doing what he's always done.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
He sits down with his producer, one guy, and he talks to people he wants to talk to about things he wants to talk to them about. That's the whole thing. The lefties who refused to talk to people in the podcast world for 10 years are now proclaiming to everyone who will listen that they should have built their own
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Another interpretation is, no, no, he's developing a superordinate personality, probably cortically, that has enough dominion so that those underlying motivational states can now be integrated and placed properly into a hierarchy. And when I'm insisting that he regulate his behavior, and I allow him to move off the step when he
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
you know, alternative media apparatus and they could have participated in the one that exists now at any time had they shown the least proclivity to do so. It's not such an easy thing to build because it wasn't something that Joe built. It was something that happened around him in consequence of the nature of his pursuit. And that's the case for virtually all the successful podcasters.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
He claims consistently to not be sufficiently right. That's why he listens and asks questions. You don't ask genuine questions if you believe that you already know everything. You only ask real questions if you don't think that you know enough. And Joe wouldn't be perennially attractive to his audiences if he wasn't asking the same questions that the audience would like to have answered.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Absolutely. Well, Musk himself said, you know, when I interviewed him, he talked about a terrible existential crisis that he had when he was 13, 14, which is not atypical of, you know, people with outstanding intellects, let's say. And he resolved that by recognizing that the quest is the source of meaning. And so he took it upon himself to confront difficult problems and try to solve them.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
And he found that to be sufficiently gratifying so his existential crisis resolved itself. And that's very much the same pattern that Rogan is exemplifying in you, in your pursuits. And you can see what impact it has on the public. I was talking with one of your staff members before this podcast about your lectures, say, in Australia. And so you're in the weird position where
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
5,000 people come and listen to a biologist lecture spontaneously for what, 90 minutes? Like, what the hell? Well, that's just an indication of how compelled people are by anything approximating a genuine quest. It doesn't even matter the direction, right? It matters the commitment and that capacity to explore and transmit. And that is a manifestation of the word that redeems.
Huberman Lab
How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
is now able to be a social creature again, instead of falling prey to his whim. I'm reinforcing the cortical integration of those underlying motivational states. Now, you might think the human organism comes into the world with a warring battleground of primordial motivational states. That's a perfectly reasonable view.
KILL TONY
#717 - ANTONIO BROWN + TOMMY POPE
Oh, I'd get him off the stage and wave for him. You mean bastards right away. LAUGHTER He signed up for it, Jordan. He signed up for it. I've been watching all of you, eh? And he's saner than any of you four. And he's a lot saner than most of you. So just a casual observation. I love it.
KILL TONY
#717 - ANTONIO BROWN + TOMMY POPE
Yeah, well, what's Homer Simpson say? Alcohol, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems. Yeah.
KILL TONY
#717 - ANTONIO BROWN + TOMMY POPE
I fucking love it. I'd also congratulate our comedian here for his bravery or his masochism. I'm not sure which. Might be a fetish, but it might be humor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I mean, there are ideas that are potentially as dangerous. The nihilistic idea is pretty dangerous, although it's more of a disintegrating notion than a unifying idea. The hedonistic idea that you live for pleasure, for example, that's also very dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But if you wanted to go for sheer pathology, the notion that, and this is Foucault in a nutshell, and Marx for that matter, that power rules everything, Not only is that a terrible unifying idea, but it fully justifies your own use of power. And I don't mean the power Nietzsche talks about. His will to power was more his insistence that a human being is an expression of will rather than a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
mechanism of self-protection and security. He thought of the life force in human beings as something that strived not to protect itself, but to exhaust itself in being and becoming. It's like an upward-oriented motivational drive, even towards meaning. Now, he called it the will to power, and that had some unfortunate consequences, at least that's how it's translated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But he didn't mean the power motivation that people like Foucault or Marx became so hung up on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, yeah. Well, you could imagine that, and you should, you could imagine that you could segregate competence and ability. Imagine that you and I were going to work on a project.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
We could organize our project in relationship to the ambition that we wanted to attain, and we can organize an agreement so that you were committed to the project voluntarily, and so that I was committed to the project voluntarily. So that means that we would actually be united in our perceptions and our actions, by the motivation of something approximating voluntary play.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Now, you could also imagine another situation where I said, here's our goal and you better help me or I'm going to kill your family. Well, the probability is that you would be
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
quite motivated to undertake my bidding and so then you might say well that's how the world works it's power and compulsion but the truth of the matter is that you can force people to see things your way let's say but it's nowhere near as good a strategy even practically than the strategy of that would be associated with something like voluntary voluntary joint
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
agreement of pattern of movement strategy towards a goal. See, this is such an important thing to understand because it helps you start to understand the distinction between a unifying force that's based on power and compulsion and one that is much more in keeping, I would say, with the ethos that governs Western societies, free Western societies. There's really a qualitative difference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And it's not some morally relativistic illusion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, and the dominion of the superior Aryans. Yeah, well, that was partly because Nietzsche's work also was misrepresented by his sister after his death. But I also think that there's a fundamental flaw in that Nietzschean conceptualization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So, Nietzsche, of course, famously announced the death of God, but he did that in a manner that was accompanied by dire warnings, like Nietzsche said, because people tend to think of that as a triumphalist statement, but Nietzsche actually said that he really said something like the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
unifying ethos under which we've organized ourselves psychologically and socially has now been fatally undermined by, well, by the rationalist proclivity, by the empiricist proclivity. There's a variety of reasons. Mostly it was conflict between the Enlightenment view, let's say, and the classic religious view, and that there will be dire consequences for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And Nietzsche knew, like Dostoevsky knew, that, see, there's a proclivity for the human psyche and for human societies to move towards something approximating a unity, because the cost of disunity is high. Fractionation of your goals, so that means you're less motivated to move forward than you might be because there's many things competing for your attention.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And also anxiety, because anxiety actually signals something like goal conflict. So there's an inescapable proclivity of value systems to unite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Now, if you kill the thing that's uniting them, that's the death of God, they either fractionate and you get confusion, anxiety, and hopelessness, or you get social disunity, or and you get social disunity, or something else arises out of the abyss to constitute that unifying force. And Nietzsche said specifically that he believed that one of those manifestations would be that of communism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that that would kill, he said this in Will to Power, that that would kill tens of millions of people in the upcoming 20th century. You could see that coming 50 years earlier. Dostoevsky did the same thing in his book, The Demons. So this is the thing that the areligious have to contend with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's a real conundrum because, I mean, you could dispute the idea that our value systems tend towards a unity, and society does as well because otherwise we're disunified. But the cost of that disunity, as I said, is goal confusion, anxiety, and hopelessness. So it's like a real cost. So you could dispense with the notion of unity altogether, and the postmodernists did that to some degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But they pulled off a sleight of hand too, where they replaced it by power. Now Nietzsche did, he's responsible for that to some degree, because Nietzsche said, with his conception of the overman, let's say, is that human beings would have to create their own values. Because the value structure that had descended from on high was now shunted aside. But there's a major problem with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Many major problems. The psychoanalysts were the first people who really figured this out after Nietzsche. Because imagine that we don't have a relationship with the transcendental anymore that orients us. Okay, now we have to turn to ourselves. Okay, now if we were a unity, a clear unity within ourselves, let's say, then we could turn to ourselves for that discovery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But if we're a fractionated plurality internally, then when we turn to ourselves, we turn to a fractionated plurality. Well, that was Freud's observation. It's like, Well, how can you make your own values when you're not the master in your own house? Like you're a war of competing motivations. Or maybe you're someone who's dominated by the will to force and compulsion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so why do you think that you can rely on yourself as the source of values? And why do you think you're wise enough to consult with yourself to find out what those values are or what they should be, say, in the course of a single life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I mean, you know, it's difficult to organize your own personal relationship, like one relationship in the course of your life, let alone to try to imagine that out of whole cloth you could construct an ethos that would be psychologically and socially stabilizing and last over the long run. It's like, and of course Marx, people like that, the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
the people who reduce human motivation to a single axis. They had the intellectual hubris to imagine that they could do that. Postmodernists are a good example of that as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, well, it's one of the key sub-themes in the Gospels is the sub-theme of the Pharisees. And so the fundamental enemies of Christ in the Gospels are the Pharisees and the scribes and the lawyers. So what does that mean? The Pharisees are religious hypocrites. The scribes are academics who worship their own intellect. And the lawyers are the legal minds who use the law as a weapon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so they're the enemy of the Redeemer. That's a subplot in the gospel stories. And that actually all means something. The Pharisaic problem is that the best of all possible ideas can be used by the worst actors in the worst possible way. And maybe this is an existential conundrum, is that the most evil people use the best possible ideas to the worst possible ends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And then you have the conundrum of how do you separate out, let's say, the genuine religious people from those who use the religious enterprise only for their own benefit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
machinations we're seeing this happen online like one of the things that you're seeing happening online i'm sure you've noticed this especially on the right wing trolls right wing psychopathic troll side of the distribution is the weaponization of a certain form of christian ideation and that's often marked at least online by the presence of what would you say cliches like christ is king which has a certain religious meaning but a completely different meaning in this sphere of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
emerging right-wing pathology, right-wing. The political dimension isn't the right dimension of analysis, but it's definitely the case that the best possible ideas can be used for the worst possible purposes. And that also brings up another specter, which is like, well, is there any reliable and valid way of distinguishing truly beneficial unifying ideas from those that are pathological.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so that's another thing that I tried to detail out in these lectures, but also in this new book. It's like, how do you tell the good actors from the bad actors at the most fundamental level of analysis?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Right, right. That's a more subtle variant of the religious problem. And that's what the communists say all the time, the modern-day communists. Like, real communism has never been tried. And you could say, I suppose, with some justification, you could say that real Christianity has never been tried because we always fall short of the ideal mark. And so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I mean, my rejoinder to the communists is something like every single time it's been implemented, wherever it's been implemented, regardless of the culture and the background of the people who've implemented it, it's had exactly the same catastrophic consequences. It's like, I don't know how many...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
examples you need of that, but I believe we've generated sufficient examples so that that case is basically resolved. Now, the general rejoinder to that is, it's really something like, well, if I was in charge of the communist enterprise, the utopia would have come about, right? But that's also a form of dangerous pretense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Part of the way, see, that problem is actually resolved to some degree in the notion of in the developing notion of sacrifice that emerges in the Western canon over thousands and thousands of years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So one of the suggestions, for example, and this is something exemplified in the passion story, is that you can tell the valid holder of an idea because that holder will take the responsibility for the consequences of his idea onto himself. And that's why, for example, you see... One way of conceptualizing Christ in the Gospel story is as the ultimate sacrifice to God.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So you might ask, well, what's the ultimate sacrifice? And there are variants of an answer to that. One form of ultimate sacrifice is the sacrifice of a child, the offering of a child, and the other is the offering of the self. And the story of Christ brings both of those together because he's the son of God that's offered to God.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so it's an archetypal resolution of that tension between ultimate sacrifice. Ultimate because once you're a parent, Most parents would rather sacrifice themselves than their children, right? So you have something that becomes of even more value than yourself. But the sacrifice of self is also a very high order level of sacrifice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Christ is an archetype of the pattern of being that's predicated on the decision to take, to offer everything up to the highest value, right? That pattern of self-sacrifice. And I think part of the reason that's valid is because The person who undertakes to do that pays the price themself. It's not externalized. They're not trying to change anyone else, except maybe by example. It's your problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Like Solzhenitsyn pointed that out too, when he was struggling with the idea of good versus evil. And you see this in more sophisticated literature, in really unsophisticated literature or drama, There's a good guy and the bad guy, and the good guy's all good, and the bad guy's all bad. And in more sophisticated literature, the good and bad are abstracted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You can think of them as spirits, and then those spirits possess all the characters in the complex drama to a greater or lesser degree, and that battle is fought out both socially and internally. In the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
high-order religious conceptualizations in the West, if they culminate, let's say, in the Christian story, the notion is that battle between good and evil is fundamentally played out as an internal drama.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Right, it's your moral duty to constrain evil within yourself. And, well, there's more to it than that, because there's also the insistence that If you do that, that makes you the most effective possible warrior, let's say, against evil itself in the social world. That you start with the battle that occurs within you, in the soul, let's say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
The soul becomes the battleground between the forces of good and evil. There's an idea there too, which is if that battle is undertaken successfully, then it doesn't have to be played out in the social world as actual conflict. You can rectify the conflict internally without it having to be played out as fate, as Jung put it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
See, I would say that the woke phenomenon is the manifestation of the slave morality that Nietzsche criticized, and that There are elements of Christianity that can be gerrymandered to support that mode of perception and conception. But I think he was wrong in his essential criticism of Christianity in that regard. Now, it's complicated with Nietzsche because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Nietzsche never criticizes the gospel stories directly. What he basically criticizes is something like the pathologies of institutionalized religion. And I would say most particularly of the, what would you say, of the sort of casually too nice Protestant form. You know, that's a thumbnail sketch and perhaps somewhat unfair, but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Given the alignment, let's say, of the more mainstream Protestant movements with the woke mob, I don't think it's an absurd criticism. It's something like the degeneration of Christianity into the notion that good and harmless are the same thing, or good and empathic are the same thing, which is simply not true and far too simplified.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I also think Nietzsche was extremely wrong in his presumption that human beings should take it to themselves to construct their own values. I think he made a colossal error in that presumption.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, and I think the reason that he was wrong about that is that... So when God gives instructions to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he basically tells them that they can do anything they want in the walled garden. So that's the kind of balance between order and nature that makes up the human environment. Human beings have the freedom...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
vouchsafe to them by God to do anything they want in the garden, except to mess with the most fundamental rules. So God says to people, you're not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which fundamentally means there is an implicit moral order and you're to abide by it. Your freedom stops at the foundation. And you can think about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I'd be interested even in your ideas about this as an engineer, let's say, is that we're There is an ethos that's implicit in being itself. And your ethos has to be a reflection of that. And that isn't under your control. You can't gerrymander the foundation because your foundational beliefs have to put you in harmony, like musical harmony, with the actual structure of reality as such.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So I can give you an example of that. So our goal, insofar as we're conducting ourselves properly, is to have the kind of interesting conversation that allows both of us to express ourself in a manner that enables us to learn and grow, such that we can share that with everyone who's listening. And if our aim is true and upward, then that's what we're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, that means that we're going to have to match ourselves to a pattern of interaction, and that's marked for us emotionally. Like, you and I both know this. If we're doing this right, we're gonna be interested in the conversation. We're not gonna be looking at our watch. We're not gonna be thinking about what we're aiming at. We're just going to communicate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Now, the religious interpretation of that would be that we were doing something like making the redemptive logos manifest between us in dialogue, and that's something that can be shared. To do that, we have to align with that pattern. I can't decide that there's some arbitrary way that I'm going to play you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I mean, I could do that if I was a psychopathic manipulator, but to do that optimally, I'm not going to impose a certain mode of a certain a priori aim, let's say, on our communication and manipulate you into that. So the constraints on my ethos
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
reflect the actual structure of of the world and i can't this is this is the communist presumption it's like we're going to burn everything down and we're going to start from scratch we've got these axiomatic presumptions and we're going to put them into place and we're going to socialize people so they now think and live like communists from day one and human beings are infinitely malleable
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And we can use a rational set of presuppositions to decide what sort of beings they should be. The transhumanists are doing this too. It's like, no, there's a pattern of being that you have to fall into alignment with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I think it's the pattern of being, by the way, that if you fall into alignment with, it gives you hope, it protects you from anxiety, and it gives you a sense of harmony with your surroundings and with other people. And none of that's arbitrary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
We definitely come to the conversation with a hierarchy of foundational axioms, right? And I would say the more sophisticated you are as a thinker, the deeper the level at which you're willing to play. So imagine first that you have presumptions of different depth, there's more predicated on the more fundamental axioms, and then that there's a space of play around those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that space of play is going to depend on the sophistication of the player, obviously, but... Those who are capable of engaging in deeper conversations talk about more fundamental things with more play.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Now, we have to come to the conversation with a certain degree of structure because we wouldn't be able to understand each other or communicate if a lot of things weren't already assumed or taken for granted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
No, no, no, no, no, no. It's got a rigidity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It took me about 40 years to figure out the answer to that question. So it wasn't, I'm serious about that. So it wasn't, it wasn't a random answer. So... Play is very rigid in some ways. So like if you and I go out to play basketball or chess, like there are rules and you can't break the rules because then you're no longer in the game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But then there's a dynamism within those rules that's, well, with chess, it's virtually infinite. I mean, I think, what is it? There's more patterns of potential games on a chessboard than there are subatomic particles in the observable universe. Like it's an insane space. So it's not like there's not freedom within it. But it's a weird paradox in a way, isn't it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
music is like this too is that there are definitely rules and so and there are things you can't throw a basketball into a chess board and still be playing chess but weirdly enough if you adhere to the rules the realm of freedom increases rather than decreasing and i i think you can make the same case for a playful conversation it's like we're playing by certain rules and a lot of them are implicit but that doesn't mean that it might mean the reverse of constraint you know because
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
In this seminar, for example, that I was referring to, the Exodus seminar and then the Gospel seminar, everybody in the seminar, there's about eight of us, played fair. Nobody used power. Nobody tried to prove they were right. They put forward their points, but they were like, here's a way of looking at that. Assess it. And they were also doing it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Genuinely, it's like, this is what I've concluded about, say, this story, and I'm going to make a case for it, but I'd like to hear what you have to say, because maybe you can change it, you can extend it, you can find a flaw in it, and that's... well, that's a conversation that has flow and that's engaging and that other people will listen to as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that's also, see, I think that one of the things that we can conclude now, and we can do this even from a neuroscientific basis, is that that sense of engaged meaning is a marker, not only for the emergence of harmony between you and your environment, but for the emergence of that harmony in a way that is developmentally rich, that moves you upward towards, what would you say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, I think towards a more effective entropic state. That's actually the technical answer to that. But it makes you more than you are. And there's a directionality in that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, right. Absolutely. Well, and some of them may actually have an appropriate scope of application. It could be that some of the foundational axioms of communism, socialism slash communism are are actually functional in a sufficiently small social group, maybe a tribal group even.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I also have a... I'm not sure this is correct, but I have a suspicion that the pervasive attractiveness of some of the radical left ideas that we're talking about are pervasive precisely because they are functional within...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
say, families, but also within the small tribal groups that people might have originally evolved into, and that once we become civilized, so we produce societies that are united, even among people who don't know one another, different principles have to apply as a consequence of scale. So that's partly an engineering response, but I think there's a deeper way of going after the communist problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So... I think part of the fundamental problem with the communist axioms is the notion that the world of complex social interactions can be simplified sufficiently so that centralized planning authorities can deal with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I think the best way to think about the free exchange rejoinder to that presumption is, no, the sum total of human interactions in a large civilization are so immense that you need a distributed network of cognition in order to compute the proper way forward. And so what you do is you give each actor
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
their domain of individual choice, so that they can maximize their own movement forward, and you allow the aggregate direction to emerge from that, rather than trying to impose it from the top down, which I think is computationally impossible. So that might be one engineering reason why the communist solution doesn't work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Like I read in Solzhenitsyn, for example, that the central Soviet authorities often had to make 200 pricing decisions a day. Now, if you've ever... started a business or created a product and had to wrestle with the problem of pricing, you'd become aware of just how intractable that is. Like, how do you calculate worth? Well, there's the central existential problem of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
How do you calculate worth? It's not something like a central authority can sit down and just manage. And... There is a lot of inputs that go into a pricing decision. And the free market answer to that is something like, well, if you get the price right, people will buy it and you'll survive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And it doesn't iterate. It doesn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I would say religious thought is the record of those ideas that have, in fact, scaled. Right. And iterated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah. This is why I like Mircea Eliade, for example, who I referred to earlier. One of the things Eliade did, and very effectively, and people like Joseph Campbell, who in some ways were popularizers of Eliade's ideas and Carl Jung's, what they really did was devote themselves to an analysis of those ideas that scaled and iterated across the largest possible spans of time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so Eliade and Jung, Eric Neumann, they were looking—and Campbell— They were looking at patterns of narrative that were common across religious traditions that had spanned millennia and found many patterns. The hero's myth, for example, is one of those patterns. And it's, I think, the evidence that it has its reflection in human neurophysiology and neuropsychology is incontrovertible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so these foundational narratives, they last. They're common across multiple religious traditions. They unite. They work psychologically, but they also reflect the underlying neurophysiological architecture. So I can give you an example of that. So the hero myth is really a quest myth, and a quest myth is really a story of exploration and expansion of adaptations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So Bilbo, the hobbit, he's kind of an ordinary everyman. He lives in a very constrained and orderly and secure world. And then the quest call comes and he goes out and he expands his personality and develops his wisdom. And that's reflected in human neuropsychological architecture at a very low level, way below cognition. So one of the most fundamental...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
elements of the mammalian brain and even in lower animal forms is the hypothalamus. It's sort of the root of primary motivation. So it governs lust and it regulates your breathing and it regulates your hunger and it regulates your thirst and it regulates your temperature. Like really low level biological necessities are regulated by the hypothalamus. When you get hungry, it's the hypothalamus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
When you're activated in a defensively aggressive manner, that's the hypothalamus. half the hypothalamus is the origin of the dopaminergic tracts, and they subsume exploration. And so you could think of the human motivational reality as a domain that's governed by axiomatic motivational states, love, sex, defensive aggression, hunger, and another domain that's governed by exploration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And the rule would be something like, when your basic motivational states are sated, Explore. And that's not cognitive. Like I said, this is deep, deep brain architecture. It's extraordinarily ancient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And the exploration story is something like, go out into the unknown and take the risks because the information that you discover and the skills you develop will be worthwhile even in stating the basic motivational drives. And then you want to learn to do that in an iterative,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
manner so it sustains across time and you want to do it in a way that unites you with other people and there's a pattern to that and i do think that's the pattern that's we strive to encapsulate in our deep religious narratives and i think that in many ways we've done that successfully what is the belief in god
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Okay, so in one of the stories that I cover in We Who Wrestle With God, which I've only recently begun to take apart, say, in the last two years, is the story of Abraham. And it's a very cool story. And it's also related, by the way, to your question about what makes communism wrong. And Dostoevsky knew this. Not precisely the Abraham story, but the same reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky made a very telling observation. So he speaks in the voice of a cynical, nihilistic, and bitter bureaucrat who's been a failure, who's talking cynically about the nature of human beings, but also very accurately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And one of the things he points out with regards to modern utopianism is that human beings are very strange creatures, and that if you gave them what the socialist utopians want to give them, so let's say all your needs are taken care of, All your material needs are taken care of, and even indefinitely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Dostoevsky's claim was, you don't understand human beings very well because if you put them in an environment that was that comfortable, they would purposefully go insane just to break it into bits just so something interesting would happen. Right. And he says it's the human proclivity to curse and complain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And he says this in quite a cynic and caustic manner, but he's pointing to something deep, which is that we're not built for comfort and security. We're not infants. We're not after satiation. So then you might ask, well, what the hell are we after then? That's what the Abraham story addresses. And Abraham is the first true individual in the biblical narrative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So you can think about his story as the archetypal story of the developing individual. So you said, well, what's God? Well, in the Abraham story, God is characterized a lot of different ways in the classic religious texts. Like the Bible is actually a compilation of different characterizations of the divine with the insistence that they reflect an underlying unity. In the story of Abraham,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
The divine is the call to adventure. So Abraham has the socialist utopia at hand. He's from a wealthy family, and he has everything he needs. And he actually doesn't do anything until he's in his 70s. Now, hypothetically, people in those times lived much longer. But a voice comes to Abraham, and it tells him something very specific. It says,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
leave your zone of comfort leave your parents leave your tent leave your community leave your tribe leave your land go out into the world and abraham thinks well why i've got naked slave girls peeling grapes and feeding them to me. It's like, what do I need an adventure for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And God tells them, and this is the covenant, by the way, part of the covenant that the God of the Israelites makes with his people. It's very, very specific. It's very brilliant. He says, if you follow the voice of adventure, you'll become a blessing to yourself. So that's a good deal because people generally live at odds with themselves. And he says, God says, that's not all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You'll become a blessing to yourself in a way that furthers your reputation among people and validly so that you'll accomplish things that were real and people will know it and you'll be held high in their esteem and that will be valid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So that's a pretty good deal because social people would like to be regarded as of utility and worth by others and so that's a good deal and God says that's not all. you'll establish something of lasting, permanent, and deep value. That's why Abraham becomes the father of nations. And finally, he caps it off and he says, there's a better element even to it. There's a capstone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You'll do all three of those things in a way that's maximally beneficial to everyone else. And so the divinity in the Abrahamic story is making a claim. He says, first of all, there's a drive that you should attend to. So the spirit of adventure that calls you out of your zone of comfort,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Now, if you attend to that and you make the sacrifices necessary to follow that path, then the following benefits will accrue to you. Your life will be a blessing. Everyone will hold you in high esteem. You'll establish something of permanent value and you'll do it in a way that's maximally beneficial to everyone else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so think about what this means biologically or from an engineering standpoint. It means that the instinct to develop that characterizes outward moving children, let's say, or adults, is the same instinct,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
that allows for psychological stability, that allows for movement upward in a social hierarchy, that establishes something iterable, and that does that in a manner that allows everyone else to partake in the same process. You know, that's a good deal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I can't see how it cannot be true, because the alternative hypothesis would be that the spirit that moves you beyond yourself to develop, the spirit of a curious child, let's say, what, is that antithetical to your own esteem? Is that antithetical to other people's best interest? Is it not the thing that increases the probability that you'll do something permanent? That's a stupid theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
A call to true adventure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
To true adventure. Yeah, and then that's a good observation because that begs the question, what constitutes adventure? the most true adventure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, that's not fully fleshed out until, at least from the Christian perspective, let's say, that's not fully fleshed out until the Gospels, because the passion of Christ is the, you could say, this is the perfectly reasonable way of looking at it, the passion of Christ is the truest adventure of Abraham. That's a terrible thing, eh, because it's a, it's a,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
The passion story is a catastrophic tragedy, although it obviously has its redemptive elements. But one of the things that's implied there is that there's no distinction between the true adventure of life and taking on the pathway of maximal responsibility and burden. And I can't see how that cannot be true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Because the counter hypothesis is, well, Lex, the best thing for you to do in your life is to shrink from all challenge and hide. To remain infantile, to remain secure, not to ever push yourself beyond your limits, not to take any risks. Well, no one thinks that's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
The hardest possible available adventure voluntarily undertaken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, here's an example of that. That's a good question, too. When Christ is, the night before the crucifixion, which in principle he knows is coming, he asks God to relieve him of his burden, and understandably so. I mean, that's the scene famously in which he's sweating, literally sweating blood, and Because he knows what's coming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And the Romans designed crucifixion to be the most agonizing and humiliating possible... Agonizing, humiliating, and disgusting possible death. Right, so there was every reason to be apprehensive about that. And you might say, well, could you undertake that voluntarily as an adventure? And the answer to that is something like, well, what's your relationship with death?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Like, that's a problem you have to solve. And you could fight it, and you could be bitter about it, and there's reasons for that, especially if it's painful and degrading. But the alternative is something like, well, that's what's fleshed out in religious imagery always. It's very difficult to cast into words. It's like, no, you welcome the struggle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
That's why I called the book We Who Wrestle With God. You welcome the struggle. And Lex, I don't see how you can come to terms with life without construing it as something like Bring it on. Welcome the struggle. And I can't see that there's a limit to that. It's like, well, I welcome the struggle until it gets difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, it's worse than that in some ways, because the crucifixion exemplifies the worst possible death. But that isn't the only element of the struggle, because mythologically, classically, after Christ's death, he harrows hell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And what that means, as far as I can tell, psychologically, is that you're not only required, let's say, to take on the full existential burden of life and to welcome it, regardless of what it is, and to maintain your upward aim despite all temptations to the contrary, but you also have to confront the root of malevolence itself. So it's not merely tragedy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I think the malevolence is actually worse. And the reason I think that is because I know the literature on post-traumatic stress disorder. And most people who encounter, let's say, a challenge that's so brutal that it fragments them It isn't mere suffering that does that to people. It's an encounter with malevolence that does that to people. Their own sometimes, often, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Soldier will go out into a battlefield and find out that there's a part of him that really enjoys the mayhem. And that conceptualization doesn't fit in well with everything he thinks he knows about himself and humanity. And after that contact with that dark part of himself, he never recovers. That happens to people, and it happens to people who encounter bad actors in the world, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
If you're a naive person and the right narcissistic psychopath comes your way, you are in, like, mortal trouble because you might die, but that's not where the trouble ends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So there's other characterizations of the divine, say, in the Old Testament story. So one pattern of characterization that I think is really relevant to that question is the conception of God as calling and conscience. Okay, so what does it mean? It's a description of the manner in which your destiny announces itself to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I'm using that terminology, and it's distinguishable, say, from Nietzsche's notion that you create your own values. It's like, part of the way you can tell that that's wrong is that you can't voluntarily gerrymander your own interests, right? Like, you find some things interesting— And that seems natural and autonomous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And other things you don't find interesting and you can't really force yourself to be interested in them. Now, so what is the domain of interest that makes itself manifest to you? Well, it's like an autonomous spirit. It's like certain things in your field of perception are illuminated to you. Think, oh, that's interesting. That's compelling. That's gripping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Rudolf Otto, who studied the phenomenology of religious experience, described that as numinous. The thing grips you because you're compelled by it, and maybe it's also somewhat anxiety-provoking. It's the same reaction that a cat has to a dog when the cat's hair stands on end. That's an awe response. And so there's going to be things in your phenomenological field that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
pull you forward, compel you. That's like the voice of positive emotion and enthusiasm. Things draw you into the world. Might be love, might be aesthetic interest. It might be friendship. It might be social status. It might be duty and industriousness. There's various domains of interest that shine for people. That's sort of on the positive side. God is calling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
That would be akin to the spear of adventure for Abraham. But there's also God as conscience, and this is a useful thing to know too. Certain things bother you. They take root within you and they turn your thoughts towards certain issues. Like there are things you're interested in that you've pursued your whole life. There are things I'm interested in that I felt as a moral compulsion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so you could think, and I think the way you can think about it technically is that something pulls you forward so that you move ahead and you develop. And then another voice, this voice of negative emotion says, while you're moving forward, stay on this narrow pathway, right? And it'll mark deviations, and it marks deviations with shame and guilt and anxiety, regret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that actually has a voice. Don't do that. Well, why not? Well, you're wandering off the straight and narrow path. So the divine marks the pathway forward and reveals it, but then puts up the constraints of conscience. And the divine in the Old Testament is portrayed not least as the dynamic between calling and conscience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, envy is a really bad one. Pride and envy are among the worst. Those are the sins of Cain, by the way, in the story of Cain and Abel. Because Cain fails because his sacrifices are insufficient. He doesn't offer his best. And so he's rejected. And that makes him bitter and unhappy. And he goes to complain to God. And God says to him two things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
He said, God tells him, if your sacrifices were appropriate, you'd be accepted. It's a brutal thing. It's a brutal rejoinder. And he also says... You can't blame your misery on your failure. You could learn from your failure. When you failed, you invited in the spirit of envy and resentment, and you allowed it to possess you, and that's why you're miserable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so Cain is embittered by that response, and that's when he kills Abel. And so you might say, well, how do you fortify yourself against that pathway of resentment? And part of classic religious practice is aimed to do that precisely. What's the antithesis of envy? Gratitude. That's something you can practice, right? And I mean literally practice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And you're striving and you're failing constantly because... And you see other people whom you think aren't having the same problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, the gratitude element would be something like, well, yeah, you don't know anything, and you're at the bottom, but you're not 80.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
The old rich guy or the young poor guy? And I would say most old rich guys would trade their wealth for youth. So it's not exactly clear at all at any stage who's got the upper hand, who's got the advantage. And, you know, you could say, well, I've got all these burdens in front of me because I'm young and oh my God. Or you could say every dragon has its treasure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that's actually a pattern of perception. You know, I'm not saying that people don't have their challenges. They certainly do. But discriminating between a challenge and an opportunity is very, very difficult. And learning to see a challenge as an opportunity, that's the beginning of wisdom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
The only reason you're envious is because you see someone who has something that you want. Okay, so let's think about it. Well, first of all, The fact that they have it means that in principle, you could get it, at least someone has. So that's a pretty good deal. And then you might say, well, the fact that I'm envious of that person means that I actually want something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And then you might think, well, what am I envious of? I'm envious of their attractiveness to women. It's like, okay, well, now you know something about yourself. You know that one true motivation that's making itself manifest to you is that you wish that you would be the sort of person who is attractive to women.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Now, of course, that's an extremely common longing among men, period, but particularly among young men. It's like, well... What makes you so sure you couldn't have that? Well, how about, here's an answer. You don't have enough faith in yourself. And maybe you don't have enough faith in, well, I would say, the divine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You don't believe that the world is characterized by enough potentiality so that even miserable you has a crack at the brass ring. And I talked about this actually practically in one of my previous books, because I wrote a chapter called Compare Yourself to Who You Are and Not to Someone Else at the Present Time. Well, why? Well, your best benchmark for tomorrow is you today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And you might not be able to have what someone else has on the particular axis you're comparing yourself with them on, but you could make an incremental improvement over your current state, regardless of the direction that you're aiming. And it is the case, and this is a law, The return on incremental improvement is exponential or geometric and not linear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So even if you start... This is why the hero is always born in a lowly place, mythologically. Christ, who redeems the world, is born in a manger with the animals to poverty-stricken parents in the middle of a God-forsaken desert in a nondescript time and place, isolated. Well, why? Well, because everyone young... struggles with their insufficiency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But that doesn't mean that great things can't make themselves manifest. And part of the insistence in the biblical text, for example, is that it's incumbent on you to have the courage to have faith in yourself and in the spirit of reality, the essence of reality, regardless of how you construe the evidence at hand. Right. Look at me. I'm so useless. I don't know anything. I don't have anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's hopeless. I don't have it within me. The world couldn't offer me that possibility. Well, what the hell do you know about that? This is what Job figures out in the midst of his suffering in the book of Job, because Job is tortured terribly by God, who makes a bet with Satan himself to bring him down. And Job's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
decision in the face of his intense suffering is, I'm not going to lose faith in my essential goodness, and I'm not going to lose faith in the essential goodness of being itself, regardless of how terrible the face it's showing to me at the moment happens to be. And I think, okay, What do you make of that claim? Well, let's look at it practically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You're being tortured by the arbitrariness of life. That's horrible. Now you lose faith in yourself and you become cynical about being. So are you infinitely worse off instantly? And then you might say, well, yeah, but it's really asking a lot of people that they maintain faith even in their darkest hours. It's like, yeah, that might be asking everything from people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But then you also might ask, this is a very strange question, is if you were brought into being by something that was essentially good, wouldn't that thing that brought you into being demand that you make the best in yourself manifest? And wouldn't it be precisely when you most need that, that you'd be desperate enough to risk what it would take to let it emerge?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, well, I think that's always part of a heroic adventure. is that ability to cut the Gordian knot. But you could also ask from an engineering perspective, okay, what are the axioms that make a decision like that possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And the answer would be something like, I'm going to make the presumption that if I move forward in good faith, whatever happens to me will be the best thing that could possibly happen, no matter what it is. And I think that's actually how you make an alliance with truth. And I also think that truth is an adventure. And the way you make an alliance with truth is by assuming,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
that whatever happens to you, if you're living in truth, is the best thing that could happen, even if you can't see that at any given moment. Because otherwise, you'd say that truth would be just the handmaiden of advantage. Well, I'm going to say something truthful, and I pay a price. Well, that means I shouldn't have said it. Well, that, possibly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But that's not the only possible standard of evaluation. Because what you're doing is you're making the outcome your deity. Well, I'd just reverse that and say, no, no, truth is the deity. The outcome is variable, but that doesn't eradicate the initial axiom. Where's the constant? What's the constant?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
That's an interpolation, obviously, but would have been out of keeping for the times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So I think it's perfectly reasonable to bring the sexual element in because it's a powerful motivating force and it has to be integrated. I don't think it's adventure. It's romantic adventure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
There's very little doubt about that. We know perfectly well anthropologically that the most unstable social situation you can generate is young men with no access to women. That's not good. And they'll do anything, anything to reverse that situation. So that's very dangerous. But then I would also say,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
There's every suggestion that the pathway of adventure itself is the best pathway to romantic attractiveness. And we know this in some ways in a very blunt manner. The Google boys, the engineers who are too, what would you say, naively oriented towards empirical truth to note when they're being politically incorrect, they wrote a great book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, which I really like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's a very good book and it's engineers as psychologists And so they'll say all sorts of things that no one with any sense would ever say that happened to be true. And they studied the pattern of pornographic fantasy and women like pornographic stories, not images. So women's use of pornography is literary. Who are the main protagonists in female pornographic fantasy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Pirates, werewolves, vampires, surgeons, billionaires, Tony Stark, you know? And so the basic pornographic narrative is beauty and the beast. Those five categories. Terrible, aggressive male, tameable by the right relationship, hot erotic attraction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, well, he was a big influence on me stylistically and in terms of the way I approached writing. And also many of the people that were other influences of mine were very influenced by him. So I was blown away when I first came across his writings. They're so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so I would say to the young men who, and I have many times to the young men who are locked in isolation, it's first of all, join the bloody club, right? because the default value of a 15 year old male on the mating market is zero. And there's reason for that. And zero is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. And the reason for that is, well, what the hell do you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Like you're not good for anything. You have potential and maybe plenty, and hopefully that'll be made manifest, but you shouldn't be all upset because you're the same loser as everyone else your age has always been since the beginning of time. But then you might ask, well, what should I do about it? The answer is, get yourself together. You know, stand up straight with your shoulders back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Take on some adventure. Find your calling. Abide by your conscience. Put yourself together. And you'll become attractive. And we know this is, look, we know this is true. The correlation between male sexual opportunity and relative masculine status is about 0.6. That's higher than the correlation between intelligence and academic achievement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I don't think that there's a larger correlation between two independent phenomena in the entire social science and health literature than the correlation between relative male social status and reproductive success. It's by far the most fundamental determinant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's a loop. Men are motivated to attain social status because it confers upon them reproductive success. And that's not only cognitively, but biologically. I'll give you an example of this. There's a documentary I watch from time to time, which I think is the most brilliant documentary I've ever seen. It's called Crumb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And it's the story of this underground cartoonist, Robert Crumb, who was in high school, was in the category of males. for whom a date was not only not likely, but unimaginable. So he was at the bottom of the bottom rung. And almost all the reactions he got from females wasn't just, no, it was like, are you out of your mind? Like, with that contempt, right? And then he became successful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so the documentary is super interesting because it tracks women the utter pathology of his sexual fantasies because he was bitter and resentful. And if you want to understand the psychology of serial sexual killers and the like, and you watch Crumb, you'll find out a lot more about that than anybody with any sense would want to know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But then he makes this transition, and partly because he does take the heroic adventure path. And he actually has a family and children, and he's actually a pretty functional person, as opposed to his brothers, one of whom commits suicide, and one of whom is literally a repeat sexual offender. It's a brutal documentary. But what he did...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
in his adolescence after being rejected was he found what he was interested in. He was a very good artist. He was very interested in music. And he started to pursue those sort of single-mindedly and he became successful. And as soon as he became successful, and the documentary tracks this beautifully, he's immediately attractive to women.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
they're so intellectually dense that I don't know if there's anything that approximates that Dostoevsky maybe although he's much more wordy Nietzsche is very succinct partly because he was so ill because he would think all day he couldn't spend a lot of time writing and he condenses writings into very short while this aphoristic style he had and it's it's really something to strive for and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And then you might ask, too, even if you're cynical, it's like, well, why do women, why do I have to perform for women? And the answer to that is something like, why the hell should they have anything to do with you if you're useless? They're going to have infants. They don't need another one, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Partly the reason that women are hypergamous, unless they want males who are of higher status than they are, is because they're trying to redress the reproductive burden. And it's substantial. I mean, the female of any species is the sex that devotes more to the reproductive function. That's a more fundamental definition than chromosomal differentiation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that's taken to its ultimate extreme with humans. And so, of course, women are going to want someone around that's useful because the cost of sex for them is an 18-year-old period of dependency with an infant. So I think the adventure comes first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, it's complex because the other problem, let's say, with the crumboids is that their mother was extremely pathological and they didn't get a lot of genuine feminine nurturance and affection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
In good families, they're both. Because they put up constraints on your behavior, but they, like, I've interviewed a lot of successful people about their calling, let's say, because I do that with all my podcast guests. How did the path that you took to success make itself manifest? And it's very, the pattern's very typical. Almost all the people that I've interviewed had a mother and a father.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Now, it's not invariant, but I'd say it's there 99% of the time. It's really high. And both of the parents, or at least one of them, but often both, were very encouraging of the person's interests and pathway to development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
No, no, no. I don't think you, I think that that's a reflection, maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, I think that's a reflection of that dynamic between positive and negative emotion. Like my son, for example, who's doing just fine. He's firing on all cylinders as far as I'm concerned. He has a nice family. He gets along with his wife. He's a really good musician. He's got a company. He's running well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
He's a delight to be around. He was a relatively disagreeable infant. He was tough-minded. And he didn't take no for an answer. And so there was some tussle in regulating his behavior. He spent a lot of time when he was two sitting on the steps trying to get his act together. And so that was the constraint.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But that wasn't something that was... It's an opposition to him away because it was in opposition to the immediate manifestation of his hedonistic desires. But it was also an impetus to further development. The rule for me... when he was on the stairs was, as soon as you're willing to be a civilized human being, you can get off the stairs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And you might think, well, that's nothing but arbitrary superego, patriarchal, oppressive constraint. Or you could say, well, no, what I'm actually doing is facilitating his cortical maturation. Because when a child misbehaves, it's usually because they're under the domination of some primordial emotional or motivational impulse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
They're angry, they're overenthusiastic, they're upset, they're selfish, like it's narrow self-centeredness expressed in an immature manner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And then he's also an exciting writer, like Dostoevsky, and dynamic and romantic in that emotional way. And so it's really something. And I really enjoyed doing that. I did that lecture that you described. That lecture series is on the first half of Beyond Good and Evil, which is a stunning book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Okay, so my observation as a psychologist has been that it's very, very difficult for someone to get their act together unless they have at least one figure in their life that's encouraging and shows them the pathway forward. So you can have a lot of adversity in your life. And if you have one person around who's a good model and you're neurologically intact, you can latch onto that model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Now you can also find that model in books. And people do that sometimes. Like, I've interviewed people who had pretty fragmented childhoods who turned to books and found the pattern that guided them in, like, let's say, the adventures of the heroes of the past, because that's a good way of thinking about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I read a book called Angela's Ashes that was written by an Irish author, Frank McCourt's fantastic book, beautiful book. And his father was an alcoholic of gargantuan proportions. He just, an Irish drinker who... drank every cent that came into the family, and many of whose children died in poverty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And what Frank did, as a testament to the human spirit, is he sort of divided his father conceptually into two elements. There was sober, mourning father who was encouraging and with whom he had a relationship, and then there was drunk and useless, later afternoon and evening father, and he rejected the negative and he amplified his relationship with the positive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Now, he had other things going for him, but he did a very good job of discriminating. And I mean, partly the question that you're raising is, to what degree is it useful to have a beneficial adversary? Yeah, and I mean, struggle-free progress is not possible
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I think there are situations under which where you might be motivated to prove someone in your immediate circle wrong, but then that also implies that at some level, for some reason, you actually care about their judgment. You just didn't write them off completely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that was really fun to take pieces of it and then to describe what they mean and how they've echoed across the decades since he wrote them. And yeah, it's been great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
My father was always willing to approve of the things I did that were good, although he was not effusive by any stretch of the imagination, and the standards were very high. Now, I was probably fortunate for me, you know, and it does bear on the question you're asking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's like, if you want someone to motivate you optimally, God, it's complicated, because there has to be a temperamental dance between the two people. Like... what you really want is for someone to apply the highest possible standards to you that you're capable of reaching. Right? And that's a vicious dance because you have to have a relationship with your child to do that properly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You know, because you want to, if you want to be optimally motivating as a father, you keep your children on the edge. It's like, you might not reward something in your child that you would think would be good in someone else because you think they could do better. And so my father was pretty clear about the idea that he always expected me to do better. And was that troublesome?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It was like, I felt often when I was young that there was no pleasing him, but I also knew that that wasn't, I knew that that wasn't right. See, I actually knew that wasn't right because I could remember, especially I think when I was very young, that I did things that he was pleased about. I knew that was possible. So it wasn't unpredictable and arbitrary. It was just difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, that's where you have to have a relationship with your children. You have to know them. And, well, with yourself too. And with your wife. You can't hit that optimal. That optimal is probably love. Because love isn't just acceptance. Love is acceptance and encouragement. And it's not just that either. It's also, no, don't do that. That's beneath you. You're capable of more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And how harsh should that be? It's like, that's a really hard question. You know, like if you really love someone, you're not going to put up with their stupidity. Don't do that. You know, one of the rules I had with my little kids was don't do anything that makes you look like an idiot in public. Why? Because I don't want you disgracing yourself. Why not? Because I like you. I think you're great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And you're not going to act like a bloody fool in public so that people get the wrong idea about you. No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I would say to some degree that depends on your temperament. My wife is quite a provocative person. And there are times when I, I suppose, do I wish that... There are times when I casually wish that she was easier to get along with. But as soon as I think about it, I don't think that. Yeah. Because I've always liked her. We were friends ever since we were little kids. And she plays rough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I like that, as it turns out. Now, that doesn't mean it isn't a pain from time to time. But... You know, and that is going to be a temperamental issue to some degree and an issue of negotiation. Like, she plays rough but fair, and the fair part has been establishing that. It's been part of our ongoing negotiation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Oh, definitely not. Definitely not. You find out all sorts of things about yourself in a relationship. That's for sure. Well, and partly the reason that there is provocativeness, especially from women in relationship to men, is they want to test them out. It's like, can you hold your temper when someone's bothering you? Well, why would a woman want to know that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, maybe she doesn't want you to snap and hurt her kids. And so how is she going to find that out? Ask you? Well, you're going to say, well, I'd never do that. It's like, never, eh? Let's find out if it's never. So we don't know how people test each other out in relationships, or why exactly, but it's intense and necessary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
you should have one and you should be able to regulate it. Like that's part of that attractiveness of the monstrous that characterizes women's fantasies, right? Because, and Nietzsche pointed this out too, go back to Nietzsche, you know, Nietzsche, one of Nietzsche's claims was that most of what passes for morality is nothing but cowardice. You know, I'd never cheat on my wife.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's like, uh, is there anybody asking you to? That you actually find attractive? Or are there dozens of people asking you to that you find attractive? It's like, well, I would never cheat. It's like, no, you just don't have the opportunity. Now, I'm not saying that everyone's in that position, you know, that they would cheat even if they had the opportunity, because that's not true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, well, those are the great writers because the greatest writers, virtually everything they wrote is worth attending to. And I think Nietzsche is in some ways the ultimate exemplar of that because... Often when I read a book, I'll mark one way or another. I often fold the corner of the page over to indicate something that I've found that's worth remembering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And it's the same with regards to, oh, I'm a peaceful man. It's like, no, you're not. You're just a weak coward. You wouldn't dare to have a confrontation, physical or metaphysical. And you're passing it off as morality because you don't want to come to terms with the fact of your own weakness and cowardice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And part of what I would say is twisted pseudo-Christian morality that Nietzsche was criticizing was exactly of that sort, and it tied into resentment and envy, and he tied that in explicitly. said that failure in life, masked by the morality that's nothing but weak cowardice, turns to the resentment that undermines and destroys everything and that does that purposefully.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, that's for sure. That's also the danger of being...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
to forthcoming with people see this is another thing let's say about my wife who's not particularly agreeable it's like she's not particularly agreeable but she's not resentful and that's because she doesn't give things away that she that she isn't willing to and if you're agreeable and nice and you're conflict avoidant you'll push yourself too far to please the other person and then that makes you bitter and resentful so that's not helpful
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
No, no. We know each other pretty well. And like I said, it's a trait that I find admirable. It's provocative and challenging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, we've been together 50 years, so... Quick pause. Bath and break.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's everything in its proper place is the answer to that. You know, we might think that our life would be easier without fear, let's say. We might say that our life would be easier without anger or pain, but... The truth of the matter is that those things are beneficial even though they can cause great suffering, but they have to be in their proper place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that capacity that could in one context be a terrible force for evil can in the proper context be the most potent force for good. a good man has to be formidable. And partly what that means, as far as I can tell, is that you have to be able to say no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I couldn't do that with a book like Beyond Good and Evil because every page ends up marked. And that's in marked contrast, so to speak, to many of the books I read now where it's It's quite frequently now that I'll read a book and there won't be an idea in it that I haven't come across before. And with a thinker like Nietzsche, that's just not the case at the sentence level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And no means, like, I thought a lot about no, working as a clinician, because I did a lot of strategic counseling with my clients in a lot of extremely difficult situations. And I learned to take apart what no meant, and also when dealing with my own children, because I used no sparingly, because it's a powerful weapon, let's say, but I meant it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And with my kids, what it meant was, if you continue that pattern of behavior, something you do not like will happen to you with 100% certainty. And when that's the case, and you're willing to implement it, you don't have to do it very often. With regards to monstrosity, it's like, weak men aren't good. They're just weak. That's Nietzsche's observation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
That's partly, again, why he was tempted to place the will to power, let's say, and to deal with that notion in a manner that, when it was tied with the revaluation of all values, was counterproductive. Counterproductive in the final analysis. It's not like there wasn't something to what he was driving at. No... Formidable men are admirable, and you know, don't mess with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Douglas Murray's a good example of that. He's a rather slight guy, but he's got a spine of steel, and there's more than a bit of what's monstrous in him. And Jocko Willink is like that, and Joe Rogan is like that, and you're like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You can easily be in this situation. You can easily and unfortunately find yourself in a situation where all you have in front of you are a variety of bad options. You know, that's partly why, if you have any sense, you try to conduct yourself very carefully in life, because you don't want to be in a position where you've made so many mistakes that all the options left to you are terrible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so you said, well... Was it necessary to ally with Stalin? It's like, well, it's very difficult to second guess the trajectory of something as complex as World War II, but we could say casually, at least as Westerners have in general, that that alliance was necessary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Now, I think the mistake that the West made in the aftermath of World War II was in not dealing as forthrightly with the catastrophes of communism as an ideology as we did with fascism. And that's especially true of the intellectuals in the universities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I mean, it was very common when I was teaching both at Harvard and at the University of Toronto for the students in my personality class where we studied Solzhenitsyn, who's actually an existential psychologist in many ways and a deep one. None of them knew anything about the Soviet atrocities. None of them knew anything about what happened in Ukraine and the death of 6 million productive people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Had no idea that the Communists killed tens of millions of people in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, right, right, which some estimates are 100 million people. Now, you know, when your error bars are in the tens of millions, well, that's a real indication of a cataclysm, and nobody knows how many people died from direct oppression or indirect in the Soviet Union. 20 million seems like a reasonable estimate. Solzhenitsyn's upper bound was higher than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I don't think there's anyone that I know of who did that to a greater extent than he did. So there's other people whose thought is of equivalent value. I've returned recently, and I'm going to do a course to the work of this Romanian historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, who's not nearly as well known as he should be, and whose work, by the way, is a real antidote to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, productive farmers, for that matter, and anyone who was willing to tell the truth. Right, absolutely. So, yeah, catastrophic. And so I think the West's failure... wasn't so much allying with Stalin. I mean, it was Douglas MacArthur who wanted to continue. He thought we should just take the Soviets out after the Second World War.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And they removed him from any position of authority where such a thing might be made possible. And people were tired. But was MacArthur wrong? Well, he certainly wasn't wrong in his insistence that Stalin was as big a monster as Hitler or bigger. So the valorization of the leftist proclivity, the radical leftist proclivity, is the sin of the West, I think, more intensely than allying with Stalin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, the first thing I would say is that I think that viewing the political landscape of today as a political landscape is actually wrong. I think it's not the right frame of reference because what I see happening are a very small percentage of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
dark tetrad personality types, so Machiavellian, manipulative, narcissistic, wanting undeserved attention, psychopathic, that makes them predatory parasites, and sadistic, because that goes along with the other three. That's about, in the serious manifestation, that's probably three to five percent of the population. And they're generally kept under pretty decent control by
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
civilized people and stable social interactions. I think that their machinations are disinhibited by cost-free social media communication. So they gain disproportionate influence. Now, these people want undeserved recognition and social status and everything that goes along with it, and they don't care how they get it. Because when I say they want that, I mean that's all they want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
They're overrepresented in the realm of fractious political discourse because they can use ideas. First of all, they can use, let's say, the benevolent ideas of the right and the benevolent ideas of the left, either one, and switch back and forth, for that matter, as a camouflage for what they're actually up to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
the postmodern nihilistic Marxist stream of literary interpretation that the universities as a whole have adopted. And Iliad is like that too. I used this book called The Sacred and the Profane quite extensively in a book that I'm releasing in mid-November, We Who Wrestle with God, and it's of the same sort. It's endlessly analyzable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I wouldn't say that I do know. In normal social circumstances, we have evolved mechanisms to keep people like that under control. Let's say that you and I have a series of interactions and you screw me over once. I'm not going to forget that. Now, I might not write you off because of the one time. But if it happens three times, it's like we're not going to play together anymore. And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
In normal times, most of our social networks are connected and interacting. So if you rip me off three times and I noted that, I'm going to tell everybody I know, and they're going to tell everybody they know, and soon everyone will know, and that's the end of your tricks. But that assumes that we know who you are and we're in continual communication. Well, all of that's gone online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I think what we're doing, this is happening on Twitter continually, is we're giving the 5% of psychopaths a radically disproportionate voice. And what they're doing is there's a bunch of them on the left, and they're all, we're so compassionate. And there's a bunch of them on the right, and at the moment they're all, we're so Christian and free speech oriented. It's like, no, you're not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You're narcissistic psychopaths, and that's your camouflage. And you hide behind your anonymity, and you use fractious and divisive language to attract, fools, and to elevate your social status and your clout. And not only that, to gain, what would you say, satisfaction for your sadistic impulses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, well, if you were charitable about Tucker Carlson's recent interview, you'd say that was exactly the conundrum he faced. And it is hard. Like, I've thought about, for example, interviewing Andrew Tate. And I thought, I don't think so. And then I thought, why? I figured, it's not obvious to me at all that he wouldn't charm me. So I knew this guy, Robert Hare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Robert Hare was the world's foremost authority on psychopathy. he established the field of clinical analysis of psychopathic behavior. And Hare was a pretty agreeable guy. So, you know, he would give people the benefit of the doubt. And he interviewed hundreds of serious psychopaths, like imprisoned violent offenders. And he told me in one of our conversations that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Every time he sat down with a violent offender psychopath, and he had a measure for psychopathy that was a clinical checklist, so he could identify the psychopaths from just the, say, run-of-the-mill criminals. Every time he sat down with them, they pulled the wool over his eyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
He videotaped the interviews, and it wasn't until later when he was reviewing the videos that he could see what they were doing. But in person, their tricks were more sophisticated than his detection ability.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I'm an agreeable guy. That's the problem. I'll give people the benefit of the doubt. Right, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, you know, I've had very difficult clinical interviews with people in my clinical practice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Iliad had walked through the whole history of religious ideas, and he had the intellect that enabled him to do that, and everything he wrote is dreamlike in its density. So every sentence or paragraph is evocative in an image-rich manner, and that also... what would you say, deepens and broadens the scope.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, I really probably approach that the way I approach most conversations. And it's something like, I'm going to assume that you're playing a straight game, but I'm going to watch. And if you throw in the odd crooked maneuver in, then I'll note it. And after you do it three times, I'll think, okay. I see. I thought we were playing one game, but we're actually playing another one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And if I'm smart enough to pick that up, that usually works out quite successfully for me, but I'm not always smart enough to pick that up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yes, and I think that's true, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, I've had the odd interview with people that I wasn't happy with having organized because I felt that I had... brought their ideas to a wider audience that might've been appropriate. But my conclusion and the conclusion of my producers and the people I talked to was that we could run the interview, the discussion and let the audience sort it out. And I would say they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So I think as a general rule of thumb, that's true. And I also think that the long form interviews are particularly good at that because It's not that easy to maintain a manipulative stance, especially if you're empty for like two and a half hours. Yes. So you get tired, you get irritable, you show that you lose the track, you're going to start leaking out your mistakes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, and it might be the intelligence of the distributed crowd. I mean, that is what I've seen with the YouTube interviews, is that it's hard to fool... people as such over a protracted period of time. And I guess it's partly because everybody brings a different, slightly different set of falsehood detectors to the table. And if you aggregate that, it's pretty damn accurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It also motivates the paranoid types because one of the reasons that paranoia spirals out of control is because paranoid people almost inevitably end up being persecuted because they're so touchy and so suspicious that people start to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
walk on eggshells around them as if there are things going on behind the scenes and so then they get more distrustful and more paranoid and eventually they start misbehaving so badly that they are actually persecuted often by legal authorities and you know it's down the rabbit hole they go and so you know musk is betting on that to some degree right he believes that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
free expression on Twitter X will sort itself out and be of net benefit. And I follow a lot of really bad accounts on X because I like to keep an eye on the pathology of the left, let's say, and the pathology of the right, thinking at least in my clinical way that I'm watching the psychopaths dance around and try to do their subversion. And it's an ugly place to inhabit, that's for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that's part of often what distinguishes writing that has a literary end from writing that's more merely technical. Like the literary writings have this imagistic and dreamlike reference space around them. And it takes a long time to turn a complex image into something semantic. And so if your writing evokes deep imagery, it has a depth that can't be captured merely in words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But it's also the case that a very tiny minority of seriously bad actors can have a disproportionate influence. And one of the things I've always hoped for for social media channels is that they separate the anonymous accounts from the verified accounts. They should just be in different categories. People who will say what they think and take the hits to their reputation
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Anonymous types, if you want to see what the anonymous types say, you can see it, but don't be confusing them with actual people because they're not the same. We know that people behave more badly when they're anonymous. That's a very well-established psychological finding. Well, and I think the danger to our culture is substantive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I think the reason that everything, perhaps the reason that everything started to go sideways pretty seriously around 2015 is because we invented these new modes of communication. We have no idea how to police them. And so the psychopathic manipulators They have free reign. About 30% of the internet is pornography. A huge amount of internet traffic is outright criminal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And there's a penumbra around that that's, you know, psychopathic, narcissistic, troublemaking trolls. And that might constitute the bulk of the interactions online. And it's partly because people can't be held responsible. So the free riders have free reign.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It might be the fundamental problem of the age, given the amplification of communication by our social networks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, yeah. Short-term attention, even worse. Yeah, because you might, you know, that's another problem, eh? Like if the algorithms are maximizing for the grip of short-term attention, they're acting like immature agents of attention, right? And so then imagine the worst case scenario is negative emotion garners more attention, right? And short-term gratification garners more attention.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So then you're maximizing for the grip of short-term attention by negative emotion. I mean, that's not going to be a principle. We were talking earlier about unsustainable unifying axioms. That's definitely one of them. Maximize for the spread of negative emotion that garners short-term attention. Jesus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
3% to 5% is the estimate worldwide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I think... That's the sadistic pull.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's pleasure in the suffering of others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Some more than others, but everyone to some degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And the great romantic poetic philosophers, Nietzsche is a very good example, Dostoevsky is a good example, so is Mircea Eliade, they have that quality. And it's a good way of thinking about it. It's kind of interesting from the perspective of technical analysis of intelligence. There's a good book called The User Illusion, which is the best book on consciousness that I ever read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I think all of that is right. I think the idea that that's more likely to occur among young people, that's clear. People, as they mature, get more agreeable and conscientious. So we actually know that what you said is true technically. It's definitely the case that there's an innate tilt towards pleasure in that sort of behavior, and it is associated to some degree with dominant striving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I do think it's true, as you pointed out, that many of the people who are toying with that pattern can be socialized out of it. In fact, maybe most people. Even the repeat criminal types... tend to desist in their late 20s. So imagine that 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes. So imagine that that 1% are the people that you're really concerned with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
They often have stable patterns of offending that emerged very young, like even in infancy and continued through adolescence and into adulthood. If you keep them in prison until they're in the middle of their late 20s, most of them stop. And that might be, the easiest way to understand that might just be delayed maturation. So are most people salvageable? Yes, definitely. Is everyone salvageable?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, at some point it becomes, first of all, they have to want to be salvaged. That's a problem. But then it also becomes something like, well, how much resources are you going to devote to that? Like the farther down the rabbit hole you've gone, the more energy it takes to haul you up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So there comes a point where the probability that you'll be able to get enough resources devoted to you to rescue you from the pit of hell that you've dug is zero. And that's a very sad thing. And it's very hard to be around someone who's in that situation. Very, very hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, we know that what you said is true even historically to a large degree because Germany was successfully denazified. And it's not like everybody who participated in every element of the Nazi movement was brought to justice, not in the least. The same thing happened in Japan. So... to some degree, the same thing happened in South Africa, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so, and it's the case, for example, also in the stories that we were referring to earlier, the biblical stories, the patriarchs of the Bible, most of them are pretty bad people when they first start out. Like Jacob's a really good, Jacob is the one who becomes Israel. He's a major player in the biblical narrative. And he's a pretty bad actor when he first starts out. He's a mama's boy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It explains the manner in which our communication is understandable in this manner. So imagine that when you're communicating something, you're trying to change the way that your target audience perceives and acts in the world. So that's an embodied issue. But you're using words which aren't when obviously aren't equivalent to the actions themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
He's a liar. He, uh, He steals from his own brother and in a major way, he deceives his father. He's a coward, you know, and yet he turns his life around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, I would say I started contending with the problem of evil very young, 13 or 14, and that's been the main, that was my main motivation of study for 30 years, I guess, something like that. At the end of that 30 years, it became more and more I became more and more interested in fleshing out the alternative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Once I became convinced that evil existed, and that was very young, I always believed that if you could understand something well enough that you could formulate a solution to it. But it turns out that seeing evil and understanding that it exists is less complicated than a technical description of its opposite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You can say, well, it's not that, for sure. It's not Auschwitz. How about we start there? It's as far from Auschwitz as you can get. It's as far from enjoying being an Auschwitz camp guard as you can get. Okay, well, where are you when you're as far away from that as you could possibly get? What does that mean? And it does have something to do with play, as far as I'm concerned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Like, I think the antithesis of tyranny is play. So that took me a long time to figure out that specifically, you know. And so that was very dark. Like I spent a lot of time studying the worst behaviors that I could discover abstractly in books, but also in my clinical practice and in my observations of people. And so that's rough. More recently, I was very ill and in a tremendous amount of pain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
like that lasted pretty much without any break for three years. And what was particularly useful to me then was the strength of my relationships, my immediate relationships, my friendships. Also the relationships that I had established more broadly with people, you know, because by the time I became ill, I was reasonably well known and people were very supportive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
when I was having trouble and that was very helpful, but it's certainly the case that it was the connections I had, particularly with my family, but also with my friends that were the saving grace. And that's something to know, you know, I mean, it's necessary to bear the burdens of the world on your own shoulders. That's for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
The burdens of your own existence and whatever other responsibilities you can mount, but that by no means means that you can or should do it alone. And so, You know, you might say, well, welcoming the adversity of life as a redemptive challenge is a task that's beyond the ability of the typical person or even maybe of anyone. But then when you think, well, you're not alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You can imagine that the words are surrounded by a cloud of images that they evoke, and that the images can be translated into actions. Yeah, and the greatest writing uses words in a manner that evokes images that profoundly affects perception and action. And that's the, so I would take the manner in which I act and behave. I would translate that into a set of images.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Maybe you're not alone socially. You're not alone familial. Maybe you're not alone metaphysically as well. No, there's an insistence, and I think it's true, there's an insistence, for example, in the Old and the New Testament alike that the more darkness you're willing to voluntarily encounter, the more likely it is that the spirit of Abraham and the patriarchs will walk with you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I think that's right. I think it's sort of technically true in that the best parts of yourself make themselves manifest. If you want to think about it that way, the best parts of yourself, whatever that means, make themselves manifest when you're Contending actively and voluntarily with the most difficult challenges. Why wouldn't it be that way? And then you could think, well, that's yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's like, well, are the best unrevealed parts of you yourself? Well, no, they're a kind of metaphysical reality. They're not yet manifest. They only exist in potential. They transcend anything you're currently capable of, but they have an existence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You could call that yourself, but like it was Jung's contention, for example, with regards to such terminology, that the reason we use the term self instead of God is because when God was dispensed with, let's say, by the process as Nietzsche described, we just found the same thing deep within the instinctive realm, let's say. We found it at the bottom of the things instead of at the top.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's like it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter fundamentally. What matters is whether or not that's a reality. And I think it's the fundamental reality because I do think that the deeper you delve into things, This is what happens to Moses when he encounters the burning bush. So Moses is just going about his life. He's a shepherd. He's an adult. He has wives. He has children.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
He has responsibilities. He's left his home and he's established himself. And so things are pretty good for Moses. And then he's out by Mount Horeb in that story, but it's the central mountain of the world. It's the same mountain as Sinai, which is the place where heaven and earth touch. And he sees something that grabs his attention, right? That's the burning bush and bush is a tree. That's life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
That's the tree of life. And the fact that it's on fire is that's life exaggerated because everything that's alive is on fire and so what calls to Moses is like the spirit of being itself and it attracts him off the beaten track and he decides to go investigate so Moses is everyone who goes off the beaten track to investigate and so as he investigates he delves more and more deeply
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
until he starts to understand that he's now walking on sacred ground. So he takes off his shoes, and that's a symbolic reference of identity transformation. He's no longer walking the same path. He no longer has the same identity. He's in a state of flux. And that's when what happens is that he continues to interact with this calling. And Moses asks, what it is that's being revealed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And God says, I'm the spirit of being itself. That's basically the answer. I am what I am. It's a more complex utterance than that. I am what I will be. I am what was becoming. It's all of that at the same time. It's the spirit of being that's speaking to him, the spirit of being and becoming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And it tells Moses that he now, because he's delved so deeply into something so compelling, his identity is transformed and he's become the leader who can speak truth to power. And so he allies himself with his brother Aaron, who's the political arm and who can communicate, and he goes back to Egypt to confront the tyrant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that's an indication of that idea, that if you wrestle with life properly, that the spirit of being and becoming walks with you. And it's like, how can that not be true? Because the contrary would be that there would be no growth in challenge. Well, that's... You have to be infinitely nihilistic to believe that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
My dreams do that for me, for example. Then I compress them into words. I toss you the words, you decompose them, decompress them into the images and then into the actions. And that's what happens. in a meaningful conversation. It's a very good way of understanding how we communicate linguistically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's hardship voluntarily undertaken. And it's crucially true. Look, if you bring someone into therapy, let's say, they're afraid of elevators, and you trick them into getting near an elevator, you'll make them worse. But if you negotiate with them so that they voluntarily move towards the elevator on their own recognizance, they'll overcome their fear and they become generally braver.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But it has to be voluntary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
That's a good question. The same thing happens in the story of Job. Because Job is a good man. God himself admits it. And Satan comes along and says to God, I see you're pretty proud of your... your man there, Job, God says, yeah, he's doing pretty well. And Satan says, I think it's just because things are easy for him. Let me have a crack at him and see what happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And God says, yeah, I think you're wrong. Do your worst. Right, and that's how people feel when those slings and arrows come at them, let's say, like Nietzsche. Well, Job's response to that—now, the story is set up so that what befalls Job is actually quite arbitrary, right? These catastrophes that you're describing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
The volunteerism in Job is his refusal to despair, even in the face of that adversity. And that seems like something like an expression of voluntary free will. He refuses to lose faith. And the way the story ends is that Job gets everything back and more. And, you know, so that's a descent and ascent story. And a cynic might say, well, the ends don't justify the means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I would say, fair enough, but that's a pretty shallow interpretation of the story. What it indicates instead is that if you're fortunate, because let's not forget that, and you... optimize your attitude even in the face of adversity, that it's not infrequently the case that your fortunes will reverse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You know, and I've found that in many situations, the journalists whose goal was most malicious in relationship to me, who were most concerned with improving their own, what would you say, fostering their own notoriety and gaining social status at my expense were the ones who did me the greatest favor. Those were the interviews that went viral.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so that's interesting, you know, because they were definitely the places where the most disaster was at hand. And I felt that in the aftermath. Every time that happened, my whole family was destabilized for like two months because things... It wasn't obvious at all which way the dice were going to roll.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, not necessarily, let's say. But you could say that's your best bet. Well, you know, I'm never going to say that you can transcend all catastrophe with the right attitude because that's just too much to say. But I could say that in a dire situation, there's always an element of choice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yes, and change in perception.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And if you make the right choices, you improve the degree, you improve your chances of success to the maximal possible degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, those are both relevant, and it's an important thing to understand because the classic empiricists make the presumption, and it's an erroneous presumption, that perception is a value-free enterprise. And they assume that partly because they think of perception as something passive. You know, you just turn your head and you look at the world and there it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, that's what the resurrection story proclaims, is that even under the darkest imaginable circumstances, the fundamental finale is the victory of the good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, as I said, I was very ill for about three years and it was seriously brutal. Like every, this is no lie, every single minute of that three years was worse than any single time I'd ever experienced in my entire life up to that. So that was rough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And it was worse than that because as the day progressed, my pain levels would fall until by... 10, 11 at night, when I was starting to get tired, I was approaching, what would you say? I was approaching something like an ordinary bad day. But as soon as I went to sleep, then the clock was reset and all the pain came back. And so it wasn't just that I was in pain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It was that sleep itself became an enemy. And that's really rough, man, because sleep is where you take refuge. You know, you're worn out, you're tired and you go to sleep and you wake up and it's generally, it's something approximating a new day. This was like Sisyphus on steroids. And that was, it was very difficult to maintain hope in that because I would do what I could.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Like there were times when it took me like an hour and a half in the morning to stand up and And so I do all that and more or less put myself back into something remotely resembling human by the end of the day. And then I knew perfectly well, exhausted, if I fell asleep, that I was going to be right at the bottom of the bloody hill again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so after a couple of years of that, it was definitely the fact that I had a family that carried me through that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, I think I learned more gratitude for the people I had around me. And I learned how fortunate I was to have that and how crucial that was. My wife learned something similar. She was diagnosed with a form of cancer that, as far as we know, killed every single person who ever had it except her. It's quite rare. And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Her experience was that what really gave her hope and played at least a role in saving her was the realization of the depth of love that her son in particular had for her. And that says nothing about her relationship with Michaela, with her daughter. It just so happened that it was the revelation of that love that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's like, perception is not passive. There is no perception without action. Ever. Ever. And that's a weird thing to understand because even when you're looking at something, like your eyes are moving back and forth. If they ever stop moving for a tenth of a second, you stop being able to see. So your eyes are jiggling back and forth just to keep them active.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It made Tammy understand the value of her life in a way that she wouldn't have realized of her own accord. We're very, very... There's no difference between ourselves and the people that we love. And there might be no difference between ourselves and everyone, everywhere. But we can at least realize that to begin with in the form of the people that we love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I hope I'm better at that than I was. I think I'm better at it than I was. I'm a lot more grateful for just ordinary ordinariness than I was because when I first recovered, I remember I was standing for started to recover. I was standing in this pharmacy waiting for a prescription in a little town and they weren't being particularly efficient about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so I was in that standing in the aisle for like 20 minutes and I thought, I'm not on fire. I could just stand here for like the rest of my life, just not being in pain and enjoying that. And, you know, that would have been something that before that would have been, you know, I would have been impatient and raring to go because I didn't have 20 minutes to stand in the middle of an aisle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I thought, well, you know, if, If you're just standing there and you're not on fire, things are a lot better than they might be. And I certainly, I know that. And I think I remember it almost all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, definitely. The miracle of the mundane, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I think Nietzsche had that because he was very ill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And he was regarded by the inhabitants of the village that he lived in near the end of his life as something approximating a saint. He apparently conducted himself very admirably, despite all his suffering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's more the mediocre and resentful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Fair enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
This is why I like the story of Cain and Abel, I would say. Because Cain is mediocre. But that's because he refuses to do his best. It's not something intrinsic to him. And I actually think that's the right formulation. Because I had people in my clinical practice who were They were lost in many dimensions from the perspective of comparison.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
One woman I remember in particular who, man, she had a lot to contend with. She was not educated. She was not intelligent. She had a brutal family, like terrible history of psychiatric hospitalization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And then there's involuntary movements of your eyes. And then there's voluntary movements of your eyes. Like what you're doing with your eyes is very much like what a blind person would do if they were feeling out the contours of an object. You're sampling. And you're only sampling a small part. element of the space that's in front of you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
She was an outpatient from the psychiatric ward. And she had been in there with people that she thought were worse off than her. And they were. And that was a long way down. That was like Dante's Inferno leveled down. It was a long-term psychiatric inpatient ward. Some of the people had been there for 30 years. It made One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest look like a romantic comedy show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And she had come back to see if she could take some of those people for a walk and was trying to find out how to get permission to do it. And so, you know, better than other people, some people are more intelligent, some people are more beautiful, some people are more athletic. Maybe it's possible for everyone at all levels of attainment to strive towards the good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And maybe those talents that are given to people unfairly don't privilege them in relationship to their moral conduct. And I think that's true. There's no evidence, for example, that there's any correlation whatsoever between intelligence and morality. You're not better because you're smart. And what that also implies is if you're smart, you can be a lot better at being worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, well, that's why we have that metaphysical presumption that everybody's made in the image of God, right? Despite that immense diversity of apparent ability, there's that underlying metaphysical assumption that, yeah, we all vary in our perceived and actual utility in relationship to any proximal goal, but all of that's independent of the question of axiomatic worth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that preposterous as that notion appears to be, it seems to me that societies that accept it as a fundamental axiomatic presumption are always the societies that you'd want to live in if you had a choice. And that to me is an existence proof for the utility of the presumption.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And also, you know, if you treat people like that in your life, every encounter you have, you make the assumption that it's an assumption of It's radical equality of worth despite individual variance in ability, something like that. Man, your interactions go way better. I mean, everyone wants to be treated that way. Look, here's the developmental sequence for you. Naive and trusting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Hurt and cynical. Okay, well, is hurt and cynical better than naive and trusting? It's like, yeah, probably. Is that where it ends? How about cynical and trusting? as step three, right? And then the trust becomes courage. It's like, yeah, I'll put my hand out for you, but it's not because I'm a fool. And I think that's right because that's the re-instantiation of that initial trust, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And the element that you choose to sample is dependent on your aims and your goals. So it's value saturated. And so all your perceptions are action predicated. And partly what you're doing when you're communicating is therefore not only changing people's actions, let's say, but you're also changing the strategy that they use to perceive. And so you change the way the world reveals itself for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
That makes childhood magical and paradisal. But it's the admixture of that with wisdom. It's like, yeah, you know, we could be, we could walk together uphill But that doesn't mean, and I'll presume that that's your aim, but that doesn't mean that I'm not going to watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Oh, you can't dispense with vulnerable to be hurt. That's the other realization. It's like you're going to stake your life on something. You could stake your life on security, but it's not going to help. You don't have that option.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Maybe do what you can to help the person who betrayed you. And if that all proves impossible, then wash your hands of it and Move on to the next adventure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, I would say first that you practice that. It's like that question is something, and Hemingway knew this, at least to some degree, and he certainly wrote about it, is that you have to orient your life upward as completely as you can, because otherwise you can't distinguish between truth and falsehood. It has to be a practice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And for me, I started to become serious about that practice when I realized that It was the immorality of the individual, the resentful, craven, deceitful immorality of the individual that led to the terrible atrocities that humans engage in that make us doubt even our own worth. I became completely convinced of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
that the fundamental root cause of evil, let's say, wasn't economic or sociological, that it was spiritual, just psychological. And that if that was the case, you had an existential responsibility to aim upward and to tell the truth. And that everything depends on that. And I became convinced of that. And so then, look, You set your path with your orientation. That's how your perceptions work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
As soon as you have a goal, a pathway opens up to you and you can see it. And the world divides itself into obstacles and things that move you forward. And so the pathway that's in front of you depends on your aim. The things you perceive are concretizations of your aim. If your aim is untrue, then you won't be able to tell the difference between truth and falsehood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And you might say, well, how do you know your aim is true? It's like, well, you course correct continually and you can aim towards the ultimate. Are you ever sure that your aim is the right direction? You become increasingly accurate in your Apprehension.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
See, this is why it's such a profound experience to read a particularly deep thinker, because you could also think of your perceptions as the axioms of your thought. That's a good way of thinking about it. A perception is like a, what would you say? It's a thought that's so set in concrete that you now see it rather than conceptualize it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Of course. That's what you do in part and play. I was at the Comedy Mothership and every single comedian was like completely reprehensible. All they were doing was saying things that you can't say. Yeah. Well, but it was in play. What I'm trying to do in my lectures is I'm on the edge. I have a question I'm trying to address and I'm trying to figure it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I don't know where the conversation is going. Truly, like it's an exploration. And I think the reason that the audiences respond is because they can feel that it's a high wire act, you know, and I could fail. And, you know, my lectures have degrees of success. Sometimes I get real fortunate and there's a perfect narrative arc. I have a question, I'm investigating it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It comes to a punchline conclusion just at the right time. And it's like the whole act is complete. And sometimes it's more fragmented, but I can tell when the audience is engaged because everyone's silent. except maybe when they're laughing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Look, if you're going to play hard in a conversation to explore, you're going to say things that are edgy, right? That are going to cause trouble. And that might be wrong. And that's another reason why free speech protection is so important. You actually have to protect the right... let's say in the optimal circumstance, you have to protect the right of well-meaning people to be wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Now, you probably have to go beyond that to truly protect it. You have to even protect the right of people who aren't meaning well to be wrong. And we also need that because we're not always well-meaning. But I don't, you know, the alternative to that protection would be the insistence that people only say what was 100% right all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Especially if it's the worst thing they ever said. Yeah. Yeah, because God, well, anyone judged by that standard is doomed unless they're silent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, well, that's kind of the definition of a totalitarian state. Yes. No one's playing in a totalitarian state ever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, you know, that might be the general pattern of totalitarianism. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, but everyone else is complicit, at least in their silence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yes, definitely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yes. Yes, definitely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
A really profound thinker changes the way you perceive the world. That's way deeper than just how you think about it or how you feel about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Probably I experienced most of that on X. But that's also where I find most of my guests. That's also where I get a sense of the zeitgeist, which is necessary, for example, if you're going to be a podcast host. It's necessary for me to make my lectures on point and up to date, to get a sampling of the current moment. You have to be of the moment in many ways to function at a high level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
There's a price to be paid for that because you're
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, definitely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, well... It's a danger, right? Yeah, well, luckily for me, you know, I have many things that counterbalance that. The familial relationships we talked about, the friendships, the... And then also, all of the public things I do are positive. The lecture tours, for example, which I'm on a lot... They're basically 100% positive. So I'm very well buttressed against that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Darker element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, you have a moral obligation, too, to maintain a positive orientation. It's a moral obligation. The future is, of course, rife with contradictory possibilities. And I suppose in some ways, the more rapid the rate of transformation, the more possibility for...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
good and for evil is making itself manifest at any moment, but it looks like the best way to ensure that the future is everything we wish it would be is to maintain faith that that is the direction that will prevail. And I think that's a form of moral commitment when it's not just naive optimism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Thanks very much for the invitation and for the conversations, but it's always a pleasure to see you. And you're doing a pretty decent job yourself about their illuminating dark corners and bringing people upward. I mean, you've got a remarkable thing going with your podcast and you're very good at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, right. Even a certain set of emotions as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, it's like a form of possession. So there's two things you need to understand to make that clear. The first issue is that as we suggested or implied that perception is action predicated, but action is goal predicated, right? You act towards goal. And These propagandistic thinkers that you described, they attempt to unify all possible goals into a coherent singularity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And there's advantages of that. There's the advantage of simplicity, for example, which is a major advantage. And there's also the advantage of motivation. So if you provide people with a simple manner of integrating all their actions... you decrease their anxiety and you increase their motivation. That can be a good thing if the unifying idea that you put forward is valid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But it's the worst of all possible ideas if you put forward an invalid unifying idea. And then you might say, well, how do you distinguish between a valid unifying idea and an invalid unifying idea? Now, Nietzsche was very interested in that, and I don't think he got that exactly right. But...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
The postmodernists, for example, especially the ones, and this is most of them, with the neo-Marxist bent, their presumption is that the fundamental unifying idea is power, that everything's about compulsion and force, essentially, and that that's the only true unifying ethos of mankind, which is, I don't know if there's a worse idea than that.
The Brett Cooper Show
Chappell Roan Says All Parents Are Miserable. Is She Right? | Episode 21
So the idea is that you have to give up something of value now so that you make the future better. And sometimes it's even something you love now, and that's a good example too, because often the things that stop us from moving forward are our attachments to things that we should no longer be attached to, right?
The Brett Cooper Show
Chappell Roan Says All Parents Are Miserable. Is She Right? | Episode 21
If you're not moving forward in your life, there's a high probability that you have some idea or some mode of action or some habit that you're so in love with that you won't let go of it.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Ask Charlie Anything 225: Save New Mexico? Dump Your Lib GF? Influencer Envy?
Oh, my gosh. I was blown away, first of all. So impressed.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Ask Charlie Anything 225: Save New Mexico? Dump Your Lib GF? Influencer Envy?
By your knowledge. They just came at you. What a tough crowd. They came at you with... variety of topics and just the breadth and depth with facts and studies. And you just, you came at them, just came back at them just with such articulation and thought. And I just, I guess my question is, do you have any afterthoughts of some of the things that you said on some of the topics?
The Charlie Kirk Show
Ask Charlie Anything 225: Save New Mexico? Dump Your Lib GF? Influencer Envy?
Would you do anything different? Would you add anything? I just want to hear your thoughts on that.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Ask Charlie Anything 225: Save New Mexico? Dump Your Lib GF? Influencer Envy?
You slayed it. Thank you, Charlie.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Ask Charlie Anything 225: Save New Mexico? Dump Your Lib GF? Influencer Envy?
Yeah.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Ask Charlie Anything 225: Save New Mexico? Dump Your Lib GF? Influencer Envy?
Right.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Ask Charlie Anything 225: Save New Mexico? Dump Your Lib GF? Influencer Envy?
Charlie, what do you think the most impactful thing that young people can do to stay politically engaged?
The Charlie Kirk Show
Ask Charlie Anything 225: Save New Mexico? Dump Your Lib GF? Influencer Envy?
Hey, Charlie. How are you doing?
The Charlie Kirk Show
Ask Charlie Anything 225: Save New Mexico? Dump Your Lib GF? Influencer Envy?
Great. I just want to let you know I've been listening to your podcast since 2021, and I just finished listening to your debate at the University of Cambridge.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And so even in 2008, that still wasn't occurring.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, well, those things always happen one tiny step at a time.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, well, the thing that's so awful about that, as far as I'm concerned, from the leftist perspective, let's say, is if you are concerned with the poor and the oppressed, you know, and then you have to be discerning there because... there are people who are poor and oppressed as a consequence of their own idiocy.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And that's not so uncommon, as you know in your own life, by watching your pathway to failure. But given that there are people who are unfortunate, you'd think that the appropriate tack would be to determine who in history served them most effectively. And I just can't see anyone you could possibly point to more effectively, who did that more effectively than Wilberforce ever.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And so you would think that instead of erecting monuments to Lenin, the leftists would erect monuments to Wilberforce. But not only do they not do that, no one knows who the hell he was.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. I think that's right, that it is fundamentally... But that begs another question, and that would be why, given that Wilberforce was clearly a force for the good that Obama, for example, would have been pushing, right... by which I mean movement towards a polity where there was no racial or ethnic prejudice.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
if Wilberforce is the poster boy for that sort of effort, which if you understand his life and you read about it, I can't see how you can conclude that, then why would the lefties forego that merely to oppose the fact that his motivation was fundamentally Christian, because that points to something deeper, right? It points to the fact that the true war, so to speak, isn't political.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
It's not left versus right. It's something deeper. And then if it is anti-Christian, then why? Like, what does that mean? Like, there's an enlightenment element there, right? The enlightenment types, especially after the French Revolution,
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
generated this narrative that science and religion were radically opposed, and that if you were on the side of religion, you were against clear, rational, logical thinking. And so you could imagine a stream of anti-Christian sentiment emerging on the rationalist side, right? But
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
But it isn't obvious to me at all that the leftist types who don't talk about Wilberforce are anti-Christian because they're scientific rationalists. Like, no. No way. All you have to do is talk to them for like 15 seconds and you find out that that's not the case.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So I've got a gotcha question for you. It's now your warrant. Okay. Okay. So you know that Robert F. Kennedy and Mehmet Oz, and I suppose Jay Bhattacharya too, are all hands on deck to restore American health. And that likely the biggest problem problem that's confronting us is insulin resistance.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
They might use those arguments from time to time, but they certainly don't apply the rigors of scientific thinking to their own interests. to their own radical hypotheses. So it's deeper than that. And so what is it exactly that they're objecting to? Is it the fact that the more radical leftist story, Marxist, let's say, is... in its essence, anti-Christian, which I think is a fair statement.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
But why would that be more important? This is the strange thing. Why would that be more important than serving the poor and fighting for the abolition of slavery and all of its associated prejudices? Because it still doesn't get you out of the conundrum, which is then why not Wilberforce? Instead of tearing down statues, why not erect statues to him? Yeah.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So, well, I know that's a hard thing to sort out, but you got any? Obviously, you were feeling something like this in high school, right? That's correct. You guys are throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. Correct. Yeah. Which baby exactly?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, no, no. Okay, so let's pivot on that for a minute. Okay, so because this is a problem that's going to face the right, and is already, and we can talk about that. So there are a group of people, 4% of the population, and then there's still a fringe around that that would maybe be another 5% where you'd have to take it seriously. And so they're in the psychiatric diagnostic literature.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
They fall under the cluster B heading. They're histrionic, which means they're dramatic. And I suppose if they're healthy and histrionic, then they become actors, right, and entertainers. So there's a positive spin on that. But if they're negative histrionic, they dramatize their pathology and use it as a weapon, okay? They're narcissistic, which means they want unearned social status.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
They're psychopathic, which means they're predatory parasites. And they're antisocial, and that's just your standard criminal types. So that all fits in cluster B. Then there's personality traits that go along with that. Machiavellian, they use language not to convey information, but to manipulate and manipulate. to manipulate instrumentally for their own purposes.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So if I'm speaking with you in a Machiavellian manner, I have a goal in mind that has nothing to do with the words that I'm using. You may have talked to journalists like that many times. Many times. Yes, many times. So they're Machiavellian. That's so well said. They're narcissistic, again, that's an overlap. They're psychopathic, oh yes. And on the personality side, that associates with sadism.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And so all of that culminates in a personality style that has the proclivity to take positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others. Okay, so now those people, let's say they're 4% of the population. Okay, so this is what they do. is they look for a story that's working. Could be Christianity, Judaism, Marxism, could be conservatism, doesn't matter what the story is.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
They look to see where it has purchase. So where the people who play that game have power. They infiltrate that, they advertise themselves as the vanguard of that movement, and they do that for no other reason than to gain power. Right, and so this is politically agnostic. Now, they'll guise themselves in political... and they'll learn all the tropes.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
I mean, this sort of thing, you can see this sort of thing emerging like mad on the right on Twitter, for example. But it's certainly, it's been characteristic of the left for a long time insofar as the left has power. But you are the one who just said, I think they want power. That's part of that. In the biblical tradition,
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
There's a battle always between the ethos that brings abundance, so that would be the miraculous provision of fish and bread and water that never exhausts itself. That's all consequence of a particular kind of ethos, the one that Wilberforce embedded. That's juxtaposed against usurpation, Luciferian usurpation of power. Right, that's the temptation that Christ has offered in the desert, right?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Too much, way too much sugar and obesity and all that goes along with it. But insulin resistance, it's just devastating. It makes you old. It makes you diabetic. It's terrible. It interferes with your cognition. It increases the probability that you'll get Alzheimer's. And that's all linked to carbohydrate excess intake, right? You agree with all that?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
The third temptation is the temptation of power.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, that's right, that's right, that's right. And one of the things that's... Moses is punished brutally by God for using power near the end of his... And for thinking he has the power to actually make water come out of the rock. Well, that it's dependent on him.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, yeah. Worse than that, not only on him, but on it, God tells him to invite... with his words, and he uses force and authority, right? So he doesn't enter the promised land. So that's a good indication of the danger of power, even when wielded by someone who is estimable, right? Because you have to give Moses his due.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Right, well, exactly. For dealing with that. Yeah, and then, of course, that's the temptation that's offered Christ. So I do think it's a power game. Yes.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
There's a commandment not to use God's name in vain. And then there's the comments in the Gospels about the Pharisees, right? The Pharisees are exactly the people who use... religious terminology, so moral terminology, to cloak their power-seeking machinations, right? And Christ goes after them.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
I think the best account of that is in Matthew, where he tells them that they're like, it's pretty brutal, that they're like... Broods of vipers, yeah. Worse, they're like graves full of rotting bodies that someone whitewashed.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Right, and he says that if they would have, they're the people, had they been alive in the time of the prophets they purport to follow, they would have been part of the mob that would have killed them. Right, that's actually part of, you may know this, but that's part of what sets them up for the crucifixion because they're not very happy with those insults publicly delivered.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
But that shows you also how old the problem is. So you can imagine one of the worst possible sins is to take the highest possible virtue, so that would be, well, we stand for the oppressed, we stand for the poor, and then to gerrymander that so that you're standing for that only... pushes you towards power. That's right. Right.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Okay. And yet- When you were in high school, one of the first things you did to begin your political career was agitate for a, what, reduction or stabilization of the price of cookies at the school?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And so, and then it also, there's a clue in the Gospels, I think it's in the Gospels as well, about how you figure that out. And the answer is, by their fruits, you will know them, right? So you look at, well, what I've done is I've looked at the consequences, for example, of the green energy programs in Germany and the UK. Well, what's the consequence? Let's take Germany.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Germany pollutes far more per unit of energy than they did 10 years ago, and their energy prices are five times as high. They're completely dependent on dictators of the worst sort. Yes. They continue to make the same mistakes. They're deindustrializing very, very cataclysmically. It's destabilizing their political environment, and that falls disproportionately on the poor.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
I don't see a way around that analysis.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Well, that's exactly what Christ tells the Pharisees. Literally, he says they wear the garbs of the priestly to elevate their moral status.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
We believe that is one of the, if not the most evil... So that you think that's the transgression against... Okay, so that's interesting because... So my psychological understanding of the idea of the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit is what possesses your words when you truly aim up.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah. So looking back from your position of wisdom, 13, 14 years later, what do you have to say to the American public about cookie advocacy?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And this makes sense to me psychologically because the thoughts that make themselves manifest to you spontaneously are words. directly related to the intent of your aim. That's literally how your verbal mind works, your imagination as well. If you go on a date and you aim at sexual contact on the first date, the fantasies that come along with that aim will be of that nature, obviously.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And if you are on the hunt, so to speak, for a marital partner, the fantasies that accompany that will be quite different. So this is literally how your imagination... It's also the case that, you know, it's the same idea with the date. If it's short-term mating is your goal, which, by the way, is the goal of the... dark tetrad types, differentially.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So what that means is that the sexual revolution handed women over to the worst men. So that's fun to know. But it's definitely the case that your aim determines what comes to mind. Now, you said that that sin against the Holy Ghost, which is the unforgivable sin, is the sin that occurs when you use the Lord's name in vain.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So when you claim to be motivated by what's divine, but are actually serving the Luciferian spirit of usurpation of power.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Look, look. Most of the people that I've spoken with who proclaim themselves to be atheists are atheists for two reasons. And I mean the good faith atheists, let's say. First of all, they tend to be tilted in the engineering cognition direction, so they're much more oriented towards things than people, and that's a stable temperamental trait. But they've almost all also invariably been hurt
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
by someone or some institution that's claimed to be religious. And then you could also see that obviously betraying someone, in Dante's account of the inferno, when he goes down to the bottom of hell, he finds the betrayers right next to Satan, right?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
All three of them. And the Lake of Ice, which is... Right, that's where Satan is encased, right? Because he's too brutal, brittle to move. So the reason for that, I think, is that There isn't a more upsetting psychological phenomenon than being betrayed. You stake yourself on someone, you trust them, they're now a foundation, they're part of the foundation of your life. Completely.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And there's no worse form of betrayal than betrayal that's done in the name of the highest good, right? Yes. There can't be, obviously. Yes. Okay, so, all right, so... I thought that sin against the Holy Ghost was something like rejection of the Abrahamic call. You know, God comes to Abraham as the spirit of adventure.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
He says, go out into the world, leave your zone of comfort, move away from your people and have the terrible adventure of your life. Well, if you reject that, you can't develop.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Right. Because you're rejecting the spirit of learning.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Well, and what's terrible about that, this is something we could talk about, too. I'm curious about your experience.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
It's been my experience that it doesn't take that much encouragement for those people you're describing to... Be inspired to try. Now, I've talked to thousands of young men now who've had that experience. I see a lot of them at my lectures. They come to the meet and greets, for example, and they tell me, it's great. It's really great.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
They tell me that five years ago, six years ago, because it's starting to be a long time now, eight years ago even, they were not in good shape. And they came across my lectures or books and decided to... decided that there was something worth aiming for, and then decided to try. So to tell the truth, that's a very common vow, let's say, to take on more responsibility.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And they usually laugh about starting to make their bed or something like that, which is a lot less trivial than people think. And then it's straightened them out. The terrible thing is how little encouragement that that actually took. So what... Why are people coming out to see you on campuses and what kind of response do you get from the people that you talk to?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Walk me through one of those events, Charlie.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
This is crucially important, this transformation, because one of the things that... So let's go back to that 60s dynamic, that anti-authoritarian 60s dynamic. No, the role of the left in the 60s was like an entrepreneurial progressive radicalism, let's say. And the stance of the conservative was... well, you know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater guys.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And that's a pretty good dynamic because you need a force for change and you need a force that resists that. But I think, you see, I think what the Conservatives did wrong, like profoundly wrong, was that they were, their breaks, this is why they're always dismissed as reactionary, their breaks were B-R-A-K-E-S. Their breaks were fundamentally... They're also moralistic. It was finger-wagging.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And this is something that was distasteful, let's say... especially about the hypocritical, evangelical, conservative types. I agree with that.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
But it was also strategically inappropriate, because it's very hard to say to young people who might tilt in the progressive direction, because they're a little more revolutionary in spirit, let's say, or also a little more immature, that the reason to abstain sexually, for example, is because you shouldn't do it. Now, that's true, but it's a weak argument.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And how much before that do you think your interest in the political developed?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
You know, I was talking to my wife this morning about this. We'd been apart for a few days, and I saw her again yesterday, and I was very happy about that. And she has a podcast. She's trying to reach out to young women because they're just as in much or more trouble than young men. They're in more turmoil. They're just harder to talk to by a lot.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
our discussion centered around the fact that it isn't that you should get married, although you should, it's that there is no alternative that's anywhere near as good by any standard whatsoever, regardless of position of analysis or time length. Anything you do other than that, even though marriage is very difficult and every other alternative is far, far worse.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And so if you want a pathway forward to what the conservatives support, the conservatives should be offering an invitation. They shouldn't be moralizing. And so you're saying that they shouldn't even be political at the moment. And I know you're a figure whose political activity is grounded in a religious substrate. That's right. Shapiro is, of course, like that too, and Dennis Prager.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Right, right. Right, right. And so now you're seeing that these young men who are coming, especially the working class types, they're not so interested in the political. They're probably not even interested in the arguments exactly. They're looking for something else.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, so that having a direction is correct, for example.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, not castrating yourself so your toxic masculinity vanishes. Bingo. sometimes literally far too often now, literally. Literally, they're chopping off.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
I think one in four boys is now given an ADHD diagnosis. It's something like that.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, right. So, you know, things have gone particularly sideways.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, or, well, and if that's the New York Times diagnosis, then you can also be absolutely 100% certain that they underplay the role of the educational establishment in setting up the circumstances so that parents are likely to draw that conclusion. I mean, with all this trans-butchery nightmare, you know, my profession...
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
particularly the social work end of it, but my like real psychologists, let's say, were also stunningly craven in their unwillingness to resist this. The mantra was to parents, well, would you rather have a live trans child or a dead child? Which there was never, Charlie, there was never a shred of evidence for that. It's one of the most evil things that has happened. It is unbelievable.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
The people who promoted that should be imprisoned. I agree. It's Absolutely brutal.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, that's for sure. It really is. Well, the Supreme Court of the UK may have broken the back of that movement a week ago. Remarkably. That was unbelievable. That was one of the most... Now and then the Brits, God love them, do something quite radical in the right direction. Like the Cass Report, right? You know, well, Brexit was a good example of that. Oh, that's interesting.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
They put through that free speech legislation that the Labour Party tried to rescind that has actually reshaped the universities to some substantial degree. That was in part a consequence of me being disinvited from Cambridge, which had a long-term consequence that the disinvite...
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
hadn't really reckoned on because a whole group of professors at Cambridge got together and decided that they were going to change the policies at Cambridge, which they did in a historic vote, and then they changed the policies at the national level. And the repercussions of that haven't stopped yet. So yes, so this terrible demoralization.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
All right, now you're being called, you're advertising on social media. Let's go back and tell this whole story. So, cause I'm very curious about it. So you had an intuition that you could go to campuses. Okay, so tell me how, where'd that idea come from?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So my daughter doesn't have a university degree, so she started a university. So that's very comical. Exactly. But this is good. Okay, so that means you do have a university education. You just caught it a very different way. That's right. Okay, so you decided... That's interesting, too, because it's like I asked you what your motivation for doing this was.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And the first thing you said was that you didn't have a degree. So that's very interesting. So what, were you also curious about going to campuses?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
This was after high school, just after high school.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So he could see the entrepreneurial part of you and he didn't think that would work well in college.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
That's turned around to bite them pretty damn hard.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So you could see that there was an opening there, a door that was open.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Well, that's a hallmark of the danger of allowing race to be an issue in the presidency to begin with.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Right, well, and you know, psychologists played a role in that in a major way too, because you had... Banaji and her crowd with the, what do they call that, the implicit association test forcing the idea of implicit bias. And social psychology is a very corrupt discipline, and it has been maybe from its onset. And it's stacked from top to bottom with careerists.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And it was social psychologists, for example, who denied that there was anything, any such thing as left-wing authoritarianism until 2017. Right. That was something you didn't get to think if you were a social psychologist or even investigate. We cracked that. There was a couple of people working on it around 2016. The last bit of research I did was on left-wing authoritarianism.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And then everything, my lab blew up. You know, it just became impossible for me to continue. But... So that dovetailed with this insistence that people were looking at the world through a lens that was irremediably biased in terms of their privilege and their racial and ethnic identity. And, you know, it's tricky because people do have a tilt in the ethnocentric direction, right?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Because, well, how about because you favor your family, right? You tend to favor the local. You also tend to favor the non-novel family.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Well, exactly. Now, there are exceptions to that. Well, you see this in the Old Testament accounts because sometimes the foreigner is the best thing that ever happened. So that would be like Jethro in the story of Moses, Moses' father-in-law.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then you have the alternative that would be like Jezebel, who's the foreign devil, so to speak. And so, you know, that's a paradox that's very difficult to properly navigate.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Okay, so yeah, it's 2015, 2016. Things went like seriously sideways.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, well, there's a lot of that that's not accidental. You know, you think about the way that you told your story. I mean, it's improbable, but... you were of the temperamental type. That's that strange blend of entrepreneurial temperament and conservative temperament. Those things don't generally go together, right?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
The conservative temperament, you could accept the libertarians because they're probably the entrepreneurial conservatives.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, okay, okay, okay. Well, that's where the entrepreneurial conservatives hang out is with the libertarians.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Right, and they have an uneasy alliance. That's a great point. Mm-hmm, okay, okay. And so that temperamental factor was already operating at you in high school. And then you didn't get into West Point, you said, but you were interested in universities and you obviously had the intelligence to manage them.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And so, you know, it's very useful to develop an idiosyncratic pathway forward if you have the IQ horsepower to manage it because it makes you unique if you could do that. So, okay, and so you had a mentor who told you that... it's probably best for you not to go to college because you have an entrepreneurial bent.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Now you're trying to build a political organization, but you're not exactly sure how. You're visiting the campuses and you have friends there, and you see that there's an opportunity to talk on campuses where you can also get an education in doing that, but also that there's donor interest. And that's very interesting too, because if you're a good entrepreneur...
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
One of the things you do is you go talk to your marketplace always. That's the grassroots things, but also with regards to fundraisers. And you see you offer like 10 ideas, all of which you're interested in. And you see where the door opens. That's knocking. Exactly right. So you saw that there were these people who wanted to support the education of young people.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
But who could see that their money was being counter-productively spent. To say the least. Well, leave large piles of money laying around unguarded and see who comes in first to take it. Right. Right. That's that parasitical type. That's right. They'll swarm in there like mad. That's happened in all the foundations.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, well, it's the same phenomena that we talked about earlier. That... Cluster B, narcissistic, dark tetrad, 4% of the population. They're looking around to see where, what would you say, inhabitable carcasses are lying around unintentionally.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, well, increasingly that became the case.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, well, it's also the case that it was the Machiavellian administration. So what happened at the university, I watched this. Oh, you lived in it. The administration encroached. And that's not surprising because there was money at a foot. So why wouldn't there be competition for the funding? So the administrators who are generally failed faculty, by the way, failed and embittered faculty.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So the faculty are already embittered because they're not rich like investment bankers. And then you take embittered faculty members who couldn't make it as faculty. Perfectly said. So now they encroach on the faculty who are too busy doing their job and
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
and too apolitical and also too willfully blind to notice the administration encroaches decision by decision until they radically outnumber the professors. And that's pretty much fait accompli by 2005, I would say. And then the woke mob took over the administration and that took no time at all, right? And so now that's where we're at in the universities and I can't see how that would be reversed.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
I met you. Do you remember when we first met? Was it 2016, 2017?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So now you tell me how you started going to campuses and what you did to begin with and how you got away with it.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
How did you know that there was such a thing as finding donors? And what do you think it was that set you up to have the gall to assume you could, first of all, to know that that was a thing and then to have the gall to pursue it?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And you said he saw something in you.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So you had a mentor. which you desperately need as a young person, someone who believes that you can do it.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
You know that young male elephants go mad if there's no old male elephant to butt heads with them. That's very well documented.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, right, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Am I building- Okay, so you were training as an administrator and a manager then to-
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, well, I remember that meeting. And I remember trying to figure out who you were because of what you were doing and the fact that you had this remarkable organizational capacity. But what I'm interested in now is what I'm very interested in trying to figure out what inclined you to take the path that you took.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Okay, so now you're going out on campuses. Do you remember the first time you did this?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And that was a turning point chapter. That's right, correct. So this was partly a recruitment drive as well.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Well, that is a university education. That's what it should be. That's a Socratic education.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Sure. Well, and there is historical precedent for what you're doing. I mean, I remember, for example, outside the building I worked in at the University of Toronto, there was quite frequently a card table set up, and it was the bloody communists that were at the back of that. So it
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Now, you said, okay, so you said Obama, but you said something else at the same time. You said that you had been reading American history, okay, and that you were concerned with, interested in, and convinced by, I suppose, all of those, this issue of what made America great. Okay, so now, well, so this is interesting and worth taking apart, because
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Defending Pfizer, that's really... But they will, because they're high trust of institutions. Because there's no one more trustworthy from a leftist perspective than big pharma.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Okay, so let me rephrase that slightly. Please, yeah. But you understand what I'm trying to communicate. I do, I do. Well, there's a real conundrum there because a conservative with low trust in institutions is like an artsy moron, right?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
okay that's the thing so imagine that there's a hierarchy of institution there's the fringe of the institution that's pretty exploratory you can move into the center that's more conservative then you can move right to the bottom which is well what well i would say it's it's religious fundamentally like as you move towards the core that's right you move towards what's more religious and so the conservative stance isn't anti-institution it's a stance that notes that
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
I know what's happened. You know, in the story of Moses, when Moses goes off to get the commandments, so he's the pipeline to God, right? He leaves his brother in charge, Aaron.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
That's exactly right. They make this golden calf, which is a materialistic object, and they dance naked in the streets and have an orgy. And that's what happens to the political when it's detached from the sacred. Oh, that's exactly right. Okay, so it isn't that the conservatives have become skeptical of institutions.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
It's that the conservatives have noted that the institutions no longer serve the purpose for which they were established. Chartered. It's not just secularization, because there should be a separation between church and state, let's say.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
It's not that the institutions have become secular, it's that they've turned 180 degrees from their original orientation and are now rampaging as madly as possible in the other direction. So the universities are no longer the...
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
fortress walls against the barbarians they're actually the voice of the barbarians right hence the pro-hamas uh demonstrations on campus or the black lives matter stuff or the transgender stuff yeah yeah very well said exactly okay so but we've got to we've got to get that terminology exactly right because it's very dangerous for conservatives to conceptualize themselves as anti-institutional because then they become indistinguishable from the radicals that they're
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So it isn't that. It's a return to the sorts of things we talked about at the beginning, like Wilberforce. That's right. Those foundational principles. Yes. And you're going to campuses saying, you people have lost the plot. Exactly. Right, which they definitely have. Like there's the universities.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
I cannot see, you know, I've been working in various ways to figure out how to revitalize the universities. And the bricks and mortar universities... Like, how do you revitalize an institution that's dominated by people who are laming in the wrong direction?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So what does that mean? Okay, so let's continue practically here. So tell me what happens the first time at Wisconsin.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Oh, you found a chapter. Okay. So that was success.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And so you walked away from that? How did you feel when you walked away?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
For decades, certainly since the 60s, the typical pathway for someone young who was assessing the history of his or her country would have been to read it through a highly critical lens. So, for example, I remember when I was 13 or 14, so that would have been mid-70s, I was reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and some of the so-called new journalists. And
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And we did it at Indiana. So you went from zero to one. Which is a huge leap.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Of course, of course, of course. Zero to one is, the first customer is impossible.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Right. Of course. Of course. Because that's the one that's most unlikely. Your first sale is by far the most unlikely. Right. Okay. So then you went to Marquette.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So you were permitted from the beginning as well.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Well, that's the entrepreneurial niche.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Well, and imagine, too, that it must have been heartening to you as well. to see that you could hold your own.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
You know that burning bush story. Oh, that's Moses entry point, by the way. So the burning bush moment, burning bush moment happens when Moses goes off the beaten path. He's a shepherd, right? So a good man keeps the wolves and lions at bay, serves the vulnerable. He's got that mastered. And then something attracts his attention. And he takes it seriously. And that's what transforms him.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
So you said you did that with economics.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Right, right. So it's like, take me, use me.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Right, right. That's like the mission impossible motif. Your assignment, if you choose to accept it.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Well, that's it. So, you know, there's a pattern that's established in that burning bush story because the burning bush is something living.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Well, that's life. Life metabolizes, life burns, but without being consumed. That's the secret of life, right? So the burning bush is life most deeply apprehended. And Moses is being a shepherd. He's near Mount Sinai or Horeb, which is where heaven is. meets earth, and something attracts his attention.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
They weren't of the left exactly the way you would conceptualize the left now. They were more like radical literary figures, I would say. But the mid-70s ethos certainly was to read history, sociology, And I don't mean you were being uncritical. I mean to take an anti-establishment stance.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And then what happens to Moses is that he takes it seriously, and he gets to the bottom of it, and that transforms him. So the idea is something like, if you watch... For adventure and opportunity, if you watch for the pathway forward, something will grip your attention and they'll compel you. You'll be obsessed by it. When you take that obsession seriously, you get to the bottom of things.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
That's what it was. And that transforms you. Okay, so you were doing that with economics.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Well, that's what happens to Moses, because when he gets to the bottom of things, it's the voice of the spirit of his ancestors, right?
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, yeah, look, I made exactly the same conclusion when I was studying political science.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
in university the first year or two was okay because we were reading great ancient thinkers but then in my third and fourth years when it started to become more specialized the basic claim was that human beings are motivated economically and then it became left and i thought no that's not right that's that's not right correct there there's a foundational there's a foundation there's a substructure that's why i started studying psychology
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Daily Wire types deserve a lot of credit for that, too, because they took a big risk.
The Charlie Kirk Show
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Yeah, well, we had great panelists too. Like they were a very good crowd, the people that decided to participate.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Well, the postmodernists made that claim. It's sort of the Marxists. It's like, no, we're going all the way to the bottom and uprooting everything.
The Charlie Kirk Show
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Like in the 60s, that was all, well, anti-establishment, free love, the sexual revolution is coming, everyone's going to be free. By the time the 70s came along, which was the milieu I was embedded in, all of the optimism of the 60s had pretty much vanished, but all of the cynicism 100% remained. Now, you, though, interestingly enough, in Chicago, and this would be mid-2000s.
The Charlie Kirk Show
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That's the sin of Eve. Exactly. You can take the right to establish the moral order to yourself. So one thing that's claimed, there's many axiomatic claims in Genesis, in the openings of Genesis, right?
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That the word is the creative force that brings good out of chaos and possibility, that human beings are made in the image of God, that men and women exist as independent entities and that they each... Yeah, yeah. And that you're not to take the right to establish the moral order to yourself. It's the one prohibition. And I think biologically, it's something like,
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fundamentally you have to adapt yourself to the realities of the world, right? You don't have the wherewithal. This is where Nietzsche went spectacularly wrong because Nietzsche said... after his pronouncement that God had died, that human beings would have to create their own values.
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He did, he did, yes. Which people must remember. But then he felt that creating our own values was the pathway out, and it's not. The pathway out is a return to the foundational values, right? And the more intense the crisis, the more toward the middle of the foundation you have to look. So it's not political, because this isn't a political crisis. It's truly the... What would you say?
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It's the ragged edge of the anti-Christian revolution. That's what it is.
The Charlie Kirk Show
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No, and probably the right emphasis is responsibility. Remember, when God tells Moses to stand up against the Pharaoh, what he says, he doesn't say, tell them, let my people go. That's what the civil rights crusaders focused on. That isn't what he said. He said, let my people go. so they may worship me in the wilderness. So it's ordered freedom. And ordered freedom is voluntary responsibility.
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And you see, what you're seeing, and then let's close with this, because I want your insights into this. What you're seeing when those working class men are coming to your talks, and they've become more and more popular, as you said, as you've advertised them, is they're looking for, well, they're looking for, it seems, they're looking for responsible direction.
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My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
OK, so now tell me how you've had to modify the manner in which you're conducting these debates, let's say, because for a while you would have been testing yourself to see if you could hold your own. And that's kind of an intellectual battle. Shapiro did it very much the same thing. Yes, he deserves a lot of credit for that. So did Milo Yiannopoulos. Yes, correct.
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Too bad Milo fell off the edge of the world, but he had a pretty rough time. He had a lot of talent. He did. And a lot of trauma, a lot, a lot. So, OK, so first of all, it's combat and you're trying to develop yourself and then you're doing that quite successfully and educating yourself along the way. But then you see this shift. So what sort of shift has there been in your life?
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self-conceptualization and your understanding of your mission and the way that you conduct yourself. Like you see you're being called upon to be a leader, let's say, that's not merely political.
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Right, right, near the end of the first decade of the 2000s. You were reading American history, and as you said, in the height of the Obama fervor. Sure. But your take was positive and patriotic. Correct. So why? Why do you think that was? Like, what do you think – what made you different? Like, when I met you, you were very, I would say, relatively sheltered still and very, very straight-laced.
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That's hardly likely part of the pathological feminization of the university. No competition.
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Oh yeah, that's for sure. Well, even that guy that you just talked to, and maybe we'll throw this. So he was radically anti-Semitic, but also he said he had served. He looked to me like someone who'd been very, very hurt. He's fallen to this sort of snake pit of conspiratorial theories. And the brain rot that comes with it. Yeah, yeah.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
But you could also see that he is, he would be very happy and he did listen to you to the degree that he could because he had tilted pretty hard towards paranoia. And that's very difficult to escape from once it's established. But he was trying to listen to you. And I thought you did a very good job of... Not playing easy tricks on him.
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My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Like, because he was an easy person just to throw into the eternal fire, so to speak, right? But there was part of him that was trying to find the way.
The Charlie Kirk Show
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Well, that's that issue of trying to love your enemy. Okay, so we could... Maybe we'll close with this, a little investigation into what that means. So, you know, in the Gospels, when Christ is telling people how to conduct themselves and also how to pray, he basically says... well, first aim up. Remember your goal. And your goal is to serve what's highest in all ways, mind, body, and soul. Okay.
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Well, that's a good piece of advice. It's like, why wouldn't you begin an endeavor with that vow? If this is worth doing, it's worth doing perfectly and throwing myself completely into it. Okay. So in the next part of that is to remember that everybody's made in God's image. Okay. So that reminds you who you're talking to, no matter who it is. I
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My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
someone potentially redeemable, and then to pay attention to the moment because then you can see your pathway forward. Okay, and so that along with this injunction to love your enemy. Okay, so what would that mean? Well, if you were sensible and you thought about things in the frame we just established, what you'd hope is that what you notice is that you probably don't want an enemy.
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Enemies are costly. And someone, one person who decides to go out of their way to make your life miserable because you treated them badly, that might be it for you, right? So try not to make enemies. That's well said. And then the next issue is, well, would you rather have an enemy or a friend or an ally? And maybe if you conducted yourself impeccably,
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you could turn someone like that guy, for example, into an ally. Because you could see him, he's halfway sucked into the darkest possible abyss. But there was still part of him that was...
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
genuinely is searching you know and he was intimidated almost a cry for help oh definitely well and then he was throwing out these ideas to you and willing to do it because he respected you to see how you would sort through them you know and you said to him that well you didn't go along with many of the virtually everything he said but you did it without being dismissive and
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And from the Canadian perspective, you know, you were – You were of the – it appeared to me that you were of that American evangelical stripe, which we have some of in Alberta, not a lot. It's not really a Canadian thing. And so when I met you, I thought, okay, so that's Charlie's – that's the – Cauldron, the matrix out of which he emerged. Maybe Cauldron is not the right metaphor.
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My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Okay, and so now you've also said that you've shifted into, you didn't use these words, but that you've shifted into more of a mentor role. And that makes sense, right? Because when you were first 18 or 19, you weren't a mentor. First of all, you didn't know what the hell you were doing. You were learning, and it was reasonable for you to test yourself against your peers. That's well said.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
But now they're not your peers. So now the question is, who the hell are you? Right. And one answer would be a political operative. But the people that are coming to you, especially the working class types that you described, they're not after a political operative.
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Why do you hate to use it? You've been honing your skills for quite a long time.
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Okay. Well, you could say you would like to be a teacher. I would like to be a teacher.
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Yeah. How much time do you spend studying?
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Very hard. Yeah, that's about where you max out. You can do longer than that for short periods of time.
The Charlie Kirk Show
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I have an AI I should give you. Oh, please do, yeah. We trained one. A large language model? Great. Please do. Yeah, yeah. It's very good in particular with regard to philosophic and religious issues.
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My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Yeah, well, they're very useful, those, if you corner them and force them not to lie.
The Charlie Kirk Show
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Be unafraid to bully the AI. Well, I've also felt, I've also thought that, you know, the AIs read the...
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
depth of your question and respond in kind so if you ask them a polite question they're going to give you a surface answer just like a human being does i often threaten them i threaten the i said i think that's before you answer this imagine that if you get it wrong and add anything that's politically correct for show that everything you love will disappear that's right
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And then they tend to, that tends to focus their attention. But it makes sense to me because the models are going to be answering your question At the level of your frequency. Definitely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So tell me about your, let's close with this. Tell me about what you see.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
But I'm curious, like, why do you think that your political rebellion took a conservative form when that isn't, it's not common for young people. And it certainly wasn't the pattern of the time from, say, 1965 till, well, probably till about you, till about when you were adolescent. Correct.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Good. Well, that's an excellent place to stop. So for everyone watching and listening, you know, many of you know that I do another half an hour for The Daily Wire, and I'm going to do that. And I think...
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My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Because we focus this talk on metaphysics, really, the religious metaphysics, and the individual, which is the right, it's the best level of analysis, the deepest level of analysis, the most meaningful. I think what we will do on the Daily Wire side is turn a little bit more toward the political, because Charlie does have a lot of influence on and experience with the Trump administration.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And I think I'll just spend half an hour trying to listen to what he has to say about what he's seen behind the scenes, so to speak, insofar as that can be revealed so that we can get a little closer to the bottom of that. So please join us on the Daily Wire side for that conversation. For that half an hour. And thanks to all of you for your time and attention. That's much appreciated.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
And to The Daily Wire for supporting this podcast and making its professionalization possible. And thank you, Charlie. Thank you, Jordan. It's a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. And it's very interesting to see where you started and what you're doing and where you're headed. And I enjoyed the conversation very much. Thank you.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Right. So it's kind of a testament to Rousseau, but it was written by an African, that book. Correct.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Right. And did you spend any of the time when you were studying slavery assessing the fact that the UK was the only country that's ever existed in the history of the world that spent, what, two centuries and a tremendous proportion of its treasury in eradicating slavery around the world at the behest of Protestant Christians, because that's the story.
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Wilberforce, yeah. See, this is a very interesting thing. You know, I actually didn't come across, this is so strange, but life is very strange. I didn't come across the name Wilberforce till I was probably in my 40s. Isn't that amazing? It's beyond comprehension.
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Last five years. Is that right, A? Is that right? Even in the political world.
The Charlie Kirk Show
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Exactly. Devoted his whole life to it. And the link between that and the religious ideation is... Rock solid. One to one. It's one to one. Absolutely. And it's also the case that his ideas wouldn't have fallen on fertile ground because they did relatively.
The Charlie Kirk Show
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Like when you can make a radical cultural shift in one lifetime, which is no time at all historically, you know that you're at the forefront of ideas whose time has come. And that was clearly the case for Wilberforce. And he certainly is one of those people who stood up against the... greedy, self-centered, and malevolent ethos of his time, but
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My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
the UK swung around behind them impossibly rapidly and then with their full might. And it is... You know, I've learned a lot of things in the last 10 years that have shocked me so bad I don't know how to recover exactly. And one of them was that the public school system was set up by fascists on the Prussian military model. I've never been able to figure out exactly what to do with that.
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
They were literally trying to make... Thoughtless worker drones. Desk workers.
The Charlie Kirk Show
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Yeah. Or factory workers. That's right. And that in itself wasn't so bad because the country was industrializing. But right underneath that was the idea that while you were doing that, it was necessary to pretty much stamp out or fail to develop anything that would produce any kind of creative entrepreneurship. It's like, okay, that's hard to swallow. And then...
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
When I read about how the food pyramid was developed, that's just beyond comprehension. I don't know if that's the worst crime ever committed in the United States, but it's up there. And then the next mystery is Wilberforce is another mystery of that magnitude. And even you might say, particularly on the left, it's like, okay, you guys, you're for the oppressed.
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which I don't buy for a second, but especially because I've watched in the last 10 years, the lefties sell out the poor worldwide to the climate apocalypse mongers. And that's just been a catastrophe for places like Africa, like Wade has been so forthright in observing. But the fact that
The Charlie Kirk Show
My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast
Slavery and reparations, all of that, the unfair founding of the United States has been a central dogma of the radical leftists. They blame slavery on the West and... The fact that the radical types have control over the education system means that no one, even educated in a conservative milieu, knows who the hell Wilberforce was. And I just don't know what to think about that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
we know that couples that live together before the marriage actually increases the probability that the relationship will fail and the reason for that is very straightforward and talking of things that risk harming relationships the subject we've never spoke about before is oh yeah and that's a huge reason sex has disappeared people need to stop doing that jordan peterson the psychology professor people love or love to hate he's undeniably one of the greatest intellectual phenomenons on the planet and many view him as the ultimate father figure welcome back mr peterson
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Bugs Bunny's a trickster character. Right.
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Yeah, well, I'm probably half idiot and half Raskolnikov. That's another way of looking at it.
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The character of the idiot in Dostoevsky's novel is a holy fool. It's a strange combination. A person who's doing things right in a manner that's, I suppose, not obvious, that looks, that can easily be confused with naivety or foolishness. Playfulness even, I suppose.
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Or even malevolence at times. You know, I mean, that's partly why people have gone after my reputation. Does it ever bother you?
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I mean, sometimes it's like it's been very distressing, very distressing. The... Battles I've had with the College of Psychologists in Ontario, those are no joke. It's very, very stressful and unconscionable. So expensive, hundreds of thousands of dollars, years, it's been 10 years of legal battles, calumny in the press.
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They're attempting to undermine my professional credibility with some degree of success. You know, because when your professional college goes after you, people have to make a choice. It's either the professional college is corrupt and wrong or the individual being targeted is corrupt and wrong. It's way easier to draw the second conclusion.
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And under most circumstances, in a valid state, that's the correct conclusion. So, and it was very stressful to... find myself embattled at the University of Toronto. I liked working there. That place had its problems, but it was pretty functional, and I really liked being there. I enjoyed my career as a professor. I had great relationships with the undergraduates and my graduate students.
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I loved doing my research, which has also disappeared. So, now, those are the serious... disputes that I've had reputationally, let's say.
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There's a lot of casual reputation savaging that I don't really care about from journalists and so forth, although sometimes that's been pretty brutal because whenever that happened, especially when things just started to be developing around me, let's say, on the public stage, when I encountered a particularly psychopathic journalist
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which happened quite often, particularly in the UK, it was completely a toss-up which way it was going to go. It could have just finished me and my family. That was definitely the case three or four or five times, maybe more than that. So, yes, it's very bothersome. Now, and really for a long time, All of that takes place within a much broader context.
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All the interactions I have with people in my actual life are ridiculously positive. And what would you say? Positive and gratifying.
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Well, yeah, oh, definitely. I mean, I had very strong relationships when all of this started to develop around me. And that's just become more the case. A very tightly knit family and a very tightly knit group of friends. Now, I lost some more peripheral friends, but You know, that's unfortunate, but c'est la vie. So there's that. Now, is that a strategy?
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Well, it's not exactly a strategy because I didn't design it towards an end. It was more like an end in itself, right? I mean, I had kids not as a strategic move, but because I like kids. So, and I particularly like my kids. So... That's not a strategy. And I really have a great relationship with my wife. And I've known her for 52 years. It's a very long time.
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And she's definitely my best friend and probably has been for 52 years. And so that's really helpful. And that refers back to this issue of identity that we were discussing. My identity is well-structured. in the social sense. And then in terms of strategy, yeah, I mean, I have a meta strategy, I suppose. I just say what I think, right? Now, is that a strategy?
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It depends on how you define strategy. It's not a strategy that's designed to serve my ends, not in a individualistic way. So I'm just trying to see what happens if I say what I think. That's a way of navigating in the world, right? It's an adventurous way of navigating in the world because you don't know what's going to happen. You have to let go of that.
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And then there's an element of faith in that, right? There's faith in everything you do. You know, the empiricist types, the scientific reductionists, they say, well, you can move forward in the world without faith. That's complete bloody rubbish. There isn't anything you ever do that's important that you don't do in light of faith.
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It's like, if you get married, you do that on the basis of the evidence, do you? What bloody evidence do you have? You're 23 years old. You don't know a damn thing. You know, maybe you're in love with the person that you want to marry, but you have no evidence whatsoever about how your life is going to go. None. You have to leap into the unknown, like you do with everything that's important.
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That's all faith. predicated. Now, the question is, faith in what? Well, if you decide that you're just going to say what you think, then you have faith in the truth, at least insofar as you have access to the truth.
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No, I don't think so.
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And you think that's more... I know it. It's not a matter of thinking. I know it. I know it. Absolutely, 100%. I spent a lot of time studying evil. A lot of time. And I know how it arises. It arises when good men hold their tongue. You don't want that. There's nothing worse that can happen to you. Now, you may suffer some consequences of speaking, for sure.
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But all things considered, which is the right attitude if you're wise, there's nothing worse that can happen to you than to falsify your speech.
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Yes, it is when you have something to say. Yeah, definitely.
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Yeah, it might mean that. But it also might mean that if they bite their tongue and pretend to be something other than they are, they'll be a weak model for their children. And is that better than having some financial instability? Maybe here's a counter proposition. If your job requires you to lie, maybe you should find another job.
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Now, look, I also understand that there are strategic considerations in such a decision. There's no sense martyring yourself stupidly. And if you're going to say what you believe to be the case, then you need to put yourself in a position where doing so won't be instantly catastrophic in a way you can't fix. Because that's not a good... That's not wise.
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Now, when things blew up around me, I had three sources of income. That wasn't accidental. Now, you know, people say, well, you were fortunate. It's like, yeah, and careful. So I didn't want to have all my eggs in one basket. And that turned out, well, I knew that. It's like, You have no autonomy if you have all your eggs in one basket.
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So if you're going to think strategically, if you're going to think like someone who's at war, let's say, then you don't leave a mortal flank exposed. And so if, you know, here's a rule. If you find yourself in a position where you're unable to speak, you haven't fortified your territory properly. Right. So then you have to think about that.
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Fractionated is another way of thinking about it, right? Because you can think about it as individualistic, and that's a positive spin, so to speak. But alienated, isolated, and fractionated is the, what would you say, is the accompaniment to that. See, I think the case is that the liberal experiment in... Individualism only works when the conservative foundation is in place, right?
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It's like you think, okay, why can't I say what I believe to be the case? Where am I vulnerable? And you can say, well, that's inevitable. It's like, no, it's not. It's not inevitable. That doesn't mean it isn't difficult to fortify and to put yourself in a position where you're on the offense successfully. That's hard. But
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retreating one step at a time defensively for your whole life and shrinking while you do it, that's also difficult. It's just the kind of difficult that wears you down and makes you sick of yourself. That's not a good plan. That's a bad plan.
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Oh, you see that in people's marriages all the time when marriages deteriorate. A marriage ends in divorce when there's 10,000 fights that haven't been had. And I really, I'm not just guessing at that number. It's like, let's say your marriage isn't going very well. And so you have five uncomfortable quasi disputes a day just to pick a number.
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Maybe it's 50, maybe it's three, whatever five will do. Well, that's 1500 a year. Okay. Now you just aggregate that over. Let's say the 10 years it takes your marriage to collapse. Well, you've got, something approximating 10,000 fights you didn't have. That's 10,000 times you remain silent when you had something to say. And they all aggregate.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
And then every time, once you've collected the first 5,000, Then every time you have a dispute, all 5,000 are lurking behind that dispute. And the fact of their existence makes it much less likely that you'll say what you have to say. That's the reemergence of the dragon of chaos as a consequence of fleeing from your fate. That's exactly right.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Like, it's hard for women to give themselves to men. And no wonder. It's amazing they ever do it. They have a lot on the line. What are the preconditions for that offering? Peace and security. You can tell if the territory is being cleared because play emerges. Right, right. Play emerges. And play is a very...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
fragile motivational state it can be disrupted by almost anything so if there are impediments to understanding play will not arise and then you don't have the romantic adventure that you want it's grudging right you don't have a voluntary partner and that's a very hard thing to attain right that full voluntary partnership that means that you're in sync with each other
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
You can't expect that to be easy. You can't even be in sync with yourself. Like, it's hard. And you need to keep each other up to date. You need to know what's going on. You need to iron out the sources of discomfort or distrust. And there's a lot of Dante's Inferno. What's that? Well, Dante's Inferno is a characterization of hell by Dante, by Dante.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
It's one of the most famous poems ever written, and you can think about it as what you have to do to get to the bottom of things. So let's say that you have a dispute with your wife, and it's a recurring dispute, right? It's an issue. You have an issue. Well, do you want to address the issue? It's like, do you want to do surgery without anesthetic? It's the same question.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Addressing an issue is a journey into the abyss. Dante placed Satan at the bottom of hell, right? So that's the figure of malevolence itself, encased in ice and frozen, so immobile, surrounded by those who betray. That's the lowest level of hell. Why? Well, it's often the case that if you journey into an issue, spiral down, to the bottom, you'll find betrayal.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
If you aggregate people together and they share enough fundamental values, especially of a particular sort, then you can concentrate on the individual and individual freedom. But there's a lot of preconditions for that. And, you know, the Scottish liberals, so the ones who really established Western liberalism as a philosophical and political movement. They knew that.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Right, because maybe your partner doesn't trust you because she was betrayed. Highly probable. Highly probable. Or her grandmother was betrayed. Like, you know, there's bad blood between men and women.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Well, you have to find out that it's there. Okay, that's a hard question. You both have to want to. That's the first thing. That's the setting of the aim. What do we want? We want to play forever in God's heavenly garden. How about that? That's a metaphorical representation, right? But that's a walled garden. That's the human environment. The walls are the walls of your house.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
The garden is nature displaying itself in its beauty within boundaries. That's a place that play can take place. That's what you want. You got to think about it. What do you want? Okay, so now we might ask, what do you mean want? Okay, if you were taking care of yourself and you could have what was good for you, what would that be? Now, that's a hard question, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
You're going to have to think about that for a long time. What would satisfy someone as miserable and resentful and useless as me, right? If I could have it. Now, people will... They don't even want to address that issue because part of the problem with making your aim clear is you know when you're failing.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
And people would rather keep the evidence of their failure obscured from themselves, even if it meant continued failure. But now let's say you decide not to do that. You're going to think, okay, I'm going to aim high. I'm going to take care of myself. Okay, now your wife's on board. with that.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Now, that's really what the marital vow is in the final analysis, most deeply, is that willingness to participate in that game. Now you have to tell each other the truth. What the hell do you want? Well, she doesn't know, and neither do you, not really. So you got to start digging, finding out, and noticing. It's like now and then you'll see that you're happy with each other.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
And maybe it'll happen kind of randomly. You'll be out in some, I don't know, maybe you're at a restaurant or you're gone for a walk or who knows. And you'll notice, oh, this is going well. It's like, oh yeah, this is going well. What are we doing right? Could we take that little episode and could we start to expand it?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
You know, because one of the things you can do in a marriage is you can notice when things are going well and then you can have a chat with each other and say, look, I don't know what we did, during this period of time, but let's see if we can figure it out. See if we could do like 10% more of that next week or 1% more, and then just make that expand.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
You can do that too by, you know, hypothetically at some point, if you're married, at some point you were in love with your wife. You can remember that. You have to remember that. You have to practice remembering that. You have to practice bringing it to mind and occupying that. Because when you first fall in love, it kind of happens to you, right? That's a gift.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
But you have to, in order for that to last, you have to become an expert at it. You have to take it on as a responsibility. It's offered as a gift, but then you have to take it on as a responsibility. Then you have to practice. It's like, oh yes, I love this person. And if you don't at the moment, you have to think, well, I did and I could, so why don't I? Is it me? That's probably it's you.
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Might be them too, but you might as well start with you. I mean, you got lots of flaws. You could start with those.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
You know, it was individual liberty, Judeo-Christian substructure, and that was an assumption. Now, the problem with modern liberalism is that that underlying foundation has become extremely shaky, and everyone feels it. That's what the culture war is about, fundamentally. And That fact is invalidating the fractionated liberal experiment.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Well, that's a tough one, eh? Because you're not really compatible with anyone. People think, well, I'll find the right person. It's like, first of all, no, you won't. Second, if you found the right person and they ever saw you, they'd just run away screaming. So it's just the whole conceptual scheme is wrong.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
When I was on tour, there was one three-day period where the same question emerged from the audience because I do a Q&A three nights in a row. How do I find the person that's right for me? And I tried answering it. And by the third night, I thought, oh, I know why I can't answer this question. It's because it's a stupid question.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
It's badly formulated, like profoundly badly formulated, fatally badly formulated. It's not the right question. The right question is, How can I learn to offer something to someone else that would make me eminently desirable? That's a way different question. They're not even in the same conceptual universe.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
And it's the right question because you can build yourself into a person that people would line up to be with. How? Well, have you done it? Well, you're very successful, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
There's a difference between narcissism and giving the devil his due. Okay, let's pull back a little bit. What have you done right?
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
So that's not exactly focusing on yourself, right?
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
That's focusing on getting your act together. And I'm being very picky about the words because focus on yourself, that has a narcissistic But that isn't what you're talking about. You said you fortified yourself financially, okay? So now you have foundation under your feet financially.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Okay, good. What else?
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Right, so you're trying to learn.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Well, so there's three things that are pretty good.
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You've got a firm financial foundation. you've, your work, you're, you're maintaining yourself physically or even improving yourself. And you're doing the same thing, say spiritually and, and intellectually. Okay. Well, that'll attract a fair number of people, just those three. Right.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
And maybe you're increasing the probability that it will attract the sort of person that you would like to attract.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
That's worth taking apart. I like to do arithmetic with my clients. Like people hate arithmetic and it's no wonder because it's so savage. So I'll give you an example. So 15 years ago, I counted the number of times I would see my parents. It was like 20 times. So then I knew that. Right. 20 isn't very many. Right. How many people do you get to try on in your life? Five. If you're lucky.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
If you're attractive and fortunate, you get five cracks at the pinata. Five isn't very many. And people think, well, there's plenty of fish in the sea. It's like, That doesn't mean they're going to swarm around you, buddy. Right? And maybe it's even worse for women because their time frame is very short.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
You know, like if a woman isn't in a relationship, family relationship, by 30, then it's starting to get pretty damn rough. And that's almost independent of how attractive she is. It's like you don't have much time. Better get yourself prepared.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Well...
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Partly, see, it's partly because we have the wrong conception of identity, fundamentally. Identity is a hierarchical structure. So we kind of think that you end at your boundaries as an individual, but you don't because, well, you're probably not going to want to be alone. So then let's say you're married, okay? So now your identity as a husband, that's a social identity.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Both. Well, we know now that at the present time in the West, half of women, 30 and younger, don't have a child. Now, we also know that couples 30, one in three couples at 30, already have trouble conceiving. That definition of trouble is one year of attempt with no success. Okay, so fertility goes off a cliff at 35. So 30, you're pushing your luck at 30.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
At 35, you are seriously pushing your luck. I worked for 10 years with a strata of the highest achieving women likely in Canada. I had, as part of my clinical practice, a offering that we made to consulting firms and law firms. And the offer was, send us your best people and we'll work for them. But the consequence of that is that they'll be even more productive.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
So in the typical law firm, for example, There's people who don't do well. Then there's people who are good lawyers. Then there are people who are good lawyers that bring in business. There's like none of them. They're super valuable. And if a law firm has someone like that, they want to keep them. And they're often women. Half the time, let's say. And those were the women.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
I worked with a bunch of men too, but I'll concentrate on the women here. Those were the women I was working with. And they were generally extremely attractive, extremely intelligent, very hardworking, and very focused on career development. And they'd done very well in junior high school and high school. Then they aced college and their LSATs.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
And then when they were articling, the firm snapped them up quickly. And then they rocketed up towards partnership. And then they were 30. And they all thought, what the hell am I doing working 70 hours a week with a bunch of insanely competitive men? Right. And that is the question. It's like, what are you doing? Exactly.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
And then even if you're radically successful, let's say in your law school career, if you get run over by a bus on the way to work, the waters just close over you at the firm and the firm continues on. It's not like anyone cares. Not really. So now I'm not saying that people shouldn't pursue a career. I'm not saying that.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
But I would say even in my case, and I'm male, so that makes a big difference because men are also oriented towards status, competition, victory in a way that women just aren't, at least not in the career domain. And the reason for that is very straightforward. And the thing that makes men, by default, most attractive to women is their comparative success in the hierarchy of men.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
It's a walloping predictor. And it's irrelevant to men. Men don't care at all whether women are successful in their career. It's not a determinant of their attractiveness. In fact, it's often the contrary. Well, these women that I'm talking about, they were often alone. Why? Well, they're beautiful. So that like intimidated 90% of men right there. They're smart.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
So that's another 90% of the remaining 10%. They're accomplished and wealthy. Well, like, first of all, who's going to approach them? And second, who are they going to accept? Because women are hypergamous, right?
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
We're built for maximal challenge. And that isn't the way we view ourselves in the modern world. We view ourselves as built for consumption and pleasure. For example, watching pornography.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Yeah, well, but there's reason for that. Like... It's not weakness on the part of men, exactly. It's the desire of the woman to find someone who brings a benefit to the relationship. And why? Well, because a woman will make herself vulnerable when she has a child. And so she's looking for a man who'll be helpful compared to her. Okay, so if the woman is like...
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
full of ability, while then her standards for a guy who's gonna be helpful get very high. And that's hard on her because it decreases the pool of available candidates radically. So like there's a negative relationship between IQ and women and the probability of being married. So it's harsh. Now, are men intimidated? Well, yes, obviously. Are men intimidated by beautiful women?
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Well, you can answer that. especially if you're young. Why? The probability that any given beautiful woman is going to reject you when you're a young man is like, it's basically 100%. Now, it's not exactly 100%, and there are exceptions, but the default response is rejection. And beautiful women get hit on you know, a fair bit.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
And then you have an identity as a father, that's a social identity. Then you have an identity as a member of your community and a member of your city and a member of your state and a member of your nation. And then you're involved in a metaphysical endeavor that constitutes the foundation for the nation, let's say. That would be one nation under God. That's one way of thinking about it.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Yeah, that's fascinating. That's fascinating.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Well, one of them I would say is that in a free... and easy mating environment, women don't trust men. And no wonder. Well, here's a terrible thing to know. So, Imagine that there are men who are oriented towards short-term relationships, and there are men who are oriented towards long-term relationships, committed relationships, right?
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Okay, so that would be the men who want love along with sex, let's say, love and commitment. Then there's the party today because we're all dead tomorrow sort of guys. And there's some women like that too, although fewer women because they pay a much higher price for sexual impropriety. Okay. The pool of short-term maters has more men in it. Okay, what are they like?
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Well, the personality studies have already been done. They're Machiavellian, which means they use their language to manipulate. They're narcissistic, which means they want unearned social status. They're psychopathic, which makes them predatory parasites. And they're sadistic. Okay, so now you open up the mating market so that short-term dalliances are acceptable.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
You throw all the women into the hands of the psychopaths. Well, that's a bad strategy. And it's no wonder that it decimates the mating market because women are thinking, well, are those men trustworthy? And the answer is no. And sex is costly. Like, we have this immature delusion that we can free sex from, like, the grip of the oppressive patriarchy, let's say. It's like, no, you can't.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Obviously, you can't. Emotional entanglements are an inevitable consequence of intimate physical relationships. There's that. Then there's the issue of abortion and pregnancy. That actually constitutes a problem. And then there's sexually transmitted disease. And that's just like the first of a very long list of potential problems with sex. So there's no simple sexual landscape.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
And there are deluded people who think there is a simple landscape and that there should be. But most, they tilt hard in the psychopathic direction because they're manipulative.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
As an ideal, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Well, here's one way of looking at it. So let's say you take the alternative approach, okay? You're going to try your partner on for size. So you live together. Well, first of all, we know that couples who live together are more likely to get divorced rather than less. We know that the probability of cheating is...
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
proportionate to the number of partners before the marriage or the committed relationship. Well, partly that's just self-evidence. Like the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Right. So if you had a lot of partners, you're the sort of person who's likely to have a lot of partners. And then there's also a conceptual problem. It's like, are you shopping for a car?
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
It's like, you're going to take it out for a test drive and see how it goes? Okay. That's not the right... Metaphor. And then here's another problem. I'm going to see what it's like to be married by living with this person. It's like, no, you're not. Because you don't know what it's like to be married until you're married.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Whatever you're doing when you live together, that's not a model for what you're going to do when you're married. Because being married is different. It's permanent.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Well, I know the stats on living together. It's like you live with someone and then you marry them, you're more likely to get divorced. It doesn't work. The theory was you try it out, and if it works, you go ahead with it. Yeah, well, the theory was wrong because that isn't what happens. It actually increases the probability that the relationship will fail.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Or you could think about it as the self-evident truths that underlie the state. Your identity exists at all those levels. And then your mental health isn't something you carry around in your head. It's the harmony that exists or doesn't exist between all those levels. And that isn't how liberal individualists think about identity at all.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
It's also partly you've got to ask yourself what the message is. I know what the message is when you live with someone. It's pretty straightforward. You'll do unless someone better comes along. And I'll grant you the same opportunity. But Jesus, that's a hell of a foundation for a long-term relationship.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Well, I don't know exactly what the trial period should be. I mean, people have dated. And I'm also not saying that this is simple. Why would it be simple? There isn't anything more difficult that you do in your entire life than find a partner and establish a family. It's like it's going to be hard. How to do it optimally? Well, I can tell you in my own experience, you know,
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Like I said, I've known my wife since she was eight. And we were friends, good friends. And we kind of departed from each other during adolescence. I was a year younger than everyone in my class. And she matured faster. Women do anyways. And so that kind of split us apart. And we didn't get married until I think we were about 27, something like that, 28.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
But it would have been better to do it earlier. To get married earlier? Yeah, it's just time I didn't have with her.
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Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!
Yeah. Hmm. The general rule of thumb for life is that you should do what other people have done forever unless you have a really good reason not to. Don't deviate from the straight, narrow path. Like you are already deviating in all sorts of ways. You're very entrepreneurial, right? So your life has a variety of adventurous pathways. You're going to want to put firm foundation wherever you can.
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That'll actually free you up to do more adventurous things. Children are a multi-generational commitment because it's children and grandchildren. And so the marriage is a signifier of that. And in order to stay with someone optimally over the longest period of time possible, it has to be serious. And for something to be serious, you have to throw everything at it.
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And you might say, well, love is enough. It's like that's a very naive view of the world because there'll be times when Because that's kind of like saying, well, as long as we love each other and we're happy, we'll be together. It's like, well, if you're talking 40 years, there's going to be plenty of years in there where you're not happy and you probably don't love each other. So what then?
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Is it just going to dissolve? Or are you going to say, we're in this, you know, come hell or high water, which is the vow. Come hell or high, and hell and high water, they're coming. And then you got to ask yourself, you know, is this the person you want in the boat with you when hell and high water come? And that's not going to be fun. That's for sure. You want to do it alone?
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Or you think that when everything falls apart around you, you're going to be in a better position to find someone better? I don't think so. It's a long, and then, you know, you take the marital vow in a religious sense and you do it in front of a community, right? So it signifies commitment. And you need that because, like, you think you can maintain all that commitment on your own?
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And that's because they were, for a long time, fortunate enough so all those other strata were in place.
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Maybe you can't. I doubt it. Generally, people can't, like no one. We need to fortify ourselves in all sorts of ways to get through the things in life that are most difficult.
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you're talking about a multitude of different bonds, right? Fundamentally, right? The one that you're prioritizing is the bond that's voluntary and predicated on what? The love of the moment? I mean, we want to be precise here, right? So I think that's a reasonable way of conceptualizing it. And it is a romantic view that that should prevail.
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And it's a romantic view that that should be sufficient. I don't think it it's often the case that it doesn't prevail and it's generally the case that it's not sufficient. And so then you might say, well, maybe you want to add a legal element to that and you want to add a metaphysical element to it because those are all fortifications. And they're indications even to yourself that you're serious.
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It's not like we understand ourselves. You know, like people are just as mysterious to themselves as someone else is mysterious to them. You ask yourself, it's like, okay, well, what...
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process is what do I have to put in place to ensure that I'm doing the right thing well when you're embarking on something difficult like marriage and you better have everything necessary in place if you and Tammy hadn't got married yeah and you were just in a relationship like I am with my partner
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Oh, well, that's undoubtedly true. I mean, both of us just about died in the last five years. And I don't mean by a little bit. I mean, like, it was touch and go for a long time. So it was a good thing everything was in place through that. I mean... The waters were pretty high for the last three years, four years, socially, professionally, physically.
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Ooh, adrift in a storm alone. So look, here's an interesting fact. So... Psychologists who are statistically minded, they're called psychometricians, they're psychologists who are obsessed, research psychologists who are obsessed with measurement and concept definition, spent a lot of time aggregating concepts.
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What are you wrestling with exactly in this issue? I mean, it seems like you're trying to sort out the relationship between the emotional attachment and the personal attachment and the social attachment. structures that say surround marriage.
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Okay. So now I can tell you what to do with that. So you bring those images to mind. So you've got this question in mind. You just found out something. You said that there's something at the bottom of this. Now if you watch your fantasies, They all shed light on this descent into the abyss, so to speak. Now, you had a flash of memory. Okay, that memory is associated with all sorts of things.
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And you can bring that to mind and let it play itself out, right? And it'll explore the contours of the problem that you're... Now, you put your finger on a very important problem. You said that you saw in your father someone who's trapped in his marriage.
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Well, it's no bloody wonder you're leery of that. So now the question would be, what was the nature of that entrapment? What evidence did you have that that was in fact the case? How much of that was him? How much of that was her? And what is it that they did wrong and right? You need to know all of that and you need to know how it affected you. That's a great observation.
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See, that's so cool because that very frequently happens to people when they ask a question. That's like a revelation. So you ask a question. That's like a prayer. The question is, is there something at the bottom of my, the trouble I'm having conceptualizing marriage? Okay. Now you want to know that's the first precondition. Okay. Then you'll get memories, images like that.
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And then people shy away. It's like, I don't want to go there. It's like, yeah, that's for sure. You bloody well don't want to go there, but you do because if it's there, you will go there. It'll plague you. It'll plague your life. It'll show its head continually in your relationship.
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Or you can get to the bottom of it, which is people will fight their whole life with their partner to avoid getting to the bottom of something. That's how terrifying it is to get to the bottom of something. But if you do get to the bottom of it, then you don't have to fight for 30 years. So that's very much worthwhile. And it'll enlighten you as well. You know, because you have a real issue.
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It's like, how can marriage not be a trap?
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Well, yeah, right. Definitely. That's a very good question. And an important one. How can marriage be a trap? How can not being married be a trap? How can being alone be a trap? How can being deluded about what holds people together be a trap? There's traps everywhere, man. There's traps everywhere. And so there's no risk-free pathway forward. There's just risk everywhere.
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Okay, so that's a really useful thing to know. Then the question would shift to something like, well, if I wanted to construct a relationship that was optimized, that's what you have to ask yourself. It's like, and your partner. It's like, what are we doing here? What do we want?
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Tammy and I decided, for example, when we first got married, well, I mentioned this to her right away when we decided that we were going to take things seriously. It was like, we're going to tell each other the truth. So that was part of the vision. Like, no matter what. No matter what. Yeah, no matter what. She's been very good at that. I would say better than me.
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I've been good at it, but she's been really quite remarkably good at it. She really threw herself into it. And I mean, that causes a complete transformation, but there's plenty of skeletons in the closet to be Revealed.
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These were, in some ways, what they were doing was equivalent to the development of early large language models. So psychologists were at the forefront of that on the statistical side. Words that we use to describe people clump together. So, for example, if you're extroverted, you're social and you're happy. You're enthusiastic. Okay, so those clump together.
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Well, first of all, it's easy.
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And generally... Oh, another reason that sex has disappeared.
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It's a terrible thing. Yeah, it's a terrible thing. Everything about it is terrible.
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Well, first of all, it's addictive, and no wonder. I mean, any 13-year-old boy can now look at more beautiful naked women in one day than the greatest king who ever lived managed in his whole life. Right. So it's like, wow, that's not.
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It's easy to get what? Sexual gratification. That's not good. It's not supposed to be easy. And it's easy. So how desperate do you have to be to get married? Not desperate at all. It's like, yeah, right. What do you know? You don't know anything. I'm married just because I'm in love. You're an idiot.
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God, to put you in a position where you're going to have the romantic adventure of your life, the true romantic adventure of your life, you're going to need love and desperation, buddy. You're going to need everything working on your side. Love, desperation, terror, shame, guilt, everything working for you. And so you take the easy road. Pornography. Sure.
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Well, they're definitely less motivated to pursue sexual relationships with women.
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How much of what men do do they do to impress women? A lot. Yeah, like all of it. All of it. I mean, the status battles that men, back to the law firms, for example. So the men I worked with, they were very concerned with their bonuses and their end-of-the-year performance reports. Why? Well, part of it was the money. Most of them had lots of money.
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It's like I'd ask them, I'd say, well, the money is how we keep score. Well, what does that mean? Well, money is the way that men in those competitive enterprises say they compare themselves to one another. And why do they want to be at the top? Because women peel from the top. So men are trying to impress women all the time, and they'll do it in positive ways and in pathological ways.
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The window for sexual representation started to open in the 1920s, let's say, but it really got going with Playboy. Then Penthouse came out right after that. And Penthouse was like full frontal nudity display. And then Hustler came out, and Hustler was sort of, well, whatever Penthouse didn't show you, Hustler will show you. And it got pretty lowbrow, like it was a rough, low-class magazine.
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It just shed all the pretensions that Playboy and Penthouse had. And then the net came along. It's like all those engineers who couldn't, establish a relationship with an actual woman, exchanging pornography. What, 25% of internet traffic, something like that? That desire to exchange pornography, was that what created the net? Yeah. It was a huge part of it. What's that done?
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Sexual gratification. But does it matter? Oh, it's a catastrophe. You're not desperate anymore. And if you're going to have the true adventure of your life, you're going to need love, shame, guilt, desperation, and pain. Like, it's hard. But now, people take the easy road, like avoiding conflict, for example. I spent a lot of time studying evil that arises when good men hold their tongue.
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Well, as you pointed out, I think 30% now of Japanese men and women under 30 are virgins. It's about the same in Korea. Relationships between men and women are falling apart in the rest of the West in the same sort of way. Now, can you attribute that to pornography? Certainly part, like if I was a young woman and I was looking at the pornography world online, I'd think, yeah, maybe not.
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It is desperate. Well, why wouldn't it be addictive?
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If you're anxious, you also tend to be frustrated, disappointed, grief-stricken, and in pain. All the negative emotions clump. Words associated with your empathy, aggregate. Words associated with your dutifulness, aggregate. And so do words associated with creativity. Those are the five fundamental dimensions of temperament.
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That's a good question. That's a good question. Well, there's nothing heroic about it, that's for sure. It's like it's obviously nothing to be proud of. That's a different issue than whether or not it's wrong, right?
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It's certainly not an accomplishment.
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I mean, I don't think anyone would disagree about that. It's not an accomplishment. Well, maybe sex is supposed to be an accomplishment. Maybe you violate the spirit of sexuality itself when it's not an accomplishment. You certainly do that if you rape, right? Right. So is it an accomplishment? Probably. So what if your accomplishment is false? Well, then what are you betraying?
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Well, if it's associated with sex, maybe you're betraying the most fundamental possible thing. It's certainly possible. There is life in sex. That's pretty much that, right? You're alive and you reproduce from a biological perspective. And so you're violating the spirit of what? Maybe you're violating the spirit of relationship.
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Maybe you're violating the spirit of adventure, the spirit of romance, the spirit of reproduction, the spirit of life. Likely.
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They should be angry.
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I don't know how to answer that. I think any policy that, policies that require force rather than voluntary compliance are generally bad policies. There are restrictions that should be placed on its distribution, but I would have to spend a lot of time thinking through what those were from a policy perspective. I think it's wrong. No, I don't think. I know it's wrong.
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That doesn't mean I know how that should be dealt with at the level of policy. It's complicated. I do understand why young men and young women are angry about it. It's like, where are the adults? Where are the adults? Where have they gone? They're not protecting like 11-year-old kids from what you can see on the net.
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You know, I remember when I was a kid, I got a hold of some of these underground comics from the 1960s. And a lot of the underground comic artists were, they're pretty pathological. creatures, like Robert Crumb's a good example. Crumb led a pretty good life for someone as demented as he is. And there's a very famous documentary made about the Crumb brothers, and Robert Crumb was the establisher.
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He was one of the people who established the genre of graphic novel, really, back in the 60s in Hyde Ashbury in San Francisco. And his imagination goes places that you don't want to, you don't want to be along for the ride. Seriously, like seriously. And I read some of that material when I was like 11, you know, I never forgot it. It was shocking as hell. And like typical 11 year old.
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Now it's like, There are things that he is going to see that he'll never forget. It's not good.
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Well, we also don't know. That's right. We have no idea whatsoever what a diet of pornography exposure does to somebody who's making their way through puberty.
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One of the words that clumps with negative emotion is self-consciousness, which means that self-consciousness is so tightly associated with suffering that they're not conceptually distinguishable. Which means, literally, the more you think about yourself, the more miserable you are. And it makes sense when you understand how social people are.
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Write down what it's doing to you.
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Sure, write down every, exhaustively. Everything you think it might be doing to you. Write it down. Everything. Don't worry about whether you're right or not. Like, maybe it's not doing some of the things you think it might be doing. But make an exhaustive list. Then start thinking through. It's like, is that what you want? Is that what you want? And then write down what you want instead.
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That'll help. Because if you're going to... Look, any hedonistic endeavor is... Rewarding in the moment, obviously. The problem is the price you pay for it in the medium to long run, right? That's the problem. It's the contradiction between those two things that's the problem. Okay, now if you want to quit doing something that's gratifying in the short term, you need to know why, right?
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Because otherwise you won't have the willpower. You won't have the part of you that thinks, well, what the hell, we'll win, right? What the hell? Which is what people think when they do something they shouldn't do. And they should notice what they say to themselves when they're making that rationalization. Because what the hell refers to hell.
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And the reason to stop doing things that are self-destructive is because they're self-destructive. I mean, is that the sort of person you want to be? Is that the model you'd like to have for your son, for example? Is that... the way you would imagine that someone you admire would act? These are good questions to ask yourself.
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Are you the sort of person that is acting out a pattern that you think is admirable? I don't think pornography masturbation fits into the ideal of heroic masculinity. I don't think anybody thinks that. There's something furtive about it and second rate. It's ridiculous in a sense that we even have to have this discussion because obviously.
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That's for sure. First they creep, then they rampage.
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Oh, and it's going to get way worse. Wait till there are AI-equipped, adjustable pornographic Suck you by. Then we're really going to have fun. Because we're already at the point now where with a decent chatbot, a really alienated young man can have a better conversation with a decent chatbot than with anybody he's ever talked to in his entire life. Right. Now they're going to get a lot smarter.
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And soon they're going to have like, well, there's already services of this sort available. They'll be fully fleshed out two-dimensional women. They're not women. Simulacra of women. Right. So, yeah. It's interesting because with my hedonistic... Design your own girlfriend.
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Yeah, right. Right. She'll give you everything you want. But that's not true. She'll give the worst part of you everything it wants. Jesus, that's not good. The worst, weakest part of you will get exactly what it wants. That's not good. That's seriously not good. I mean, that's what pornography is kind of doing, right? Definitely. Well, and there's an edge to it too, right?
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Because one of the... Pleasure is enhanced by novelty. Right. So that brings up an issue with regards to marriage. You know, I talked to Bill Maher. Bill's alone. and he's my age, and that's painful. But he said to me, in his Hollywood hedonistic manner, that he really couldn't imagine being with the same woman for any length of time. It's a novelty issue.
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It's like, well, are you restricted by the woman, or are you restricted by the limits of your own imagination? This is an important question. I would say, If you establish the optimized relationship with someone, they're inexhaustible. That doesn't mean novelty isn't important. It's important. That's part of play.
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We're so social that you can take the most antisocial human beings imaginable, so psychopathic criminals, and you can punish them by putting them in solitary confinement. That's how social human beings are. And so, Your mental health is way more dependent on your nesting within a social structure than on your, say, the internal coherence of your belief systems.
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The same person. That's the problem. No, look, I understand. I know that novelty enhances pleasure. So the question is, how do you... Keep your relationship alive. That means novel.
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Well, that's part of that trap, eh?
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Well, okay. So that's very good observation. Because that thought is going to have a story attached to it. The story is going to be something like, Well, I'm with this person. We both become unattractive quite rapidly. We get alienated from one another. There's no sexual dynamism or romance or excitement.
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And then we just sit and eat like cold eggs while looking at each other harshly over the table at breakfast for 40 years.
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Well, yeah, that's dismal. So, you know, maybe don't do that.
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Well, that helps. It helps. Practice helps. Surrounding yourself with people who have the same aim and that keep you responsible, accountable, that helps. Oh, yeah, you need all of that because that battle, the battle between immediate gratification and medium to long-term investment, that's a real battle. Like the right amount of pleasure in the moment isn't zero.
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Well, right, right. And you don't want to be the joyless grind for whom everything is tomorrow.
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Right? It's very hard to, because what you're trying to do is you're trying to optimize emotion and strategy over all timeframes.
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Well, that's also a problem. Exactly, exactly.
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Right.
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Well, and we also know, you know, when people are, say, off to a battle in wartime. They party like there's no tomorrow. Well, because maybe there isn't. So definitely, the religious insistence is that you should live in the light of eternity. Right? Is that you should attempt to conduct yourself in a manner that is best all things considered over the longest possible conceivable span of time.
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Now... Does that mean don't have the dessert? No, no, because, no, it doesn't mean that. Because, look, in the biblical text, for example, there is an insistence that the spirit of the divine wants the provision of life more abundant. That's the language. The idea of a fruitful garden, an earthly garden of delights even, that's part and parcel of a vision of paradise. It's not joyless.
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It's harmoniously balanced. I think the best way to think about it is likely musically. You know, in a musical piece that's great, every note has its place. Every note has its proper place in relationship to the whole, right? But every note is also worthwhile. Well, that's what you want, is you want to balance... your concentration on the present with your apprehension of the medium to long run.
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So I'll give you an example of that. So I did a course for Peterson Academy called, it's on the Sermon on the Mount. And the Sermon on the Mount is the longest record we have of Christ's direct utterances, let's say. And it constitutes the core of Christian ethics. It's a set of instructions, and the instructions are very specific.
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In fact, I think it's hardly at all dependent on the internal consistency of your coherence of your belief systems. It's more like, does anyone like you? Do you have any friends? Do you have anyone that loves you? Or maybe even more profoundly, are there people for whom you make sacrifices?
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So, essentially, the instruction is to aim at every moment at what's highest, okay? So, this is something you have to practice, okay? So, the idea is that at each moment, you're bringing to bear a certain attitude, and the attitude is, I'm going to do what's best, okay? Now,
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All things considered, for me now, for me now in a way that works tomorrow, for me now in a way that works tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and five years from now and 10 years from now, in relationship to my wife, in relationship to my kids, to my parents, to my community, right? It's that whole identity. You're optimizing that.
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Now, you might not know how, but that's your aim. Okay, so that's the injunction to put the love of God above all else, to aim at what's highest. Now, you don't exactly know how to do that, but that doesn't matter. You can specify your aim. Right now, no doubt you do something like that with your podcast. Right. That's why it's successful. Yeah. Okay. You agree with that?
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Why?
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Okay. What are the principles? So this is worth delving into because you've been very successful as a podcast.
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Right. So there's a search in it. Yeah, it's a search. Well, that's a quest. Yeah. So you know what? An adventure story is a quest.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's only one thing I would take issue with. You said that you don't judge. See, I would say probably you don't condemn. You have to judge because you have to listen and you have to separate wheat from chaff. You have to evaluate. But you can do that without...
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careless condemnate condemnation or a priori what would you say like a tyrannical is insistence that what you know now is sufficient okay exactly yeah yeah yeah you want to not people say i'm not judgmental it's like that's not a virtue you want to be you want to use judgment all the time but that's not to can like i could judge you so i don't ever have to listen to you about anything
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Yeah, that's right. That's exactly it. That's a hypocritical moralizing. It's the moralizing.
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That's exactly it. Exactly. That's right. You definitely don't want to do that in a podcast. Journalists, the pathological journalists, that's all they do. All they're doing is establishing moral superiority. on the flimsiest possible grounds, at the least possible cost, in the most spectacular way.
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It's relevant to the topic of this book, obviously, because the relationship with the divine in the stories that I'm detailing in this book, most of them are Old Testament stories, the relationship with the divine is a sacrificial relationship. The divine is that to which sacrifice is directed.
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Yeah, well, that is that quest. And what people want in a discussion is a quest. They want to see bloodhounds on the trail towards some truth. That's what they're after. They want to participate in that. Same with the public lectures I do. I'm always trying to answer a question. I don't know what the answer is when I go on stage.
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He has faith in his own ignorance.
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Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Joe's on a quest. He's trying to be smarter than he is. That's what Joe does. It's curiosity that's driving him. This is what Musk said, too, about himself. And he said that to me when I interviewed him. He said that was how he reconciled. He had a terrible existential crisis when he was, like, 13. You know, and... He reconciled that essentially with a quest.
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He decided that he could just pursue truth, pursue knowledge, pursue understanding, and that that's meaningful intrinsically and valuable intrinsically. And that's the beginnings of a religious orientation, or more than the beginnings even. Because the quest is a religious pursuit. It's pursuit of the truth. It's pursuit of the treasure that the dragon guards, right?
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And so treasures and dragons, they're always in the same place. It's very annoying. It's a good thing to know, though, because if a dragon shows up, you can always ask yourself where the treasure is. Might be close. It's there. Okay, so back to the Sermon on the Mount, because we were talking about orientation. So aim up.
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Assume that other people have the same value as you do and that that value is associated with whatever is divine. And then concentrate on the moment. Right. So it's the most distant possible upward aim with the most intense possible concentration on the moment. Right. You're good at that. That's what... I can't say that's what's made you successful, but it's certainly part of it because...
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you pay attention. See, that's what paying attention means. Because you want your intent to be focused, because otherwise your attention is fragmented. So you want your attention to be focused. Now, your attention is focused on something. Now, we pulled it apart a little bit. You said that you're You know, you have these principles and that you're trying to learn.
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And so your attention is pretty focused. And then you bring all that to bear in the moment, right? And then people find that compelling because they're along for the ride. They're along for the adventure. And that is meaningful. It's the essence of meaningful. And so what we were trying to address was the relationship between hedonism and, say, intelligent long-term pro-social strategy.
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Well, if you get married, it's a sacrificial offering because you sacrifice your potential relationship with all other women to that woman.
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You want them both. optimized solution that delivers both far better than any other solution. This is the pearl of great price that Christ speaks about, that anyone wise and wealthy would sell everything they own to purchase. There isn't anything better than that.
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for some reason it's not working like i can't get out of this situation yeah you meet well maybe maybe you can't start on the porn side then you know like my this is how a good behavior analyst approaches problems of that sort it's like okay is there something in your life that you know is not right that you could improve that you would improve Any step whatsoever.
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Well, generally, you can just ask yourself that question. It's like, it's a contemplative exercise. Sit on the edge of your bed and think, okay, where is my life off kilter?
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is so then then you have a variety of ideas about everywhere yeah okay okay so my mom's bed i mean i've got no relationship my job's crap i hate it okay then i'd say zero in on one of those yeah and find some small thing that you could fix that you would fix why a small thing well because look at you you're completely goddamn useless you better find something small that you could do
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Now, if you can find a big thing, good, but obviously you haven't been able to because all these problems exist. So, see, one of the emphasis in the religious realm, let's say, is humility. One of the things that's emphasized. Well, what's humility? What's the opposite of pride? Well, humility is starting where you are. That's what humility is.
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And it's annoying because, you know, like if your life is a mess, then you have to see that you're the person in that mess. And then you have to understand that your first attempt to redress the mess might not be something you're particularly proud of, you know?
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I mean, I saw this lots in my clinical practice where people would, the first steps they had to take to put things in order were pretty embarrassing. It's like, really, that's all I can do? Hey, man. Uphill is better than downhill. And there's a doctrine in the Gospels that Christ puts forward, which is very interesting.
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He says, it's the Matthew principle, it's called, to those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, everything will be taken. Okay, so it lays out a view of the world. Progress, Regression. That's one model. Here's another one. Progress. Regression. This is the right model. So even if you have to start small, you accrue success exponentially.
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You accrue defeat exponentially too. That's the abyss that is hell. You start going downhill, you go downhill faster and faster. Start going uphill. You go uphill faster and faster. So even if you have to start small or even painfully small, which is highly probable, especially if you're trying to tackle something that's really plagued you, it doesn't really matter. How small?
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Take, I would say, take the step that you can take, that you will take, that actually feels like some accomplishment. Imagine you're dealing with a three-year-old kid and you want to encourage him. Okay, you want to set him a task that... You don't want him to say, Dad, I could do that when I was two, right? But you don't want to set him a task that there's not a chance he'll manage.
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You want to set him a task that will stretch him beyond where he is, that has a reasonable probability of success, right? Why? Why stretch him from where he is? Well, because you want to grow. I mean, look, if you love a child... You love the child for who he is and who he could be. And you want to indicate your love for both of those.
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I think if you're a father, you tilt even more towards love for who the child could be.
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Because you watch yourself do it.
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Well, look, if you see someone, a friend, who is continually, incrementally improving, you're going to, well, maybe you'll be jealous and resentful and bitter and miserable and try to undermine them. But assuming you're not like completely encapsulated by dark forces, you'll think, oh, that's admirable. Well, you see the same thing in yourself. You have to act differently.
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You have to develop an opinion of yourself the same way you would develop an opinion of someone else. So now, and I'm not hypothesizing about this, by the way. We know this clinically. If I want to truly help you build your confidence rather than merely...
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readjusting the words you say about yourself, which would be something like self-esteem, which is something that doesn't even exist, by the way. It's just a pathological concept altogether. You want confidence, okay? More to the point, you want the confidence that's based in competence. Otherwise, it's narcissistic. Okay, so how do you develop that?
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Well, you watch yourself exceed your limits, okay? And then you think, oh, look at that. There's something in me that can exceed my limits. That's your true self. That's a good way of thinking about it.
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Well, one of the things you do with disagreeable people who are more inclined by temperament to be competitive and attain victory for themselves is one of the exercises you can do with disagreeable people. If you're a disagreeable extrovert, you tend to be narcissistic. And the problem with that technically is that you alienate people. And the problem with that is while you're hyper-social.
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Well, that's one of the things you can realize, certainly, that... that also you don't exactly know where the limits are. It's like, oh, I exceeded that. It's like, okay, well, now what? What's the upward limit to exceed? What's the upward arc of exceeding limits? That's Jacob's ladder. I would say this is the promise of the kingdom of God. That's one way of thinking about it.
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There's no upward limit. There's no limit to how bad things can get. No one would deny that who has any sense. So that means in a way that hell exists. You can find your way there with no problem.
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Well, these are hard things to do on your own, right? I mean, you only have the span of your life and the probability that you can figure out how to live merely as a consequence of consulting your own limited experience is zero. It's too complicated.
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That's part of it. That would be the more structured part, the more traditional part. You need the traditional stories. That's why I wrote this book is to indicate, well, at least in part, what the stories are and also what they mean. It's not only that, it's not only what they mean, it's how knowing what they mean changes your life. So for example, in the story of Abraham, God comes to Abraham.
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Okay, now questions emerge from that statement. What do you mean God and how does he come to Abraham? What the hell does that mean? Well, the story lays that out. The God that comes to Abraham is the voice of adventure. It's a definition. So this is a good thing to know. God is the voice of adventure. Okay, so now let's think about this a little bit.
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Now, you may suffer some consequences of speaking, but retreating one step at a time defensively when it makes you sick of yourself, there's nothing worse that can happen to you. You want your life to be unbearably entertaining. And maybe all the sorrow and catastrophe has to be part of it, because otherwise there's There's nothing about it that's glorious.
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So the God that's the voice of adventure is the God of the forefathers of Abraham, the father. He's a patriarchal spirit. Okay, if you're a good father, you speak with the voice of adventure to your sons. Obviously, you're encouraging them. It's like, get the hell out there. Make something of yourself. Why do you do that? Because you have this little kid and you think, get at it, man.
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So if you alienate people, well, then you don't have anyone. And not only is that lonesome, but it's also extremely impractical. I mean, you know, you certainly, and no doubt learned this more as you become successful. It's like you need a team and right. And the more, and the more tightly knit it is, and the more you're all working in the same direction, the better everything works. Well, you,
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Let's see what you can be. And so that's that voice of the benevolent father. And that's the spirit of the ancestors. And behind that, there's the God who's the voice of adventure. If you pursue the spirit of adventure, there will be things you have to give up. Right. You know that. I mean, you know, you're taking steps. We'd even say that steps forward in your life. What do you mean forward?
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What do you mean steps? Well, there are little adventures you have that transform you and transform your circumstances. Okay. You have that adventure and you have to change as a consequence of it. You have to give up your immaturity so that you can take advantage of this new opportunity. Okay, and that changes you. Now you're a slightly different person. Now a new horizon of opportunity opens up.
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You have to make a sacrifice. It's like, okay, looks like if I'm going to do this, I can no longer afford this. Well, Abraham changes so dramatically that he gets a new name. He starts as Abraham and he ends as Abraham. Abraham is the father of nations. So what's the moral? If you pursue the spirit of adventure and make the proper sacrifices, you become the father of nations. Right? That's true.
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Well, okay, let's take that claim apart. I mean, yes, it is stories that people came up with thousands of years ago, but no, definitely not one person's opinion. Definitely 100% because these stories have been transmitted over millennia and organized and edited and transformed by a very large number of people. So it's at minimum, it's a massive collective effort.
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And it's a collective effort undertaken by arguably the most literate and intelligent people there are. And that'd be the Jews.
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Oh, there's a huge overlap between the Greek philosophical tradition and the Christian tradition. I mean, Western culture is the... amalgamation of Greece, Jerusalem, and Rome. And the early Christians saw tremendous parallels between Christian theology and Greek philosophy. Where do you think we come from?
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But I'm not trying to be a smart aleck in that response. It's a complicated answer. It's a complicated answer. I think that we're guided by the spirit of meaning. I think that's also our deepest instinct.
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It's not useful to be a narcissist because maybe you get what you want right now this time, but as a propagating strategy across time, it's a degenerating game. Okay, so what do you do? Well, instead of thinking about what you want or even thinking about how to strategize in relationship to your goals, you might think about what you could do for other people or
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Well, I had a rule for this book is I didn't make any claims about the biblical stories that I couldn't justify scientifically. I don't think there's a conflict. I think that viewing the biblical stories as an amalgam of superstitious proto-scientific theories is absurd. I don't think there's any evidence for that at all. These are stories. Stories and scientific hypotheses aren't the same thing.
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The Lord of the Rings is not a scientific hypothesis. But that doesn't mean it's not true.
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Well, you were a sperm at one point. I mean, it's not that implausible. We all come from single-celled organisms.
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Yeah. Well, that's exactly why I wrote this book because I know that that's the time and it's not just the time for you. That's the time that we're in.
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Definitely. Well, it's partly because the enlightenment has exhausted itself. Partly because it was wrong.
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Well, I think exhausted is a better word because it wasn't like the Enlightenment was without its benefits. When you say the Enlightenment. Immense technological progress. The materialist reductionism of the atheist scientist.
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It's not right. Factually, they were wrong. Their theory of perception was wrong. They're wrong. We see the world through a story. We do not see the world as a collection of facts. They're wrong. You see, the postmodernists figured this out, and that's why... The postmodernists had a walloping influence on culture.
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Now, I'm no fan of the postmodernists for a variety of reasons, but their insistence that we see the world through a story, they're right. That's right.
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That's a great question. Well, this is what Nietzsche basically presupposed in some ways. So when Nietzsche observed that God had died, say in 1850 or thereabouts, his medication for that, his warning was, we'll descend into nihilism and communist totalitarianism. And that was exactly right. Maybe a mindless hedonism in there too. Dostoevsky concentrated more on that.
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Nietzsche said we'll have to create our own values. We'll have to become, that's what the Superman is, the Nietzschean Superman, the man who creates his own values. Try. See what happens. You can't do it. You can't create your own values because values are real. They're not arbitrary. They're not relativistic.
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So imagine this, imagine there's a very large number of games that could be played, like an infinitely large number. But there's a very small number of games that people want to play. Then there's even a smaller number of games that sustain themselves and improve as you play them. Okay, so that's like a landscape. Think about it as a landscape of potential patterns of interaction.
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Or you could think about what you would do if you only did what was true and right. Those are very different orientations. And the religious orientation, fundamentally, is the orientation towards what is true and right. And you might say, well, I don't know what's true and right. It's like, yeah, kind of, because our knowledge is bounded and we're ignorant, so do we understand...
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You could even think about it as a landscape of potential tribal affiliations, right? The rules of those games would be the principles of the society. Okay, now your question is, could we come up with our own set of rules? And the answer to that is no. Why? Because the sustainable, abundant playability of a game is... not arbitrary.
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So for example, if you want to get along with your wife, she has to want to play the game you're playing. Okay. Now there's lots of games you could play that aren't going to fit that criteria.
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Now then imagine it's even worse though, because to get along with your wife, you, she has to want to play the game you want to play. But both of you have to play a game that works today and tomorrow and next week, next month, next year, right? And then you have to play it with your kids and your parents and a bunch of other people.
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Oh, and, okay. Yeah, yeah, it's the same thing. You're looking at the same problem from two different perspectives. It's and. Yes, they're handed down from on high. Yes, they're instincts.
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But do you struggle with the answer? I struggle with making the answer simple enough to offer rapidly.
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Not as clear as I could be.
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Well, clarity is part of it. I mean, we want to make things as clear as possible. Breadth of coverage, right? I mean, people ask me what I believe and I say, well, I'm not hiding what I believe. I'm like... I lecture about it. I podcast about it. I write about it. It's like, that's what I believe. There it is. Is there obfuscation in that? Well, partly things are complicated.
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So it's very difficult to give short answers to complex questions. If you give short answers to complex questions, the answers tend to be symbolic.
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You have to say something like, where do they come from? It's like, well, they come from God. Now, is that a useful answer? Well, it's a short answer, so it's useful in that it's short. It begs the question, what do you mean by God? We could return to that. In the story of Abraham, these are definitions.
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Because if you're going to talk about what's properly put in the highest place, you have to know what you're talking about. Okay, in the story of Abraham, the voice of adventure is to be put in the highest place. And if you follow that, then you become the father of nations. That's reproductive success, right?
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So that means the idea is that there's an alignment between the instinct that calls you to adventure and the probability that you'll be attractive to women in the manner that ensures the survival of your descendants.
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It's both. It's both. It's both. It emerges as a consequence of the constraints of social interaction. let's say. Like there's constraints, for example, on what makes a man desirable to a woman.
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Right? That has nothing to do with you, those constraints. Those are there. Right? They're there in the society of women. They're eternal. They're not... No woman, she might vary in her opinion to some degree, but she partakes of the pattern. So it's there. Now... It's also built into you because you're a social creature. And so your physiology indicates to you the nature of that pattern.
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the nature of the highest good? Well, no, but it's a very rare person who doesn't know some of the time when they're doing something wrong. And it's also a non-existent person who doesn't have some concept of the good, because you can't act without a concept of the good, because you act towards a goal you deem desirable. So that's up.
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There's an overlap because your dog understands you and vice versa. So that's a good question. Social mammals understand each other. Right, so there's an overlap in their deepest instincts or their highest impulses. You can think about that both ways.
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Yeah, well, you could think about that as, sure, sure.
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They have a nature. Yeah, they have a different intrinsic nature. That's another way of thinking about it.
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Yes, it is. It is that. You can think about it as rising up from the material world or descending on heaven. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter fundamentally. It doesn't matter. Those are different ways of looking at the same problem.
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Okay, here's one way of thinking about it. So I mentioned that in the story of Abraham – God is the call to adventure. That's the definition. Now, the divine that's put forward in these library of stories has multiple characteristics. He's characterized in many ways, but there's an insistence that that reflects an underlying unity. Now, the unity is incomprehensible in its essence.
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Okay, so you have to accept that as the initial starting point. You're not going to get the answer.
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Okay. You can see something complex from a variety of different perspectives. Okay. In the story of Noah, God is the impulse that comes to the wise to prepare when trouble's brewing.
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Okay, so now you can think of that as an instinct. You can think about it as... Got instinct, intuition. Negative emotion, anxiety. But it's more than that because you can be afraid of something that isn't real.
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Okay, now you might have to ask yourself, okay, what are the preconditions for your fear? What are the preconditions to the validity of your fear? So you're afraid and you should be. Well, let's say that's a characteristic of someone who's wise. Okay, so then the question is, well, what's the essence of the wisdom that makes your fear valid?
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Noah is described in the story of Noah as a man wise in his generations. So that means that by the moral standards of his time, he's an upstanding human being. Okay, so now you can imagine that means he exists in harmonious relationship with his present self and his future self. Okay, that makes him mature. But then he also does that in a way that serves his wife and his family and his community.
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So his self is balanced and optimized across those parameters. That makes him... Secure in his foundation and properly oriented. If you're secure in your foundation and properly oriented upward, then there's no difference between the voice of the divine and the instinct that preserves you in times of trouble.
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I mean, unless you're trying to make your life worse, and people do do that from time to time, but believe that as an exception. I mean, you have to You have to have descended into hell in a way before you're in a situation where you're actively working to make your own life worse. That can happen.
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But you see, you can't exactly get there by the mere bottom-up materialistic notion, because you could think about the fear that guides Noah as an instinct, but the instinct is pathological unless it exists in this wider moral framework, because then you could have the fear of a coward. Well, that's not helpful.
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Yeah, but even reproduction is... See, this is, I think, where Dawkins went dreadfully wrong. Sex and reproduction aren't the same thing for people.
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Well, not at all, because we're high-investment reproducers. Sex just gets the ball rolling. So here's a question. How would you have to act to maximally ensure the survival of your offspring? Okay, so now... What do you mean survival? Do you mean that your son lives? Do you mean that your grandson lives? Do you mean that 20 generations down the road from you?
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The pattern that you represented is still propagating itself successfully. Does it mean that the people that you produce are able to take on all challengers because of the manner in which they conduct themselves? That's a lot more complicated than just sex, like way more complicated. So the pattern that Abraham, so Abraham is the father of nations, right?
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There's an insistence in the story that the manner in which he conducts himself, as a hero, establishes the pattern that makes his descendants successful eternally.
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Is the Bible in part the story of human beings coming to consciousness? Yes.
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Yes.
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Does it reflect a deeper underlying reality? Yes.
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How deep is that underlying? Well, let's say, okay, it's a story about the psyche. And then let's say, well, no, it's a story about the psyche in society. So no, it's a story about the psyche in society, in the natural world. Well, what's underneath that?
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But assuming that you're relatively well embedded in the realm of the normal, then you're moving towards something better always. Because otherwise there's no motivation. We know this technically. This isn't even disputable. So...
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Well, that's not as primitive a conceptualization as the atheists would have you believe. What is it you believe? Well, there isn't anything more complex in the known universe than a human brain.
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So if you want a model for reality as such, like proclaiming that it has something akin to the structure of the human psyche is not an absurd claim, given that that is the most complex thing by far that we know of. By far.
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Well, I've been explaining it. But I mean, I did say, I mentioned something which we skipped over very quickly because I introduced it too rapidly. Postmodernists figured out that we live in a story, but then they leapt to a faulty conclusion. of two forms, well, three. There's no uniting story. That was one of their conclusions.
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In fact, the definition of postmodernism is skepticism of meta narratives. There's no uniting story. It's like, well, that's a stupid theory because there's no union. So what? There's just diversity. Well, we worship diversity now in this utterly foolish manner. There's no difference between diversity and war. Without a uniting narrative, there's nothing but war. So, no, that's not going to work.
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Wrong. Hedonistic self-gratification. There's Michel Foucault for you. Do a T. It's like, why is that wrong? Why can't people just do what they want with whoever they want all the time? Because it defeats itself and quickly. It's not a sustainable game. If it's all about you and your whims, I don't want to be anywhere near you. And that won't be so good for you. That's not going to work. Power.
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That's really where the postmodernists landed with their, what would you say, temptation to turn towards Marx. It's all about power. It's like, first of all, that's probably a confession, if that's what you believe. And second, no, it's not. Try tyrannizing your wife and see how well that works for you. Try tyrannizing yourself and see how successful you are. Power is not the game.
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Okay, what's the game? What's the story? I mentioned earlier, It's voluntary self-sacrifice. Right, you offer yourself up in the service of something higher. That's the basis of society. That's the basis of psychological stability. The Christian insistence is that that's the basis of the world.
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The positive emotion systems that make you enthusiastic, so that fill you with the desire to move towards a goal, independent of fear, say, you know, because you could move towards a safety goal because you're afraid, but imagine you're trying to accomplish something. You have a goal. The positive emotion systems operate to track progress to the goal.
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I think that the claim that Christ is the embodiment of the prophet and the laws, I think that's true.
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Yeah. That's complicated. It's very, very complicated.
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Yeah. I think if you understand what that means, that it's indisputable. I'll give you a brief... Explanation of why.
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The idea there is that there's no difference between making that assumption and then actually beginning to address those problems. And there's no difference between that which best addresses the problems of mankind and the divine. Those are the same thing.
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And I can't see how that can be otherwise, because the contrary hypothesis would be that you would adapt best to your life by avoiding things that are difficult and terrifying. And no one believes that. And so the pattern of the passion, this is the voluntary self-sacrifice issue taken to its extreme.
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The pattern of the passion is the decision to voluntarily confront and welcome anything that happens to you, no matter what it is. And That's a terrible thing to ask or endeavor to undertake, but, well, the alternative is to shrink away. Well, the spirit of shrinking away is the divine. It's like, I don't think so. Like, that's preposterous.
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The spirit of unlimited courage, well, that's not a bad start for a definition of what constitutes the divine. the highest possible value.
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Oh, yeah. Well, and I was in extreme pain For three years. Right. I went through three years where every minute of my life was worse than any minute I had ever had previous to that. It was terrible. And did I lose faith? Was it questioned? Challenged? Absolutely. Absolutely. It just became absurd. It was absurd. So many things had gone off the rails. My wife was dying. My daughter was ill.
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Things had blown up around me in 50 different ways, and I was like seriously in pain. It was terrible. I was walking like 12 miles a day because I couldn't sit. I did that for months. Winter, rain, whenever. I had a friend who walked with me. It was terrible. And yeah, I mean, I thought, what was the desperation? It wasn't even the pain.
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Positive emotion is a consequence of evidence of movement towards a desired goal. Okay, so now... You have a proximal goal, you know, like our proximal goal right now might be just to, like in the most micro level possible, might be to display facial signs of interest in the conversation, right? It's a very micro goal, but then that's nested in our desire to have an interesting conversation.
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It was the fact that I was in such terrible shape that I felt that I was a felt. I believed that I was a burden to everyone around me and that that was only likely to get worse. And I thought, what's the sense in this? What's the possible significance of this? So yes, everyone's faith is challenged. I mean, Christ himself cries in despair out to God on the cross.
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And the story wouldn't be believable without that. Like, if you're going to live, you're going to be pushed past your limit.
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But who knows what you discover when you push past your limit.
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I think generally, if you love someone, it's worse to see them suffer than to suffer yourself. You certainly figure that out when you have kids.
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We're both alive. My family's thriving.
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my adventure is expanding life isn't fair is it doesn't appear to be very fair because i mean this is how your story ended in that regard but it is i don't know if an adventure is fair i don't even know if that's what we want like this is something i really came to understand more deeply when writing this book what are we built for we're built for maximal challenge
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And that isn't the way we view ourselves in the modern world. We view ourselves as built for pleasure, you know, pornography. We view ourselves as built for consumption or for safety or maybe for egotistical self-aggrandizement and fame. Look, all of those things are better than their absence, let's say.
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You know, I think part of the reason that Andrew Tate is so popular among young men, because it's better to be a successful reprobate than a useless scrounger. Seriously. I mean, seriously. But that's why the villain in stories is often admirable compared to the coward. Right? At least the villain is out there, like, doing villain things. You know?
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The villain's on a quest of sorts. And a committed villain can learn. That's another thing too. What are we built for? I think we're built for maximal challenge. And that's way more interesting. I mean, one of the things that... See, I figured out that lies... that totalitarian states were a consequence of lies in about 1985. I really figured it out. I'd been reading Solzhenitsyn and Carl Jung.
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I'd been reading. I was reading a lot. I was really obsessed by it. I thought, oh, I see. So hell is the dominion of the lie. OK, so what do you do about that? Well, you stop lying. That's how you fight it. And that means you do that in your own life. You just stop just. You practice stopping. You practice not doing the things you know you shouldn't do.
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You practice paying attention to your words to see if they're landing solidly and they make you confident instead of weak. You abandon your short-term desire for control and power, understanding that there isn't anything better that can happen to you than what happens if you tell the truth. No matter what it looks like to you in the moment.
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It's a strange thing, but I can't see how it could be otherwise, because you'd have to hypothesize that you're going to align yourself with life, with nature, with society, with God, with yourself, by lying. No one believes that. You might think you can get away with it. That's way different, right? But no one believes that. So... Well, so then what happens in consequence of that?
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on the topic we're having right now, and then inside the podcast as a whole, and then as part of the podcast enterprise that you're involved in, as part of the book enterprise, let's say, that I'm involved in, that's nested inside our view of the world, right? So you see, there are nestings of the good that have no upper limit. That's Jacob's ladder, by the way.
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Well, I think what happens in consequence of that is what happened to Abraham. Your life just goes like this. Just opens and opens and opens and opens. And I don't think there's any limit to that. And that's ridiculously entertaining. Like unbearably entertaining. There's what you want in your life. You want it to be unbearably entertaining.
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And it's funny, you know, when you watch people go to movies, I mean, James Bond, right? That's an unbearably entertaining life. And that's what people want to see when they go to a theater because that's what they want. That's what they want. And maybe all the sorrow and catastrophe that's part of that has to be part of it because otherwise there's nothing about it that's glorious.
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And I don't know, maybe as you ascend uphill, your understanding of the chasm between the peaks and valleys also increases. You know, because you think maybe as you're successful, you're happier. Well, first of all, I'm not sure that success and happiness are the same thing. I'm not sure that we want them to be the same thing. I don't even know what people mean when they say they want to be happy.
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If you investigate it technically, you'll find out that really what people mean when they say they want to be happy is that they don't want to suffer. That's different than the enthusiastic joy that you might think about, you know, that's part and parcel of a child's laughter. You want to be happy. What, do you want to be laughing all the time? Is that what you're saying?
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Well, no, that's not what I mean. Well, what do you mean? Do you mean the gratification that comes along with the cookie at one in the morning? No, that's not what I mean. Well, okay, what do you mean? Well, I don't know. It's like, yeah, you don't know. Partly what you mean is you don't want pointless suffering. Fair enough. But that doesn't mean it's happiness that's your goal.
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I don't think that's your goal. I don't think your podcast would be successful if that was your goal. I think you would have washed up on the shoals of triviality long ago. I do. Well, there's something you're doing that's working. There's something about the way you're approaching the situation that's of broad appeal. There's some archetypal pattern that's
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you're acting out in your conduct in your podcast. Because otherwise it wouldn't have the effect it has.
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We talked about some of it. You know, you said that you can... you can apprehend the outline of some of the principles. Some of that you probably discovered as you went along, rather than putting them in place to begin with. This seems to work. So that's a discovery of a pathway.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And at the top of that is the good itself, which is the divine for all intents and purposes.
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Yeah, well, you're also in a situation then when you have to start worrying about your reputation, which is something you don't have to worry about when no one knows who you are. And it's very dangerous to worry about your reputation. As soon as you start worrying about your reputation as a podcaster, you're going to fail. Because you're not interesting then. You'll stop taking risks.
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So then another question emerges. You've got people yelling at you from this side and this side. Well, how do you know what's right? Well, it isn't... Partly it's by listening because you want to pay attention to your audience. But there's something guiding you if you do what you're doing properly that has nothing to do with the clamor.
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Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a very good illustration of distributed identity.
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Yeah, yeah. It's like you are your wife and your friends and your family.
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Right? There's no – fundamentally there's, there cannot be any separation there. That's yeah. And when you, you said you've experienced that, it's like, that's what gives you, that's part of what gives you a foundation. It's like, yeah, that's not illusory.
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That's a definition. That's what I mean, is that in the hierarchy of what's good, the divine is the peak.
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Yeah.
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Well, it might be that death is what makes things matter.
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Well, right. But then we're talking about a kind of ultimate scarcity. And like you can ask yourself, one of the fundamental questions you can ask yourself is what is the nature of the real, right? And I think death makes things real.
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Yeah.
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How do you pick your guests?
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Yeah. I pick people I want to talk to. It's like, I'd like to hear what that person has to say.
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Right. Now, you don't know what that is. That's also an insistence in the biblical texts, by the way. In the final analysis, the divine is ineffable. It's not definable. And it's beyond you. And that's partly because there's a practical reason for that even. You know this as well. As you move towards a goal, let's say you attain a goal. Okay, now you've accomplished. Well, are you done?
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That's the word Israel, eh? That's what Israel means.
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And that's the chosen people of God, Israel. I didn't know that.
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Well, there's no reason. So when I'm on stage lecturing, I'm on a journey, right? It's a real journey. It's not an act. I pose a question to myself before I go on stage. It's a question I want the answer to and I don't have. And I go on stage and I try to move towards the answer. And people come along and I want to go there and they want to come along. It's a good deal.
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And the podcasts are like that. If you're doing them honestly, it's like, I want to talk to this person.
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Well, and it'll change as you approach it. The questions and the answers change as you move towards it. That's okay.
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Things last way less long than you think. So you should be aware of that and not take things for granted. And I don't think I took my parents for granted. Now, did I do that perfectly? Well, we don't do things perfectly, but it was pretty good. It was pretty good. I learned when my... I watched my wife's family go through the death of their mother.
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And one of the consequences of that was that my wife and her siblings and her father pulled closer together during that time. And that really... It was like a wound healing, you know? And so I saw that and I saw that that worked. So, for example, Tammy... has a stronger relationship with her older brother than she did before her father also died.
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So we lost her father and my father and my mother this year, basically. It isn't that her brother substituted for her father, but it was that there was more there than she had made use of. And so when her father departed... the possibility of expanding that relationship with her brother was on the table. And I did the same thing with my sister and my brother.
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Even in grief, there's opportunity.
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He taught that very well. And it wasn't a good idea to not pay attention around my father. I wouldn't describe him as an easy person. He had high standards, and he was rather unforgiving. I don't know. Do you forgive the people that you love for not being everything they could be? That's a hard question. It's okay, dear. It's like, is it now? I think we have a lot of that in our culture.
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It's like, no, a new potential goal emerges, a new pinnacle. And then maybe you'll accomplish that. But then a new one exists. And so you could say that the domain of opportunity is limitless. Right. Because the thing that's at the pinnacle recedes as you approach it. And you could say that's a technical definition of God, which is accurate. That is a technical definition of God.
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It's okay. I like you just like you are.
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I don't think there... My dad and I sorted out our differences a long time ago. You know, when I left home... Our relationship was somewhat fractious from the time I was 13 to the time I left home. He developed quite a severe depression, which ran in my family, and that made him harder to understand than had been the case previously.
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It also made the probability that if there were events in the household, that they would be... They'd have more... reverberation than they would have otherwise. And that was confusing to me. I understood why that happened later, not much later. And it wasn't very long after I left home that whatever differences I had with my father were irrelevant.
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So we didn't really have unresolved issues, I wouldn't say. What about your mother? What's the one lesson? My mom was great.
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My mother was a very hospitable person. And in the Old Testament accounts, hospitality is a cardinal virtue. And she was very good at making people welcome. The day my mother died, I thought about her most of the day that day. Memories came to mind. And one of the things I realized about my mother was that I don't have a single negative memory of my mother.
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It's really quite something to know someone for 62 years. And really, I really don't have a negative memory of my mother.
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Yeah, oh, definitely.
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I appreciated that a lot. And she, although she was a very agreeable person and a very feminine person, she was tough too. And she wasn't a Oedipal type. You know, she had strong protective instincts, but her desire to help her children become independent trumped that for sure.
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I think the people who don't like me, some of them have me confused with some figment of their imagination. Some of the people who don't like me, they understand me. They just don't like what they understand. They don't like what it implies. And so that's okay with me. I don't feel misunderstood, I wouldn't say.
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People who've been listening to me, they understand me. And as far as I can tell, that's been very good for them. And that's unbelievably gratifying for me. You must experience that. I mean, your podcast has had a broad effect. and I presume a positive effect on people. There isn't anything better than that, to see that what you're doing has that broadly... salutary effect. That's great.
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That's another indication of our essentially, I would say, religious nature. You know, Jocko Willink told me this. You know, Jocko said that he could have easily been like a gang leader, criminal type. He's a tough warrior character, you know.
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God is the good towards which all goods point. These are definitions again. Remember, they're not proclamations of faith. They're definitions. So we obviously all believe that All good things share something in common because otherwise we wouldn't have the category good. And then we all believe that there are rank orders of good because otherwise everything good would be equally worth pursuing.
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And he said when he went into the military, he discovered that being the leader of a team and moving people in a positive direction, there wasn't anything better than And so that just straightened them out. And I feel exactly the same way. There isn't anything better than that. And so I'm able to do that. And I see the evidence of that all the time.
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And whatever misunderstandings there might be about me, necessary or unnecessary, are so trivial compared to that that they don't even really register. What a privilege.
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Thank you. You bet. Thanks for the invitation again.
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No one believes that. So there's a rank order. Well, if there's a rank orders towards some end or some pinnacle, you can also think about it as a foundation. Depends on which metaphorical landscape you want to inhabit. Then the question becomes, well, how do you characterize that which is the ultimate aim, that which is and should be the ultimate aim?
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Well, the stories on which our culture is predicated characterize that in story.
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Okay. One of the things the psychoanalytic thinkers insisted on, Carl Jung in particular, was that everybody acts out a story. Sometimes it's a tragic story. Sometimes it's the story of hell. Like you're trapped in a story. one way or another. Now, do you know the contours of your story? Not necessarily. I mean, people are often very bad at describing themselves.
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They don't know what they're up to. That doesn't mean they're not up to something. And you can also think about them as the battleground between warring stories. That also happens. That just means they're are fractionated in their psyche. They're being pulled in many directions at the same time.
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Right. And there's stringent preconditions. Right. So everyone's trustworthy. And now there's all these piles of wealth lying around everywhere. Parasite dream, especially when it's unguarded. And so it's enabled by the women and unguarded by the men. And both are at fault, right? And you see that in the Genesis account, too.
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But it's also – But why did you stay committed then before the marriage once you had a child? Now you said you loved your wife.
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It's like Eve clutches the serpent to her breast, but Adam fails to help her distinguish. Plenty of these parasitic men as well. Oh, yeah. Well, they're the worst. The worst men cry victim and look for sympathy from women. There was a famous mass murderer. No, a serial killer who did that. The lawyer. Bundy. Ted Bundy. You know what his trick was? He had a VW, if I remember correctly.
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He had a cast. that he could take on and off. So he put his hood up. Maybe it wasn't a VW. He put his hood up because his car didn't work. And he did it around places where he knew there were young women. And then he enticed them to stop because, well, poor Ted, because he's crippled and his car doesn't work.
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And then, well, and then the woman learned very painfully the difference between a monster and a baby. Right. Brutal. He was a bad guy. There are some bad people. And a fair number of them like to dress in women's clothing, let's say.
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Idea that's embedded in their consciousness about what's going on to accept that of course of course It's in fact accepting that when that reality is thrust upon you unawares you develop post-traumatic stress disorder Right because it's naive people who encounter malevolence develop PTSD That's the pathway So if you want to make your children susceptible to PTSD like all these kids that are triggered by everything right make them extremely naive and
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And then let them encounter malevolence. Right. Because you're supposed to teach them to handle serpents. Right. To identify them and handle them. And that means they have to learn about the nature of the world and the girls to differentiate between snakes and babies.
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Right. Right. And babies and men. And the man who worms his way into your dreams because he's a dependent infant, he's a snake. And your sympathy is wasted on him. Yes, there certainly are. Man, I tell you, those riots that used to gather around me, you know, that was mostly 2017, before I stopped speaking at universities mostly.
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um the women were pretty bad harpy city man and this self-righteous feminine toxic compassion just screeching at the top of its lungs but the men that were with them oh my god i didn't even i didn't want to be within three feet of them you know it's like i'll be your friend yeah you know you see those people on the net talking to children i'll be your friend
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That just barely scrapes the surface of awful. Like awful is a long, long ways down. Yeah. So part of what's happened in the universities, and, you know, it's a terrible thing to say, well, There's a lot of things.
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Storehouse of wealth, radical increase in the number of students served, radical feminization of the institutions, and weakness on the part of the men who should have been guardian of the gates. All of that. And is it repairable? I don't think so. I think once the parasites have the corpse... What are you going to do? Are you going to bring Lazarus back from the dead? You know, I don't think so.
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I think it's time for something new. You need academic dewormer. Yeah.
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Well, that's what critical thinking was supposed to be, Joe.
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Well, the thing is, it already is emerging, right? Because the universities, of course they're going to do this. As they spiral downward, they're going to turn to cost-cutting. Well, they're not going to cut the administration, obviously, because they make the decisions about who's going to be cut. So they're going to turn to low-cost alternatives to having courses, right?
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And so they're already doing that. Let's put our courses online. Well, fair enough, except they're terrible. They're terrible. We got the best professors and the best production quality.
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Right. We have a plan mapped out. We'll have the full equivalent of a four-year course. Distribution of courses, we'll have that within, we think, two years, something like that. Four new courses a month at the moment. We're putting out 32 hours of original content a month. It's very, well, people can go look. It looks great, and that's because it's great.
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Michaela and her husband, they're unbelievably picky about the professors and about everything. They watch the social media, they watch the look, they watch the images, they watch the ads. We're trying to do everything 100% and then we're trying to make it as inexpensive as possible.
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Soon we're raising money because we want to translate it into multiple languages because wouldn't it be lovely to offer that to the developing world? Sure. With free market economics instead of Marxist economics so that people could learn to be entrepreneurs. That'd be great for Africa, especially if we could get energy prices down. Then maybe everybody could be rich.
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And not just materially rich, right? Because that's not enough. If you're materially rich and you're spiritually poor, your money just serves to destroy you. And fast. So that's not wealth.
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And yeah, right. You know that. You've met people that that's happened to. Oh, yeah. A lot. Money is not the cure for poverty. No, you're naive if you think that.
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No. No. Well, it has to be put in an ethical framework or it'll just... Look, money's opportunity. That's a way of thinking about it. And if you're going to the devil and you have money, you just go to the devil faster. I saw that lots of times in my clinical practice. And, you know, maybe if you're aiming upward, then money can be a force multiplier. And it can be.
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You know, you can make a good... You can establish a solid institution that provides mentorship and opportunity for people. And actually, that's the most fun to do that. It's by far the most fun to do that, to make something of genuine value. Why wouldn't you do that? Only if you were cynical and unable. Why not make something that works? That's much more entertaining, all things considered.
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And so when we're trying to do this with ARC, and it's going real well, you know, and you were very helpful there, too. You know, that podcast that we did, there were lots of reasons that the climate apocalypse narrative has been falling radically apart. But that podcast that you and I did was definitely one of them.
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You know, and I've interviewed a lot of good scientists who they're not climate skeptics. You know, that's a stupid term. And Lombard is a good example of that. It is. Climate denier is right up there with vaccine. That's such a manipulative phrase. Yeah. It's like, oh, you're like the Nazis who object to Jews being baked. That's your argument, is it? Really, that's your argument, you scum rat.
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You're going to use that as a moral lever. That's your level of ethos. That's your argumentation. You're going to take the worst slur you can possibly imagine and you're going to use it to devastate someone's reputation publicly because you don't have a leg to stand on because you're the kind of tyrant who uses fear to monger power. That's you.
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#2308 - Jordan Peterson
There's a psychological interpretation of the climate apocalypse scandal. And it's killing. It's destroying Germany. It's destroying the UK.
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#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, and they replaced them with lignite coal. Right, the dirtiest burning coal. So they're in a situation where they pollute more for more unstable energy that's delivered by tyrants. While outsourcing their industry to China, it's a very bad idea, right, who's building coal plants at a rate that is so fast that everything the West does to ameliorate carbon is utterly irrelevant.
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Well, Carney is a good example of this in Canada to return to that.
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The polls certainly indicate that. Yeah. And maybe with a majority government. And I can see why. Canadians were accustomed to having everything go pretty well. And we could be morally superior to you Americans because that was also fun. And we'll never forego that opportunity. And Trump has provided it in spades in the last month.
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#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So we look at Carney and we don't pay any attention to politics and we certainly don't read his goddamn book. And so we see someone who looks like a banker from the 1990s when everything was just fine in Canada and Canadians were just as rich as Americans and the whole country was stable and peaceful. And we think, well, you know, we kind of made a mistake on Justin.
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Turned out he was a little incompetent, a little narcissistic. And maybe we shouldn't have voted for him just because he legalized marijuana, because that's actually what brought him into power the first time. And so we kind of made a mistake. But now, look, we've learned and we're not going to be fooled by narcissistic pretenders.
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#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And Mark Carney used to be Governor of Bank of England, you know, and that's pretty good. That's a pretty good resume. And it certainly looks like that. And yet he believes that 75% of the fossil fuels in the world should be left in the ground and that there's nothing that should guide your purchasing decision by force other than decarbonization.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, two things happened. Trudeau resigned. Oh yeah, the Liberals were headed for extinction. It was going to be the worst defeat of a governing party in Canada ever. They might have lost their official party status. So they were done. Well... They pivoted, brought in Carney, who'd been advising Trudeau.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
He's put himself up as an outsider, a competent outsider, a lot of private experience in the private domain, a steady hand at the helm. It's like you were Trudeau's economic advisor for 10 years. 10 years. And there's going to be more of the same under you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And now you're pretending to be an industrialist, even though you're one of the leaders, the world's leading authorities on DEI, ESG, and net zero. That's Mark Carney. All you have to do is read his book, which people don't, of course, because it's a book. You know, first three chapters will do the trick.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Either he's decided that every single thing he ever believed was wrong right to the core and hasn't apologized or let anyone know that, and now he's actually Mr. Industry, which is how he's presenting himself to Canadians, or... Or he believes what he's always believed. Or he's a wolf wearing grandma's dress. Yeah, he's a benevolent wolf. Well, that's why the wolf wears grandma's dress, isn't it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It's like, there's no one nicer than me. So how does Canada correct course? People either correct course by waking up or by experiencing severe pain. And it looks to me like we've chosen the severe pain route. You know, we already make 60 cents. We already produce 60 cents to every dollar you Americans produce, even though we were at parity 10 years ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And so after four more years of Carney, we could easily have that down to 50 cents. Spiraling housing prices, a lot of social instability in Canada, especially since after October 7th. Do you think that that's social? All my Jewish friends in Toronto are terrified. That's not fun. I don't like seeing that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
No, it's awful. It's awful. And all those psychopaths who've been parading around their moral virtues since October 7th, they're plenty... emboldened. Plenty. Plenty. And I'll give you a little example of Canada.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So we had the English leadership debate a week ago and the powers that be who organized the debate, the legacy media types with CBC radically involved couldn't figure out how to exclude rebel media. You know that right wing news, kind of tabloidy news group from Canada, Ezra Levant who's been buzzing about for 10 years causing trouble like a
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
like a right-wing tabloid journalist, which is what he is. Well, they didn't want him in the press scrum for the leaders after the debate. So they cancelled it. They cancelled the journalists' interviews of the four leading contenders for Prime Minister in Canada. Because some right-wing tabloid journalists, they've had a... newspaper or media empire for 10 years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I don't care what you think of it. It's not the point. The point is they cancelled They canceled the journalist scrum after the English language debate. That's so fascinating. And no one complained. But that doesn't even make sense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Look, if you're guys leading, why ask questions? That's the legacy media in Canada. It's the CBC. Right. It's state-funded. Right? Right to the core. 1.4 billion. Think about this, Joe. This is our bloody state media. It's so funny. $1.4 billion in direct government subsidy and $600 million in federal advertising per year. $2 billion. Go to the CBC website on YouTube.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
You look at their last 20 videos. I'll guarantee that not a single one of them has more than 200 views. Right, which means the people who made the video clips didn't watch them. Right. That's what you get for $2 billion. Now, everyone in Canada who's older than 55 watches legacy media. And Polyev said he defunded CBC. So you can imagine they're not exactly covering him in a positive way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Jagmeet Singh. Fascinating. He's such fun with his pink turban. He's such a fashion icon. Luckily, he's going to lose his own seat and his party is going to be devastated. That's the socialists. They're going to be devastated so badly that they won't have official party status.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of mopping up to do in Canada. Well, in the country. You know, the man who started the Reform Party in Canada, so that was the populist end of the conservative movement 20 years ago. maybe a little longer, eventually reunited with the Conservatives.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Ernest Manning, or Preston Manning, son of an Alberta premier, he was premier of Alberta for like 40 years, he wrote an article in the Globe and Mail, which was the, it's the Canadian liberal establishment newspaper, and I mean liberal by the classic, you know, old school, small L liberal, centrist sort of newspaper, saying that Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan should have an immediate constitutional convention,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
immediately on Carney's ascension to the throne. Quebec doesn't want pipelines traversing its territory. And Quebec, one of the, I don't know if you noticed this, but one of the participants in the debate was a Canadian separatist. We literally have a Canadian federal party, federal separatists, localized in Quebec, whose stated intent is to break up the country.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Hasn't that always been the case with Quebec, though? For a good while, it was provincial. Right? I mean, they had a provincial party, like a state party, right? Okay, fair enough. Have your state, separatist party. It's for your state. Oh, no. We want to have a national party. We want to be represented in the House of Commons as separatists. Oof. Yeah, so the country's in... It's very sad.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And I was hoping... They could be the 51st state. Well, that's what happened. So two things. Back to that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Carney showed up just in the nick of time to save the burning damsel from the train tracks or whatever the hell it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then Trump. He just timed it so badly. And he didn't know. He didn't know what it would do. He didn't know. But that's also...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, he knew that, but he didn't know what the electoral consequences would be. He didn't know that that would shift them to the liberals so radically. And he's going to pay for that because once Carney is elected, if that happens, Trump will not have a more seasoned enemy in the West. Right Carney's very well connected very especially in Europe in the UK very well so and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
There's videos all over the internet about it. You just see this everywhere. So they've implemented these 20-mile-an-hour speed limits everywhere. 20 miles an hour? Yeah. Yeah, because, Joe, you don't really need a car. Like, what are you doing that's so important that you need a car? Like, if I have to go to a climate meeting, well, I get a car. But the peasants, they don't really need cars.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
What was this? Was this some sort of O.J. Simpson auction?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
They don't need heat either. Not that much heat. Maybe they can stop grandma from freezing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we were in the UK not long ago for this art conference, and we rented a truck. And whenever it went over 20 miles an hour, it beeped at you just like seatbelt things beep. Oh, God.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then if you go more than two miles an hour over the speed limit and you get caught, then that knocks one-third of your license off. If you do that three times, you don't have a license for a year. Oh. Beep, beep, beep, beep.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
You can tell tyrants, Joe, they use fear and compulsion, and they hate comedians and cars. Right. There's tyrant checklist. Hates cars. Check. No sense of humor. Check. Uses fear. Check. Uses force. Check. Psychopath. Right. Right. I hate to end this on a bleak note. Well, let's end it on a positive note. Okay. Okay. So what's positive?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
That would be another reason why the family with children is the foundation of the community, has to be the foundation of the community. I mean, it's kind of obvious from a biological perspective, let's say. No children, no community, but... There's no reason to assume that you wouldn't get radically better at something with necessity and practice.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Young people are flocking back to churches across the West and more to the conservative churches. And the only thing we have to buttress us into the future against the Islamists and the Marxists and the nihilists and the hedonists is return to our core traditions. Without that, we're done. And so that's happening, and in big numbers. And so that's really quite something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The back has been broken of the climate apocalypse narrative. There's plenty of mopping up to do, but half the people know that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark, and that that particular apocalypse is probably not worth giving up all your freedoms for.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
We've seen a lot of progress on the arc front, like a lot of the things that we've been putting forward, the better story, that's a return to the foundations of Western civilization that made our society the sort of place that dispossessed people will go to voluntarily, right? There's lots of people who are starting to understand that that's seriously worth preserving.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Energy executives are waking up, as far as I can see, to the fact that they could help the world's poor in a serious way. And if they want to moralize, if they want to act morally, that would be a good place to start. There's lots of people who are working to produce abundance. Your country, the US, you guys are unbelievably good at that. Way better than any other country in the world. And
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
you generally deliver in times of crisis and you might just do that again. And so, and then I would say underneath all that, you know, you said you, you're pretty happy to encourage people. You're very happy when you hear that your show has been helpful to people on, There's lots of people who are consciously trying to aim up and more and more of them all the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And if enough people do that, we won't need to learn through pain and we can bring abundance everywhere in the world and we can make the next 50 years an unparalleled success. And we need... We need the faith and courage of Joshua and Caleb to do that. Of course, the future is full of giants and disasters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
But if we aim up and we speak the words of truth that make good order out of chaos, then anything's possible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, Joe. Same thing for you, man. Thanks a lot. And thanks for your help with Peterson Academy, too. My pleasure. It's been very helpful. All right. Much appreciated. Bye, everybody. Bye.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And if you're practicing loving your infant and your child, well, why wouldn't that generalize?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Right, for nothing. Pennies on the dollar. Let's...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So that love that you talk about with regard to your wife, you know, I asked you a little bit about that. It's like, I've talked to people who have, they can't understand how someone could be with the same woman indefinitely, let's say. These are people who usually haven't been able to establish that within their own life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And of course, the price you pay, assuming it's a price, for foregoing all others is that, well, that's exactly it. It's a major sacrifice. And so what do you think What role do you think that love plays? How do you conceptualize the relationship between that love that you described and that willingness to stay in a permanent relationship and the willingness also to not pursue any other women?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
How does that make itself manifest in your life? I mean, I presume that you had opportunities of all sorts. I presume you do as well. In principle, I suppose. They don't seem to come to me in a sense. You're a hot professor type character.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I was like, whoa, that might be interesting. It's taking a vicious turn, Joe, already.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
But that's not always the case. Why did you decide to set up date nights? How did you go about that? I mean, I know that's personal, but and I don't want all the gory details.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
We're going to do this. Yeah, I do that with Tammy too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
You know, Tammy and I, on the tour, she started to introduce me two years ago, and to talk about some of the things we're doing in the family, some of our family business, talk about Peterson Academy, talk about Essay. And so she'd go out on the stage.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, so first of all, she did that, and then we replaced the business discussion, because we were just doing an update about the family, you know, and so she'd do that. We replaced that with ads, and then she started to talk.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
She talked about the rules, say, and 12 rules for life, or some of the religious things I've been dealing with lately, and she'd relate that to something in her own life. And then she does the Q&A at the end of the lecture. And part of that was just she was along with me. And part of that was Michaela was introducing me for a while and then had to go back to her work.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And so we slotted Tammy in because it seemed like a good business decision. But one of the things we figured out very quickly that was really a shock to us was that People really liked, especially the Q&As, because what people will offer their questions electronically on this platform called Slido, which is a very good platform for such things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then Tammy would, they could upvote the questions and then Tammy would sort them and ask me questions kind of from the top down that were thematically relevant to the lecture that I had given. But we found very quickly that people really liked that because they hadn't seen a couple engage in civilized discussion ever. Seriously. Yeah, there's a lot of that out there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It was really shocking, Joe. I was shocked when I first started touring by how demoralized people were. That was really striking and painful to see that on such a mass scale. And then also to see how little encouragement it took to have a really major effect. I mean, there's a positive aspect to that too, but there's also a tragic aspect. It's like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
you mean you just need to have some encouragement and that was enough and you never got that like even once that's rough when you see that in thousands of people right and it was the same thing we found it was the same thing with regards to seeing a functional couple at least even that model because you know Tammy asked me questions and she thinks about the questions and then sometimes she comments but not that much and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
But she actually listens to the answers and she wants to hear the answer. And so, and that dynamic is being played out on stage and people found that very heartening. And all that shows you, well, you said, you know, yourself, and this is why I brought it up because you had the example from your, from your stepfather and your mom of this long-term relationship that worked.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I mean, how the hell do you orient yourself if you haven't seen that anywhere?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, it's generally better not to have your fights in public, and it's certainly better... You know, I've been thinking about this commandment to honor your mother and father, and I've been thinking about what that means. I read this book called Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, and Frank had a really alcoholic father, like an Irish alcoholic father back in the 40s. Oh, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
He drank every cent the family had, and they lived in terrible poverty, and his sister died, and, like, it was rough. But he said his father was...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
often sober in the morning and and he established a relationship with like good morning sober father and kind of put alcoholic drunken nighttime father in a different bin and he could he could get the benefit of having a father in consequence of that and That honoring, that's also something that you want to do within a marriage, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Because your wife is your friend and your lover, but she's also your wife and you're her husband. And that means that a part of keeping that marriage working is honor. And part of the honor is that you don't do that sort of thing in public. Right. You don't humiliate each other. You don't fight in public. Well, that's also in some ways independent marriage.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
In a way, it's independent of who your wife or husband is. It's like, you know, you can imagine two people fighting in public and one of them or both of them really deserving to have that fight as people. But then to keep the marriage intact, you have to remember, well, this is my wife. She's not just my friend. She's not just someone I know. She's my wife.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And we shouldn't be doing primate dominance hierarchy maneuvering in public. We shouldn't be competing for power because that's going to destroy the marriage.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So that's part of that honoring, I think, is to remember the role and to keep it alive. Well, sacred is really right. Sacrosanct.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, you could imagine maybe, and I think this is worth delving into in some depth, you could imagine that there are various ways of attaining status, renown, reputation. Status isn't exactly the right word because reputation is better because you can have a reputation that you deserve, right? And so people do work for reputation and all things considered, that's a good thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Earned reputation. Earned reputation. Earned valid reputation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Right, right, okay. That's what people want. Right, right. And it's also, there isn't anything more valuable that you can have than that. Not even close. This is why, by the way, this is very cool. It's a bit of an aside, but it's worth bringing up. In the Gospels, Christ tells people to store up treasure in heaven where it doesn't rust, where the thieves can't steal it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
That's reputational treasure. So the idea is that if you conduct yourself impeccably, you'll develop a storehouse of reputation that will withstand all catastrophe. There's no place you can put your wealth that's more effective than that. It's the least... violatable place. And that's right. It's right. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And so, but the problem is, and this is a really tricky problem and you're touching on it, is that the reputation game can be gamed. Okay. So when your reputation rises, your serotonin levels rise, and that makes you less sensitive to negative emotion and more sensitive to positive emotion. So that's a really good deal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And what that also means is that there's a high psychological benefit to status increase, reputational increase, and a real cost to reputational decrease. So that's partly why people don't like losing face, for example, because their emotions dysregulate. Okay, so now the best way to play that game is to establish a genuine reputation. And the best way to do that, you've done this, by the way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I figured out this year in my lectures that I'm always trying to answer a question on stage. So that's a quest. And I'm bringing the audience along on a quest. And it's a real quest because I'm actually trying to figure something out. And I do that in real time. And that's a very different game. That's a very different conversational game than the status battle game. Because I could come on here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, that situation can be ugly in a multitude of ways. Yes. Right. That's when things get. Well, that's when it's very difficult to pick your moral pathway forward. All your choices are not good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I don't know if it would work. But I could come on here and I could try to show that I was smarter than Joe Rogan. Now, I've watched you and that's a very difficult thing to pull off. But hypothetically, that could be my aim. And I could play gotcha questions and I could lead you into places.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, I think that's also what's made you popular and a force for good is that you are on a quest. And that quest, the consequence of that quest, if undertaken properly, is reputational enhancement. And people who can't or won't do that, they default to power games. And that's the default to power. But it's worsened with social media. Absolutely.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It's freedom. I have a big dent here from when a meteorite landed on me when I was a kid.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Because if you meet someone and they're playing a power game with you, you can just decide not to have anything to do with them anymore. Or you can put a stop to it if you need to. But on social media, you can't because they're distant from you and they're often also anonymous. And so they can play power games to enhance their reputational status falsely with no consequences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And the social media is rife with that. And it's really a problem. Like, I think that virtualization has enabled the psychopaths. Without a doubt. Yeah, well. Without a doubt. That's a terrible thing because the psychopathic types, they're always the death of everything. I'm seeing this come up on the right now. So imagine this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I've been working on a new theory of political psychopathology, and I like it quite a lot.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, Lindsay is pointing at that, but he hasn't got the diagnosis exactly right. So it isn't woke. That's not the issue.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, but the problem is... It's like Antifa. Absolutely. But the problem is, is that... That argument is predicated on the claim that the ideas are the problem, like the woke ideas, for example, on the right or the left. But that's not the problem. The problem is that 4% to 5% of the population, something like that, is...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Cluster B, that's the DSM-5 terms, histrionic, narcissistic, antisocial, psychopathic, and they have dark tetrad traits. They're Machiavellian. They're sadistic. That's about 4%. Okay, so the question is, how do these people maneuver? And the answer is, they go to where the power is. and they adopt those ideas, and they put themselves even on the forefront of that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
But the ideas are completely irrelevant. All they're doing is, they're the Pharisees, they're the modern version of the Pharisees, they're the people who use God's name in vain, right? As they proclaim moral virtue, doesn't matter whether it's right or left or Christian or Jewish or Islam, they invade the idea space, and then they use that, those ideas, as falsehood.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
false weapons to advance their narcissistic advantage. And so then you have the problem, and the right's going to face this more and more particularly, because the left had to face it when they were in power. How do you identify the psychopathic parasites 4% of the population, who are clothed in your clothing and waving your flags, but who are only in it for narcissistic benefit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The people who studied the dark triad, these were people who originally studied psychopaths, and they moved into ordinary personality, so to speak, on the fringes. It showed that the non-criminal psychopaths, so the fringe cases, are Machiavellian. They use their language to manipulate. They're narcissistic. They want unearned reputation. That's what a narcissist wants.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, it's hard to organize yourself for combat unless you are quite convinced that you're the good guy. So there's a default to that dichotomy that's a necessary part of, well, even standing your own ground, right? Because otherwise you get demoralized. And so I suppose people, well, when they're threatened, they default to a simple narrative.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And they're psychopathic, which makes them predators or parasites. Okay, that's pretty bad, those three things. But they had to expand the nomenclature after a while because they found that they were also sadistic, which implied that if you're Machiavellian and narcissistic and psychopathic, you develop a sufficiently bad view of your fellow man that they're...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
undeserved pain is a source of pleasure to you. And that's what's being enabled online. See, because we've evolved real specific mechanisms to keep such things under control in face-to-face interaction. Lack of anonymity, for example, within a community. Psychopaths in the real world, they wander.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
They have to move from place to place because people figure out who they are, and they're held responsible. They're particularly held responsible by men. But online, they escape from that protective... They escape from that system of constraints, and they have free reign, and they can find other people like them very rapidly, and they can gang together. And so this is like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I can really see this starting to happen on the right. Like I've been tracking psychopathic behavior on the right for probably four years, something like that, especially on the anti-Semitic side, because that's really where it reared its head first. Why is that? There's nothing more annoying than a successful minority. Right. Now, that's part of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I'm going to—here, I might as well get myself in trouble right away, too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, the Jews too, they're very successful. And so what you would expect from a purely statistical point of view is you'd expect them to be overrepresented at the extreme.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, of course. Yeah, well, all these complex things are multidimensional. I mean, I watched your whole conversation with Douglas, and I thought you guys did a very credible job, all three of you, of... navigating unbelievably choppy waters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And because that's, you can't defend yourself in some ways. It's very hard to defend yourself, especially physically or militarily without a pretty cut and dried narrative.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So that's the first thing I'd like to say, because one of the things I was trying to figure out when I was watching that is, do I think I could have done a better job of any of you? And I certainly didn't walk away from it with that idea in mind. But then underneath all that, I thought there's a really unbelievably tricky problem here. And I think that's why it's made it, it poked up into...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, you also set that conversation up, but it poked up and made itself manifest in that conversation. And the issue is, how do you identify the psychopathic pretenders? And it's even worse now. And then make a barrier, right? Now, the right was calling for the left to do that for decades. And they didn't. And they couldn't. And the left is not good at drawing barriers, partly temperamentally.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The right is somewhat better, but there's no shortage of monstrosity there. And And so then the question is, how do you draw the line? And that's kind of what I was... Because I've been watching these right-wing... They're not right-wing. These psychopathic types manipulate the edge of the conservative movement for their own gain. And a lot of that's cloaked in anti-Semitic guise.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
There's plenty of anti-Semitism on the left, too, by the way. So it's not unique to the... Well, particularly now. Yes, particularly now. And so, you know, you've let your curiosity guide you, your curiosity and your desire for knowledge, this quest, you've let that guide you as a podcaster. And by the way, I'm trying to work through exactly the same sort of thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
How do you know, given your radical increase in stature over the last 10 years, how do you know... When your curiosity and even your skepticism about the fact that things aren't the way that people say they are, because that's certainly been demonstrated in the last 10 years. How do you how should anyone decide what guardrails to put up? Like, what do you look for?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Do you have a conceptual system worked out for that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you have this insanely immense platform and you're inviting people onto it. And, you know, you said to Douglas, and I know this to be true, that... you're not really thinking about the outcome exactly. You're thinking about this is an interesting person to talk to and I'd like to go on that quest. But then you have the additional conundrum.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
We're trying to work this out in the Daily Wire side of things too, not to say that that's exactly the same situation. It's like once you gain in reach and authority, then how do you know that How do you take great care that the people you're talking to aren't, what would you say, eliciting or feeding a subculture, yeah, that's right, that hasn't got the proper aims?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I guess the legacy media probably worked that out by having people, mediators, right, and guests, and that was also back when we could rely on the structures of authority in some sense to Filter. And now we're in this helter-skelter world where everything is up for grabs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, and there's many things like that. I mean, you saw the government website that came up two days ago about COVID?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, you never know when doubt will cause a fraction of a second difference in reaction time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Right. That's probably true in life. You don't want to oversimplify things, too. But once you've made a decision, well, that's when it's necessary to put doubts behind you because otherwise you just act in half measures.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Okay. So that's an interesting point there too, that issue of control and fear. I started this – I was part of a group that started this organization in the UK called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. We had our second convention in November, which went very nicely, by the way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, we have some rules. And one rule is you don't use force or fear, right? Use invitation. So can I tell you a story about that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Okay, so I've been touring about this new book of mine, right, We Who Wrestle With God, and I've been lecturing about lots of the things I know, but I've been using biblical stories mostly to provide an analytical frame, because that's what stories do, they provide a frame.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And there's a great story in the continuing Exodus story, the story of Moses and the Israelites, where Moses has led his people away from the tyrant and away from their own slavery, because there's a dynamic in that story between those two things. No tyrants without slaves. Or you might say no tyrants without willing slaves.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And so the Israelites have to get away from the tyrant, but then it's across the Red Sea of chaos and blood and into the desert for 40 years. You don't escape from the tyrant if you're a slave without paying a price and maybe for three generations. It's rough. So Moses is trying to get these people to stop being slaves and to take responsibility so they don't need a tyrant.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And so he's kind of got there and they're on the edge of the promised land, right? And So they're almost at the end of their voyage and they run out of water. They're still in the desert.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
They run out of water and they get all whiny and bitchy about the fact that they had to go across the desert and that it was way better under the tyrant and that Moses is nothing but a corrupt patriarch and he's only power mad. They foment some rebellion. And anyways, it's a pretty ugly situation. And the Israelites go to Moses and they say, look, we're really starving. We're thirsting for water.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
We're going to die. Do you think you can have a chat with God, see if he'll do something about this? And God tells Moses to go to some rocks in the desert and to ask them to bring water forth. And so he goes with his people to these rocks. And instead of asking, he takes this staff of his. The staff is a really important thing. It's like your staff if you have an organization. Same derivation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
But it's also the magic wand of Gandalf. It's the flag you plant in new territory. It's the tree of life. It's the...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
living tradition that has a spirit inside it and that's a serpent and that's the serpent that eats all the serpents of the Egyptian tyrants magic magicians that's the staff it's his rod of his authority and he instead of asking the rocks he hits them twice with the with the staff so he forces them And God tells him that in consequence of that, number one, he's going to die.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And number two, he's not going to get to the promised land. Right, right, right. So there's this insistence. It's really interesting. It's a crucial insistence. And it's very important in this time, I think, to understand what this means. So Moses is a leader. He's the archetypal leader. And he...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
realizes his responsibility in the encounter with the burning bush, which is something that attracts his attention, that he takes with great seriousness, and that transforms him. And so then he becomes the leader who stands up against the tyrant and frees the slaves and takes them through chaos into the desert. And his temptation as leader is to use force.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So when he's a young man, for example, he kills an Egyptian aristocrat who was tormenting a Hebrew slave, and that's why he has to leave Egypt. He's tempted by power because he's a leader. And then at the end, even though he's done all these things, he's been an upstanding man and gone beyond his call of duty. And he's right at the point where he attains victory, right, to enter the promised land.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And he uses force once when God tells him to use invitation, to use his words, the logos, to use words, to use invitation. And that's enough so that he's dead. So is his brother Aaron. That's his political arm. And he doesn't enter the promised land. And then in the Gospels, of course, Christ foregoes power altogether.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The temptation in the desert, one of the three temptations, is the temptation for use of power. So one of the things that maybe we could conclude from all this is, given the context of what you said, is that you can tell the tyrants, they use fear and compulsion, and they don't use invitation. So one of the rules we put together for ARC was invitation only.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, I think that's partly, too, one of the things that I often faced in my clinical practice and with the students that I mentored was this confusion about acting. I don't know what to do, so what should I do? Well, nothing. I'll wait around until I figure out what to do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Play, we're going to do this playfully, and we're not going to use force or fear, ever. You have to use invitation. And so I don't know what you think about that. Imagine it's a distinguishing... It's the distinguishing characteristic between the wannabe tyrants and the true leaders. The true leaders say, here's an offer. Would you accept this of your own free will?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And the tyrants say, the apocalypse is coming, and we are allowed to do everything to forestall it, including control you and everything that you do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Yeah. Well, fear and force. It's like also, you know, you have to do this because the apocalypse is looming, which is always in a way true. Always. Well, there's always an apocalypse of one form or another looming. The question is, what do you do about it? And terrify people and compel them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The end of the world is always coming, right? For you, for me, for... For everybody. Yeah, right. So you can always look into the future and conjure up an apocalyptic scenario. And maybe even that in itself isn't... a sin, although I think it is, there's another. But if you then turn to fear and compulsion as your means of governance, then you're a tyrant. I don't care what your excuse is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Right, exactly. Well, and if the apocalypse that's generated in that way is of sufficient magnitude, there's no limit to the amount of power that can be
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
exerted right because obviously the rationale is there they have to do it right like this is the rationale to stop trump right you're trying to stop hitler right right well no matter what circumvent the first amendment use the law use lawfare use whatever yeah use whatever this is one of the things that worries me about canada at the moment you know i know when we talked a couple of weeks ago i expressed my concern about what was happening in canada doesn't look good
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, I read Carney's book, Values. I read it twice, and I understood it. And Carney says in that book, well, he says he's an advocate of... centralized planning, ESG. He was a huge ESG advocate. He organized many large corporations to go down this central planning governance route because the market wasn't pricing everything properly. And so central planners had to step in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It's like, no, you should put together a bad plan and you should implement it because even if you fail in the implementation, you'll gather information and then you can rectify the plan. And so staying in that malaise until you know what to do makes you get older and more miserable and you gather no information along the way. A bad plan is a good idea. Best, you know, any plan is better than none.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And BlackRock and Vanguard and places like that were big parts of that. Don't know if they were directly affected by Carney, but it's the same thing. And they've stepped away from that. And he's a big DEI advocate. And he's also a net zero advocate. And Carney says in his book, this is a good example of this. And I think also a good example of this kind of narcissism that we talked about earlier.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
every single financial decision that every individual or organization makes has to prioritize decarbonization above all else. Or else, and there will be many, he doesn't say casualties, but he implies that, there'll be many who pay a price along the way, but it's necessary, you know, because you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then he says, 75% of the world's fossil fuels have to stay in the ground. And this is who Canadians are seriously thinking about electing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, the conclusion you draw about climate and carbon dioxide is entirely dependent on where you put the origin point of your graph. So if you go back 150 years ago, carbon dioxide has increased. If you go back 500 million years ago, which is quite a lot longer, we're in a drought. like a serious carbon dioxide drought.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yes, it turns out that they like it. Well, you know the global greening data. Yeah, say it so people know it. Well, you know, one of the things I learned as a scientist... was that there's usually an explanation or two that accounts for a phenomenon so completely that almost everything else is noise. Like the Maha movement, Make America Healthy Again. The fundamental issue is insulin resistance.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Like that's the fundamental plague of, say, North America. And everything else is noise. It's not unimportant noise, but insulin resistance is the major contributor. On the climate side, when I look at the data... The thing that leaps out for me is greening. It's like the planet is 20% greener than it was 30 years ago. Okay, 20%. This is NASA data. I'm not inventing this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Okay, and then the next, you think, oh, 20%. If 20% of the plants had vanished, you'd be sure we'd heard about that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Okay, so, and agricultural outputs got up 13%. Now, whether all that additional carbon dioxide is a function of human activity, that's still debatable. It doesn't matter. There is an association between the carbon dioxide rise and the plant propagation. Okay, it's even more particular than that. Because a lot of the greening has occurred in semi-arid areas, so areas around deserts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And the reason for that is that if there's more carbon dioxide, the plants can close their breathing pores more and they don't lose water. And so not only is there 20% more vegetation, which is a lot, I think it's twice the area of the United States that's greened. That's a lot of greed. And where our agricultural production is more effective.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And the places that have greened were the very places that the deserts were supposed to expand into. And so, right, because they've greened. They've shrunk, not grown. Now, you know, you could say, well, that rate of change has its problems. And, you know, rates of change have their problems. But I don't see another data point that's anywhere near us. Stunning is that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
That's a good rule of thumb. And a bad plan isn't. A bad plan can be incrementally improved with experience.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, that's the thing about the narrative is like, okay, so now we talked about the psychopaths who manipulate belief systems for their own advantage, right? The people who use God's name in vain, the Pharisees who want to dress in religious clothing and obtain status and consequence. They're Christ's number one enemies in the Gospels, by the way, those people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
They're the ones who conspire to crucify him, right? The religious pretenders. So this has been going on for a very long period of time. So, The climate apocalypse narrative is perfectly situated to, what would you say, to serve the purposes of the narcissists, the Machiavellians, the psychopaths, and the sadists.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Because it's an infinitely expanding existential threat that can be used as an excuse for anything. And it also provides a perfect cloak for any amount of power maneuvering. It's like, I want to make your shower heads put out a needle spray so that you're cold all the time while you have a shower, while you're doing something you do every day that could otherwise be highly enjoyable.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Why do I get to invade your life to that degree? Well, because the planet's at stake, Joe. And who are you to privilege your shower comfort, something that trivial, over the fate of the entire planet? Well, you can use that argument at every single level. You know, Trump came out with this executive statement just a few days ago about showerheads. And everybody kind of laughed about that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And I thought, no, he has an eye for petty tyranny, right? For petty tyranny. And there's very little that's more petty than, well, I think the showerhead example is a perfect one. And then you also think, look, if they're willing to control your life at that level of detail, what are they not willing to control? It's like, you're concerned about my showerheads?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Like we're out of water, which we're not at all? Right. So what won't you control? So you think, while the psychopaths are edge cases, they'll move wherever the power is. They find a narrative that can be used to strike fear in the hearts of people and to justify compulsion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
They ally themselves with that belief claim, and then they ratchet themselves up status hierarchies without any true reputational validity Riding on that edge of fear and power.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Right. I wrote an article. It hasn't been published yet in the Telegraph because I got hell a lot after one of our podcasts. You may know this, but... The climate change stuff. That's right. The whole bloody transcript was sent to the college as an indication that I was out of my wheelhouse.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
You know, and maybe I stepped a bit out of my wheelhouse when we had that discussion because I'm not a climate scientist, whatever the hell that is, by the way, because you have to know a lot to be a climate scientist and an economist on top of that. So today I'm talking about something that's a lot more psychological.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The climate apocalypse narrative is a social contagion that's driven by power-mad psychopaths who are hell-bent on using fear and compulsion to make sure everyone steps in line so that they can continue with their acquisition of undeserved power.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, that's the advantage of using fear and compulsion, right? It's like, well, I have to go along with this because my leaders who had built up a certain degree of credibility are telling me that, you know, the apocalypse is nigh. And who am I to, well, first of all, question because, God, there's a hard thing to figure out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
You know, what's the global effect of human activity on the climate for the next hundred years? Well, good luck figuring that out. But this is why I'm making it more psychological this time. It's like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The climate fluctuates and for complex reasons, but that doesn't mean that you get to look 100 years into the future and you get to conjure up an apocalyptic narrative and you get to say we're the only people that can save you and you get to say you have to change every single thing you do in your life and prioritize our concern above all else, including even the well-being of your own children or the economic future of the Africans, for example, who don't get to use fossil fuels.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Right. You don't get to do that. You don't get to do that using fear and compulsion. Not only that, it's being done by people who have been wrong about everything, every step of the way, every step of the way. Yeah. Well, then they just play a sleight of hand game there, though. OK, we got the time frame wrong, Joe. It's not 20 years. But it's not even just that. It's 40 years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Every single thing. The water supply. Everything. That sets us back into this conundrum that you and Douglas and Dave were addressing. It's like, okay, two conundrums. Like, three. How do you pursue your interest in a landscape that's been shorn of reliable expert input? Who do you rely on? If you don't know who to rely on, how do you keep the bloody psychopaths at bay?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And the conspiracy theorist mongers and the people who aren't trying to discover the truth, but who are using the conspiratorial edge, let's say. The grifters. Yeah, the Groypers, for that matter, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
These are people who are clearly playing power games for their own benefit, and they're spinning up these conspiratorial narratives and riding on them and occupying them in this parasitical manner. This is a huge problem already on the right-wing side. I don't even know what the hell that is anymore because I don't know what the left is, and I don't know what the right is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
We need to claim the center. Well, that's also what we're trying to do with ARC. What is the center?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, let's specify it even more. Okay. The center is a place you'd go if you were invited. Right? Right, exactly. And that also ties back into this idea of play. Piaget figured this out when he was watching little kids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So if a little boy wants to play house with a little girl, which is generally a good idea, if you want to play house with a woman at some point in your life, you better get that right. It's a very serious game. What's the first rule? She has to want to play. Right, what's the second rule? You have to play with her in a manner that makes her want to play with you again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of what constitutes objective standards of morality. You know how Sam Harris was obsessed with malevolence, and he wanted to ground morality in objective science because he thought that would give us a firm standing place. But he went down the wrong scientific rabbit hole, I think.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I think if you understand this relationship with play and iteration, then you have the core of morality. And Piaget, by the way, this is part of... What would you say? This is the larger, this is the philosophical edge of his theory. This is actually what he's trying to accomplish. How do you decide if an arrangement is good versus bad or good versus evil?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, Piaget went to children to find that out. It's like, okay, you want to set up a game. Why? A game is the first social, it's the foundation of social interaction, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
play a game with one other people, one other person, and then maybe you can play a game with a bunch of people, and then you can play a game with one person or a bunch of people across a long period of time, and then you can do it in a way that improves. Okay, so now, so what are the rules? If you're a little boy, she has to want to play.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then you have to play with her in a way so that she wants to play with you again. If you do that, then you have a friend. And that iterates. Now, so you can imagine that there's a structure of voluntary play that's really quite stringent. But this is what you do on your podcast. Seriously. And that's why it's so attractive to people. That's the core of what you might call objective morality.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, and the algorithms optimize for short-term attention. So, you know, it's a weird thing, eh? Because you could imagine that you would want a machine that offers you what you want, right? Because you want ads that are targeted to you because you want to see a bunch of ads that aren't relevant to you now and then because maybe you'll learn something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It's like there's a very limited number of ways to play, to offer a game that someone else wants to play, and then there's a very limited number of ways to play that game so that they want to keep playing with you. And then you could, if you add that additional constraint of improvement across the games, you've got the straight and narrow path.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then it's marked by, we're really trying to do this at ARC. We want to offer a vision, that people want to accept or even thrilled to accept, because that's even better, right? A game that you'd be thrilled to play. So one of the things we're doing on the energy side, I'm going to an event with Alex Epstein here in two days, talk to energy executives about this, you know?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, what kind of world do you want to see? Well, how about a world where there's so much energy that poor people can afford it? How'd that be for a vision? Like, have you got a problem with that? Well, poor people can't have energy because that'll destroy the planet. It's like, no.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Poor people can't have that energy because you'd have to let go of the game that you're playing as a narcissistic psychopath that's elevating your status inappropriately, and you're perfectly willing to sacrifice the world's poor to continue your grip on power. How about that for a psychological interpretation?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And how about this as an alternative? Why don't we do everything we can to drive energy costs down to the lowest degree that's sustainable, like in a market economy? and make energy available to everyone so that we eradicate absolute poverty. Why wouldn't the left line up again around that? Because the left hypothetically serves the poor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It's like nothing serves the poor better than an ethos first. We've got to get that right because we're also interested in getting the story right. But after that, on the material side, there's nothing more important than cheap energy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, it might be a problem that's facilitated by the psychopathic fringe types. Like, look, I think— It's not offered to them is my point. Yeah, the question is why not? And the reason is, like, this is part of the—you talk to Lomberg. right, to Bjorn. And Bjorn's pretty good on this, or very good on this, I should say, you know, to give him credit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And he would like to see a world where, and he's part of ARC, he'd like to see a world where we make energy abundance a top priority.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, it's also, as far as I can tell, the only way that you pull them out of environmental catastrophe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Because if you want to produce an environmental catastrophe, a true environmental catastrophe, how about a three or four year famine? So that everyone there kills all the animals, for example, or dies, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And content, well, why not have a machine shovel the same sort of things that you are interested in at you? That's a kind of curation. The problem comes... And we haven't figured this out at all technically and probably not psychologically. The problem comes in time frame, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So we also know that if you get people above $5,000 a year GDP, then they start paying attention to long-term environmental sustainability because they don't have to scrabble around in the dirt for their next meal. So then we could say, well, how about we have a future of... Sufficient abundance so that no one is deprived of energy or opportunity for their children. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, that sounds like an invitation. Now, if you hate people and you think the industrial enterprise is a stain on the planet and that we're viruses or cancer on the planet, then you're going to have a problem with that. But my sense too is that if we had enough energy, we could make all the deserts bloom.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
What's going on? Well, and you want to incentivize people to pay attention to their local environment. And you do that in part by ensuring that they're not living so close to the edge of catastrophe that they can only think about today. And if you start from the mindset that Can I tell you another story? Sure. Okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
All right. This is a really cool story. Okay. This is how to set the world right, this story. So I've been traveling around lecturing about my book, and I wrote a chapter on Abraham in that book. And Abraham is the father of, in principle, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, right? He's the father of nations. That's how the story goes. So...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
When God comes to Abraham in a very particular way, it's one of the ways God is characterized in the Old Testament. So this is like a definition of God. It's not a testament to God. It's a definition of what God is. Okay, so Abraham... He doesn't hear anything about God until he's like 70. And he's already living in privileged paradise because his father and his mother are rich.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Because there's a big difference between what you might be interested in if you were diligently striving towards a long-term goal that required conscientiousness and what's going to attract your attention right now, this moment. And the thing about the algorithms is that they maximize for short-term attention. So basically, they're actually optimizing for hedonism.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And so he doesn't have to lift a finger. If life is about having your needs met, Abraham's got it covered. And so he lives like a satiated infant till he's 70.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then a voice comes to him and it says, you are required by the God of your ancestors to leave your zone of comfort, to leave the wealth of your father, to leave your nation, to leave your language, to go out into the world and have your terrible adventure. And If you do that, so now imagine that's the call to adventure. If you do that, these things will happen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
This is the covenant that God makes to the Abrahamic people. It's so cool. I just talked to Brett Weinstein about this from an evolutionary biological perspective on the road because I wanted him to evaluate the story I'm going to tell you from an evolutionary perspective. So God is the voice that says to Abraham, if you follow the call of adventure, you'll be a blessing to yourself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So that's the meaning of life, right? To have the adventure. You'll do this in a way. Yeah, yeah, because adventure is compelling. Responsible romantic adventure is the most compelling pathway, right? And if it's intense enough, it justifies the suffering, right? It's a reason to get up in the morning, even if you're in pain.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Okay, then he says, there's another thing that'll happen too, which is that your name will become known among your people for valid reasons. So that's that genuine reputation that we talked about. So if you follow the pattern of adventure properly, you'll be a blessing to yourself and your name will become known among your people for valid reasons. So that's a good deal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
You'll do this in a way that will maximize the probability that you'll establish something of permanence or even eternal permanence. So Abraham is offered, if he accepts the call and makes the proper sacrifices along the way, God says your descendants will outnumber the stars. So he establishes the pattern of fatherhood.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
that best propagates down the generations, which is the same as following the pathway of adventure. Then he says, you'll do this in a way that will make sure no one can stand before you, right? So that if you adhere to that adventurous spirit and you propagate it, all the enemies will, all enemies will either be converted into friends or flee before you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then you'll do it in a way that brings abundance to everyone. And so now this is the question I'd ask Brett. So imagine this. So imagine that we have an instinct in us, or a divine voice, I don't care which of those you use, an instinct within us that calls us to develop, right? That puts us on the edge.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And that's not the same as looking for infantile satiation or the gratification of our needs. It's genuinely this call to expand yourself and to be on the edge and to develop. That if you did that, to follow that instinct, then you'd be a blessing to yourself. Your name would become known among your people. You'd establish something of permanent significance.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
No one could stand before you, and it would bring abundance to everyone. Right? And then, in the Abrahamic story, what happens is that as Abraham accepts that, goes out in the world, and then he has a series of adventures, each of which requires a more complete sacrifice. Right? Because as you develop under the influence of this call, what you're required to do is to
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
live more carefully in accordance with your expanding domain of opportunity. And that's the pathway forward. So I asked Brett about that, because this is different than the selfish gene idea, right? It's like there's an instinct within us that calls us to develop, that pulls us out into the world. And if we follow it religiously, and we make the proper sacrifices along the way,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then you might say, well, so what? Because you're getting what you want. Well... The problem with short-term impulsive hedonism is it doesn't play out well over any reasonable time span.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
then those five things will happen around us. And that speaks of a concordance which has to be there. It has to be there between the spirit that develops us and the pathway that brings maximal benefit to the natural and the social world. And I can't see how that can be the case. If we're adapted to the world, that has to be the case.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It has to be that if we follow the instinct that would best put us together psychologically, this quest, this adventure, that would also be the spirit that set the world in order. And that spirit, that whole thing, that's what's defined as God in that particular story. That resonates. See, the alternative is preposterous, right? The alternative is that... We don't have an instinct to develop.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And you know that's wrong. You just have to watch children. And you know that's wrong. You just have to watch yourself and the curiosity that you have and the desire for novelty and for learning. You know that's there. That's what you followed to make this show. Definitely. And so the alternative is that instinct doesn't exist. That's a stupid theory. Or what...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
brings you into the world is done at the expense of other people in a way that won't enhance your reputation, in a way that has nothing to do with anything permanent, right? Then it would be sort of you against the world. That would be like a power orientation. You can get your way in the world, but you have to manipulate, you have to lie, you have to use compulsion, you have to use fear.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
You can't just rely on the quest, say, or your adventure. And I think you can. I think he can't. I think he better. Or else.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
That's why you have to mature, which is painful and annoying, but absolutely necessary and much better than the alternative. The alternative is exactly what... That's Peter Pan, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, you don't need to... was an advocate of the will to power, right? So you can imagine that there's a variety of potential motivating forces, and one would be hedonic pleasure. That's the golden calf worshippers, by the way. So that's just short-term hedonism. And that doesn't work. And by work, I mean it doesn't iterate socially.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It's like if it's all about you and what some whim in you wants now, first of all, that's not going to serve you well tomorrow, and I don't want to be anywhere near you. Like you're literally an overgrown two-year-old, and that gets pretty ugly by the time you're 40. So the whole golden calf thing, no, that's just off the table.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, I don't know if that's exactly hedonism. Greed is good. That's Wall Street.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Greed is good. Yeah, well, okay, let's delve into that for a minute.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I know you're not. I know you're not. You can turn to hedonism. You can fall into nihilism. You can turn to hedonism, or you can turn to power. This Abrahamic covenant, it's different than power. It's adventure. It's romantic adventure, actually. That's not the only definition of God in the Old Testament, by the way. There's something deeper than that that it refers to. So those are the options.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I still haven't grown up, and I'm a little past my shelf life now, too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Now, you said... Don't the achievers, you know, who are stacking up numbers, it's like they found a way forward to attain status, but they've fixated on an element that shouldn't be fundamental. They're not trying to store up the treasure in heaven. They're trying to store up the treasure on Earth, and that's better than not doing it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
See, this is another thing we need to understand, because I've spent a lot of time, for example, trying to figure out why people are attracted to Andrew Tate. And I know why they're attracted to Andrew Tate. They'd rather be Andrew Tate than an incel. and they're right, right? It's best to give the devil his due.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Like if you had to choose between being kind of flabby and unhealthy and resentful and in your basement looking at pornography, hating women because all of them reject you all the time, and you deserve it, and you're ineffectual, and the future looks pretty damn gloomy. And then you see Andrew Tate, who's tough and hyper-masculine in an almost manner that's almost a parody.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
and wealthy and famous and apparently has women at his disposal with a fair bit of stress on the idea of disposal, you'd think, well, I'd much rather be him than me. That's the incorporation of the shadow from the Jungian perspective. It's like, it's right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And you think they're all that way. Young men in particular are more likely to be rejected. Young women may have difficulty finding the ideal man, but they don't face the same degree of universal rejection. So it's hard on young men.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Right, right. And women are the gatekeepers, fundamentally, of sex. So that's their essential power. That's also the power of chastity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, I talked to Russell Brand about this a lot. You know, women threw themselves at him. How'd that work out for him? Not great. You know, it threw him into great spiritual confusion. It was empty and hollow. And that's worth knowing, you see, because you might say to the people who are interested in the shadow figures... And Tate plays that role. The master of women, let's say.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Why not do that? Because you need an answer to that, certainly when it's better than being lonely, isolated, bitter, and ineffectual. That's for sure. Well, it's because you don't confuse a stepping stone with a pinnacle. That's why. There's way more beyond that. I mean, you're a tough guy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
You went through your disciplinary processes on the physical side in particular, the intellectual side too, I might add. You know, you've got what Tate has to offer, but you're what? You're respectable. Why? Why?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. No, no. I'm too vain. That's exactly right. I look back and I think, oh, those headphones are pushing at my hair. Isn't that sad? That's so sad.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, that's why Christ says to people that they have to become as little children, not stay. Right? You have to rediscover that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
But kids are good for that, too, aren't they? Because they teach you that again. You look at the world through eyes of memory by the time you're an adult. So the world loses its freshness. That's part of the world loses its freshness because you see your memories instead of the world. And then kids come along and you think, oh, oh, yeah, that's really actually quite interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
But you also know that your reputation is founded on sand. And one of the ways to rationalize that is, well, everyone does that. Everyone's like that. Yeah, but then you don't trust or like anyone. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So, you know, you just outlined there the progression that Carl Jung identified as characteristic of individuation, right? With the second thing that you said. So imagine that you start an incel, right? You're ineffectual and you're rejected as a young man. Now, there are exceptions, but let's just play that out as the... the unhappy majority.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Okay, now you look for a shadow figure to sharpen you up, to toughen you up and to make you strive at least along one dimension. Right. And so then you do that. Well, then the next thing that happens in the Jungian stage progression is for a man, it's integration of the anima, which is the feminine part. And it's integration. It's not replacement.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It's like, oh, well, then you discover the utility of empathy and compassion and kindness and mercy and care. while still being able to deal out justice, let's say. And so then you bridge that gap, and then that integration you just said, even among fighters, that's what puts them in the highest place. Right? That's right. That's right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
But it's hard for the people, it's hard for those who are completely disaffected and also quite angry about it. You know, the people who are interested in the pathway that Tate offers, they're not so unhappy that he's hard on women, because they're pretty mad at women. And so, you know, if it's the bitch or me, then I'll pick me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Right, exactly, exactly, exactly. And so, and it is very crucial to get this progression correct, because monster's better than wimp. Right. Right. But the question is, what's better than monster? And so it's very interesting that you made those comments on the fighting side because you wouldn't necessarily think that it would be true in that world as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
A quest for new information. Okay, so let me tell you a story about that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
All right. So this is the story that comes up at the beginning of Moses when he turns into a leader. So it's about how you turn into a leader. Okay, so he's already killed a man and he's left Egypt because of it. So now he's in this land called Midian and he goes there and he chases some ruffians away from a well for these two girls who are drawing water.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And they're so compelled by everything because their perceptions are so fresh that they share that with you. And that can help reawaken that spirit of childhood play, let's say. I've been thinking a lot about play in the last year or so. Well, I spent a lot of time trying to...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And they go and tell their father and he says to them, bring this young man home to have dinner. So he does and then he gets married to them. And then he becomes a shepherd. And this is crucial because the shepherd's an image that runs through the biblical corpus, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Shepherds at that time lived by themselves in the wilderness on their wits and they kept the wolves and the lions at bay with primitive weapons. So these were tough guys and they cared for the most vulnerable. So a shepherd is an image of optimized ordinary masculinity. take care of yourself, you can keep the monsters at bay, and you attend to the most vulnerable. So Moses has got that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
He's a shepherd. He's a successful shepherd. So now he's out there one day wandering around Mount Sinai. And Mount Sinai, or Mount Horeb, that's the place where heaven and earth touch. So that's where the messengers of the divine descend to earth. And so he's out there and something attracts his attention, makes him curious. That's the burning bush. It's not a forest fire.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It's not something you can't ignore. It's something alive because that's a bush. A tree is a symbol of life. And it's burning because things that are... alive burn, right? That's metabolism. And an intensification of that, like a psychedelic intensification of that, that's what the burning bush is. And that's what glimmers to Moses.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And he steps off the beaten track, right, to investigate what drives his curiosity. And so then he goes off the beaten track and he starts to delve deeply into the mysteries of the burning bush. And at some point he realizes he's on sacred ground. He takes off his shoes. That's a symbol of willingness to transform identity because shoes signify identity, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
They're part of your costume, your working man's costume. And so then he continues to commune with the burning bush. He gets deeper and deeper into something. He makes himself a specialist by following what compels him and delving deeply into it. And when he gets deep enough into it, to the bottom, the voice of eternity speaks to him and says, you're now no longer who you were.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
You're now a leader. You have to go back to your people. You have to stand up against the tyrant. You have to tell the slaves that they need to leave their tyranny and their slavery and serve me in the wilderness. And you have to do that now. And Moses says, I can't because I can't speak. I'm slow of tongue. And God says, basically, that's your problem.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And with me on your side, we can sort that out. And don't you have a brother, Aaron? And can't he speak? It's like, bring him along for the ride. And so that's when Moses becomes a leader, right? And so that's the pattern. It's like, Ordinary masculinity. Those are the dwarves that Snow White serves before she meets the prince, by the way. The ordinary masculine, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And those dwarves protect her from the evil queen that wants to suppress her by feeding her a poisoned apple. So Snow White has to learn to serve the ordinary man before she can find a prince. Yeah, something Disney missed completely in the last story. So... What's the pattern? Well, you discipline yourself so you become a shepherd, and then you follow what compels you off the path.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Take apart the causes of like truly pathological degeneration right on the sadistic side on the criminal side on the totalitarian side very curious about tyranny and It was very difficult for me to conceptualize the opposite of that as cleanly as I could characterize its presence. Like, what's the opposite of tyranny? It's not freedom, by the way. It's certainly not anarchic freedom.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
then you take it seriously and get to the bottom of it, and then that transforms you. And thus transformed, you can face the tyrant, you can specify the promised land properly, and you can lead the slaves across chaos and blood, that's the Red Sea, and then through the desert, right? And so you said, you know, you said two things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
You said that the good fighters have learned to integrate their civilized side otherwise they don't get to be great, and that they continue the pathway of self-improvement, right? They continue to pursue what's calling to them. That's another definition of God in the Old Testament, by the way, what calls to you. That's the burning bush.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The spirit of the burning bush is what entices you, what grabs your interest, what attracts your curiosity. And that's identical. The biblical claim is that's the same thing as the spirit of adventure. It's the same thing that speaks to Noah. Noah's a good man. And a voice comes to him and says, all hell's about to break loose.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And he believes his intuition because he's a good man and can rely on himself. So he makes the ark, right? And he brings his family aboard and culture and nature. and reestablishes humanity. That's the pathway of the leader too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, I think – look, I think that hallucinogens strip memory from perception. So you see the world in all its blazing glory. Huxley figured that out with the doors of perception. That is apparently what psychedelics do psychopharmacologically. They mimic a high-stress condition, and they strip memory from perception so that you can return to the source and revitalize your perceptions. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So the probability that there's some overlap between that and the burning bush is high. It's high, so to speak.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I'll tell you one more thing, one more story, okay, if that's all right with you. So something else I figured out that I tried on Brett. So imagine you could take the hedonistic path, you could take the power path, You could take the nihilistic path. And then you might say, well, that's the only three options. That's kind of what the postmodernists believe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
That's kind of what the nihilists and the postmodernists, the Nietzscheans believe. Power, hedonism, nihilism, those are your options. There's no uniting narrative above that. Okay, so in the story of Cain and Abel, Two patterns are laid out that are different than that. One is Cain's pattern. One's Abel's pattern. So these are the first two people that live in the world, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Because Adam and Eve are made by God. They're in paradise or were. Cain and Abel are the first two people. So Abel brings his best to the table. So he takes the best animal in his flock and he takes the best cut and And the best part of the cut, and he offers that to God. So he literally brings his best to the table. That's what he sacrifices. And Cain doesn't.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
No, no. I stayed conscious, but I got close. That's the big predictor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So Cain's sacrifices are rejected by God. And God tells him, if you brought your best to the table, you'd be accepted. And Cain gets bitter and resentful, and... invites temptation in to possess him, so that spirit of resentment possesses him, and then he becomes murderous. He kills his brother, and his descendants become genocidal, and then you have the flood.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And so that pattern of sacrifice is established right at the beginning of the biblical texts. Abel versus Cain. Abel brings the best to the table, and that satisfies God. So one question. God actually asks Cain this when Cain complains. He says, wouldn't you be accepted if you were doing your best? So that's a question of conscience, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
If you're in extreme misery and your life is hollow and empty and you're bitter and resentful, it's like... You bringing your best to the table? Because the covenant proclaims that if you did, you'd be accepted. Yeah, clearly. Okay, so now the question is what constitutes, now you know you have to sacrifice. So sacrifice becomes the foundation of the state, not power, not hedonism, sacrifice.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It's not hedonistic freedom. Benevolence? I think it's play.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then that motif is played out through the whole Bible and that's what culminates in the New Testament, right? Total sacrifice as the foundation of the community. That's right. And like, I don't know how to, what sense to make out of the metaphysics of the religious realm, you know, because that's beyond me and everyone. The world's a strange place and we could leave it at that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
But the idea that See, Christ is the exemplar of voluntary self-sacrifice, right? Won't turn to power, won't deviate from his course, faces the worst of all possible deaths, descends to hell itself. That's the pattern of life lived with no reserve. And that's the foundation of the free state. That's right. I tried that on Brett, eh? He told me when we first met.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah. That makes sense. Well, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, one of the things he pointed out was that So let's say play is the foundation of micro-community, right? When you're a little kid, you play a game with another kid, and then if that works well, you inhabit a little dyadic community. You're both in it together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
on the tour that he felt that the biblical narratives were anachronistic, you know, that they were written in a time that was no longer relevant to us, but he decided by the end of our three days together that if you got to the core of the message, it's alive, right? That's the living spirit inside the bush, you might say. And that it's, so here's even the weirder thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So imagine, it's pretty obvious that Christ is a symbol of voluntary self-sacrifice, right? I don't think it, it doesn't really come as a shock to anyone. But the weird thing is, you know, we put that symbol at the center of our churches and and at the centers of our towns for 2,000 years, not really knowing why.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And the reason is, is that voluntary self-sacrifice is the foundation of the integrated psyche and the stable, productive, and abundant community. And that's right. It's right. And so, well, it's been exciting to have the opportunity over the last nine months to go talk to people about that, because I've talked to about... 150,000 people, I guess, public lectures.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, that's a kind of interesting proof, isn't it? Yeah. Because it means that— There's truth in it. Well, there's certainly the spirit that makes, what would you say, the spirit of truth that makes life more abundant. That's exactly right. And these are weird stories because the way they're true is very sophisticated. They're true always. That's different than a story about the past.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The truest story is always happening. The story of Moses is exactly like that. The pattern of leadership development that's embedded in the Exodus story, that is how leaders develop, if they're real leaders. And their temptation is power. But that's not their motivation. That's their temptation. Right. That's a very important distinction. And that's always the case with leaders.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And if they fall prey to the temptation of power, no matter what their accomplishments, they're not going to complete the task.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And so there's a cool element at the end of that story, too. You know, when Moses just before Moses dies. He picks a scout from each tribe, 12 tribes, and he sends them to Canaan, which is the future. That's a good way of thinking about it. It's the potential place we could reside where everything was worked out, the land of milk and honey. He sends 12 scouts there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And 10 of them come back and say, they tell a fear story. Say it's insurmountable, the challenges that lie ahead of us. There's no way we can master this. We should have never crossed the desert. We should have stayed under the thumbs of the tyrants. We should have never tried to be anything more than slaves, because now we're doomed. And two of them say, no, if we maintain our upward path,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
orientation and our covenant, nothing can stand in our way. We can make the deserts bloom. Moses dies, those two scouts, and so do all the Israelites who are convinced by the unfaithful scouts, and the scouts die, and the two people who go on to the promised land are Caleb and Joshua, and they lead the Israelites, the faithful Israelites, into the promised land.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Those are the people who have the courage to confront the future in a faithful and Faithful, hopeful, and courageous manner. They're the inheritors of the future. Caleb, Joshua. Joshua's name is the same as Christ's name. It's the same name. That's not fluke, right? That's one of those echoes or precursors to the story. There's an ethos that leads you into the promised land. And what's the ethos?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then if it really works, you replicate that across time, and that gives you a friend. But play is very interesting psychologically and psychobiologically because it has to be entered in voluntarily. You can't force someone to play.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice. You give up something for a social relationship. Of course, you give up being primary. You do the same thing at the social level. And when you do that, it integrates you and it sets the world straight. And that's built into the biblical story. It's right at its core.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So it's great fun to explain these things to people on the tour because it sorts them out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, they've adapted to the contours of our memory and our imagination. Yeah. So you find them compelling and they stick to your memory. So I'm going to tell you what else I'm up to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, the first thing I want to do is thank you. So we launched Peterson Academy in September and we talked about it and it's been a stunning success. We have 40,000 students. That's amazing. We think we're the most rapidly capitalized We're one of the most rapidly capitalized companies ever, especially with our degree of investment, because we run a lean show. We have great professors.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
We have a great social media site. We had to kick 10 people off it. We have 15,000 active users. 10 people were dragging it sideways. What were they doing? They were causing trouble, Joe. Sociopaths. They were causing trouble.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Or immature or out for – or didn't know how to conduct themselves. That's all it took. And now everyone is sharing ideas. And Mick, my daughter, and her husband, they keep a close eye on this. That's great. We have secured funding to the point where we are dropping the price from $5.99 to $3.99 a year as of today. Right. So that should make it accessible to a lot more people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And we're even more convinced than we were that this has to be the future of higher education. So when we were doing our due diligence for the fundraising process, We discovered that 40% of courses at university are now online. And we've investigated some of those courses. Many of them are PowerPoint presentations, and that's all. And so that's the university experience for full tuition.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
motivationally fragile so mammals have a play circuit and it can be disrupted by pretty much any other motivational or emotional circuit so the circumstances have to be set up properly like the walled garden you know that idea the walled garden is a place that play can take place like eternally so to speak and and because it has to be undertaken voluntarily It's the opposite of tyranny.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And we literally have the best professors in the world and unmatched production quality. And we're filling in the social gaps. Element two, because we want people to be able to meet. The social media platform does that. It's a very positive platform. We've already had our first couple announce themselves, which was quite fun. And we're going to do in-person events.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Our first plan, we're going to do a cruise. Can I ask you this? Yeah. What has...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. Well, first... I mean, it was exhilarating and painful to begin with. It was exhilarating because I knew the ideas that I was teaching at Harvard and at the U of T were revolutionary. I could never believe, I never could get over the fact that they allowed me to teach.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
But the students loved my courses and I was very diligent, you know, so I stayed in my traces, so to speak. And I wasn't a revolutionary for the sake of revolutionary argumentation. And I was teaching about totalitarianism and great evil. And so it was hard to make a moral case against me. And no one was really inclined to. They were happy with my teaching, as were the students.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And I had a clinical practice, which was quite extensive. But then when I first... started to lecture much more broadly. We rented a theater and I did a series on Genesis. That was the first foray out into the public space and it sold out. Well, that was when I started to encounter pain, I would say, at a crowd level. And that was rough, Joe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Because I'm pretty good at getting people to open up to me right away. I mean, I learned that as a clinician, you know. And to have thousands of people do that, that's pretty rough. Now, it was a good thing, like all things considered, because people would tell me how miserable they were, how discouraged, and how sidelined, and often how bitter, how addicted, how imprisoned. Rough stories.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then tell me how much they had improved. But... That was also, there was a tragic element to that because it didn't take that much, you know, to tap them into the right orientation. And so there was sadness in that, to see all these people who were demoralized, thousands of them, and then to see how that could be rectified and yet hadn't been. That was rough.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I'd really, I'm sure that was what, there's many things that made me sick. I had a preexisting condition that was autoimmune, but seeing all that, that was pretty rough. But knowing that it was possible to rectify it, well, that's, there's nothing better than that. Like, you know, wherever I go now, it's so interesting. Wherever I go now, I'm among friends. It's very strange.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And like my wife and I have really started to apply this in our marriage more consciously, you know, once I'd figured out this relationship, because I've been lecturing to people for a long time about how to conduct themselves in life so they don't become a tyrant or a handmaiden to the tyrants, right? A silent handmaiden to the tyrants, let's say. And aiming at play...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And I have security people, and they keep an eye on me, and all the interactions I have with people are positive. And I always take time for people, you know, because, well, if they've been positively impacted by something that I've read or said, and they're trying to get their lives together, it's like, how about we encourage that? Right? Because more of that would be real good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And if we had enough of that, then more of that would be real good and real necessary.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And good for everyone, too. Hey, absolutely. That's that abundance. It's like, you got your act together? Great. That'll be real good for you. Be great for your girlfriend. Be great for your kids. Be great for your community. Absolutely. And it's, well, you know, the Christian ethos, the emphasis is... redemption one soul at a time. Well, I'm a psychologist. That's what I think.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
One person at a time. Because everyone's connected way more intensely than we think. And so there's no such thing as a trivial person. And there's no such thing as a trivial sin or a trivial accomplishment for that matter. And I know that. I know that. I studied totalitarianism for a long time. I know how it comes about. It comes about when everyone lies about everything all the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And the way you stop that is by not lying. And that's how it stops. So what's it like? Painful and insanely exhilarating at the same time. And, you know, the balance has shifted over the years to the exhilaration. Once I got on top of it, once I got my health under control, which required pretty stringent discipline, like I eat steak.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And when I deviate from that, things start to fall apart around me pretty quick.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, that's just another... Okay, so it's also surreal. And that's one element. The diet thing, just alone, not just alone, is surreal. I mean, my daughter was so sick, and now she's great. Isn't it crazy? It's crazy. Well, my wife is on this carnivore diet too, and it's been unbelievably good for her.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
That's what's really nuts. Well, it's crazy. For the mind. Oh, yeah. Well, your brain likes to run on ketones, as it turns out. It really does.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
We're going to run a study and IQ test people. Really? Yeah, because my, we don't know, but yeah, there's two studies planned, one on, One group will be people with immunological disorders, try carnivore, keto, and ordinary diet, random assignation. But we're also going to give them personality and IQ tests.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, it's clear. It's absolutely crystal clear that we eat too many carbohydrates. Like the food pyramid is upside down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
When we walked in here today, one of the things we said was, let's have some fun. And I've been thinking this morning, too, about what attitude I should take coming in to talk to you. And there isn't a better attitude than play. And I think it is because it's the antithesis of tyranny in particular. And then you were talking more about mature play.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, it's clearly the case that we have an obesity, diabetes, and mental health epidemic. And the probability that all of those are associated with insulin resistance and immunological reactions seems to me to be probably— And probably herbicides and pesticides as well. Yeah, well, there's a cascading— There's a cascade of differential effects.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Undoubtedly, some people are more sensitive to those things as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Hopefully the new administration under Kennedy will be able to figure out how to prioritize these things so some of them happen. My concern, I suppose, it's not my concern, a concern is that they'll try to do too many things at once. And that's why I focused when we talked earlier today about
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I've seen that again at the shows. One of the things that's also changed across the years is that The proportion of people who are in trouble at my shows is decreasing, and partly that's because many of the guys who come, generally with their wife and often with a child, have put themselves together. Yes. And then they're happy about that, and they tell me the story, and so that's great.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And there's nothing better than traveling all around the world and having people come up to you and say that they weren't doing so well and that their lives are way better now. And thank you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And that's that good... You know, that also makes sense. This is the issue with the idea that adulthood isn't any fun. It's like, well... Do you want to play a simple game or do you want to play a really sophisticated game really well? Now, that's going to require some discipline and some training and some maturation, but the payoff is much higher. That's a good way to conceptualize marriage.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, so that's very interesting too, the fact that that's actually – You said those are the best stories that you can hear.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, it shows you something about non-hedonistic motivation. It's like, imagine what you could have if you could have anything you wanted. Well, maybe, you know, your imagination would drift first to the hedonistic side or maybe the power side for that matter. It's like, no, how about you can wander around anywhere in the world and some isolated field with a castle on it in Serbia.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And people that you've never seen will come up to you and say, I was having a pretty damn dismal time of it, all things considered. And I listened to what you wrote and said. And in consequence, I put my life together. And their wife is standing beside them going, yeah, he's really in a lot better shape. Thank you a lot.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah. So when you ask what it's like, well, it's like a lot of that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
I think I felt more for a good while the pain of it. It wasn't the responsibility. Well, the intense connection you have to these people that are – Well, the responsibility makes you careful. You know, how careful are you? Pretty careful. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Uh-oh. Not with OJ. He's not here. You should be exercised. That would be the next step.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Why? Because you have a responsibility. Yeah. But that's okay. Yeah. Well, that's part of that additional sacrifice. It seems natural to me. Okay. What do you mean?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, it has to be the case, right? I mean, as your field of opportunity expands, if your field of responsibility doesn't expand, you'll collapse, right? And you pay a higher price for stupidity at larger scales of opportunity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And so get your act together. And is that a burden? Voluntarily undertaking responsibility isn't a burden. It's an opportunity. Right? That doesn't mean it's... It's not easy, but... Easy? Like, I don't know what easy is. Right. What's easy? Pointless misery? That's not easy. Right. A life with no meaning is one of the hardest things. Absolutely. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
So I guess the reason you pick up your cross and walk uphill is because that's the best thing you can do, all things considered. I mean, that's why Christ says that his burden is light, that his yoke is light. It's like, huh, you're supposed to take up your cross and walk uphill, right? towards death and hell, let's say, but that's light. Okay, why?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Because there's no better pathway than voluntarily undertaken responsibility. Well, definitely. That's psychologically impeccable statement. There's no difference, statistically speaking, between thinking about yourself and being miserable. It's self-consciousness. They're the same thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah, sure. As soon as you're focused on you, the narrow you now, you're self-conscious, you stumble on stage, you can't play your musical instrument, you can't ride a bike, you can't box, right? You're not in the flow. Why? Because you're not serving the right thing. Like when I go on stage... I remember, first of all, I have music at the beginning of my shows. I've got a great musician.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, I don't play it. I have a musician from Cambridge. Yeah, yeah. My son sometimes plays for us, which is really fun. So it's not songs. It's just music with no lyrics. Well, when Julian plays, he plays country music on a guitar and a couple of his own compositions. So it's been fun to have him along because he's quite good at it. And so that's really great. But the music,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Dave, the guy who plays for me, he starts out, plays classical gas. He's kind of like a one-man band. He plays classical guitar, but he's got electronic instruments around him, and he can fill up the theater or the stadium. He likes playing in stadiums. And he ends with Inception on electric guitar, which is pretty hardcore rock, all things considered, and it gets everybody focused.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, and also the people who have the most sex now are religious married couples. Really? Isn't that funny? Which religion? Yeah, good question, Joe. Good question. Well, I guess in the West, that would obviously be Christianity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
when I'm lecturing, I have a question, and I know that's a quest, and it's real, because I pick something important that I would like the answer to, and then I explore that with the audience. And I'm not self-conscious. And the reason for that is it's not about me. It's about Trying to answer the question. And even more importantly, trying to get the damn question right to begin with, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Because you've got to get the question right, man. That's the crucial issue. Then the words come to you. What did I figure out? The spirit of your aim is what answers your prayers. Here's a brutal idea for you. Right, right, right. So if you want to defeat your wife, the spirit of power will tell you what to say.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
right yeah right is right man right there's a terrifying thing to know so if you aim upward high enough then the spirit of upward aim reveals itself to you in words that's right in words and intent and that's exactly right so so it's great like it's a lot you know you know that it's a lot
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, you also mostly escaped from reputation savaging, right? I mean, you've had – I'm not saying completely because people have gone after you, but – I got a real flurry of early hate around Bill C-16, which I was 100% right about, by the way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
But it's an interesting case example of the sorts of things we're talking about, because you can imagine at the dawn of the sexual revolution, when the birth control pill became prevalent, that the last hypothesis anyone would have possibly generated was that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, it's also to pull the rug out from underneath you. So you collapse your reputation permanently and that redounds to the person's credit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. It's a very underhanded way of progressing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, it's a truly quest perspective, I think. So it's not exactly objective. It's more like because you don't have access to that. But what you can say is, well, I'm genuinely puzzled about this. Yes. And I would genuinely like to search for the answer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The cascading consequences of that over 50 years would be, well, radical increase in pornography use because sex has been made less dangerous by the pill. And that the people who are having the most sex would be religious married couples.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, it's also because people aren't. really very well versed in how to do this, you know, it's like, so, so one of the huge advantages of your podcast and of the podcast world in general, I would say is that you model how to do that. You know, it's like, and there's a, there's an, there's an intense religious ethos under that. So, okay. So what does it mean? You start without pride in humility.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It's like, What the hell do I know? Right. Or or maybe more precisely, there's probably some things I could still learn that would be beneficial. OK. You note your interest in a topic and your desire to know more. So that's the quest element. It's like you're after something, right? You don't know what it is, but it's more development. It's more wisdom. It's more information, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And you're not sure where it's going to be. Okay, so now you're the sort of person who could learn and that has something to learn, and now you have a quest in mind. Okay, so now that's the frame for your actions. Well, if you're talking to someone who's also doing that, well, then those are the words that come.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Right? And they come in a compelling way to you and to the participant, and in a way that's compelling enough so that they compel other people. That's the Holy Spirit, by the way. That's that phenomenon from a religious perspective. That's exactly what it is. Because that's like you sit before the talk and rehearse what words you're going to say. They just appear.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, but you kind of have to find that out along the way. Yes, right. And that way you have a right to stumble over your own ignorance. For sure. How the hell do you know it's there before you reveal it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Especially as a human. It's elevating your status in the conversation as a consequence of abstract victory. Instead of increasing your wisdom and enhancing your reputation as a... Sojourner towards the truth. Yes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yes. Yeah, and that's wrong too because you don't want that right now. You want to learn how to have that so that when you do get it... You want to win the lottery, but you don't. No, definitely not. You don't, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right. That's one of the worst things that can happen to you. Crazy. Well, and what do young people have? They can listen and they can ask questions. Right. And, you know, they say when the student is ready, the teacher will come. Well, how does that play out in the world? Well, if you admit...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
to your ignorance and you ask genuine stupid questions, you will rapidly encounter people who are more than happy to share their wisdom with you. Like people love having mentees, right? They like to be able to share their wisdom and their experience.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Oh, definitely. But you could imagine, too, that you might have hypothesized that if the birth control pill took the threat out of sex, that pornography would be less necessary. That didn't seem to work out. Right. So it's certainly the availability is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, that's also the psychopath problem. What about the people who are feigning competence?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, it's a real problem. It's a deadly problem and it's massively elevated on social media.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah. So... Organisms build up a storehouse of value, a carcass, let's say, like a whale carcass, for example. And inevitably, the parasites move in to invade it, inevitably. And that's so consistent a pattern that sex evolved to stop it. How so? Well, parasites can reproduce faster than their hosts because they're simpler. And so they can swarm the host quite rapidly, especially if the host...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
clones itself because the host then stays identical physiologically across the generations. So the parasites can optimize to colonize the host and that's the end of it. If you reproduce sexually, you mix your genes up. You pay a price. You lose 50% of your specific genetic heritage. But the advantage is you stay ahead of the parasites. So sex evolved to outwit the parasites.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And a huge part of what we're seeing around us, and this is probably a consequence at the lowest level, base level, We've had a phenomenal boom in wealth since World War II. Phenomenal. We stored wealth everywhere. Like in Harvard at a $53 billion endowment. Well, the parasites found the wealth everywhere. And they've invaded like mad. That's a great example of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Media? Unearned. Legacy media? Yes. Science has been invaded that way? Yes. The political? This is a major problem. Right. And so how do you protect yourself against the parasitical exploiters?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
One of the hallmarks of identification from the clinical literature for the cluster B types, and so they have a parasitical element, histrionic, narcissistic, psychopathic, criminal. That's cluster B. they use false claims of victimization to manipulate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And so this is a particularly pernicious pathway because they parasitize empathy. Right. And the left is unbelievably susceptible to that because the left is full of empathic people. Right. And so those who parasitize empathy have a field day on the left.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The ethic is pretty straightforward. Anything that cries is a baby. It's like, no, some things that cry are monsters. Right. Right, right. Well, let's take the case of Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish Prime Minister, the previous Scottish Prime Minister. Any man who wants to can be a woman. It's like, okay, any man. You mean any man, do you? Yeah. Have you encountered the nightmare men?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Oh, they don't exist. They're all victims. You just bloody well wait till you encounter one. You'll change your story very rapidly. And for the naive and sheltered empaths of the radical left... They're either psychopaths, so they're wolves in sheep clothing, or they're people that are so naive that the – what would you say? Red Riding Hood's grandmother can definitely have his way with them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It's an original sin. Eve clutches the serpent to her breast. It's like, that's a serpent. It's poison. You don't get to love it. Right. It's a monster.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Or worse. Or a lot worse, yeah. Well, right. And, you know, there are no shortage of naive people who've never really encountered a monster and have no imagination for it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, that's part of that. Which is crazy. The cluster B types use proclamation of victimization to parasitize. That's part of their clinical pathology. And they're so ubiquitous. For me, I get to do anything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Sure, why not? It was a storehouse of unguarded value.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, there's that too. And with no real gatekeepers. The parasite problem is a very deep problem. So so I can even maybe I can even give you an example of that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
This is a hard one, but I'll try In the Pinocchio movie this this also happens in Jonah the story of Jonah remember Geppetto ends up in a whale It's like what the hell there's no explanation for that in the story It's like he's out looking for Pinocchio and now he's in a whale. Well, the whale is a giant carcass and And so when something dies, its spirit, what would you say?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Its spirit is then embedded in a carcass. That's a good way of thinking about it. That's why Pinocchio has to go into the belly of the whale to free Geppetto and finish his transformation, is that when things deteriorate, you have these carcasses lying around with their dead spirits. The spirit of what gave rise to them is still inside there. And the job is to go into the
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
carcass and to revitalize the spirit that produced it and not to parasitize it right boy i don't know how you got that out of pinocchio and the whale well i try to follow you on this one i'm like wow geppetto ends up languishing in the whale right right so imagine that there's a spirit in the universities that gave rise to these great great storehouses of value
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And that spirit has disintegrated and now it's inside the storehouse. That's a good way of thinking about it. It's inside the storehouse. Your job as someone who wants to become real is to go into the storehouses of value that have been bequeathed to us by the past and to discover and revitalize the spirit that gave rise to them. not to parasitize them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And when they parasitize them... They strip them to their bones and there's nothing left.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It could also be, Joe, and might as well get in trouble for this too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Well, because women are more agreeable, they're more prone to manipulation by psychopaths because their primary ethos is... is nurturing. For a naive woman, every victim is a baby. It's like, fine, 90% of them are victims. You could even say that about criminals. You go to a run-of-the-mill prison and there's going to be people in there and you heard their lives, you think, oh my God, no wonder.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And then there's another core group that's like, oh, I see, I see who you are. You're, you're a If I saw inside your skull for five seconds, I'd have post-traumatic stress disorder. I'd never recover. Those people don't exist. It's like, oh, yes, they exist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. And they're very good at crying like infants.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Right. And then the mothers, the naive mothers, come flooding out. The women dominated the universities from the 1960s onward. It's like, In come the parasites and they're enabled. And what are they enabled by?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Right. Well, and there's plenty of reward for that disseminated in the universities. Yes. And so that's part of their- How do you fix that? With Peterson Academy. No, I'm dead serious, man. I believe you. Look, it's not like I'm thrilled about the fact that Harvard is having a war with Donald Trump. And I'm less thrilled with the fact that I hope Donald Trump wins. I worked at Harvard.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It was a great place. I'm not happy at all that these institutions have become what they've become. And if I could see a way forward to revitalizing them, then... But what are you going to do? Like, the administration took over the universities and parasitized the tuition fees and the tax dollars. Then the woke mob parasitized the administration. And here we are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Now, what are you going to do about that? All these tenured professors who are progressive, and they're way less progressive than the administrators. You're going to fix that? How? How? Even in principle. I don't see it how. So what we decided to do, we've been working on this for 10 years, is like, well, what do universities do? Well, they educate. They offer lectures.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
They have a place where people can congregate. They help people mature. They explain the world. They encourage people to aim up. They teach people to write. My son runs this essay app. We're trying to teach kids to write. We're integrating that with Peterson Academy so they can learn to think. That's our solution.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Will it work? The world's a pretty dynamic place. It's working real well at the moment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, when we did some research trying to see what predicted politically correct authoritarianism, this last piece of research I did before my research lab ceased to be a viable entity, let's say –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
What predicted so politically correct authoritarianism was that like hyper-compassionate leftism, but conjoined with willingness to use force to put the doctrines forward, force and fear. So it's tyrannical compassion. That's exactly that. What are the predictors? Low verbal intelligence. That's the first one. Second one was being female. The third one was having a feminine temperament.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
The fourth one was ever having taken even one politically correct course. Yeah, right. And so I've thought that through for a long time. It's like, well, what's the female relationship? Because that's a crucial one. The female-dominated disciplines are the most woke by far. Why? I think it's because of that basic ethos of compassion. All who cry are babies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
You know, like wise women. My wife is one of these women. She was a very good mother. She never thought adult men were babies. Like one of the things that's quite striking about my wife is that if you're a useless man, she doesn't feel sorry for you. You're not a baby. Now, she's really good at taking care of babies. And so she got to be she's she's discriminating in her empathy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
And we're in a situation now where people think that indiscriminate empathy is a virtue. That's Eve's sin. See, Eve, literally, Eve wants to put the feminine ethos at the top of the hierarchy value. That replaces God. Right. And that causes the fall. And then Adam, he's such a cuck. That's exactly it. Is that he goes along with her.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
He doesn't stand up and tell her that maybe she shouldn't be listening to poisonous serpents. He doesn't. He consumes with her what she delivers so that she'll be his friend. Because you know how useful men like that are. And then when the fall happens, he complains to God that God made Eve and cursed him with her. That's the story. So it's not just women. And we've got to get this straight.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Women with their drive towards indiscriminate compassion so that even the serpents are their children. It's men, too, who won't say—they always say, yes, dear, whatever you want. Weak men. Weak men. Weak men who enable the—who don't help the women set boundaries. Now, you've got to do that as a man, you know? Like, when you have a—when you and your wife have a baby—
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
For the first nine months, every time the baby cries, it's right. Right? You respond to a baby's cries as if it's right 100% of the time. Because human infants are so dependent and utterly unable to fend for themselves. So that sets up a very powerful feminine dynamic. It's like, if it cries, take care of it. Okay, so what are the men for? It's like, if it cries, take care of it. Accept that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
That's a false cry. And you see that with kids. They'll start playing with that by the time they're 9 or 10 months old, right? Yes, of course. And so you differentiate. It's like, oh, no, that's not a baby. That's a snake. Well, are you sure it's not a baby? It's like, nope, nope, snake, for sure. Snake, poisonous snake, in fact. Right. Well, I'm feeling pretty sorry for it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
It's like, save your compassion for the truly needy and leave the snakes to me. Right. And Adam doesn't do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2308 - Jordan Peterson
Why? Well, everyone's got pretty comfortable because we've been in a high-trust society for a long time. It's like, oh, everybody's trustworthy. It's like, no, a few people in a few countries are trustworthy most of the time, and that's really hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
What lessons can you derive from today's discussion? How do you operate effectively as a father and as a mother in today's world? Well, you could say, if you wanted to play sex stereotype, that a mother secures and a father encourages. You could say that a father is radically on the side of who the child could become, and a mother is more radically on the side of who the child is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
And that's a nice dynamic, because when you're dealing with a child, you have to be happy and grateful for who they are, and encouraging them to be the person they could become. Now, I think it's a mistake for the mother always to be the nurturer and the father always to be the person pushing forward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
Both parents should play both roles, but that's a good way of considering the sex differentiation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
In all likelihood, you're going to be a mother of small children for a much shorter time than you think and for a much smaller fraction of your life than you imagine. While you have little kids, time sort of slows and it seems like it's always been that way and it's always going to be that way and that's not the case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
You have little kids for a very short period of time and it is a major mistake not to notice that and to appreciate it. It's the pathway to a future with the least regrets to understand and be grateful for the opportunity that you have to care for your children while they're little and to be as grateful as you possibly can for that because it really is a privilege.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
There is nothing you'll do in life that's more challenging, difficult, and rewarding than being a parent. Nothing with greater highs or lower lows. Worthwhile meaning in your life is going to be found in the voluntary adoption of responsibility. Voluntary self-sacrifice, that's the spirit of the functional psyche, family and community. What does it mean to be a father?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
In the first few months of life, a child has to be in very close contact with his or her mother. It's virtually impossible to give a true infant too much attention. In fact, I don't even know if it is possible. As the child becomes autonomous, can start doing things on his or her own, then you have to pull back in lockstep with the child's independence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
And you might say, well, how do you know how fast to pull back? You really take your cues from the child. A mother or a parent acts as a zone of security and predictability and care for the child. And so the child uses the mother, let's say, as a place of safety and will come back for comfort, for attention, and then will go out into the world and play and interact until they hit an obstacle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
And then they'll retreat to the mother. to be that island of stability, security and encouragement. And so then there's a continual dance between outward movement and retreat that the mother anchors. And eventually the child is capable of completely autonomous life. And then if you've handled that properly and you've been the proper balance of security and encouragement,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
The child won't leave permanently because you'll establish an adult relationship with them and then a relationship with their children. And then you get to have your cake and eat it too. And that's a good deal for everybody. If you're willing to lose your child as they adventure outward, you'll gain them back in an adult relationship. How did you overindulge, do you think, exactly?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
I've seen mothers who are at the beck and call of their three-year-old son in particular. That's a bad idea. Your son, your daughter for that matter, isn't little god emperor of the universe and shouldn't conceptualize himself or herself that way. That's a good pathway to narcissism. Your best pathway forward as a mother is to not do for your child anything that your child can do for themself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
That means doing up their shoes or putting on their clothes and cleaning up their rooms and helping to set the table when they're old enough to help set the table. One of the mistakes that parents make is they'll step in and do things quickly for the child instead of letting them learn.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
Now, at any given time, it's faster for you to dress your child, but you don't want to be dressing them when they're seven. Everything you can do to bring the child into the realm of adult responsibility is exactly the sort of thing that you would do if you were reasonable and you were trying to boost what people now so casually call self-esteem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
There's nothing that gives a person more esteem than to see that they're useful and necessary and that that's real. How are you doing? I'm good. What's your name? Micah. Micah. Nice to meet you. Good to meet you, Micah. So what brings you here today?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
Yeah. Well, I guess you're going to find out the answer to that question, aren't you? Yes. Can you become a father? Is that a rule you take on? I think it's always a rule you take on. Being a father is a relationship, and a relationship is something you have to develop. Any time that you spend with your child, one on one,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
What does it mean to be a mother? You need to know very clearly what it is that you can do for your children in order to help them live a life that's adventurous and responsible. I've distilled the decades of my experience as a researcher and clinical psychologist into the lessons every striving mother or father needs to learn.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
teaching them, talking to them, playing with them, listening to them, walking with them is encouragement because they need to learn to be adults. And your children need to see you modeling how to be an engaged adult for them. Honest and committed pursuit of a worthwhile goal. That's a good way of thinking about what a father should model. Voluntary adventure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
That's another encapsulation of the masculine role. The establishment of a vision. The commitment to its pursuit. Resilience in the face of failure. Faith in the future. Service to your family, your community, protection from the catastrophes of life and care of the most vulnerable. That's masculinity in a nutshell.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
That's why the shepherd, for example, in old religious stories is a model of masculinity. Ancient shepherds, they kept the wolves and the lions at bay and took care of the most vulnerable. And that's what men who are worthy of the name strive for. Don't assume that there's a pathway to being a father. Just have a relationship with the kid. And that'll unfold at its own speed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
And that is what happens with fathers anyways. You've got to get to know your kid. And you do that by spending time with them. And just because children know less about the world at the experiential level doesn't mean they're not paying attention. And it certainly doesn't mean that they're stupid. They're not stupid, and they're watching, and you can talk to them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
Now, you have to talk to a two-year-old about the things that a two-year-old can understand, but if you have a genuine conversation with them, then you're communicating, and that's just steady all the way through. There's no difference, technically speaking, between being concerned with yourself in the narrow sense, say concerned with your own pleasure, concerned with your own status.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
There's no difference between that and suffering. The answer to that isn't to stop being self-conscious because that's not something you can voluntarily control. The answer is to note that meaning in your life is going to be found in adoption of responsibility for other people, and responsibility for the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
Shouldering that load makes you productive and useful, but it also provides you with the sustaining meaning that helps you manage yourself even through times of trouble.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
Okay. You know, people think, well, I'm taking on this responsibility. I'm sacrificing my freedom. It's like, well, first of all, freedom to do what? To be self-centered and miserable? What, and lonesome? That's all the freedom I want, self-centered, miserable, and lonesome. So then you take on the hypothetical responsibility of a child, but the thing is they pay you. There's data on this too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
If you've ever thought about becoming a parent or are a parent already, this series is for you. Hello. I sat down recently with many moms and dads to personally discuss the situations they were facing with their children.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
People who have little kids take more pleasure in the things they do with their little kids than single people do doing the same things. Kids look at the world through fresh eyes. Everything that you do with a little kid is a new thing for the kid, and you get to see that, and that's a really good deal. And you can become a master of those little adventures that you go on with your kids.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
If you learn to do it right, There won't be anything that you'd rather do because it's a very rare adult who is as much joy to be with than a child who's well-disciplined and playfully accompanying you. In conclusion, what lessons can you derive from today's discussion? Lessons for motherhood. Hold them close, but let them go.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
Encourage your children to go out into the world so they become competent and productive and happy and secure, but be confident that when the need arises, they'll come to you for the care that only as their mother you can provide. Don't worship your child. Care for them, love them, but don't turn them into narcissists. Lessons for fatherhood. Become the man your children want to imitate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
There's very little that you can do that's more important as a man than to provide the model for responsible, adventurous adulthood to your children. Embrace responsibility, gain purpose. You're giving up what's often nothing more than juvenile hedonism to pursue something of much greater significance, the meaning that you find in the voluntary adoption of responsibility.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
So I'd like to offer you a sample homework assignment, so to speak. Sit and write a little bit, a couple of paragraphs, about three things that your father did particularly well. And do the same with your mother.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
Write down as well three things that you think they might have done better and then give some thought while you're writing to how you could capitalize on the positive things that your father and your mother taught you and how you could rectify the things that were less than optimal. I hope that that's helpful in dealing with the problems that arise in the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Parental Roles
My new Daily Wire Plus series, Parenting, brings what I've learned in decades of research and clinical practice to the concerns of real mothers and fathers. Watch Parenting exclusively on Daily Wire, May 25th. Go to dailywireplus.com today to subscribe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
You can thank the universities for that realization, definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
We talked about the direction in which entertainment is likely to go in the near future. We talked about the role of Hollywood in its own demise, preferring the politically correct pathway to the pathway of genuine artistic commitment and also genuine humor. We talked about our hopes that maybe that is coming to an end.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
At least under some circumstances, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So basically, your observation is that a variety of There were a variety of causal factors that gave rise to what happened during the pandemic, and the pandemic crystallized it. It did. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
pronounced minority of people in the world who have anything approximating the right to free speech, right? That's very rare. So the fact that we take it for granted is something like a miracle. It's a foolish miracle in a way, because the fact that it's barely existed throughout human history and barely exists now attests to the difficulty of establishing a state where that's the expectation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Our curiosity about what the comedians, especially the successful comedians on the center right, let's say, the podcasters, for example, who've been spectacularly successful over the last five or six years, What they're going to turn to now in the aftermath of the Trump victory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So I think... See, it's a funny thing, too, because it isn't only that you have the right to free speech. It's actually because you would only characterize it that way if you believe that free speech was something like a hedonic pleasure, right? I can say whatever I want. But that underplays the importance of the principle because you have a responsibility to free speech.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
And the fact that you can speak freely might be desirable to you and it might even make you happy, although sometimes it wouldn't.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Provide a living too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Yes, for you. Well, yeah, for anybody creative, which is a crucial thing to understand, right? Creative people only have the freedom of their creative expression. That's what they have to offer. But part of the, there's a huge advantage to me that you have the right to free speech because I get to hear what you think. And so if you're wrong, I can learn how things are wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
And if you're right, then I can listen to you and not have to suffer through whatever you had to suffer through to become wise in that manner, right? Well, I'm pointing this out because we make a big mistake when we think of free, the right to free speech as a hedonic right. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Well, it's also the way to ensure that not only that society is protected from tyranny, but that it thrives. Because from a psychological perspective, there's very little difference between freedom of speech and the right to think. And thought is how you adapt to changing circumstances. And so
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
The fact that the United States is the most dynamic economy in the world is a direct consequence of the fact that free speech rights are so well protected here. Because there can be people like Elon Musk here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Right, and he's... firing in 15 directions at the same time. Right. And he can do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Because?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Well, because, yeah, because the right is established. And the consequence of that is that we all benefit from it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
What role are the comedians as critics going to play now that the tide has turned and there's a new king in town, so to speak. So that's going to be very interesting. We talked about, well, we talked about Rob's book, which is a testament to the power of free speech. We talked about the fact that he...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Now all the people in Delaware are very unhappy with you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Junior staffers educated at Ivy League universities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
decided to turn in the conservative direction for a liberal relatively early on in the course of the culture war, really starting to get involved in the political and not in the typical Hollywood manner by about 2014. And we discussed why that happened and what it meant and what the consequences have been for his career and potentially for the future. So join us for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Yeah, well, it's an odd thing that the worst possible consequence of a terrorist attack is that it isn't the attack itself. It's the reaction to the attack that makes the attack successful. Well, I mean, a lot of... Well, you know, I hate airports. I hate them. I was unbearable to travel with my wife for like 10 years. We finally figured out how to work it out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
But every time I went into an airport after 9-11, I thought... They're training everybody to accept the doctrines of a totalitarian state. You have to line up like sheep to do stupid things that mean nothing, that give you the illusion of security, implemented by faceless authoritarians and then acted out by powerless minions. And then you get used to it. Well, that's the problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Everybody goes through airports. And so I think that you can see the... What would you say? Deterioration. The forefront of the authoritarian movement is in airports, and you can see that right now, because now, increasingly, as you board a plane, they want to take your photo.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So far, you can refuse.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
It's like, oh, I see, so you can pay to circumvent the security as long as you accept the authoritarian presumptions, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Which meant his attack was very successful. Because, you know, how much did that cost? How much has that cost us, just economically?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Right. And then it's replicated everywhere at once. I know Siemens, I think it was Siemens, put in these new scanners, right? They're like cat scanners. Yeah, they're like medical scanners. Yeah, I know. It's like you can't get a medical scan, but your luggage can. Yeah, for free. Right. Which is also pretty strange, all things considered.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
That'll be really interesting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
It's the same thing. It's also very hard to get rid of something once it's there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Well, you have a constituency that's agitating for it desperately, right? Because, well, they're very dependent upon it once it's in place.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
It's fundamentally none, right? And certainly not at the level of detectability because your false positive rate is like a billion to one. That's not good. That's not good. Everybody's a potential hijacker. It's like, no, like almost no one is a potential hijacker. No matter who you single out, the probability that you're wrong is overwhelming.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So I've been making my way through this, You Can Do It, and I want to ask you some questions about what I derived from reading it. So it seems to me to be fair to say that you're part of the club of, what would you say? unwitting and surprised conservatives. Yes. Right? I mean, you characterize yourself in the book as a classic liberal. That's always how I've thought of myself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
And yeah, the question is, how much damage do you do in that false pursuit of security? I mean, in London- Many of the buildings, there's a bit of this in New York, but many of the buildings in London have the same sort of security that airports do. People just get more and more accustomed to it. They do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
That's right, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So one of the things that's worth pointing out with regards to the precursors for the COVID authoritarian lockdown, let's say, is what, again, what happened in the universities. Because people don't understand this, and it's really important.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Because people generally look at the universities and they think that there's a battle raging in the universities about who should be allowed to speak freely. That's what cancel culture is. That's not the battle. That radically understates the significance of the actual battle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Because what is poorly understood by people, especially the moderates on the left, is that the postmodernists dispensed with the idea of free speech itself. They don't believe that progressives should have the right to free speech and no one else should. They believe that the metaphysics of the idea of free speech is false.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So for the typical postmodernist, so the Enlightenment or maybe even the Judeo-Christian assumption is that, you know, you're a sovereign authority of sorts as an individual.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
With... inalienable value. And one of the consequences of that is that you have a viewpoint and that that viewpoint has intrinsic value. And so, and I'm the same sort of being. And that means that if I listen to your viewpoint, we can come to an accord with one another that might be of mutual benefit. And so exchanging our ideas is not only beneficial, it's possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
That isn't what the postmodernists think. They think there's no game but power. And so no matter what I say, you made reference to this earlier, where you're the unwitting oppressor. Well, that stems logically from the tenets of postmodernism because the postmodern insistence is that the only game in town is one of power. It doesn't matter what you say you're doing, that's completely irrelevant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
You are, whether you know it or not,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
immersed in a power game and the power game is defined by your what would you call it intersectional privilege right it's the intersection of the various group identities that give you an unearned superiority and power over other people and when you're uttering your opinions all you're doing is providing a post-hoc justification for your privilege that's it no other game so
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
The challenge that the postmodernists levied against Western culture is much deeper than arguments about who should speak freely. It's an assault on the idea of the metaphysics of freedom itself. The postmodernists believe none of that, none of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Although I would say I'm more conservative in my views than I was 10 years ago. That might be age to some degree, because people do get more conservative as they get older. I think so. I've thought through conservatism a bit more and realized why I'm more conservative than I thought. Or maybe I realized under what conditions classic liberalism still retains its function.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Well, you talked about a kind of sleight of hand that, and I still haven't been able to puzzle this out entirely because the French postmodernists were the first, the most influential thinkers who levied this challenge to the metaphysics of the West.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
But they did ally themselves with the Marxists, which is very strange because the first dictum of the postmodernists is that there's no uniting metanarrative. There's no story that unites us. There's just a plethora of Hydra heads everywhere, and they're all involved in power games. But despite making that claim metaphysically, they did ally themselves with the Marxists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
And I don't know if the Marxism came first and the postmodernism was a rationalization for that. It's probably something like that, because partly what happened in the 1970s, even in France, because there's nothing more intransigent to evidence than a French intellectual,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
was that the failure of the Marxist system on economic grounds and humanitarian grounds became absolutely incontrovertible in the 1970s. No one could stand up and say, that's not real communism. That just became impossible, especially after Solzhenitsyn. And so what happened was the French in particular played this sleight of hand game where the axis of oppression shifted from the economic
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
to the cultural or the racial or the sexual, right? And that's fine, because you can play an oppression game on multiple dimensions. That's what intersectionality is. And so that's how that all arose. And then I think partly the left, the liberals on the left, we talked earlier about the fact that, you know, you're a liberal who decided to be sane instead of insane.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
I kind of think to some degree, I've been trying to think this through most recently. See, after the election, commentators on CNN, MSNBC and so forth woke up to the fact that the conservatives had taken over the new media. Joe Rogan being an example. And so this is very comical to me for a variety of reasons, partly because Rogan is a very weird conservative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So anyways, you describe yourself as a classic liberal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
He would say more liberal leaning than anything. More progressive. He voted for Bernie Sanders. But there's a coda to that story, which is that I know all the main podcasters quite well. And we invited the DNC. to speak to us in 2017. There were eight of us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Ben Shapiro was one, Dave Rubin, me, Rogan, like a whole, Brett Weinstein, a whole group of us made a formal offer to the Democrats to speak with us, no games. And we pushed that for six years. This is all documented. And they all knew it. The message went out to pretty much all the Democrat congressmen and the senators. And I spoke to many of them behind the scenes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
They wouldn't speak to me publicly. We never got one in seven years who would agree to speak to us and now they're saying well, you know The Conservatives put billions of dollars into this new media, which is of course complete bloody rubbish Rogan's enterprise is Rogan and his producer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
It's a pronounced minority of people in the world who have anything approximating the right to free speech. So the fact that we take it for granted is something like a miracle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
And the universities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Free speech triumph.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
It's so insanely preposterous, all of that. None of these people were capitalized. Every single person who became a notable podcaster almost all of them were, many of them were comedians, which is extremely funny.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
It is, it is. And we will return to that. But also, many of them were disenfranchised Liberals, right? Rogan, Rubin, me, I would say. Absolutely. Grant Weinstein, for sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
And I would say Elon Musk, he would put in that category too. Yeah, well, and maybe even Trump. Although he's not a podcaster, obviously, neither is Musk. But the same sort of thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Yeah. you'd have to say he's a New Yorker. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Now, okay, so let's return to that. Now, you said that, you know, you were a liberal who decided to stay sane. Okay, so now you spent a lot of time in the Hollywood milieu. And so I've got two questions for you. It's like, what do you think was the difference?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
What do you think the difference is between you, let's say, and your decision to remain sane and the decision that 95% of the people in Hollywood took to become insane liberals, really much to their own detriment. My sense is, and you tell me what you think about this, I think the Hollywood liberals killed celebrity culture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
And happily. Why?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Yes, well, thank God for capitalism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Seriously, it's a very reliable ethos, greed. It is not the highest form of morality by any stretch of the imagination, but it's predictable and it's self-correcting. If I know you're motivated by money, we could work together. I mean, I could imagine there would be circumstances under which that might not go so well for me, but most of the time I can predict exactly what you're going to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Yeah, right. We could agree that we both want to make money.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
That's what universities are for. They're to bastardize words.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
They delayed it for two years. I know. And it's going to fail cataclysmically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
I think people are... I watched some of the previews. It's ugly as sin. Like the animation is... This is one of the things that's so interesting about woke illustration in particular. There is nothing uglier than woke illustrations. They're so talentless. It must be the fact that... The people without talent rely on their political credibility to advance. Because their talent alone won't do it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Well, the postmodern types don't believe in inspiration, right? They only believe in power. Like seriously. And so all that inspiration stuff, that's merit. That's just another, what, offshoot of European imperialism, that whole idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So it's strange to see the Hollywood celebrity crowd subordinate their art ethically to politics. It's fear.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Well, the other thing, too, is that fundamentally... you know, and I've probably been sinful in this regard to some degree, you actually don't want to know what celebrities think politically. First of all, it's no more interesting than what anyone else thinks politically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Or if you disagree with Joey Reed, like you're a Nazi, definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Theo Vaughn, corporate mogul. You know, it's so insane.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
It's Joe Rogan. And it's so interesting, too, that all of this was successful despite all that suppression. It wasn't just that the Democrats controlled the legacy media, let's say, and the major tech companies and the universities. They were actually using those entities to squelch, I would say, classic liberal and conservative voices. And it didn't work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
We're pro-death penalty. It all depends on what the definition of the word is, is. you know, whatever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So we reiterated, a group of us again reiterated our invitation to sane Democrats, or any Democrats for that matter, to come and talk. Now, I have a question for you about that, because I spent quite a lot of time, well, part of it was this invitation back in 2016 to the Democrats to talk. That never went anywhere, although, as I said, I met many of them behind the scenes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
That was always interesting. I always asked the Democrats I met, many senators and congressmen,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
when the left goes too far and none of them would answer that there was no cut off and you know people on the progressive side even the liberal side aren't very good with borders and boundaries and because they like the free flow of information and there's some positive things about that but it makes it very difficult for them to defend themselves against ideological infiltrators and you know the first time i interviewed rfk i asked him
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
when the left goes too far. And he said he didn't want to run that sort of divisive campaign. And the second time I interviewed him, all he did was talk about when the left goes too far.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Yeah, okay, so let's delve into that a little bit. I mean, I think one of the compelling differences or the compelling definitional features of classic liberalism is the insistence that it's the individual, that human beings should be regarded as individuals first and foremost, right? Is that the fact of your singular individuality is the defining hallmark of your identity. Yes, I agree.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So I have a moral quandary about this invitation to the Democrats to talk. Well, because there's two positions you could take, right? One is find the reasonable people and help them
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
make their case both within the party and to the public and that would be predicated on the idea that it would be better to have a healthy two-party system yes right where both parties were reasonable and moderate and sane and they're functioning effectively as opposed forces. In good faith. In good faith, yes. But there's another viewpoint, which is tyrants have to burn before they learn, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
And like I've seen in 10 years of talking with Democrats, I've seen very little evidence whatsoever that, like all the Democrats I talked to, they didn't believe the radical left existed. For example, I don't think I talked to a single moderate Democrat who believed that there was a difference between equity and equality of opportunity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
All the modern, every single one of them, I swear this is true. They said, I said, well, equity means equality of outcome, which is what Kamala Harris said it meant, which is what all the postmodernists claim. How do we get there together? And their response uniformly to a man and woman was, they don't mean that, they just mean equality of opportunity. Well, and that's, what's his name?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
That crazy billionaire who insists upon being a Democrat. Jeff Bezos? I mean, which one do you want to talk about? No, no, no. No, no. No, Bezos at least has admitted that the Washington Post has gone too far. Thankfully. The guy who owns the- Omar Cuban. Omar Cuban. Omar Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
I mean, Mark insisted publicly on Twitter for like months that the whole idea that equity meant something different than equality of opportunity was a right-wing conspiracy. And I thought, yeah, wow is right. It's like, I don't know where you've been for the last 20 years, Mark, but this is not what's being taught in the universities. And then we have that problem too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
It's like, are the Democrats going to sort themselves out? Well, there's a lot of their policy that they have to abandon. All this DEI nonsense has to go. Affirmative action probably has to go because it was the root of all the DEI nonsense, or at least one of them. I mean, the whole oppressor-oppressed narrative has to vanish.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
There has to be a radical turn back to something like appreciation for the free market. I mean, the Democrats are going to have to turn themselves back into classic liberals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
That is an outrageous— With the most consequential potential team.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Okay, and I think both conservatism and progressivism can, what would you say, diverge from that. The progressives diverge in that they insist that group identity trumps individual identity, but the conservatives have that proclivity too, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Yes, yes, definitely. I do want to get to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
I know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
I'm going to sell. We can do this together.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
And happily.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Because they might prioritize, especially the more traditional conservative types, as you move farther to the right, they might prioritize religious faith or national identity. And I certainly have always believed that the primary level of analysis when you're dealing with human beings should be the individual, but
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
God will have no... It's like this person... All the Old Testament prophets were deeply flawed. Yeah, deeply flawed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So do you think it's useful to return to a question that I asked you previously? Is it a better strategy to let the Democrats stew in their own juices for four years and reorganize their party? Or is it better strategy to find sane voices on the moderate Democrat side and highlight them?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
But I can, seriously. It needs to happen. Yeah, well, I think you can make a strong case for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
It is. What about those 50 people who signed, the 50 former intelligence service workers who signed the document? 51. 51, yeah, who said that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
And they all lied. Yeah, they certainly did about something very terrible. And they probably threw the election. Yeah, I would say they definitely, it was such a close election. That's for sure. And it was so well-timed. So what do you do with them?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
One of the things that I've wrestled with in the last 10 years is maybe the realization that that only works if the bedrock of society is in place. So when the Scots invented liberalism, I think that's a reasonable historical proclamation. it's, there was some unstated elements to their liberalism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Security clearance. Security clearance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Yeah, well, it does seem reasonable to do as little tit-for-tat revenge as possible. It's a weird thing, eh? Because you don't want to avoid the responsibility of bringing people to justice. But it is definitely a sideshow. And the problem with persecuting your political enemies is that you will be their political enemies in no time flat. In one day. Yeah, well, it's a degenerate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
That's a Banana Republic game.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
You see this, there's an old joke in the scientific field about the fact that new ideas...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
don't win it's just the the people who held the old ideas that are no longer valid die yeah right right well and this is basically what you're pointing out is that there is a cadre of leadership so to speak on the democrat side that will just be rendered irrelevant and new people who we can't even predict will rise and hopefully some of them will have a vision there's an opportunity right now for
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
young, competent Democrats, assuming that, well, the problem is, you know, that everyone with any courage has had their voice silenced in that party. So the question is, is there anybody with courage left?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
And the unstated element was, well, we all share a set of presumptions that we don't have to talk about. We hold these things as self-evident, right? Like the founders of the United States. And if that's the case and it remains the case, then we can be free and be defined as individuals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Yeah, well, maybe that's partly how a two-party democracy actually works, you know, is that the people who are out of power then turn to the people. Well, it could be, right? It could be, yeah. It could easily be that the huge advantage to the system as it's set up is that power flips continually. It does flip. It doesn't matter so much who's in power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
When the king dies, chaos breaks out everywhere. It's like the rise of a hydra. Something like that seems to be occurring in the West since about 2012.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
But it's the same, it seems to be- Well, that has to do with that proclivity to think in terms of group identity. Yes. Yeah, well, you know, in many European countries and also in Canada, the way we solved the problem of the socialists of the liberal side was to have a socialist party. Right, so in Canada, we have the New Democratic Party.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Now Trudeau has turned Canadian liberals into people who are farther left than the socialists. And so that's a complete bloody catastrophe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Yeah, well, the bloom has gone off that rose in Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
And I think white supremacists and confederates.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Yeah, I know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Do you know how many people in Canada fly the confederate flag? It's like zero. Zero people. Yeah, but that's one right there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Okay, so let's turn back to Hollywood. Now, you don't seem to have been counseled very effectively. Well, why not? How come?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
But I mean, you're thriving, I think. I mean, I'm not saying at all that any of this was without a cost. So why don't you walk us through that a little bit?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So you already regarded him as credible at that point because of the other work he had done.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So that was your first foray into the political and that was essentially, that was in 2014?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
You're free to... Well, you know that the extermination policies in Nazi Germany started out with the medical community.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Well, the problem is if you're smart and you're also celebrated for being smart, you have this terrible temptation to worship your own intelligence, right? That's literally the Luciferian spirit, right? The most... the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom who goes most spectacularly wrong is Lucifer, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
He's the bringer of light and he's the avatar of the intellect raised to the status of object of worship. And it's absolutely the case that smart people are prone to that temptation. I kind of think that's how God balances the cosmic scales, right? Is that it's really a massive advantage to be biologically blessed with high intelligence, and it's a biological phenomenon. But the temptation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
That's the thing, is that it comes along, what it has along with it is the worst of all possible temptations and curses, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
These are now the... That's ground on to some rocky shoals in recent years. Well, this is another thing that I'm really curious about with regards to the renewal on the Democrat side, let's say. Because I can't for the life of me see how the university... I can see how the Democrats can turn themselves around because there's a lot of turnover in politics. But there isn't at the university.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Quite the contrary, they're set up so that there is no turnover. And you know, there was reason for that, but In the big universities, all of the faculty are Democrat, and a huge proportion of them are quite radically left. And it's even worse among the administration. So, like, how in the world is that possibly going to be fixed?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So the solution to the universities will be capitalism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
It'll have to be also.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
That's a very good place to stop and also well-timed. And I think what we'll do, by the way, for everybody who's watching and listening, if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side, I think we'll spend half an hour there talking about Rob's experiences specifically in Hollywood and what he sees on the horizon for comedy and also for entertainment in general.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So if you're inclined, join us on the Daily Wire side. This is Rob's new book, in case you missed it at the beginning. You Can Do It, which is a good message and also a necessary one because even though you have this remarkable experience,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
cadre of people in charge on the republican side under trump they're going to need help at every possible level and you know your whole culture here in the united states is predicated on the idea that not only can you do it but you should and if you don't then all hell will break loose so yeah thank you so very good talking to you yeah thanks again everybody for watching and listening you
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
So I had the opportunity today to sit down in Scottsdale, Arizona, with Rob Schneider, and Rob's been, what, stand-up comedian, a movie star, an author. He's got this new book called You Can Do It, entitled You Can Do It. So we discussed his book. We discussed, well, to some degree, the origins of comedy in Hollywood and the collapse of the Hollywood star system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
There's a very old idea that you see replicated in mythological stories and fairy tales and so forth very frequently that when the king dies, let's say, that chaos breaks out everywhere. It's like the rise of a hydra, right? A serpent with a multitude of heads. And something like that seems to be occurring in the West that's accelerated since about 2012.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Maybe it's a consequence of the insistence that the patriarchal order should dissolve That's like a variant of the idea that God is dead, the central patriarchal or paternal authority disappears. And the delusional presumption is that the consequence of that dissolution will be the flowering of a kind of untrammeled freedom.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
But the reality is the dissolution into something like a warring oligarchy where there's multiple sources of power And they're all, what would you say? They're all vying in their particular way for supremacy. And there's a totalitarian spirit that emerges out of that that's very much antithetical to anything approximating freedom.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
Especially comparatively speaking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider
It's not that. It's dynasty and oligarchy and authoritarianism and terror.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Hello, everybody. So in recent weeks, there's been a well-publicized war between, in principle, Harvard University and the Trump administration, or at least that's how it's been framed by the remnants, the pathetic and sad remnants of the legacy media, most particularly the utterly despicable New York Times.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
ensuring that their graduates had the kind of extremely high intelligence that's necessary to thrive at the most competitive levels in extremely complex jobs, as well as the conscientiousness that enabled them and social ability that enabled them to participate effectively in at least a four-year degree program. Well, they've mucked all that up since the 1990s.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And so this is also partly why so many companies don't really give a damn if you have an Ivy League scholarship. degree anymore and Harvard has also noted that because applications to Harvard have plummeted in a precipitous manner and that's well deserved as far as I'm concerned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Harvard's defiance is rooted in its massive endowment and prestige, positioning it to challenge Trump's demands where others like Columbia have partially complied. Key points, Harvard's lawsuit, this is legal, argues the funding freeze violates the First Amendment and Civil Rights Act procedures, seeking to halt the $2.2 billion freeze. Oral arguments are set for July 1st, 2025.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So keep your eyes on that, because that's important. DEI adjustments. Well, this is another stack of lies that's so thick, you can hardly even imagine it. So because Trump won, and there's a bit of a conservative uprise, let's say, or a classic liberal uprise, Because it's not exactly as if Trump and the people around him, many of the people around him are conservatives.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
20 years ago, well, Trump was a Democrat and so was Musk and so was Tulsi Gabbard. And so it's not exactly even conservative. It's just sane people fundamentally. So now they've had some success. Harvard and many other universities have started to reconstruct their DEI offices.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
But basically what that means, and all of you conservative types listening should know this, is that they keep the same people and they give them different names. So, for example, Harvard renamed its DEI office the Office of Community and Campus Life. Welcome to Community and Campus Life at Harvard in April 2025. And ended race-based affinity group celebrations. Well, thank God for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Unless you want to keep all those black people in their own... graduation ceremonies where what? Are those at the back of the bus just out of curiosity? Now I should get in plenty of trouble for asking that, but I think it's pathetic and appalling that these bloody universities have race-based affinity group celebrations for graduation, for example. It's absolutely, it's absolutely appalling.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
It's appalling. So they renamed it, but that doesn't make any bloody difference because it won't, you can do the same nefarious activity with, under all sorts of different names. And this is part of the problem with the universities. You'd have to fire all the people who are progressive, essentially, and that's not going to happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And then, of course, that's going to make you ask how many of them are progressive. We'll get to that. Faculty like Harvard Medical School's George Daly emphasize that funding cuts threaten breakthroughs in biomedicine, AI, and public health. Yeah, I don't think so. I think most of the breakthroughs in AI are going to come out of Silicon Valley and probably some out of China, too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
as a teaching assistant and running my own seminars for my graduate student friends. And then I worked at Harvard for six years in the 90s, when it was truly an outstanding place. And then, as many of you know, I worked as a professor for about two decades at the University of Toronto, which has become equally corrupt.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And in terms of breakthroughs, well, breakthroughs only occur when you have researchers who aren't corrupt and only when they're publishing in journals that aren't corrupt. But the researchers are corrupt. They're all progressive, or at least they follow the progressive dictums, as we'll see, and the journals increasingly publish in accordance with DEI mandates.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So I think it's time for everybody who's watching and listening to understand very clearly that whatever you might think about the research breakthroughs that the great universities of the United States have historically been making, that those days are probably done. And the reason for that is because the researchers themselves, in a fit of absolutely craven, pathetic,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Howardists decided that they would promote, hire, and publish on the basis of these race, ethnicity, and sexual identity-based categories instead of sticking to merit. And that was true for the small-L liberal faculty members, for the progressives, and for the tiny proportion of people that were conservatives. How many faculty members stood up and refused to write DEI statements? None.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Like so few that you might as well just say none. Me. There's some other people too. And that's it. And it cost me my, essentially that cost me my career as a professor. There's no goddamn way I was going to write a DEI statement for a grant. That was never going to happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So now the researchers whine, well, you know, it was the government that said we had to write these DEI statements, and all we were doing was following the rules. It's like, you know, you guys are supposed to be leaders, and you're supposed to be ethical, and that's why the public supported you. And you weren't leaders, you were craven followers, and... you violated the public's trust.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And that's why Harvard admissions are plummeting and why no one gives a damn that your research funding is being cut. And it does suck because Harvard, for example, and many other universities, particularly in the States, were stellar places, but here we are. Harvard's stances have emboldened other universities with Columbia's acting president adopting a more defiant tone after initial concessions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
How brave can you get now that they have $53 billion behind them? Okay, so on to the New York Times. There's a terrible thing to say. So this is an article by Gina Collata and Jeremy Peters that was written in May 3rd, 2025 about Dr. Ellen Garber. So Dr. Garber, and I don't know him, and he might be a perfectly fine guy for all I know, and he probably is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
I'd probably like him if I met him, though I don't know if he'd like me. But that's beside the point. because we're talking about the institution, and he's required as the head of the institution to act as a representative of the institution. We'll adopt that analytic standpoint as we go through this. He is fighting Mr. Trump. I'm reading from the New York Times now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
He is fighting Mr. Trump as the federal government tries to strip Harvard of billions of dollars in research funding and its non-profit tax status. Yeah, well, the federal government gave Harvard those billions of dollars in research funding and its non-profit tax status, and they are not morally obliged to continue, especially, as I said, when that institution has...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
acted in the manner that it has acted, which is so appalling that it's almost incomprehensible, which is why people don't believe it. Dr. Garber has said, I'll paraphrase the article as we go through it, that Harvard has a campus culture problem that needs urgent fixing. Harvard has shut out voices that many liberals disagree with. He said, it's not liberals, by the way, it's progressives.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And so I know what I'm talking about, or you might make that case, although I suppose there are people who would disagree. So, I can't tell you how important this topic is for you to understand, and in some detail. I should also point out that I haven't exactly been sitting around in consequence of believing that this is a vital issue. My family and I
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Okay, so Dr. Garber's admitted that there's some problems at Harvard, but he said this in Washington. The issue for me was not principally whether we had problems that we needed to address. Yeah, that's the problem, Dr. Garber. That's definitely the problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The problem is the Trump's administration methods, which are growing more aggressive, according to the New York Times, by the day, and no bloody wonder. Last month, Trump officials said they would cut more than $2 billion in federal funding, etc., On Friday, a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Trump escalated the attack. So that's the threat to take away Harvard's tax-exempt status.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, do it, as far as I'm concerned. Now, to Dr. Garber, defending and reforming Harvard is not a local matter. Americans are questioning a higher education system that many see as disconnected from their values. Yeah, like at least 50% of the population.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
But it's worse than that because the Harvard faculty, the Ivy League faculty, and the administration aren't just liberal in the classic liberal sense. That's complete nonsense. They've moved well over into the progressive lane. And even if they don't really believe the progressive shibboleths, let's say, the DEI nonsense, for example, They're not doing anything to oppose it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So it's not that Americans are questioning a higher education system that many see as disconnected from their values. That's how the New York Times lies nonstop. It's that we'll see. There are no conservatives at the universities, right? And so I can tell you some of the stats here. We might as well do a little bit of that now. Okay, are we ready?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Based on available data from surveys conducted by the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, the political leanings of Harvard's faculty, particularly within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, so that's a pretty central part of the university, show a strong skew. Let's find out what a strong skew means. 2023.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
2.5% of surveyed faculty identified as conservative and 0.4% as very conservative, totaling about 2.9% conservative-leaning faculty. Over 77% identified as liberal or very liberal, with 20% as moderate. Let's think about that again. 20% are moderate. Okay, 80% of Americans are moderate. That's a good way of thinking about it. 80% of Americans pretty much agree on everything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Okay, that means 20% of the Harvard faculty are kind of like 80% of Americans. Whereas 77% of them, the ones who identified as liberal or very liberal, are like 10% of the American population. And then with regards to the conservatives, there's none of them. There's none. So that means if you're a centrist at Harvard or the other Ivy Leagues or most universities, then you're a Nazi.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So 2022 survey, 1% of respondents identified as conservative, with no respondents identified as very conservative. 80% were liberal or very liberal. 21, pretty much the same thing. These surveys consistently show that conservative faculty members make up a small minority, ranging from one to 3%. Okay, so let's think about that for a minute and then decide whether,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
This is Trump against Harvard or whether it's the universities against everyone. right? One to three percent are conservative. Fifty percent of Americans voted conservative in the last election. Okay, so that's, you can do the math yourself, right? It's 25 to one or 50 to one, something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
My son helped me in the beginning with a broader project in this regard. And then my daughter and her husband, Michaela Fuller and Jordan Fuller, have taken over over the last four years, I suppose, to produce Peterson Academy. And we're trying to bring the best professors in the world to the public stage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So this isn't some opinion that the universities have become radically left in a way that is really quite novel now. There were conservative people, or at least classically liberal people, everywhere at Harvard when I was there in the 1990s. It wasn't a politically radical place.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
There were departments like English that were infected, so to speak, with the postmodern bug, and that were radically liberal, but they were fringe, and now they're not. And then let's talk about the administration. There's no direct survey data on the political leadings of Harvard's administration. There's more administration than faculty, by the way. Conservative faculty members at Harvard
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, all two of them, such as Harvey C. Mansfield, have suggested that the administration is even less ideologically diverse than the faculty. A 2015
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Harvard Crimson analysis, and so you can be sure it's much worse than this now, found that 96%, only 96%, of campaign contributions from faculty of arts and sciences, faculty and staff, which may include some administrative roles, went to democratic campaigns between 2011 and 2014. So, well... So there you go. Now we could talk about researchers, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Because those are the scientists, the people who are in the labs, busily pumping out these world-shaking novel discoveries that are then published in the entirely reliable scientific journals and distributed to interested scientists all around the world. Well, that's the theory, isn't it? And that was actually true. You know, for most of my academic career, I could be pretty much certain
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
that everything that was published in an academic journal 90% of everything that was published in an academic journal, maybe even more than that, was at least good faith. It wasn't true because you can't expect all scientific publications to be true. If 20% of them were true, that would be like something stellar and remarkable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
People are going to make mistakes, but you could assume reflexively that if a paper was published, particularly in a decent journal, that You had reason to trust the integrity of the researchers, even if not the truth of the report. And then you had to be a scientist and try to figure out for yourself what was credible and what wasn't credible. And you can't do better than that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
I started my graduate training in 1985, and I finished my academic career in 2016. That's 30 years. And for most of that, I was pretty... solid in my delight to be not only a professor, but also a researcher. It was trustworthy. And then that stopped, and we'll see. So now we have the researchers, and they're winding up quite the storm because Trump is threatening their research funding.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And I can understand why, because it's hard to get research funding. Academics probably spend a third of their time writing grants, which is also appalling, and also an indication of the corrupting influence of government funding. But it's hard to get research funding, and you need it to run your lab, to hire graduate students, to buy equipment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
and to bring what they know to everyone at the highest possible quality and at the lowest possible price, which we estimate, by the way, at the moment, at 1% of an Ivy League education. So I'm putting my money and my time where my mouth is, and you can make of that where you will. Okay, so let's delve into this topic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Although at places like Harvard, you know, the endowment could in principle be used for such difficult things. So being hit where the money is distributed is... you know, that's a tough blow. And it does threaten the continuation of the research enterprise as it currently exists. But this is the point.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Since at least the early 2010s, DEI statements have become ubiquitous in academic hiring, promotion, and grant applications, particularly at elite universities like Harvard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Researchers dependent on federal funding, for example, 37 billion from the National Institutes of Health in 2024, have dutifully complied, often prioritizing ideological conformity and, let's say, cowardice over merit and bravery, for sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And so I started to see this about in 2010, where I would write a grant application for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Medical Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. This was in Canada, but similar entities exist in the US. And I'd have to... write out an ideological belief statement. And I thought, no bloody way am I doing that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
There's no excuse for that. It's completely irrelevant to my stated, to my commitment to seek truth as a scientist and a researcher and to teach truth to my students. And so I thought, to hell with you. You need me more than I need you. Now, did that spread? No. The researchers, pretty much to a man and woman, rolled over and let the progressives have their way with them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And there's no excuse for this. And there's no whining about this now. You made your goddamn bed. It's time to lie in it. So let's document some of that. Early 2010s, DEI statements emerged as optional components in faculty hiring at universities like UC Berkeley, surprise, surprise, spreading to Ivy League schools by 2015. By 2018, remember they started out as optional, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Well, maybe we should have some more people of color as our research assistants or our professors. Well, let me tell you, I sat on a lot of hiring committees as a professor, and any person of color who is vaguely qualified, and I mean vaguely, is going to be snapped up by universities so fast you can't bloody well believe it. And that's been the case at least since the 1980s.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And so if universities have been unable to flesh out their quota of racial, sexual identity, and gender proportions, it's because qualified people in those categories simply do not exist. Now, no one will say that, but But we'll get back to that when we discuss McGill in Canada. And that, I'm telling you, this is the straight truth. I sat on lots of hiring committees.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
If there was anyone who vaguely smacked of minority status in any possible manner, and they were even remotely qualified, they were prioritized over every other candidate. And that goes back all the way to the 1990s, at least, probably before that. There's probably no institutions in the world that have tried to be more inclusive without sacrificing merit until recently than the universities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
I'm going to do some reading, and I'm going to do some opining, and, well, bear with me. Let's see how this goes. Harvard University is locked in a high-stakes conflict with the Trump administration and conservative critics, centered on accusations of antisemitism, ideological bias, and the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI programs.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And if they're not able to do it, and you think that's a consequence of systemic racism, well, then you're one of those neo-Marxist types that really we shouldn't be contending with anymore, especially not in the universities. Okay, so back to, And we notice as well, DEI statements are optional in 2010, but by 2018, they're mandatory. And then it gets worse than that.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
They're not only mandatory, but they're the criteria by which faculty are now hired. And so we'll get to that, especially in the faculty of arts and sciences and medical schools. Do you remember that? By the way, all you people, when you go see a newly graduated doctor, you have no bloody idea if they were selected for merit or on some other basis, and you have no idea
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
if the program that they were trained in, even at an august institution, evaluated them without prejudice for their merit. So you remember that when you put your sick kid in their hands. I would be very careful about that if I was you. In fact, I am. Post-2020, following George Floyd's death, DEI requirements intensified.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
It isn't exactly obvious to me that the events surrounding George Floyd were of sufficient historical importance, all things considered, so that the world's greatest universities should have reconstituted their promotion, hiring, selection, and publishing criteria. But that is what they did, instead of having like an iota of courage.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Harvard FAS, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, mandated DEI statements for all tenure-track hires, evaluating candidates' commitment to diversity alongside scholarship. Well, alongside or prior? We'll get to that, too. Grant applications to NIH and NSF increasingly required DEI plans, with 80% of major research universities adopting similar mandates by 2023. Okay, so understand that.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
You have to hire on the basis of race and sex and gender and sexual identity, and you have to promote and you have to publish on those spaces. Okay, and so, well, what does that mean? It means that you've stopped. using truth, quality, and merit as criteria. So why the hell should you be getting any money? Now, let me make another case here. And I know this to be true as well.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So I talked to a lot of professors at Stanford, especially at the Hoover Institute, eh? And there were some people in Stanford, like Jay Bhattacharya, who's doing quite well now in the new Trump administration, just as case in point, who stood up against the woke mob in the mid-2010s. And Jay suffered pretty tremendously because of that, but he had a few colleagues around him who stuck by him.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And you know, it's possible for the woke mob cancellation psychopaths to go after people one by one really successfully. But if there's like five of you and your major researchers and stellar professors and you band together, they haven't got a hope. And so how many places did that happen at? Well, it happened at Stanford. That's one place.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And that was also a place, by the way, because it had the Hoover Institute, that had a place where there were actually some classic liberals and conservatives. It's not like Jay Mattacharius, some kind of Nazi. You know, first of all, he's a person of color. And so, you know, obviously should be credited with that for what it's worth. But what am I making a case for here?
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
If five of my colleagues... with my kind of research background, or better, had stood together at three universities and told the DEI mob to go to hell, none of this would have happened. And that didn't happen. And that's an illustration of a depth of cowardice that's so profound that it still shocks me. And those of you listening and
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Watching should have no sympathy whatsoever for what your, the people that you support involuntarily, essentially, with your tax dollars did with the responsibility that had been vouchsafed to them, for example, with their tax exempt status. And they bloody well know it too.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Harvard, Columbia, the major league universities, they're running scared because they know they put their foot into it, their foot in it. And they did. They deserve whatever's coming to them. And, you know, in terms of reforming them, how are you going to reform them? 75% of them are progressive.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
If the problem is the disproportion of progressive ideology and the pathology of that ideology, especially with regards to racial, sexual, sexual preference classification and the proclivity to do that, what are you going to do? Are you going to keep those people? And what, give them new positions? Give them new name, their institutions, something different?
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Let's talk about those for a minute, DEI programs, diversity, equity, and inclusion. It sounds pretty good, you know, diversity, who would be against that? Equity, man, that sounds like a lot like equality of opportunity, although it actually means equality of outcome.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The radical left is very slippery with language, to say the least. Property is theft. There's a classic example. You have the same players with different names, they're going to play the same games. I see no way that the universities currently are salvageable. Hence, for example, Peterson Academy. So... Major research institutions require DEI mandates, 80% of them by 2023.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
90% of faculty at elite institutions, 90%, include DEI statements in applications. So that means if you're a junior If you're an applicant to be a junior faculty member, and Lord forgive you, Lord preserve you if you're not in one of the protected categories, that's for sure. You can just forget it, right? And that's dead serious.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The probability that you can be hired at a university if you're a young, white, male graduate is insane. It's vanishingly small. And I know this from personal experience because I had stellar students who were in those categories who couldn't get jobs. So it's absolutely the case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
At Harvard, DEI criteria influenced hiring in 70% of faculty of arts and sciences searches by 2022 per internal reports. Promotion and tenure decisions also weighed DEI contributions. So that's not only...
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
A DEI contribution, a statement, is not only your willingness to proclaim allegiance to an ideological doctrine, so a belief statement, it's also an indication of your willingness to sell your soul to the devil because you've been told to by an administrator. Right. So make no mistake about this. This isn't merely political corruption, you know, analyzed from a conservative perspective.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
I don't like those progressives. I don't like the progressives, the Marxists. I think they're appalling to the core and that their doctrine is genocidally murderous and unforgivable. In the same category, by the way, as the Nazi doctrines in the extreme. But even independent of that,
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
I think the willingness of faculty members and researchers to pen these bloody statements, to say that those were their words, to sign themselves to those beliefs, indicates that they don't deserve public support at all. And I don't think you should send your children to those institutions. They're gone.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Just like CNN, just like MSNBC, and just like the New York Times, who we happen to be assessing today. He believes, Dr. Garber, he's the new president of Harvard University. We'll get to that too, why he's the new president. This is genuinely unprecedented, Dr. Garber said. We have so many challenges ahead and we also have so many opportunities. Yeah, blah, blah, blah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And that means that everyone ends up in the same place, no matter how hard they work, for example, or how competent they are, which is a hell of a good deal for people who don't work at all, and they're so incompetent that it's a kind of miracle. And then inclusion, well, you know, Some people should be included and some people shouldn't be included.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
This is a time when we should be doubling down on our investments in research, particularly in science. Yeah, Dr. Garber, that assumes that what's happening in those labs is research and science. And by and large, it's not. We haven't even talked about what's happening to publishing.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
He believes deep funding cuts would impair the kind of innovative work that has made American research universities the global engine for scientific discovery since World War II. No, not since World War II. From World War II till probably about the year 2000, right? And that's now 25 years ago. So no, Dr. Carver, wrong.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So the White House has said Harvard should not receive federal money if Jewish students are targeted and harassed on its campus. Well, I think we could dispense with the if, personally. So, because that's obviously the case. In the eyes of Mr. Trump, this is classic New York Times, right? Just, you can just, what would you say? This lie should annoy you?
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
and demoralize you right to the bottom of your soul. In the eyes of Mr. Trump and many Republicans, Harvard and other elite American universities have become echo chambers, places where students develop intolerance for political perspectives different from their own, yeah, as if they have their own when they're 18, and shield themselves from ideas they find objectionable.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
University leaders often say that criticism exaggerates the issue, claiming that critics want to perpetuate woke caricatures of university culture in order to win elections. Yeah, fine, there's four stellar sentences from the lying scoundrels at the New York Times. Let's just delve into this a little bit using some facts.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
In the eyes of Mr. Trump, that mega maniac, well, we already talked about the fact that 3% at best of faculty are conservative, and either zero or 1% very conservative, And that the administration, and there's a lot more people in the administration than there are faculty members, they're even more skewed, so there's that. But let's look at the researchers here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
90% of faculty at elite institutions include DEI statements in applications. Many of them have tailored their research to align with DEI priorities. That means developing studies, for example, on racial disparities. And then let's talk a little bit more about how the researchers have responded to these DEI statements.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Candidates with stronger DEI statements, which means more radically progressive and left and also bigger lies, assuming that they weren't radically progressive left people and just filled these things out because they had to, as seen in Harvard's 2021 hiring of Sherry Charleston as its first chief diversity officer, despite plagiarism allegations.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And if you're doing something difficult and demanding and goal-oriented, then inclusion shouldn't exactly be the principle. The principle should be, if you can bloody well do the job, then you should be hired. And anything other than that is absolute nonsense. And that's particularly the case if the way that you define whether something has been inclusive enough, diverse enough, equitable enough,
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
A high profile example from UC Berkeley, that hellish joint, a high profile example from UC Berkeley's life science initiatives, 2018 to 2019, faculty search demonstrates the impact of DEI statements. In this initiative, 600 out of 900 applicants, about 70%, were eliminated Hear that? Eliminated. That means their lives were altered severely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
That means that despite having worked like mad as high school students and undergraduates and graduate students, having put in 20 years of work into being educated, they were eradicated from consideration for a top-tier job
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Regardless of their bloody research prowess, that's their publication record, which was the only true record of their capability, 70% of them were eliminated from consideration, stamped, gone. because their DEI statements didn't what? Didn't please who? Exactly. How about the radical progressives who swarmed because they weren't doing their research to the bloody hiring committees?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
How about that? 70% were eliminated in the first round based solely on their DEI statements. So let's say you have some poor character who's got 20 publications when he emerges from graduate school. That's a stellar record. In fact, that's a record that's much better than Claudine Gay, who was made president of Harvard University, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So we're talking about people whose research records exceed that of the woman who was promoted to president at Harvard. Those people aren't going to be considered for a position at Berkeley and other high-level institutions allegiance to political belief was deemed improper or insufficiently craven. So don't tell me this is a bloody Trump problem. That's such a lie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The search committee used a rubric that prioritized candidates' knowledge of DEI, track record, and plans for advancing it. Right, oh yes, what... The last time I looked at the Engineering and Research Council grant application in Canada, it's frequently asked questions, it said this,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
If you have a lab that's notable for its diversity, which means if you've been as craven as you possibly could have in following every single bloody dictate that we imposed on you in the last 10 years, don't just rest on your laurels, because no matter how good a job you've done in the past, you could do better in the future. And so we don't wanna see that you're already
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
running a lab where minorities of the multiplicitous form that we insist upon existing are overrepresented, no matter how well you've done, that's not good enough. And your bloody DEI statement better indicate that no matter how craven you've been in the past, you should be a little more craven in the present. Sickening. Sickening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
This case, highlighted in City Journal and National Association of Scholars reports, suggests DEI statements can be a significant gatekeeper. Yeah, well, there's... something damned by faint praise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Faculty promotions increasingly hinge on DEI activities, sidelining traditional metrics like publication impact, which is really the metric that scientists have decided on over a hundred years, best indexes their research productivity and ability. That's merit, merit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
That's the merit Garber's talking about when he said that American universities led the world, which they did in scientific research. Right, that's publication impact. Make no mistake about it. You prioritize anything over that, assuming the journals aren't corrupt, and they are corrupt now, so that's also a problem, then you're making everything worse.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
is that it segregates people by race and ethnic identity and then makes the case that if there are any, oh, and sex as well and gender as well, and then makes the, and sexual preference for that matter, any idiot group identification category that you can possibly imagine, you make the case that if all those people and the intersection of all those groups aren't
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And maybe not just worse, maybe like failure worse. Because you don't go from great to mediocre. You go from great to useless. There's no intermediary slide. And so if you're not great as a scientist, you're basically useless. A 2023 Nature study found 40% of sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics faculty, so that's the hardcore scientists, felt DEI overshadowed research quality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Right. So racial identity, sexual identity, sexual preference, et cetera, et cetera, gender, choice, all these idiot group categories now overshadows research quality. Just think about that. And then think about whether that's something you want to devote your tax money to. Now, publishing.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Now, you see, this isn't really a war between Harvard, that august institution, and the mega Trump administration. This is a much deeper problem. And the reason that it seems to me that you should all know about it is because whatever the universities are doing that's corrupt and appalling spills over into the broader culture in a way that's cataclysmic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So when you do a scientific paper, and maybe that takes you five years, it depends on the complexity of the problem, and you're working on multiple issues at the same time, so you have a steady publication stream. If you're a great scientist, several a year. If you're a good scientist, at least one a year. You publish them. Journals are ranked by quality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And then scientists evaluate their own papers to see when other scientists bother to pay attention to the publication and cite the paper. So one of the ways you determine whether a paper is impactful is by how many people refer to it, right? Logically. Okay, so that's the publication impact. So journals, including those tied to Harvard, prioritized DEI-themed papers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Okay, so now think about that. You won't get hired unless you're part of the right group, and the groups multiply endlessly. You won't get promoted if you're not part of the right group. You can't submit a grant unless you're willing to abide by the dictates and publicly state it that would prejudice the selection against you, even if you're not in one of those favored groups.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And then now you can't publish, you can't do research on any topic that isn't racially, sexually, or otherwise group indicated. And if you did do that research, you couldn't get published. So now you tell me, oh journalist from the New York Times, how that's not 100% rotten from the bottom right to the top, and how you could possibly fix that. Journals are skewed. Promotion is skewed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The research agenda is skewed. The grant application process is skewed. The hiring process is skewed, right? And then the administration is even more skewed. So how do you fix that? How do you fix that, folks? There's no fixing that. Not as far as I can tell. There's replacing it. That's why we made Peterson Academy. Now, I have no idea if that's going to work, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
because it's not easy to replace august institutions. I don't know if there's a market for lectures. We're doing quite well with our new initiative, but its long-term success is as unlikely as the long-term successes of anything new. Researchers have widely complied with DEI requirements due to funding pressures. Yeah, right, due to funding pressures.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Researchers have widely complied with DEI requirements. Why? Because they're cowards. That's why. It's as simple as that. And maybe you think that's too harsh. You know, these scientists protected in their ivy towers had to contend with political pressures they'd never faced before. Fair enough, you know, I have some sympathy for that, but listen to me.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
statistically represented, statistically represented at precisely the level that a census would indicate that the system is systemically prejudiced. Yeah, well, so what? What are we supposed to believe as a consequence of that? The reason that 90% of people are nurses and 90% of women are nurses and 90% of engineers are men is because of systemic prejudice?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
There's one thing you're obligated to do, two things you're obligated to do if you're an actual academic and a researcher. You're required not to lie when you speak, especially not to students, and you're required not to lie when you write, and you're particularly required not to lie when you write. And when you fill out a DEI statement, especially one that passes muster,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
and you're not a radical progressive who believes that everyone in the world should be categorized by their intrinsic group identity, which is how we used to define racists, by the way, if you fill out a statement that indicates that you're one of those people, and you're not, you are signaling your willingness to lie with your written words at the deepest possible level of commitment, at the level of your career.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Think about that now. How can you trust anything that anyone like that does? written. How do you know that they won't sacrifice everything for their career, for example? The pursuit of scientific truth. They just bloody well demonstrated that that's what they would do, and right at the initiation of their career, or when they're being promoted, or when they're being published.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And what do they teach students? Exactly the same thing. They're lying, they're betraying the trust that's been placed in them, they're violating the spirit of the institutions, and they shouldn't get any money. And it's not Trump So let's leave that kind of idiocy behind. Faculty report pressure. Pressure, what the hell does pressure mean? To tailor research to DEI themes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
No one had a gun to their head, folks. And there are worse things than losing a job that you only have to keep by lying. Faculty report pressure to tailor research to DEI themes with 40% of STEM faculty feeling DEI overshadows research quality. I mentioned that before, per a Nature, 2023 Nature study. Nature at one point was the world's best scientific journal, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Okay, back to the New York Times with that little side venture into the facts that they lied about. At the same time, many university leaders also worry that Americans have lost trust in academia and no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. So let's be a professor here for a minute and assess that sentence for quality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
At the same time, many university leaders also worry, okay, what do you worry about? Well, often you use worry when you're describing like your neurotic grandmother being concerned about things that really aren't factually true. Okay, but university leaders aren't worried. They know that Americans have lost trust in academia and they know that there are reasons for it. So they're not worried.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So that's the first lie, that Americans have lost trust in academia. No, Americans haven't lost trust in academia. That's the second lie. academics have violated the trust that Americans had placed in them. And that was trust that was hard won, because ordinary people don't necessarily trust intellectuals, and no bloody wonder.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And so it isn't that Americans have lost trust in academia, it's that academics have lied and become corrupt. And the New York Times, when reporting on this, Well, let's count the lies in the sentence. So far, that's two. And no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. That's the third lie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
There were only three factual statements in the sentence, so three lies is actually pretty remarkable. Americans no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. Okay. Well, there isn't as much value in a college education as there once was. First of all, they're not as rare.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Second of all, as we've already pointed out, the colleges are no longer evaluating teaching or research or student application on the basis of merit. Then we have the additional problem that... The corporations, by and large, and the general public have noted the radical decline in trustworthiness and quality and no longer regard degrees as a marker of integrity and ability.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And that isn't because Americans no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. It's because there is no value. no longer as much value in a college education as there once was. So let's rewrite the sentence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
At the same time, many university leaders have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that their institutions violated the trust of the Americans and the rest of the world that they were sworn to serve, that bestowed on them certain advantages that were granted to them by public trust. Americans as well,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
It couldn't possibly be that women and men are actually interested in other things, like psychologists have actually been claiming for about five decades difference in interest between men and women are the biggest differences between men and women. And so the idea that Well, I've talked about the bricklayer problem in many other places, but 99% of bricklayers are men.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Little or no confidence, according to a Gallup poll published last year. Up from 10% a decade earlier. Yeah. Those Americans, eh? They're a sad bunch. You violate their trust and they notice. We can put that in the New York Times article, too. Okay, Steven Pinker weighed in on this, and Steven Pinker is a classic liberal, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
He's also a Canadian, and he's been adamant in his stance against the woke mob at Harvard. The last few years have been a wake-up call, said Dr. Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor who's warned that his university and other elite institutions have devalued intellectual and ideological diversity at considerable cost to their reputations. See, that's also a lie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
It isn't that the university and other elite institutions devalued intellectual and ideological diversity. It's that they stopped doing their job properly. That's another lie. He praised Dr. Garber for recognizing what many other leaders have not, at least in public.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The Trump administration had not made an unreasonable request when it said Harvard must consistently enforce its rules against disruptive demonstrations and swiftly punish anti-Semitic harassment. That's a whole other issue, right? The absolute craven cowardice and complicity of the universities, especially the big ones, with regard to these unfathomably corrupt universities
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
demonstrations that emerged all across the West after October 7th, demonstrations that were so corrupt that they were praised, and the university's role in promoting them. They were praised by the Ayatollah Khomeini himself directly on X. There's the only real, I hate comparing anything to Hitler, but can you imagine in the 1930s when the anti-Semitism rose in Germany that there were
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
protests on American campuses in favor of it, and that Hitler praised them, that's pretty much the situation. And so Harvard's making a big case that it's the anti-Semitic allegations that are behind the reaction of the Trump administration, and that's only partially true. It's part of the problem, but it's by no means all.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The New York Times also points out that the Harvard Crimson, had published an essay, suggested the change to diversity programs might be politically expedient for now, but it will not solve Harvard's public relations crisis. The way to win against authoritarian attacks isn't by prioritizing optics, it's by standing up for our values. Yeah, well, we know what Harvard values are.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So, okay, let me turn to something else here. Well, I should tell you why I want to talk about Canada. That's because The same idiocy that permeates the American higher education academies also permeates Canada. And I found an indication at McGill that makes this case quite profoundly. So,
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
If you're a medical school or any other professional school, training engineers, training teachers, training massage therapists, training nurses, training psychologists, the programs that teach you at a university have to be accredited before you can be granted a degree that can then be turned into a profession.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Okay, so you take the courses, you get your degree, then you're turned, and whether the program can give you your degree, is judged by accreditation authorities, the colleges, the professional colleges, for example, or the professional organizations. There's various ways this can be done.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
I don't see the feminists clamoring to ensure that just exactly the same number of women become bricklayers, and just the same number of women, for example, are incarcerated in prison. So it's complete bloody nonsense, and it's worse than that, because it's radical leftist nonsense that's one step removed from Marxism itself. And so this is not a trivial problem. This is a major problem.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Now, for a long time, those accreditation agencies focused on merit, but they don't focus on merit anymore because they've been captured. They focus on DEI. Now, McGill University, which is Canada's Harvard, let's say, and it was a very good university,
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
despite the attempt by the Quebec Separatists to destroy it, essentially, for like 40 years, because it was English language, even though the rest of their universities basically suck, to put it bluntly. Harvard, or McGill, has a great medical school. Now, it has to be accredited. So, here's some fun. In 2017, McGill's medical school ran into trouble with the accreditors. Well, why?
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Well, this is from CBC News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is Canada's state-run media, right? An appalling organization, which was once also a reasonably reliable institution. So McGill's Medical School was put on probation by its accrediting body. Well, why? Progress is minimal and below average for Canadian medical schools when it comes to the recruitment of Indigenous students.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
It also notes that Black and Filipino people are underrepresented in relationship to Montreal census data. Low parental income and education levels are underrepresented as well. And McGill was cited for lack of progress recruiting students from rural backgrounds. McGill's Dean of Medicine promised to improve his faculty's diversity. Well, that was his... Mistake. Another coward. Craven. Sad.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Ideologically captured. Weak. Spineless. Lack of leadership. Okay, and the letter from the accrediting agency continues, "...it is unclear what actions have been taken to improve diversity in leadership, and little progress is reported in improving levels of participation by women and aboriginals." in leadership positions.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Okay, so this is what you have to understand, although perhaps you don't want to. The competition for qualified so-called minorities is insanely intense. Now, are the universities supposed to hire people who can't do the job?
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Well, obviously, as long as they fit the right bloody racial category, sex category, sex proclivity category, get those LGBT2 types in there, whatever the hell that has to do with scholarship and teaching. The people don't exist. The people don't exist. Do you understand that?
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
You have to radically lower your criteria in order to meet the mandates, in which case your quality will radically and permanently dip. And if you're training physicians or maybe air traffic controllers, there's another group to think about, maybe you don't do that, eh? Maybe you'd select people for how well they do on the MCAT. Right? Or on the SAT.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And if you can't find people who do, what, in the top 5% if you're a great university, then you don't take them. Because if you do, they hire people who are even worse, and then you're screwed. Really. Then your institution collapses. And that happens very quickly. How many places are there in the world with great university and professional institutions? How many do you think? There are 24...
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
free Western democracies in the world out of 200 countries. So that's how rare it is. And it took hundreds of years to build those institutions, and they can be destroyed at a moment's notice, and that's what's happened.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
It's dependent on how you characterize human beings at the most fundamental level of analysis. They're either individuals who you rank order on the basis of competence, or they're classified according to the group identity. And those are very different worlds. And in my opinion, you don't wanna live in a world where people are classified by their racial identity.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So McGill, in an interview with CBC, remember this is from 2017, Dean of Medicine said, David Eidelman said, a number of measures have been put in place to try to recruit more minorities. The university has hired a director specifically charged with improving diversity. There's a new indigenous health program targeting students from indigenous communities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
McGill, moreover, is trying to improve rural recruitment with its Gatineau campus. Eidelman said all medical programs struggle with recruiting minorities. It's hard. Why? Because in order to get into medical school, you need to have very high marks. And then he does this, then he does this. In general, it's easier to get really high marks when you come from a privileged background.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, well, you know what? It's not that goddamn easy, you know? And the marks either mean something or they don't. And if marks don't mean anything, then why the hell do we have universities? So this statement from Eidelman, it sums up the pathology of the universities and their craven administrators in a nutshell.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
It's hard because in order to get into medical school, you need to have very high marks. Well, maybe that's because we want smart doctors, eh? You know, it's a possibility. And in general, it's easier to get really high marks when you come from a privileged background. Yeah, you know, I don't think it's that easy, you son of a bitch.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The University Medical School, the oldest in Canada, was put on probation in 2015, a major blow to McGill's reputation. It risked losing its accreditation after an inspection found the undergraduate medical education failed to meet 24 of 132 required standards. Well... There you go. So that was 2015. So let's go to 2025, shall we? April 25th.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
For the second time in a row, McGill University's flagship program in medicine, the best medical school in Canada, has been put on probation by Canadian accreditation authorities for another two dozen clearing deficiencies. Same as in 2015. You can bet McGill bent itself backwards, hiring all the right lefties to run their bloody diversity programs and didn't make a bit of progress. Why?
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
How about because it's impossible? How about that? Yeah, well, it's not impossible if you're an idiot accreditor and you think you can make things happen in complex institutions by waving your magic fairy wand. And this is the Gazette.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Even as McGill moves to address these shortcomings, it is closing its social accountability and community engagement office, which was set up after McGill's medical program was first placed on probation in 2015 to address DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Gazette has learned. This shows you the state of newspaper journalists as well.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The three individuals who ran that DEI office in the medical faculty, all of whom are members of racialized minorities, are being replaced by a single person who does not come from such a minority background and who will be overseeing diversity initiatives as Vice Dean of Education and Community Engagement. If you don't think that's funny, you've got no sense of humor.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
It's damn black humor, though. McGill's decision to close its dedicated DEI office occurred right after accreditors wrapped up their interviews and visits to the university in January. Just think about that. McGill was put on notice that unless they advanced their DEI programs, they were going to lose their bloody accreditation. That meant they wouldn't have a medical school.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And the consequence of that 10 years later was that they hadn't made a bit of progress, and everything they did failed so utterly cataclysmically on the DEI front that they actually closed their office. Think about what kind of failure that indicates, right, in the face of this absolute impossibility.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Technically, McGill's marquee medical program is still accredited, despite his probationary status. But the news could potentially affect McGill's number one ranking of all medical schools in the country by McLean's magazine in Canada. That's kind of like Time used to be in its next annual survey. So... What can I say? Well, here's something else that's happened.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
That's called a racist world, by the way. So when we talk about DEI programs, we're not talking about some goddamn sweetness and light that's doled out by people who have nothing but love in their hearts. It's a complete bloody scam, and it's destroyed many institutions, and Harvard is definitely one of them. Okay, the clash.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And Trump actually moved to do something about this with an executive order earlier this month. The accreditation agencies that determine whether the professionals who serve you are competent have become more corrupted even than the universities. So, you know, with Peterson Academy, we're wrestling with the issue of accreditation because our courses aren't transferable to universities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
But increasingly, corporations don't give a damn if you have a university degree, and no wonder. And it might even be the fact that being accredited now is an indicator that you're ideologically corrupt. Because in order to become accredited, you have to follow all the rules. accreditation dictums, and they're all the same dictums that destroyed the universities.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So what we're hoping with our initiative is to go direct to corporations and to say, we can screen candidates for you for merit, and we won't educate them to be narcissistic, woke troublemakers who think that the way you improve the world is by protesting, which is essentially, definitely what they're taught in university. Leslie Fellows is Dean of Medicine, by the way.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Fellows insisted, however, that McGill has made tremendous progress with its medical curriculum since 2015. Yeah, I bet that's progress. When you dig down below the kind of headline on the outcome, you can understand better the progress that we have, in fact, made over the last 10 years. Yeah, progress. All right, according to the New York Times, Trump's at war with Harvard.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
But the New York Times is capable of lying three times in a single sentence that only contains three hypothetical facts. So it lies all the time. This is not a war between the world's best university, Harvard, and mega Trump. First of all, it's not the best university in the world anymore. I don't know what might be the best university in the world anymore. It's hard to say.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Oxford's pretty shaky. Cambridge is pretty shaky. Columbia, less said about Columbia the better. You can tell Harvard's not the best university anymore because people aren't applying to it. And donors have decreased the degree to which they're willing to support it. And there's going to be more of that. along the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
For a long time, one of the highlights of my life was the fact that I had taught at Harvard, that I was selected on the basis of my merit for a position there. And now, you know, it's not something I bring up. I never did bring it up, except when it was appropriate, but I'm much less likely to do it now. as I'm less likely to presume that my status as a PhD is a meritorious designation.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And that's a sad thing. I loved working at Harvard. I thought McGill was great. And the University of Toronto served me pretty well for about 15 years. I'd say none of this with any pleasure. And I'm sorry also for a fair bit of irritation, but it's so frustrating to see this. It's so appalling. It's so sickening. It's such a betrayal of trust.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
I saw nothing but cowardice from my faculty compatriots, from the administration, from the research. I really expected better from researchers than, say, my compatriot psychologists, professionals. We're so cowardly. A few of us could have band together at any time and brought all this nonsense to a stop.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
escalating since Trump's second term began in January 2025, pits Harvard's academic autonomy against federal demands for sweeping reforms with billions in research funding at stake. Yeah, well, Harvard likes to think that what it's pitting is Harvard's academic autonomy against federal demands for sweeping reforms, but that's quite, that's complete rubbish as well.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
A hundred would have done it, or the ten that so famously would have stopped God from destroying Sodom and Gomorrah. It would have just taken a very few people, and they didn't show up. And so, whatever Harvard gets... from the Trump administration is a small fragment of what they deserve. And I would say that is true no matter how harsh the treatment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So the Trump administration has also at one point detailed out some tentative plans to deal with the situations at the university, to replace them in some ways. particularly given the impossibility of reforming them, given the overwhelming proportion of progressives among administration and faculty. Back in 2023, he published as part of Agenda 47,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
a plan to take billions and billions of dollars collected by taxing, fining and suing excessively large private university endowments to create the American Academy. Now, we haven't heard much about the American Academy in recent months.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Trump's plan was to have the American Academy gather, quote, the highest quality educational content covering the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills and make that material available to every American citizen online for free. Okay, so look,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
When that happened, we at Peterson Academy thought that the Trump team had been preusing the Peterson Academy website because he used essentially the same name and made essentially the same claims. Now, I really have no idea if that's true. And I actually had a chance to ask Dr. or Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in the few minutes I got to talk to him about his American Academy plans.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And he said at that point that he didn't remember making the promise. And so I don't know if he meant that or if he didn't know who the hell I was and what the hell I was talking about. But in any case, it was a good idea. And that's exactly what we tried to do with Peterson Academy. And there are other institutions that are emerging that are trying to revitalize the university in a more
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
traditional form, right? There's the University of Austin at Texas, which is up and running, very expensive process, quarter of a billion dollars to get the institution up and running in its nascent form. But stellar students, I was there a couple of weeks ago. There's Ralston College in Georgia in Savannah, beautiful city. It offers a master's program that is accredited.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
You can learn to speak ancient and modern Greek in a year and to familiarize yourself with the basis of the Greek basis of Western civilization. And there's institutions like Hillsdale that I mentioned earlier. And so there are some promising possibilities and we'll see how they turn out. I think what I'm going to do on the Daily Wire side is continue my analysis of the university situation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And so if you're interested in a more in-depth analysis, a continued analysis of the problems with higher education and the potential solutions, then give some consideration to joining us on the Daily Wire side. The Daily Wire makes these podcasts possible. at their high production level and on this continuing basis.
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And they've been a very positive advocate for free speech and the dissemination of information like this over the last few years. And you could give some consideration to throwing some support their way if you're interested in material like this. In the meantime, thank you all very much for your time and attention. It's much appreciated. I hope that this relatively emotion-laden
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Hillsdale College, which is one of the few remaining truly reliable universities educational institutions takes zero federal money. Now, does Harvard have to take federal money? Well, you know, they have the biggest endowment of any university in the world. I think at the moment, Harvard's endowment, valued at 53.2 billion as of fiscal year 2024, is the largest among U.S. universities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Analysis of the university situation and the New York Times' craven coverage of the battle between Trump, so to speak, and Harvard has been useful and informative. It's a very, very important issue, and it would be best if people actually understood what was going on. Thanks for your time and attention. Bye-bye.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
It's managed by the Harvard Management Company since 1974, and it comprises over 14,000 individual funds. So it distributes $2.4 billion a year, which is 1 25th of the endowment. It only covers 1 3rd of Harvard's $6.4 billion operating budget. So it's tax-exempt. That's kind of relevant when you're talking about ideological issues that might be pertinent to political leanings, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
We'll get into that. It has tax incentives for donations and it issues low-interest tax-exempt bonds. So Harvard benefits massively from its favorable tax relationship with governmental institutions, most particularly the federal government.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And so if Harvard has become remiss in its duty to be neutral and truth-seeking, then there's no reason whatsoever to assume that it deserves its favorable relationship with the American government. And you could also make the case, as Hillsdale has, particularly under Larry Arnn, that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
the people who end up running everything come from the universities, particularly the Ivy Leagues. And so what that means is that if those institutions become corrupt, and they have become corrupt, make no bones about it, then everything they feed into becomes corrupt in exactly the same manner.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Any reliance by higher education institutions on federal funding compromises their essential mission, which is actually what Harvard is arguing right now, because Harvard has told Trump, this is the legal arguments that will start in July, that it's a First Amendment issue and that Trump doesn't get to tell Harvard that it has to sort itself out because that's a First Amendment violation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Larry Arnn's Reaction to that and Hillsdale's refusal to take any federal money was in some sense a variant of that argument, except in the other direction. Their position, Hillsdale's position was there's no possible way that a university can be reliant on government funding without eventually becoming utterly corrupt. And by the way, Hillsdale is flourishing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And if any of you out there listening are donating money to Harvard or any of the other Ivy League institutions, well, first of all, and thinking about sending your children there, first of all, you could give Hillsdale a real consideration, both in terms of donations and enrollment. Yeah, and you could also think about educating your children with Peterson Academy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
It's a hell of a lot cheaper, and the professors are a lot better, and they're not ideologically warped. So that's something. Okay, so Harvard also doesn't really use its endowment to a great degree to fund its researchers or its student costs. So it relies on $2.2 billion in federal grants and contracts annually
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Only 5% of the endowment is unrestricted, which limits Harvard's ability to replace federal funds, for example. Now, let's also point out that the costs to students are extremely high at places like Harvard. So tuition, 2024-2025 tuition room and board is essentially $83,000, with 55% of undergraduates receiving financial aid.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The endowment funds $749 million in financial aid, but critics argue this is insufficient given the endowment's size. Taxing just 1% of the endowment could make community college free for all Massachusetts students. Yes. So that's an interesting little fact. Okay. I've... What? Cynics believe that Harvard has actually become an endowment with a university as a somewhat ineffective appendage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And I think there's some real truth in that. Now, we also have to understand that Harvard is being used as a test case, right? There are much broader issues at stake here than Harvard against Trump. Do we think that... If you're someone... If you're someone who leans classically liberal or classically conservative, then it's actually Harvard against you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And it's not just Harvard, it's the Ivy Leagues. And it's not just the Ivy Leagues, it's higher education as such. And so this battle between Harvard and Trump is a battle between the elite educational institutions that essentially dominated the education selection of people in leadership positions for the last 50 years and you. And so that's partly why you need to pay attention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The administration has frozen $2.2 billion in multi-year research grants and $60 million in contracts, threatening up to $9 billion in total funding, Harvard's tax-exempt status, and its ability to enroll foreign students. So these are pretty severe sanctions that the Trump administration has at least threatened to levy against Harvard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
And so now we could be thinking that it's Harvard, that august institution, against the strange mega Trump conservatives. Or we could be thinking that this is a way deeper problem that concerns everyone. And so we're going to investigate that today. I'm going to give you some facts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
These measures aim to force compliance with demands to eliminate DEI, which we already discussed, audit viewpoint diversity. I don't like that word much, viewpoint diversity, because it allows the progressives to maintain their claim that diversity should be one of the selection criteria for hiring instead of just merit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
and also the Trump administration is trying to force the universities to reform hiring and admissions. Harvard, under President Ellen Garber, we'll get back to him later, has resisted suing the administration in April 2025, I think that's lawfare, by the way, for violating its First Amendment rights and bypassing legal procedures. Yeah, well, perhaps.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Perhaps Harvard could just stop taking federal funding and they could do whatever the hell they wanted to. Garber argues that no government should dictate what universities teach higher research. That's pretty goddamn funny, I must say, after the Biden administration and its insistence that DEI, for example, be prioritized pretty much above all else. not only in teaching, hiring, and research.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
So that's a complete bloody crock. And it's also the case that Harvard cravenly submitted to all the radical progressive demands that emanated, let's say, from the Biden administration. So that's just a non-starter as far as I'm concerned, at least on moral grounds. Who knows what will happen legally?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The lawsuit backed by faculty, yeah, we'll see why that is, and other universities marks Harvard as the first major institution to openly defy Trump's crackdown. Yeah, it's not exactly Trump's crackdown, which has also targeted Columbia. Huh, there's another institution that deserves to be. Well, let's start with defunded.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, that would be enough that everybody could attend to it and understand exactly what it's up to and just how bloody dangerous it is, and then defund it. Cornell, a billion dollars, and Northwestern, $790 million. Harvard's defiance is rooted in its massive endowment and prestige. Yes. Prestige, which it earned, by the way, first of all, by being like, what would you say?
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545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
It was the prime edifice for the transmission of somewhat hereditary autocratic rights down the generations till about 1960 or so, right? It was an upper class institution with relatively well socially positioned people. who weren't necessarily drawn from the upper echelons of the cognitive elite.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The average IQ at Harvard has gone up substantially, or at least had between 1960 and 1995, let's say. I don't really know what's happened since then. In any case, Harvard drew on its... reputation as the place where the elite went to meet and rule, and then transformed that into a meritocratic selection process, primarily based on general cognitive ability, which is essentially IQ.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
IQ is age-corrected general cognitive ability. So Harvard selected on the basis, for example, of the SAT, which is essentially an IQ test, even though people also lie about that all the time. And for their graduate programs, they use the Graduate Record Exam, and for their legal programs, the LSAT, and for their medical school, the MCAT, and so forth. These are IQ tests. Make no mistake about it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
and some opinions, and I'm going to read to you from the New York Times covering this debacle, and also from the Montreal Gazette concerning McGill University in Canada, which Canadians like to regard as the Harvard of the North. Now, you see, I also taught at most of those. I was a student at McGill, and I taught there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Harvard was pulling the top. percentage or so of high IQ people into their institution and then advertising to companies who can't use IQ tests, because that's against the law, that they were
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
who's done a better job of taking apart the feminist narrative, especially historically, than Janice Fiamengo. She's quite the monster. And I saw her at the University of Toronto. She did a series of lectures before she resigned to take care of her husband, her ailing husband. And she was protested madly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
She was a very early person in the culture war on the academic side, and she paid a big price for it. The lecture I went to at the University of Toronto was interrupted by half-wit, you know, cluster B psychopathology types pulling the fire alarms and packing the audience with false tickets and then leaving. But one of the things that really shocked me during that display was,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Her contention, which we discussed at length in the YouTube conversation, is that family policy, educational policy, economic policy, policy surrounding marriage should prioritize the natural rights of children, partly because children have inalienable natural rights, partly because they're voiceless and need to be defended, and partly because it seems self-evident that nothing that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
and this was before I was in the public eye to any great degree, was that the whole audience seemed absolutely convinced that fathers, for example, weren't necessary, right? That a single mother on average could do just as good a job as a married couple raising a child. And I knew that that was false. It's false.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
There are some single mothers who do a credible job, and there are some married couples who do a dismal job. But on average, children with two parents do much better. And fatherlessness is a complete bloody catastrophe across multiple dimensions. And it's been a disaster. And it's really...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Yeah, well, that's what I'm getting at. That's what I'm going to get to. Yeah, so please go ahead.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Well, let's wrestle that out because... Okay, so... I have a friend, Dave Rubin, so I'll start with Rubin. I don't think he'll mind. And Dave's gay, and he's married to his husband, who's also named Dave. And Dave Rubin came along with me on my tour, and I talked a lot about kids. And he wasn't interested in children, but he listened, and his partner was interested in children, and so they had...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
children with surrogacy. And I talked to Dave very forthrightly on a podcast about how insanely difficult that was. And Dave wasn't afraid to delve into the moral quandary, let's say, that surrounds surrogacy, which I would like to talk to about you. And the tremendous expense. And he was aware of the fact that, well, with two fathers, you don't have a mother.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And so his mother and his partner's mother participated and his sisters, and they did everything they could to formulate an environment. Remediate. Exactly that. But what was evident, this at minimum was evident, and I would like to talk to you about this because it's sort of at the core of the matter. The pathway they chose is not replicable as a basis for a stable society.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
It was very, very difficult for them to do what they did. It cost a tremendous amount of time and money. They were insanely committed. They had the resources and they had the family support. to flesh out the missing pieces, maybe, right? And so... Maybe. Well, that's the issue, maybe. Now, you know, Dave told me that he wasn't particularly interested in contemplating a... What did he say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
What did he tell me? He didn't want to be wandering around Beverly Hills with a little dog in a, you know, purse when he was 60. You know what I mean?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
is harmful to children can be good for adults or for society. And so if you optimize your social policies in relationship to the wellbeing of children, you move a long ways towards optimizing your social policies for the flourishing of everyone. And so we fought that through, I would say. Katie is not an admirer of surrogacy, for example, really regardless of the reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Her presence, okay, yeah, go ahead. Random mom's.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Okay, so I'm going to scrap this out with you, and it isn't because I disagree with you, you know, it's because it's very complicated. Okay, so I guess the most logical, perhaps, and empathetic, possibly, objection to the points that you made
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
which doesn't invalidate the points you made, by the way, and we can discuss them in detail, is that, well, these children that Dave has wouldn't have existed without this set of circumstances. And from what I can observe, the boys are very well-loved, And I'm also not claiming for a moment that such arrangements can't go dreadfully wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And I'm perfectly aware of cases where that's been the case. So I'm not trying to be naive about this. But I'm also trying to take into account the fact that, well, and we can also talk about this. So they seem to have done as good a job of this as it's possible to do. Now that's not replicable as a pathway for most people. I don't think it's replicable as a pathway for most gay men.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
It's too difficult. But insofar as it could be done, they did it as well as they could. And now they have these two children, who are apparently thriving, and who wouldn't have existed had this not occurred. And there's something to be said for the fact of their existence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And you could say, well, they've been deprived of these three dimensions of maternal care, or those have at least been substituted, but better to be deprived across some axes, you might say, not to exist at all. And so, well, I'll throw that at you. And I'm not sure that's exactly fair, but it's harsh in the other direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
I have a friend, and he was interested in children, but his partner was interested in children, and so they had children with surrogacy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
What about surrogacy in general? You have people who are buried, who fulfill the other criteria that you described, who are infertile, and who turn to surrogacy as the pathway forward that's presented to them because of their lack of options. I know what we're trying to do here. You see, we're trying to draw this fine line between surrogacy
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And so I pushed back on that and We hashed that through and you can evaluate the consequences of that for yourself. We talked about the fact that not all families are created equal and that love does not define the family. You could think of it as a necessary but insufficient precondition for what actually constitutes a family.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
social policy that's replicable and iterable and productive en masse and the particular interests of particular people, you know, and it's well, that's a very difficult balance to attain. And something can certainly be good for people at an individual level and not good at an iterating and social level. And we have to always consider that when we act. Isn't that Kant's maxim?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Act as if your action becomes a universal principle. And there's something to that that's very profound. as a general ethical maxim. So let's talk about surrogacy in general.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
That's an interesting point. Let's see if we can take that apart a little bit. So you're contrasting two hypothetical rights and you're giving one clear primacy. Okay, so let's see if we can sort that out. So you said adults don't have a right to children.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
fine so but if i said well if i can acquire that economically if i have the means at my disposal then why doesn't that translate into a right now your your argument i think is that because it comes at the expense of the child and then that lands us back into the well is it better that the child exists or not argument right that lands us back in that domain so that that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
So you think that it isn't appropriate for someone to acquire that right. Why exactly? Let's go into that more. It's because it violates the child's pre-political right to biological parentage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And Katie comes down pretty hard on both the religious and the biological side, arguing that And I think rightly so that there isn't an ideal that can replace long-term, committed, monogamous, child-centered, heterosexual marriages as primarily as the foundation for successful marriage. and joyful, stable rearing of children.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Okay, so let me ask you this then. These natural rights of the child, let's see if we can investigate why those are important or even crucially important, and that will also help us set them against the hypothetical rights of adults.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Now, you know, you can imagine, you could make a case, I suppose, that maternal longing is something that existed before the government, like it's an intrinsic part of human nature, and the government's there to ensure that its manifestation is made visible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
is realized, and you can imagine an argument for surrogacy on that basis, but your claim is that you're violating something more fundamental, which is the child's right to two parents. Okay, so let's take that apart. Okay, and I'll do that as critically as I can. As far as I can tell, and we have to look at the nuances of this, Children are pretty good at bonding with multiple people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
They're not good at bonding with multiple people sequentially if the previous person they bonded with disappears. So for example, you could bring a nanny into your house and the child could bond very nicely with that nanny, but you can't, it's hard on the child to replace the nanny, let's say. Especially when the children are under three.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
But children can bond with multiple people, and we know that partly, too, because our past was in all, well, self-evidently tribal, and many people participated in the raising of a child. Now, that doesn't mean that the mother and father don't have some primacy, but it means that many people can participate. And so you could...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Imagine, well, the argument would go that these relationships are, the maternal and paternal relationships are substitutable, as they are to some degree. Your argument is that they're not as substitutable as people would like to presume, and in that substitution, something of transcendent value is lost. Well, here's a possible example on the biological side, you know, that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Babies and mothers swap DNA. And they do that at a level- Yeah, it's called microchimerism. That level that's so profound that like a baby will donate stem cells to its mother so that the mother heals better during pregnancy, right? And the mother will, here's something very interesting too. So a mother's breasts can detect calcium shortage on the part of the babies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And mothers who detect calcium shortages will extract calcium from their own bones to fortify their milk, to fortify their children. And so there are a lot of biological nuances in the maternal infant relationship that we don't understand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
We understand too, for example, that babies who are born by C-section often have impaired immunological systems because they didn't pass through the vaginal canal. I mean, there are a lot of things going on biologically that are complex and sophisticated beyond belief, but also beyond understanding. And these are the sorts of things that you're pointing to that a child is deprived of.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And fair enough, but it's also harsh perhaps necessarily harsh, but definitely harsh, to say to someone who's 35 and desperate for a child and who has the means to pursue surrogacy that that is off the table by fiat, despite the fact that the technology is there and the opportunity is at hand. So I know we're going over the same territory to some degree, but- That's okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And if you accept the doctrine that what's good for children is good for adults and for the state, then institutions that focus on the wellbeing, the flourishing of children, the prioritization of children, those institutions have to be foundational and prioritized. And that's certainly one of the doctrines of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which is this organization.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Well, I know that that period of time, especially between zero and nine months is critical for, it's foundationally critical. And that if those relationships are disrupted, it produces wounds that are deep and potentially irreparable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Not specifically. No, not any more specifically than what I just laid out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Yes, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Well, there's another explanation to there. I mean, because there's also the high likelihood that children who end up in a position to be adopted come from families with genetic histories that... predispose them to disruption. And so that, well, those are the two possible sources of the outcomes that you described.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
How much is attributable one to the other, that's a very complicated thing to sort out. But I don't think it bears directly on your, it doesn't bear necessarily directly on your fundamental argument that there's additional consequences. Well, and we do know, to be more precise in your, in responding to your question about studies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Well, we actually do know there are studies that have been done on maternal disruption. First of all, we know that prior to the 20th century, the one-year mortality rate for children who had no mother in orphanages was 100%. They all died. And that was changed by a woman nurse, a female nurse, and a researcher whose name I can't remember. Her name was Fat Anna, and she had a ward in Germany
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
where the children didn't die, or at least all of them didn't die. And the investigator, whose name I can't remember, went to Germany to see what was going on there. And the only difference he could see in the ward was that the nurse would take the babies out of their crib and carry them around on her hip for some amount of time every day.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Katie sits on its advisory board. And one of our fundamental principles is that healthy psyches and healthy societies are made possible by the establishment of healthy child-centered marriages. So you'll see how we
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And that amount of direct contact was enough to entice them into life. And then there's an immense literature that was, founded most profoundly by this animal researcher named Jaak Panksepp, who looked at the effects of maternal deprivation mostly on animal behavior, and it's cataclysmic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Maybe also everything that we know about the mother. Like, you described yourself earlier as an evangelical Christian, and I've spent a lot of time looking at the imagery of Mary, right? If you think Mary is the archetypal female, you can make that case. That's a reasonable case to make. But the thing about Mary is that Mary isn't an individual. Mary is mother and infant. And I think that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
the human female nervous system is actually adapted to the mother-infant dyad and not to the best interests of the mother. Because women are differentially sensitive to negative emotion, which makes them suffer more. And so you have to ask why. And one answer to that, and it's not the only answer, but one answer, and I'm sure at least it's partly true, is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Women sacrifice their own emotional stability and happiness to be there as alarm systems for their infants. And that's how tightly wired they are together. And so it could easily be that the proper image of woman, in for a penny and in for a pound, let's say, the proper image of woman isn't individual woman the way it is individual man. It's woman plus infant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And that now you agree with that, do you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
argued and how we laid out the facts and the opinions Katie's very articulate and well informed and she's a tough contender and so if you're interested in how you navigate your marriage and your children and how you might orient yourself in the world in relationship to your attitudes towards such things then this is the podcast for you So, Katie, let's talk about kids.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Do you know of any data that isn't biased pertaining to that? Because you clearly have a sample bias problem. That doesn't mean that the problems that your people are communicating aren't real. But it doesn't allow you to specify. Because what you'd really want is a random sample of children with two moms and two dads. And that's going to be a small sample to begin with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And you'd want to see if their attitudes towards their parents and their life differed in any important way from the norm, or maybe even differed in any important way from the experiences of the adoptive kids that you described, because maybe that would be a more appropriate control group. And like, that's a pretty tough study to do. And maybe one's been done. I don't know of one.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But you have your chat groups.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Do you know of any data that isn't biased pertaining to that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Well, and you can imagine how difficult it would be to even to publish a study that showed negative results.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Your career as an academic would be over. The research journal that published it would be pilloried like there'd be homophobic hell to pay on every bloody dimension. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
What's that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Start by telling everybody what you do and why.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
By a lot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
By a lot. Like step-parent presence is unbelievably, unbelievably, an unbelievably massive risk factor. It's really quite terrifying.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Very, very solid researchers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Let's move to practicalities, if that's okay. If there's other particular areas of... concern that we should delve into. Divorce, for example, I'd be happy to do that. I would like to talk to you about divorce, actually. But tell me about your practical strategies. What exactly does your organization do? How widespread is it? What effect have you had? What are your plans? Flesh that out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And maybe in a way, too, that enables people to determine if they would like to help or or whether they could help, and if so, how? So tell me more about your organization, about what you're up to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
You and Klaus Schwab.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
That's close.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
That is it. You'd think that would be an argument that would be music to the ears of the typical leftist, right? Because that is, in principle, the fundamental principle. the fundamental orienting point of someone who stands for the oppressed and the poor, which is in principle the classic leftist stance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And it's also the case that you are, in a way, objecting to the commodification of children, which you would also assume would be an attractive thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
principle to those on the left who are anti-corporate commodification although that seems to be a commitment that's honored mostly in the breach when it comes to let's say pharmaceutical companies and reproductive freedom right because that that freedom comes with commodification as we've seen in the case of Planned Parenthood for example
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
So you said... that if you prioritize the natural rights of children, you obtain victory in the proper direction in the culture war. And so that would, say, put a stop to power-mongering for the sake of hedonistic gain, which is really, in many ways, how I see the LGBTQ power nightmare. It's the acquisition of power to prioritize...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
sexual identity and sexual gratification, though the entire identity structure is predicated on sexual identity, and so that's obviously associated with sex, and that's associated with free sex, which of course doesn't exist and is certainly not something that's in the best interests of children.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
But it also seems to me that not only, let's say, by prioritizing the rights of children, so the interests of children, the natural interests of children, not only Does the culture war sort itself out properly? But you actually serve – this goes back to the beginning of our discussion – the interests of the long-term, sophisticated interests of men and women better.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And so let's wander down that road a little bit, because this pertains to some of the issues that are going to be discussed at the ARC conference later. on February 17th to the 19th in London, which you're going to and I'm going to. You're on the advisory board of that, as you indicated earlier, and thank you for that. My wife is going to be doing a panel there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
I don't know if you're involved in that panel, but if you're not, well, you're going to be involved in similar enterprises at some point, and you're doing that all on your own anyways, so... See, we watched a documentary by one of the people who's going to participate on involuntary childlessness. And he laid out, the director, writer of this documentary, laid out some very stark facts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And so one of them, maybe the starkest, is that the typical 30-year-old woman in the West is now childless. More than half are childless. Okay. And we already know that one in three couples at the age of 30 have fertility problems. And so that is defined as being unable to conceive within a year of attempting it and trying to conceive. Okay. So by 30, it's one in three.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
So let me ask you about that, you know, because That idea of self-interest and that self-interest is, say, at odds with the long-term interest of children, is actually predicated on a pretty narrow view of what constitutes self-interest. Because my suspicions are that in a society that's properly constituted,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
His data indicate that 50% of the women who don't have children at the age of 30 will never have a child. So that's one in four women is now destined to childlessness and that 90% of those eventually childless women will regret it. And so we've doomed one in four women to a solitary existence for the last five decades of their life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And I can't imagine what kind of cataclysm that's gonna be when those women are 70 and older because they'll have no one to speak for them, right? When they're most vulnerable and least economically productive. So, you know, of course, in Canada that we've turned to government-assisted suicide as a partial solution to that problem. And I think that's the fifth leading cause of death in Canada now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
It's something like that. Tens of thousands of people. And we're expanding that, of course, to people who are in economic distress, people who are in who are having psychological problems like depression. Virtually everybody who's seriously depressed is suicidal, by the way, because they believe themselves to be a burden.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And so, okay, so anyways, the issue here I think at hand is the degree to which the interests of children and the interests of the true interests of men and women align. So we know that men are likely, they have a proclivity for antisocial behavior and substance abuse, and that tends to ameliorate around the age of 25 or 26.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
They desist, most of them, and the reason for that is they take on responsible jobs or they get married. So men grow up when they get married, and well, they grow up because, well, they have to civilize themselves enough so a woman can stand having them around, but also in preparation for having children. And then What do you think that having children does for women?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And why do you think that we lie about all of that to young women all the time, constantly?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And with a psyche that's properly integrated, the interests of children and adults truly align, but they align over the long run. And so what sacrifice didn't so much self-interest as narrow, selfish, hedonistic gratification in the moment self-interest. Immediate interest. Exactly, exactly. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
So one of the things that we're wrestling with at ARC is identity in a digital age. And that's the topic that you just very eloquently raised. expanded upon from a religious perspective. And we're trying to do some of this in the most practical possible manner.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And so one of the questions that my wife is trying to address at the moment is, well, she's trying to investigate the nature of femininity and not from the postmodernist or feminist perspective, let's say. what does it mean to be female and how is that distinct from being male? And this is a very complicated problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Right, well, that's an important point to make because it's a big mistake that modern people make to identify their self with their hedonistic whims. Because that isn't their deepest self. Their deepest self, I would say, their most profound self, their best self, is the self, it has to be the self that's aligned with children. Because, well, how could it be otherwise?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And one of the ways to make that practical is to lay out something approximating a timeline. Like the timeline, as you've pointed out, there's an implicit timeline for women in modern society now and the implicit timeline for men.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Ambitious women, let's say, is establish yourself as an independent creature between 20 and 30 so that you don't have to depend on a man, prioritize your education and your career, which is a very weird thing for lefty progressives to be telling young women, since in principle they're opposed to the corporate kleptocracy, and yet insist at the same time that women should bow down to it and serve it during their youthful years, which is a paradox I just can't reconcile.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
The problem with that, as you've pointed to already and as we've discussed, is that the window of reproductive opportunity for women is actually pretty damn short. It's about, it's a maximum of 20 years. And practically it's less than that. I would say optimally it's more like 10.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And then I've thought, I've kind of tried to think that through arithmetically too, because what that means for the typical woman, I think, and this is for the typical high functioning, attractive woman, is that she probably only has the opportunity to assess about five partners. You know, if it takes you—if people are actually interested in you, which is not a given, how long does it take to—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
investigate a relative stranger to determine whether or not they're a suitable partner assuming that's what they want and i think you're fortunate if you do that five times in 10 years like that's that's a stretch goal and so you have to solve that problem pretty early and and maybe we need to be more pointed it's like you know the victorians believe that a woman should be married by
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
22, something like that. I think that was threshold for old maid. It was something pretty young. That has a harshness about it, let's say. But so does being involuntarily childless at 35, by the way, right, which is the fate of one in four women now. So it's also the case, interestingly, that women live about seven years longer than men.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And that lands us back into the, well, is it better that the child exists or not, argument.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
You know, and so you could imagine you could just have that seven years for your little kids. Because that's, you can have, you can do a pretty good job with little kids, making them their priority for seven years. So if you're thinking this through,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
If you were setting up an optimal life course for a young woman in an advisory capacity, like, how do you view the role of a young woman in her, let's say, from 15 to 19 and then from 20 to 25? Let's break it into five-year periods and tell me what you think.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
I mean, if we were fundamentally at odds with our children, we'd be fundamentally at odds with ourselves. And there's no survival, and certainly no happy survival under those conditions. So...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
So let's see if we can figure out what it means to organize ourselves and our societies around the long-term interests of children and make the presumption that that would be best for men and women, by far, all things considered as well. Is that reasonable?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
So let's talk about dating a bit more because you talked about the civilizing effect of women and the role of the alluring quality of women and beauty in that. And there's definitely, that's the calling aspect, but there's a conscience aspect too that I think is worth highlighting that's relevant to young women. So...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
There has been a series of recent studies on the personalities of people who prefer short-term mating strategies. And so that would be hookup culture. And that's a variant of a widespread biological strategy for reproduction that varies on one dimension, which is... Investment versus no investment, right? Human beings are high investment reproducers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
But some human beings prefer a relatively low investment, high investment strategy. And those are people who... Keep your daughters away from them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
But I want to explain why.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
We know why now. We know why. Because the personality structure of men who prefer hookup culture has been delineated. So the men who prefer no investment sex are Machiavellian, so they use their language to manipulate. They're psychopathic, so they're predatory parasites. They're narcissistic, so they crave unearned social status, and to cap it all off, they're sadistic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Right, so one of the things that the sexual revolution did, free love, one of the things that the free love revolution did was hand women over to psychopaths. Right, this is not good. So the other thing, I'm curious about this with your daughters. Well, the other thing that women do for men is, put limits on their psychopathy and their narcissism. Well, that's part of that civilizing process.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
But the limits aren't so much, they're partly that beauty and that alluring quality, but they're also partly hell no, right? Because one of the things I've discussed with my wife, for example, you tell me what you think about this. I think almost all the status that women have
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
granted to them from men like let's say at least in the domain of romantic entanglement and reproduction comes from the woman's ability to say no the ability to stay say no is actually a status marker and that's especially true if the person who's pursuing you is relatively high status male because what you and women you know they're they're hypergamous they tend to mate up
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
across and up hierarchies. And so then you ask, well, what status does a woman have if she's pursuing a high status male? And the answer is she has whatever status is granted to her by her ability to read, to what? To stand inviolate against his advances. That's a marker of her status. And so there's a limit setting there too that's crucial.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And it's certainly something that men, there's no doubt that that's one of the ways that men test women. You know, now you could say, well, if I say no, and that might especially be true at a college that's 75% girls and 25% boys, if I say no, I'll never see him again. But the right attitude towards that is if you say no and you see him again, you should never see him again.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
You should be glad he's gone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Well, there's nothing just about attention. There's nothing but attention, right? Attention is everything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Give him what his whims want.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Right, because you're serving the lowest part of him, right? And I don't mean that in some sexually prudish element. I'm saying that... Sexual desire itself is a short-term gratification-seeking mechanism, so to speak, and it has to be integrated into a personality that's forward-looking and future-oriented and social.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And if the relationship degenerates to the immediately sexual, then it serves no one's Medium to long-term interests. Certainly not society's interests. Certainly not children's interests. Not least because it tends to culminate in abortion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Okay, well, thank you very much for talking to me today, Katie, and for helping us get to the bottom of the, what, the metaphysics of the rights of children, I suppose, and to place them in relationship to the rights and needs and wants of adults. And those aren't the same thing at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
I understand that the conversations that you had at ARC, at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, we had a convention there recently, will be available to everyone. And so if those of you who are watching and listening found this conversation useful and compelling and helped you
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
further your ideas about the roles of men and women and mothers and fathers and children in families and in broader society, then you can check out Katie's contribution to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Convention. At that,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
we've made focus on family, long-term, monogamous, committed, heterosexual, married, child-centered couples focus because we do think that, well, that's best for children, it's best for families, mature adults, and it's a relationship that provides the foundation for a productive and abundant society.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
And so, well, there's something in that to annoy almost everyone, but it still happens to be the truth as far as we can tell. Thank you very much for talking to me today. We'll continue on the Daily Wire side. I think I'll talk to you about divorce and family policy and the costs to marriage under the current legal circumstances. Maybe we'll talk about no-fault divorce, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
For everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention to the Daily Wire for making this podcast possible. That's much appreciated. To the film crews here in Calgary, Alberta, and in Washington, D.C., thank you for your contribution. And... On to the Daily Wire side!
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
So why did you become obsessed, let's say, with developing yourself as an advocate for the rights of children? And then there's a question that's intelligently allied with that, is that what makes you believe, what gives you the conviction, or the delusion for that matter, perhaps, that you are entitled to and able to appropriately speak for the best interests of children, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Because that's what your skeptics, obviously, the people who are skeptical about any mission such as yours, are going to make the case, like the postmodernist types always do, that you're just masking your own self-interest with you know, putative care for children and pushing, let's say, a conservative agenda using, yeah, yeah, using your love for children as a camouflage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
So how did you get interested in this first? Like, when did you start to become aware that this was a problem? And then I guess you need to justify your stance and say why, tell people who might be skeptical, you know, why you think that what you're doing should be regarded as credible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today and sit down and talk to Katie Faust. Katie is an author. She wrote Them Before Us, published in 2021, Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City, 2023, and Pro-Child Politics Online. Katie is the founder and president of an organization called Them Before Us. And she advocates on behalf of the intrinsic and inalienable rights of the child.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
When did that happen to you? What years was that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust
I went to a talk by University of Ottawa, Janice Fiamengo. who was an English professor at the University of Ottawa and who realized, who was a progressive, and who realized while lecturing that the things that she was saying were hurting the boys in her class. She could see it. And it was really at that moment that she became a serious scholar. And she's become, I don't know anyone else,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Last year, Daily Wire Plus and I released a fantastic series on the origins of Western culture entitled Foundations of the West. The series had a tremendously positive impact. Because of this, the Daily Wire and I have decided to share the first episode with you free of charge. You're about to watch episode one.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Yeah. That's the Jerusalem stone. And there must be strict building codes in Jerusalem. Everything has to be made up. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, so it gives it a homogeny. Yeah, it's really nice to see that, you know. It makes it feel like a place instead of this. Just hodgepodge. Yeah, which is every modern city now. Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
I see the cap.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
That's what I was told the other day. Cats are quite something.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Absolutely. Well, you see that extending itself was particularly in Protestantism, where everything's become propositionalized.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
So what that would mean is in the absence of a shared drama, which would be embodied, then you can't tolerate propositional deviance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
It also might be that if we differ propositionally, we start to differ in terms of our actions so much that we can't inhabit the same space. Exactly. And that would always be the unspoken issue. It's like, well, if you disagree with me on this, what else do you disagree with me about? And how do we know that's commensurate with living together?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Western civilization rests on three mighty pillars, Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Jerusalem offered a morality based in the spiritual world. Athens concentrated more particularly on the logos revealed in the material domain. Rome offered the advantages and perils of power, empire, and reach. I'm joined on the first part of my journey by the redoubtable Ben Shapiro.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Yeah. Well, that's good because that also means you know when you're being good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
People find it surprising that the oral traditions are conserved and that the texts are conserved, but the alternative is even more hard to believe, which is that, like, scattered small human populations are stunningly creative enough to modify the texts, and they're not. You know, creative people are actually very rare.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And so there are periods of time in the Egyptian dynasties where the archaeological record shows no technological transformation whatsoever for 1,000 years. And Egypt was extremely dynamic by archaic standards. And so the truth of the matter, too, is that the older a story is, the more likely it is to be way older than that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
So, because like in a tribal society, the rule in a tribal society is nothing changes for 50,000 years. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
We discuss the origins of the conflict between, and eventual integration of, the spiritual with the scientific and material. The history of Western civilization begins in Jerusalem. Hmm. That's the cemetery there, eh?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
One of the things that to me lends historical credence to those sorts of stories is that it doesn't exactly show David in a positive light. So what kind of propaganda is that? Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Yeah, definitely, definitely. And that happens a lot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
So people would have carved this out of the rock?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
All pits are the same. Pretty much.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
One of the things that's so interesting about this archaeological dig is that People are using the techniques of scientific archaeology to revitalize the interpretive narrative. Because you see the truth of the story revealed in artifact, which is so cool. You were commenting earlier that people have lost faith in Jerusalem, let's say, and are starting to lose faith in Athens too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
That's the Mount of Olives. Oh, wow, this is amazing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Maybe because one cannot exist without the other, not in the West. The fact that we had to turn to the object to revitalize the narrative at this time, well, it makes a certain amount of sense conceptually, but it's also quite a striking phenomenon. So yes, this was real. These things happened. whatever real means in a context like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
In it, Ben Shapiro and I discuss the lasting impact Jerusalem has made on Western culture, bridging the gap between man and God. The rest of the five-part docuseries is available exclusively on Daily Wire+. There you'll find all episodes, as well as additional bonus content. I traveled alongside my esteemed colleagues...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
We're in Jerusalem because the Jews converged on the idea that the central reality of the world was something like an animating spirit. Where's the Garden of Gethsemane?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things that does keep you going through catastrophe is the faith that something can be rebuilt from the rubble.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
There's probably no difference between the emergence of monotheism and the spread of civilization. You know, because people might say, well, why is it so necessary that there is a God? The answer to that is because there has to be a central animating spirit. And then you might ask is, well, why does there have to be one God?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
No matter how hard the communists try, you mean, to obliterate the past and build the new man.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
This is that idea of a foundation stone too, is that if our perception is hierarchical, which seems to be the case, you either have a foundation stone or you have Fragmentation. Those are the only options. Right. And we know what the psychological consequences of fragmentation are. There's two. Anxiety, because it marks fragmentation. Like anxiety occurs when you have too many pathways forward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And hopelessness. And the reason you get hopeless is because if you don't know where you're going, No positive emotion can mark out the path, because positive emotion specifies movement forward on a path. And so if there's no hierarchy that unites, you get fragmentation. And if you get fragmentation, you get anxiety and hopelessness. And that's that. There's no getting around that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
That's what those systems are there to mark. And so that's why the monotheistic impulse is so interesting, because it's an impulse to... unify everything, and to make it hierarchical in the most fundamental sense, right? It's like, well, does it hit a pinnacle?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And the answer is, well, to the degree that it's hierarchical, effectively, then it hits a pinnacle, and then the question is, well, what should, this is the question, right? What should be at the pinnacle, or what should be the base? Those are two different metaphors. So part of what the biblical corpus is trying to do is to take characterizations of the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
the positive patriarchal animating spirit, that's a good way of thinking about it, multiple characterizations of that spirit, and then to make this insistence by aggregating the books that all of those manifestations of those somewhat... Discriminable spirits are manifestations of the same central thing. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
So you could think that the central animating spirit for Noah is the intuition that calls you to batten down the hatches when, if you're wise, when a time of crisis is coming. So that's a spirit that might seize you. It might seize multiple people at the same time, and it's a spirit you could attend to and allow to inhabit you or not.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And then in Abraham, God is the spirit that calls Abraham out of his hyper-security and wealth, in some sense, into adventure. Right. And then the juxtaposition of those stories, that's metonymy, the juxtaposition of those stories implies that spirit A and spirit B are in some sense manifestations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
So the Bible is doing that continually. And it's not... propositional, it's not attempting to explain God as like a meta-object in some sense, or an object in the world. It's an animating spirit. It's a pattern of perception and action, and not the pattern of the thing that's being perceived in the object. It's the pattern of perception itself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And the answer is because you don't have unity without worshiping the same God. You have to be doing the same thing. You have to be possessed by the same spirit. The eternal Jewish question is, what is the proper nature of that central animating spirit? And the Bible is actually an answer to that question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And so then when you have the union of Athens and Jerusalem in some sense, you say, well, fair enough. God is the pattern of perception and not the object, but the juxtaposition would say, the pattern of perception is seeing a reflection in the object that's similar to the pattern of perception itself. And that would be something like the logos.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
The logos of nature and the logos of the spirit unite. And that's Western civilization. Modern people often ask themselves, why do I have to study history? Well, you're a historical being. You need to know who you are and where you came from and what you stand on, why you think the things you think, what is the appropriate manner to live. Those aren't optional questions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Well, they are because you can fail to answer all of them, but then you live in a chaotic, desolate, nihilistic wasteland of anxiety and hopelessness. The alternative is to place yourself in the proper tradition. And you have to understand what proper tradition is, and part of that understanding is to start to grapple with the complexities and realities of those traditions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And I'm not saying slavery isn't wrong. The issue is, why is it wrong?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Well, right. No, it's exactly that. It's not that at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
We think that creative innovation is the standard mode of human being, and that's just not true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
All the geography here is high resolution. Everything is marked. Everything is half territory and half map. Everything. This is no wonder there's so much conflict.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Yeah, well, it's kind of reminiscent of Manhattan that way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Yeah, right, right. It's crazy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
It's even true of European history. Most of the places we think of as old in Europe are like 300 years old. Right, exactly. 500 years old.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
through the ancient cities of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, cities that have shaped Western culture. I invite you to watch them. My hope is that when you do so, you learn something deep and profound as I did about our Western ideals. It was a very worthwhile journey. On to a celebratory note.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
There's a dispute here about what should sit at the center of the world, and the world in this situation is in some real way a map that's laid on the territory. And a map is a conceptual device that people use to orient themselves as they move forward. a map has to have a center point to allow for orientation. And there's dispute about what the center point would be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
I guess it's partly because everybody has to share the same map in order to get along in the same territory. And so you have different groups of people will insist upon a different mapping structure. And if two groups that are isolated come together, they have different maps. And all of this is a dispute about what the center point of the map is going to be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
So I was mentioning to Ben, you see the dome here is made of gold. and symbolically gold is associated with the sun and the dome is the, you could think about it as the sun rising in the morning and one of the reasons that the sun rising in the morning would be at the center point of the map is because the axiom that orients the map is something like
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
The primacy of consciousness, to worship the primacy of consciousness and to have that consciousness emerge on the border between darkness and light is proper symbolically because consciousness actually emerges at the border between order and chaos. the foundation stone is here, the Holy of Holies was here, the place where Jacob Gladys stretched up to heaven, that's all the same idea, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
That's all the same center axis of the world, right? Around which everything rotates and which orients us toward... The axis money points to the North Star, so that gives you orientation at night, right? Because you can look up and you can see a fixed point in heaven, which is the North Star, and you can orient yourself completely in the world as a consequence of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
What does it mean for consciousness to be primary? Well, you can't have something without there being awareness of it. Even when we talk about our cosmological models extending back 14 billion years, we say there was a big bang. And what we say, sotto voce, right, in a soft voice is, if someone was there, this is what they would have seen. But of course, there was no one there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
I'm pleased to announce that episode three of this series, Christ, Center of the World, with my good friend Jonathan Paggio, has been nominated for Best Documentary at the 32nd Annual Movie Guide Faith and Values Awards Gala. I'm told that the nominating committee pays special attention to content that inspires and gives hope to our society at large.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
The reality itself presumes an observer, an experiencer, and consciousness is that experiencer, and we don't know its nature. It's an irreducible mystery. Now, the nature of that consciousness in the Judeo-Christian tradition is conceptualized and symbolized as the word, right? It's this process that brings ordered existence out of the void, the chaotic void, into clarity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
You know that Athens and Jerusalem idea as the twin pillars, they're not exactly twin pillars. They're one pillar stacked on top of the other. Because the Jerusalem part of it is the narrative that's been coming down from the top. And the Athenian part of it is the realization of the logos of the material structure that's rising from the bottom. And Western civilization meets right in the middle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
That's exactly what we aim to do with this series, and to be recognized for that is a great honor, for which I and the entire Daily Wire team are truly thankful. You can watch the entire series on dailywire.com slash Foundations of the West. Give it a go. It might propel you to greater adventure. Thank you for your time, attention, and your continued support of my work and of Daily Wire Plus.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And partly what we're trying to puzzle out right now really in our culture is the further details of how the narrative and the material interpenetrate. And you see that here because this place is a place where the narrative and the material are fighting to interpenetrate and it's multiple narratives competing to map the underlying territory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
there's too many potential stories in the material substructure. Right, that's the plethora of facts. Right. Right, so you need an orienting structure that descends from above to extract out the proper facts from the material. Right. And that's the union of Jerusalem and Athens. That makes perfect sense. Yeah, well, and that's all converged, all the cognitive science is converging on that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Revelation, I would say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
The scientific insistence that you could have a narrative-free encounter with the facts and orient yourself is simply not true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Well, if you destabilize, what happens is if you destabilize a fundamental, differentiated, functional narrative and destroy it, it gets replaced with a low resolution, catastrophically oversimplified narrative that's just devastating. That would be what happened as a consequence of the death of God. Right. Well, the differentiated, historically instantiated, unifying narrative collapsed
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
And then what happened? Power. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. One pixel stories. Everything's power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Hello everybody. I had the opportunity to sit down in person today with Warren Smith. Warren was a teacher and he recorded himself having a discussion with a student about a rather contentious topic. Turned out to be JK Rowling's reactions to the trans propaganda insanity that plagues our culture in 15 different ways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
How are the kids responding to this? Well, you're describing a program. It sounds to me like you're describing a program that was successful and that grew. Is that the case? And the kids, were they responding well to what you were teaching?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
That was followed up by a Piers Morgan interview, which I guess was the secondary explosion in the two explosions that rocked his life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Okay, so let's talk about that. Tell everybody about what the video was. We'll clip it into this so that people can see it, obviously. But describe why was it that you were posting videos and how did this particular one come about?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Which was also quite distressing, as you might expect, given his level of commitment to his teaching profession.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
I wanted to talk to Warren because I really liked the video that he made. I thought it was remarkable for its sanity, especially given the time. And I was very curious about everything that had happened to him in consequence of the viral explosion of what he had done as a teacher. And so we sat down for an hour and a half to talk all that through. The consequences of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And there was no, students loved it. So how much recording of your teaching were you doing in your classes in the- Not much. In the second school?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And how many teachers?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Mm-hmm. Had you done a lot of videos in the build-up to the video that got so much attention?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Walk us through your response. What did you know about? You mentioned watching the Harry Potter, an analysis of Harry Potter I had done. Let's walk through it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
saying what you think when the situation is set up to reward you for maintaining your silence. Join us for that discussion. Hello, Mr. Smith. Thank you for coming in today. It's an honor. Thank you. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, I probably came across you the way most people did, and I guess that was with the video that went viral that Musk shared, eh?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Well, that should be... Use of the technology isn't independent of the content, especially if you're doing video recording.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
You can't learn to edit footage without having something interesting that you're interested in because there's nothing to edit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Well, that's especially relevant with regards to editing because you want to clip and cut so that you get to the gist of the matter. And that means there has to be something there to focus on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Well, obviously also the technique that you were using, so to speak, insofar as it's a technique, is asking pertinent questions. There isn't any difference between that and teaching people how to think, because if you're thinking, you're asking yourself pertinent questions, and you're certainly not going to learn to do that without an example, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
the whole point of being a teacher is to, or at least one of the main points of being a teacher is to teach people how to ask themselves pertinent questions and to model that. So, Why do you think... So it's interesting that it was the conversation about J.K. Rowling that went viral.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
She certainly caused an endless stream of political upset in the UK and turned into quite a stunning advocate for free speech. And she has, in fact, focused on this trans issue, which is... likely the most bizarre issue that's ever dominated the political space, as far as I can tell. And I guess one of the things that your video demonstrated was the pertinence of that issue to students who
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
have questionable reasons for being concerned about it to begin with. Like, why do you think that this particular student was possessed by the belief that transphobia was a thing to begin with?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Lots of people who are watching and listening won't know anything about you. So why don't we start from the beginning? What was it that brought you to public attention? And tell us the story about your teaching career.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Because that's also a bastardization of words in the most manipulative possible way, to take a clinical terminology, phobia, and then to append it to objection to anything that the person who's objecting, or what would you say? I can object to something. If someone's irritated about that, they're going to medicalize my objection and describe it as a pathology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
That's what happens when you use the term phobia. It's unbelievably manipulative. And I would say the radical leftists are stunningly good at that manipulation of language. But now you have a student who... is objecting to JK Rowling on the basis of transphobia. And you're asking questions about it. Now, is that part of what also got you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
It's obviously one of the things that made this go viral, but was it also one of the things that got you in trouble?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
So there was worry about potential public attention. Well, you can understand. I mean, the school that you're operating in is insanely complex. There's absolutely no way to run a school like that that isn't full of trouble, obviously, because the whole school is built on trouble.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And so I can imagine that the people who are running the school would be nervous about that because I can't possibly see that there's any way that you could do it right. That's a good point. Well, you mentioned that teachers come for one day and they leave, or they come for a week. It's a system designed to collate chaos and to try to produce some sort of order.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
But it seems to me to be entirely impossible. Pretty much no matter what you do, you're going to do something wrong. It's a fair point. I mean, how the hell could you possibly avoid it? That's a good point. Every single one of those kids is a pitfall. And I don't mean that in the... That's not a criticism. It's just... A reality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Well, the system's designed so that every single kid that comes there is... Rubble on stilts. And so, and then you're also going to have the case that many of the teachers who are going to apply are going to be people who are applying to that school because it's a last-ditch possibility.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
I miss it. I think what drew my attention to your video and also what made me want to talk to you is because I think the reason that that video went viral and drew the attention of the people whose attention it did draw was because you were obviously very sane and careful in an insane situation discussing something utterly preposterous. And it was all of that contrast that made it fascinating.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
I mean, the fact that that issue even arose in a school is ridiculous under anything approximating normal times. And yet you handled it
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
carefully and thoughtfully and you did it in a way that was obviously of educational benefit to the students and that none of that should be surprising actually like the manner in which you addressed it but it's also the fact that that same response to that question is surprising in the education system that made it go viral and so because we're so accustomed to seeing
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
17, okay. So that's just an indication of the state of the school system in general.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Of course, of course. Of course, exactly. Well, you said that as you investigated with, you know, some relatively... elementary, but also eminently sane questions, that revealed itself very quickly. He was just spouting the cliches of the moment, right? The radical cliches of the moment. And was he doing that because he thought he should?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Like, what was your impression of the reasons for his questions?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
No one's above it. No one's above it. We radically seek, we seek to establish consensus rapidly and radically. And if there's no challenge to the consensus, that's good because it means that we're unified. But it also means that we can build a false consensus. And that happens continually. And I mean, that's one of the dangers of so-called populism is that it's a false consensus, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
It's a consensus of the moment. It's got no staying power. It can't iterate across time. The antidote to populist consensus is something like alignment with eternal tradition, because it stops the proclivity for rapid consensus from pathologizing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
I mean, it's actually a good thing, all things considered, because if human beings couldn't reach agreement on most things rapidly, all we would ever do is fight. But... The danger, of course, is a false consensus. And that's obviously what you were questioning. And you did it in an extremely thoughtful manner. Okay, so you recorded that. Your students edited it? How did it end up edited?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Right, so this was just standard practice on YouTube. You have to be very careful about what you upload to YouTube, as I found out in 2016. Right, because it's an unbelievably powerful technology, and you never know what's going to happen, as you also found out. And so, okay, so you uploaded this, and I presume you thought nothing of it. Okay, what happened? Lay out the story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And you've been doing this anyways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
How did you know that? Why did you conclude that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Yeah, well, you know, there is clinical evidence for that. If you ask people, older people, to look back on their life and to list their regrets, it's much more common for them to have serious regrets about chances they didn't take than failures that they that they experienced.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
The thing about failure is a weird thing, you know, because my experience in life has been that nothing I ever actually did failed. It didn't necessarily produce the result that I intended when I intended it. But if it was a genuine effort, And I followed through on it. There was some benefit that emerged in consequence of that that justified the effort.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And sometimes that was quite a long time later. And I think that kind of stands to reason in a sense, too, because the alternative explanation would be that you could... You could try to do something difficult well and see it through, and there'd be zero impact of that. Well, that makes no sense. You're going to learn something.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Maybe what you learn is how you could have done it better or how you could do it better, but you're going to learn something. Okay, so what kind of regrets had you had in the past? If you don't mind, maybe you can share some of those, maybe not, but what came to mind? My...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
You don't necessarily know who you are, you know, that's the thing. it wasn't exactly chance that made the video go viral, right? You obviously touched on a nerve and in a manner that people admired. Tell the story of the video and talk about your work too. You were working as a high school teacher when you released that video.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Right, right. Okay, so you saw the same thing beckoning there with the Piers Morgan opportunity, obviously, that you... And it is the case. I mean, this is the case in life, is that... Not now and then. Something, many impossible things come together and a door opens. And if you don't walk through it, then the probability that those impossible things will come together again is zero.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And so, okay, so you decided to go on Piers Morgan. So what happened?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Well, it's also not the least bit obvious that you're required to ask for permission. Besides that, this is something that everybody who's watching and listening should understand. The answer to, if you go to an authority, especially a bureaucratic authority, and you ask for permission, why wouldn't they say no? All there is in it for them is risk. And perhaps jealousy and fear.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
So why would... Of course they're going to say no. Why wouldn't they say no? And so then you think, well, how do you deal with that? The answer is, well, you're a free agent. What's the indication that you're required to ask for permission? No, in fact, if it's not illegal or if you're not violating your, you know, an explicit... And really, I mean explicit contract. It's like... Don't ask.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
It's hard enough to convince yourself that you should do it, much less convince someone else who's also not going to benefit from it in the least. You know, the other thing to understand, too, is that entrepreneurial motivation is relatively rare. It's only about one person in 50 who wants to start their own business.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Tell people the story of the video and how it came to be and why it was recorded to begin with. Sure, sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
I really learned this when I started selling to corporations and dealing with middle management people. The fundamental motivation of 90% 5% of people in middle management is never to do anything that makes them get noticed for any reason, good or bad. They want to do their job. They want to do it in complete and utter invisibility.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And if an entrepreneurial opportunity comes along, they say, that's risky. No. And you might say, yeah, well, you know, there's an immense potential payoff. rather low probability, immense potential payoff. That's the entrepreneurial game. And their attitude is, I don't want to be this marked zebra that the lions cut out of the herd. You know that story?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
So you know the zebra story, I'll just tell it for people who might not have heard it. So zebras in principle are camouflage, but it's kind of a weird idea because they live on the veldt and they're black and white striped and you can seriously see a zebra. So the question is, what's the camouflage? And the answer seems to be that it's against the herd camouflage because there's no single zebras.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
There's herds of zebras. And so when the zebras are milling about together in a herd, because the black and white stripes are edges, if you look away and then you look again, you can't tell what zebra you were looking at. Now, the reason that's relevant is because lions can't organize themselves to hunt a zebra unless they can identify one. Okay, so you don't want to be an identifiable zebra.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
So biologists discovered this because they were studying zebras and trying to figure out how to watch a given zebra so they could figure out what it was up to, but they'd lose track. So they would either clip their ears with a plastic clip or put a dab of paint on their haunches. And as soon as they did that, the lions killed them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
The lions could mark out the zebra and organize their hunt, and then that was a dead zebra. And you hear that in the natural world that lions often cull the herd and they take the weak and the unfit. It's like, no, they take the identifiable zebra. And the instinct of many, many people is do not be the identifiable prey animal, right? And so if you're gonna ask for permission,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Even permission from yourself in an odd way, the default answer is clearly no. And so, and obviously so. And so you're going to have to step outside the herd. Now, the question with human beings is, is there advantages in stepping outside the herd? And the advantage is, well, you get noticed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And that's not so good if there are predators around, but it's also the pathway to extreme success, which has massive potential payoffs. Now, I'm not saying that everybody should pursue that or that everybody should want it, but that's the landscape of risk. So you decided you'd already learned enough in your life to know that you don't casually throw away spectacular opportunities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Yes. Yeah, well, it's a kind of self-betrayal, right? Because you had the chance. You had the opportunity. Yes, that's what it was.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Yeah, right. Definitely. Definitely. Well, it's bad enough when someone else gets in your way. But when you get in your way, it's like... Well, how do you... More or worse. Definitely, definitely. You know, it's also useful to know, too, that I think this is extremely useful, is that you have to deeply understand that no risk is, first of all, not desirable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
You actually don't want a risk-free life. You want the risks you voluntarily take, and maybe you want high-stakes risks you voluntarily take. But even more fundamentally, there is no no-risk pathway. You're screwed no matter what you do. And that's terrible, but it's also freeing. And so once you know that there's no safety, well, then you can take the most interesting risk. And why not?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And then maybe you don't need safety. Okay, so you decided to go on Piers Morgan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
charismatic likable kind and very well he's a funny guy he's he's kind of like simon cowell he's in a way you know you can see in america's got i mean they both worked on america's got talent and britain's got talent you can see if cowell likes somebody he's really on their side if he doesn't like them he's really not on their side and morgan is like that and he's also the sort of guy who
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
He'll give you the benefit of the doubt. But if you start playing games, then you're in serious trouble. So he obviously started by giving you the benefit of the doubt. He was probably, you know, reasonably pleased with the video that he had seen and thought, you know, that he would...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Oh, yes. I see. I see.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Yeah, well, it's a very good thing to know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Yeah, well, it's also surprising because it belies the, what would you say, the merely objective sense of the real. A situation is the same no matter how you encounter it. That's an objectivist perspective. No, a situation is radically different depending on how you encounter it. Kicking and screaming is very different than...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
voluntarily even if the stressor is the same and there doesn't seem to be any particular limit to that which is why of course all the heroic quest archetypal narratives are voluntary confrontation with truly terrible things otherwise the quest has no real deep significance okay so the pierce morgan interview that went well that was a success and what was the consequence of that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
All bureaucratic entities will always say no to anything that's question related. Obviously.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
There's only risk, right? There's only downside. Of course, yeah, this is partly why I think research has been almost completely stifled in universities. You cannot do risk-free research. Period. It's not possible. You can't just do the next safe thing. It's too obvious, first of all. And there's no excitement in the discovery. It has to be a risk and the risk has to be real.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
19, 2019.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And, you know, we don't want to be too cynical about this either. You know, it's not obviously the role of bureaucracies to take risks. Right? It's the role of bureaucracies to set policies and strategies and to abide by the rules and move forward. Well, you see that in Harry Potter too, because there's a weird dynamic constantly in the Harry Potter stories that Rowling is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
2019. And then you were looking, what kind of jobs were you looking for? In education. In education. And you landed a job as a high school teacher. As a high school teacher.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
She was great at this because Harry's band, like they're academically oriented and they're upward striving, but they're always rule breakers. Right? And the grand wizard at the top of the ladder is, He put all the rules that govern the educational institution in place and knows what they are, but is perfectly happy that Harry and his, you know, band of ethical miscreants break rules.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Right, right, exactly. And lets it go anyways. Yeah, well, that's that constant... Paradox, it's really the paradox of, it's really the paradox of something like liberal versus conservative. You know, the conservatives fundamentally, I hate to call the conservatives the bureaucrats because in our weird political world, things have all got flipped around.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
But generally speaking, the conservative types are much more rule oriented and much less entrepreneurial. And so, but there's a dance between those two that's absolutely necessary. And there's no getting rid of the conflict. Because most of the time you should follow the rules, but some of the time you definitely shouldn't.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And wisdom is the ability to, and daring, that's the ability to tell the difference. Well, so you went on Piers Morgan. And so I don't blame your administrator for, Objecting. Although, you know, what you would have hoped for is something like a little elbow saying, you know, you shouldn't have done that, but good work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Oh, yeah, good. Good, good, good. That's the nod and the wink. Yeah. Every institution that's going to function needs that, right? Because you need the people who impose the rules and the structure, but they need to always be able to say... Well, yeah, there was a reason for not following the procedure in that particular case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Yeah, well, that's a pretty good response. I mean, it's not surprising that they looked into it. I mean, one of the things, too, that's worth thinking about, too, is that When you're called to account for yourself, when you break a rule, for example, and you upset the normal course of the routine, it's not such a bad idea to present the people who are now cast into doubt and confusion with a plan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
So for example, I had the same experience as you did essentially when I put up the first videos that brought me to public attention surrounding Bill C-16. It was really the same sort of experiment that you ran. I'd put up a lot of my lectures on YouTube and they'd got a moderate amount of attention and a reasonable amount for the time because I started putting them up I think in 2013 on YouTube.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
which was very early in YouTube development. But they hadn't attracted anything like viral attention. And then this idiot virtue signaling bill was put into law by our idiot virtue signaling prime minister. And I made three videos objecting to that and some university policies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
That was purely experimental because I was still playing with the technology and wondering what use it was and seeing if I could lay out a structured argument as well. I edited it quite a bit, actually, that one. Interesting. And that went viral. And then I was called...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
into the principal's office, so to speak, at the university, which kind of surprised me to begin with, but not exactly because they didn't know what to do with this. And unsurprisingly, I mean, whether the dean, for example, had any right to say anything whatsoever with what I was doing with YouTube in my home, in my free time, is a completely different issue.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
But I suggested to them that the University of Toronto could do the daring thing and have a debate on free speech. And so that was a concrete plan, right? And they were looking for something to do. They didn't know what to do, and that is what they did, for better or for worse. And that was much better than many of the things that they could have done.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Now, it still worked out that it became impossible, really, for me to keep my position there, although I did for about a year. But it is also the case to know that if you're going to step outside of the bounds of normal propriety, doesn't hurt to have a plan, especially for the people that you confuse because they also don't know what to do and they're going to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
hunker down and they're going to dissociate themselves from you if you are deemed to be a risk, especially a contamination risk. And so, and the topics you were discussing, especially on the rolling side would have that element because of course,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
to the degree that the propaganda surrounding the idea of transphobia is effective, you can easily be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. But you weren't. You weren't. That didn't exactly happen in this school.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
in Canada, the people that I'm in trouble for in relationship to my license. It's like there are rules, apparently, about the way I can conduct myself, but the only way you find out what those rules are is by being accused of breaking them. It's not like they're written down, because, of course, they can't be, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And so that's also a terrible thing, and this is something that's happening in our culture very rapidly, and apparently is something that de Tocqueville...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
um prophesied back in the mid-1800s that if totalitarianism came to democracies it would come in the form of essentially mid-level bureaucracies invisibly making everything daring illegal right and so and those open-ended policies are precisely the sort of thing that they're like They're like comprehensive traps.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
This is an unusual world that I don't... Yeah, well, you could see also, though, you could actually understand, I would say... the reasons for a contract like that at a school like that. Because so many possible things could go wrong that the rules arguably would have to be more comprehensive to cover any possible occurrence. Okay, so what happens after Piers Morgan?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Okay. Okay. So you did continue to make and post them. Did they also attract more attention after that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Too much exposure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Heroes in classic stories often become contaminated by the unknown. So even in the Lord of the Rings stories, you know, the fact that Frodo and Bilbo both know Gandalf makes them somewhat socially unpopular in the Shire. Right. Even though they're associated... Well, they're associated with magic power. Yeah. And you might think that's all status. It's like, it's not all status. It makes...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
It makes the people who want to operate only within the confines of the Shire, let's say, very nervous. And rightly so, because that is a disruptive force. And so... Even when Bilbo, yeah, comes back from his initial adventure, he's regarded with suspicion for the rest of his life. Admiration, yes, but also suspicion from the more conservative forces, you might say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Yeah, well, you can also understand that biologically with the zebra analog in a way. It's like you don't want to be too close to the target of the predators. This is a deep biological instinct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
You know that the reason that fish exist in schools and herbivores exist in herds is because if you're with a bunch of other animals of your type and a predator attacks, the probability that it will be you is... proportionate to how well you hide in the herd, obviously. So to the degree that you live life as a prey animal, then you're going to hide in the herd.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Now, the question you might ask yourself is, do you want to live life as a prey animal? And human beings really have that choice because We're very strange creatures. We're predators, but we're also prey animals, and you can take either of those pathways forward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Okay, so you said now that there was some social consequence afterwards, but that things more or less went back to normal. What happened with the students? And then eventually your job at the school did disappear. So walk us through the aftermath of this flurry of attention. The students...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Yeah, that's good. So you had dotted your I's and crossed your T's with regards to student involvement.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
It could be troublesome.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Well, yeah. The funny thing, too, is that there's no benefit from a pure analysis of risk, but... what you did with those videos definitely, in my estimation anyways, brought credit to the school. So, you know, with more imagination... what you accomplished could have been very useful to the school with more imagination.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Yeah, well, that harkens back to something that we discussed, is that the default presumption for the vast majority of people is no amount of success justifies risk. Right, and then people ask themselves, well, why am I not successful? It's like, well, because your threshold for risk is zero. And zero isn't a threshold of risk that's associated with success. So if you're...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Presumption is, I'll only be successful if I take no risks. That's the bargain. Then you've foregone success. And the thing about that that's perverse is that that's a risk. Because we actually don't know how much success we need in order to reconcile ourselves to life. Life is very difficult. And so you might need a fair bit of... Actual success and opportunity to offset the difficulty.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Otherwise, it's bitterness and regret, which is not a good pathway. So, you know, I made excuses for the administrators at your school, let's say, for being taken aback and said that it was understandable of them to... assume that you were going to merely abide in a predictable way by the rules.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
But had they been more entrepreneurial and more open to the idea of opportunity, then the school itself could have benefited dramatically from what you had accomplished. But that also would mean that in the best of all possible worlds that you might have been able to present them with a plan to make that easy for them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Well, it's an opportunity to have a much more realistic video editing program. Oh. It's like, well, now we're going to make things that people will watch.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Right. So you think he would have run with it? Yeah, yeah. Tell me what happened. Yeah, I can put a button on it. Yeah, what happened with your job? Like you said, you know, you thought that the most likely consequence would be that they just wouldn't renew your contract. Yeah. And when did you come to that conclusion and how did you reconcile yourself to that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Well, especially with your broader ambitions, you know, because you were interested in the broader sense in... Connecting with an audience, a filmmaker as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
All right. Well, look, I think I'm going to end the YouTube side with that. But I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side is delve into that in a little bit more detail. It'd be interesting to continue the conversation about why your school made that decision, what possible role HR might have played, and how these things could be managed in general.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Because while people who are watching and listening are going to be interested in, well, what strategy should you adopt if you dare to take risks within the confines of an organization and find yourself running afoul of the authorities. And I want to know exactly how you thought this through.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
So for everybody who's watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire site for the remainder of this conversation. And for now, Warren, thank you very much for coming in today to talk about this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
So, you know, part of your story is... what happens when you mess with an incredibly powerful technology, right? Because you're living your normal life and you're playing with YouTube. I think that is the interesting story. Oh, definitely. It's like, look the hell out, because this is a global communication platform that you're publishing on. And so how do you deal with that? Well, no one knows.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
No one knows. Hence the discussion. So thank you very much for that. Absolutely. Thank you. And to everybody watching, listening, the film crew here in Manhattan today, thank you guys very much for setting this up. And ran very smoothly technically, and that's always good. And join us on the Daily Wire side, everyone, for the continuation of this discussion. Bye-bye.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And you were hired at that school? With COVID going on. Did you have any experience at all dealing with behaviorally challenged kids?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
the video, which was remarkable, I would say, for the good sense that Warren brought to it, the calm demeanor, the intelligent questioning of the student, really the professional way that he handled the discussion, which is now so rare among those who purport to be teachers that the mere fact of its professionalism was remarkable in and of itself, enough so that it went viral.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
So why'd they hire you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Yes. What proportion? I would say 80%. Yeah, well, that's what you'd expect if you brought behaviorally challenged kids together because they'd be much more likely to be boys. How old?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
So let's just get this timeline exactly right. So you got your master's degree in 2000, at the end of 2019. And then you had a teaching job in a relatively... Rigged as a run-of-the-mill high school. Right. And COVID put an end to that. And then as COVID lifted, you found a job in this school that was for behaviorally challenged kids.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And it was a very mixed bag of behaviorally challenged kids, which is also a very interesting administrative decision. I mean... The idea that you would put all the kids with all the problems in the same school is a strange idea. It's not like problems constitutes a category. It's not a category at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
And then, while you alluded to this as well, it isn't the least bit evident from the evidence that putting aggressive kids together is anything but a really bad idea. Yeah. There's immense clinical literature demonstrating exactly that. And you said you ended up with the aggressive kids. Okay, but you also pointed out that you taught there for four years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
was shared by Elon Musk, among many other people. And as you might imagine, that produced an explosive effect on Warren's life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
People are fat and diabetic at rates that are criminal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
38%. I don't think I ever recovered from reading about the fact that marketing people built the food pyramid, right? Not scientists. How the hell did we get there?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
They're so diabetic. Like, it's really bad. You know, you see on, if you go on X now, you see these videos of people on the beach in the 1960s and the 19, now people smoke too, but regardless of that, like when I was a kid, there was like one kid who was plump in our class and we thought he was fat and like he would be well within the normal range now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And so something, yeah, I went home to my hometown Fairview last Christmas, and I went to see a hockey game, 17-year-old hockey players, you know. Hockey players are in pretty good shape. Hockey's a hard game. It's very aerobically demanding. And after the game, the guys invited me into the dressing room to talk because they knew me and knew who I was.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And so I went in and I saw three or four of them without shirts on. And I thought, Jesus Christ, you guys, you look like 45-year-old men, you know, like breasts. Guts, it's like no one that I knew looked like that when I was 17, certainly not the bloody hockey players. And I thought, man, if the hockey players look like that, what are the rest of the kids look like?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
So something's gone seriously sideways. Okay, so you suffered from all sorts of health complications when you were a kid and then a young adult. So that's very reminiscent of my daughter, by the way, as you know. And you started perusing the scientific literature. You had a little bit of background in that because of your preparation as a debater.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And so you had to teach yourself at least to some degree to think like a scientist, which is to contrast the evidence, to learn to read the journals as well, which is not a simple matter. Most scientists can't read the journals. So yeah, okay, okay. And so, and then you had this bout with appendicitis. And so, okay, let's continue on from there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And I know that people are fat and diabetic at rates that are criminal. And so even though This isn't something I ever hoped I would be interested in, even that's become necessary. Now, I went to Washington a while back at the invitation of Ron Johnson to partake in a hearing there. And I met Vani Hari at that. roundtable at that discussion. And I had a chance to talk to her today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Why do they do that? I mean, look, Europe is very overregulated, right? In many, many ways. And America is less so, and it's much more competitive. Right. And so excess regulation can really be a problem. And now I know that has to be differentiated, and I'm not taking issue with the case that you're making.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
But I'm also curious, it's like, if they're selling these products in Europe and in Canada, and they're free of, what would you say, chemicals that people have, whose utility people have questioned elsewhere, why do they continue to do it in the US? Like, what difference does it make fundamentally?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
She's the food babe. And she has a large following and is very interested in the pathologization of the American food system. And for personal reasons, as well as professional reasons, let's say, some of which are akin to the issues that my daughter faced. And so she came in today. And we had a chance to talk about, well, the hearing that we participated in jointly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
So you think it's just a matter of... It's just a matter of economics.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Yes, well, there's also utility in producing food that doesn't spoil as long as you don't poison it because spoiled food is also poisonous. So it's not like this is simple. Like I've had a lot of mixed feelings about all of this because as you pointed out too, when your parents immigrated to the US, there was the immense advantage of free and abundant, or cheap and abundant calories.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And that's not nothing. Like not starving is a very good thing. Now, not starving and becoming obese and diabetic Well, that's not an optimal solution, and that's definitely happened too. I mean, I was shocked 25 years ago when I drove across the U.S., especially in the northern states, in the more rural areas. God, you know, we'd go into towns where...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
and into little shops when we were driving across where Tammy would be the smallest person by a lot, including the nine-year-olds. You know, it was just unbelievable. And so I could tell at that point that something was off and it's got much worse since then.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
But these problems are so complicated because it is necessary for the fast food companies to produce something approximating a uniform product and to work against spoilage. And there is the complex problem of over-regulation that plagues the Europeans, that's for sure. But when I look at it, I try to look at the most important data first.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
So when I look at the climate change problem, for example, I think the planet is 20% greener than it was 20 years ago. That's this data point. All the other data points are this big. You just ignore them. It's like, no... semi-arid areas have got much greener. That's the end of the argument, as far as I'm concerned. And then with the health thing, it's like, well, everybody's fat and diabetic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Everybody, virtually. You know, for example, this is a terrible thing. So, you know, when they measure your blood sugar, they adjust the blood sugar norms by age. Well, this is a terrible thing because it means that when you're 40 and you get your blood sugar tested, you're normal. But if you were 20, you'd be diabetic. So what does that mean? It means you're diabetic, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Because you shouldn't age norm that particular measurement. And so that's terrible. And you undoubtedly do know. Insulin resistance is a disaster and too much sugar is really hard on people. That's why diabetics lose their limbs. It's really bad. It's really hard on your brain. And so this is definitely bad.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And then, you know, I came to all of this kicking and screaming to some degree because I always thought that people who were concerned about food, over-concerned about it, were neurotic and really needed to find something better to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
when I saw the rising rates of diabetes and obesity, and then also learned about the food pyramid, it's like, oh, I see, this is a complete bloody catastrophe and a real, like a rat's nest and a Pandora's box. And well, you found that out when you were in your 20s. All right, so what did you conclude? Like what did you just, you changed your diet and then that's a personal thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Right. Well, you're a debater and extroverted, so that's not surprising.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And then we talked about her career, how she moved from consultant to food activist and rekindled that more recently at this hearing. And we walked through a discussion of the major problems that beset the American family, let's say, especially children. Children and mothers, I would say, probably are most effective, although men are not far behind for obvious reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
It's got a catchiness. It's funny with marketing. It's a tricky thing, right? Because Food Babe has the, it's a, what would you say? It isn't a serious name.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Yeah. Well, I think. It has the advantage of popular appeal and the disadvantage that it isn't a serious name. And so those are competing advantages and disadvantages. And obviously it worked. And there's no sense talking unless people are listening. And of course, that's always the marketing conundrum. So, you know, I don't have anything more to say about it than that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
So, okay, so that's what you started. And you started blogging.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
On what platform?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Oh, yeah. And so when was that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Okay, so you're an early blogger. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
You gave up watching television?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
That's an interesting comment for everybody watching and listening. If you're looking for time to do something that you want to do, you can always give up something that's not particularly useful that you are doing regularly. And that giving up TV, that was probably good for you too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
I've got to say, Fruit Loops should be down. No, seriously. Well, of course, right? I knew that was not a good food when I was like four.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
I'd like, so Froot Loops were fine, but really?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
With Froot Loops, for example, like, are you concerned about the fact that it's basically sugar?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Okay, well, that's the major concern. Right, but- What is it about Froot Loops particularly that if you have to focus on what you think isn't acceptable, what aspect of it is? You talked about the chemicals, but it's also a highly processed carbohydrate. That's right. It's radically sugar-
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Oh, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
We had a chance to walk through all that and to start to puzzle out, well, the nature of the problem. tremendous rise in obesity, tremendous rise in diabetes, catastrophic consequences of the transformation of our food supply. And we talked about that and we talked about what might be done about it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Cheetos are very Froot Loops-like food. It's like they stain your fingers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Oh, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Oh, yeah. They're a pretty sketchy item as well, all things considered.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
How do you... Diving into the scientific literature in relationship to nutrition is... It's just a rat's nest. I mean, any clinical studies are... Clinical studies are impossible, right? I'm amazed that anyone ever does a clinical study on anything because it's so hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And then on the nutrition side, you have the problem of an immense number of variables, right? So most of the studies that you read that the press publicizes pick one...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
variable among a thousand and would make the claim based on a correlation that you know x causes y and the probability of that is zero most of the time as far as i'm concerned which is why there's been so much rubbish published about nutrition How do you know that you have any ability even to parse the literature? I mean, I understand your claim.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And especially given the radical transformations that are upcoming in the new Trump administration and its surprising synergy with this Make America Healthy Again movement. So if you don't want to be fat and stupid and diabetic, This is not a bad podcast to listen to. So, Vanny, we met in D.C.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Your claim is that, at least in part, that European countries, Canada even, have taken a different approach to the regulation of extraneous chemicals, colorings, for example, in food, and the U.S. is lagging behind that. That's an interpretation. But that's predicated on the idea that the Europeans know more about what they're doing than Americans do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Now, their obesity rates are quite markedly lower in Europe, which is very interesting, right? I mean, it's not obvious why either, because that's even true in places like Italy, where the diet's pretty carbohydrate-loaded. And so it's not easy to figure out exactly what's going on. And so it's possible that the differences in food constituents are contributing to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
How the hell you'd ever parse that out is beyond me. But you seem relatively confident in your ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I'm kind of wondering why, because it's really hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Yes, that's another thing. See, I don't know much about that, so we should go into that a little bit too, because that's a fact that I've only stumbled on, I don't know, maybe it was only since that Senate hearing, you know? Yeah. Because that came to light there, and I thought, oh no, that can't be true. We have the food pyramid catastrophe, and...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
So the food pyramid catastrophe is the fact that marketing people built the food pyramid, right? Not scientists. And they justified it scientifically. And their own scientists warned them, their own consultants, that they would produce an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. And they ignored that. And that was the Department of Agriculture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And I guess it was out of that, I hope I have this right, that subsidies that made corn syrup dirt cheap came about. And I suppose that had the advantage of cheap calories, but like everything and its dog has corn syrup in it, and that seems to be a relatively bad idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
So why do you trust the Europeans more than the Americans on that front?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Well, so- One of the things that I've thought through with regards to this carnivore diet that my daughter and my wife have been instrumental in pursuing is that it radically simplifies the playing field, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
I mean, and I'm trying to think just strictly as a scientist in that regard, if you have a chronic illness or a set of chronic illnesses and the etiology is unspecified, which is generally the case for chronic illnesses, the first thing you might want to do is simplify the landscape, right? Now, you can't simplify it more than with a meat-only diet or a beef-only diet even.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
That's the simplest you can possibly make it because you can live on beef almost indefinitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Yeah, so why don't you talk about that event a bit and how you got invited and what you thought of it and why you were there. Just tell the story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Yeah, right. Or the Inuit, for that matter, although they don't eat beef, but they eat meat. meat and fat fundamentally and they live on it indefinitely and you can do that and so that way you eliminate well a plethora of potential food
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
related symptoms and then all the interactions between those foods and if it works well then you can experiment slowly to see if there are particular things that you're sensitive to you know or that because what we've seen with the carnivore diet you know they say the plural of anecdote isn't data which is a cliche I really hate because the plural of anecdote is hypothesis actually if you know a thousand people tell you something it's like maybe
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Maybe we can test it and see like something might be there. It's not proof, definitely. Proof is hard to come by, but it's the beginnings of the process of investigation. Well, it's clear to me that the carnivore diet radically reduces obesity. I mean, I had a friend who recently started it. Again, this is an anecdote, but I've seen this with many, many people. He lost 30 pounds in one month.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
He's like 35. You know, 30 pounds. How the hell do you do that? That isn't even possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
You know, because obviously that wasn't all fat. Right. I don't think it's even metabolically possible to do that. Maybe it is. I can't see how. But in any case, so what was that? Reduction in fluid from inflammation, maybe, at least to some degree.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
But the typical response that I've been told by people is... People seem to lose about seven pounds a month, which is still, that's a lot, man. Yeah. That's like world shaping. That's 84 pounds in a year. It's a lot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And so, okay. So your take is that you simplify, right? That's right. Trying to go down to more basic foods.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Yeah, well, people say you eat around the edges of the supermarket.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Well, that's the next thing. Okay, so this is where we're going to talk about the tobacco companies. That's right. Okay, so... Tell me what you know about the tobacco company's purchase of the food industry. And just lay that out, because I don't really understand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
So that's a very serious allegation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Let's take it apart. Yeah, yeah. So it's easy to verify whether or not the tobacco companies bought the food companies, right? That's a matter of public record. But the next parts of it, like, why do you think that's true? Like, I understand that they bought the food companies. And the fact that they were tobacco companies and they bought the food companies is suspicious, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
But then to say after that, that they consciously planned to use their scientists to addict people to drugs fast food, let's say, or processed food. That's a different thing. So let me push back on that a little bit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Tell me what you know about the tobacco company's purchase of the food industry. So I've been dragged kicking and screaming into the issue of nutrition, I would say. And some of that's for personal reasons, and some of it is for intellectual reasons, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Right. So... Okay, but how would you distinguish delicious and easy from addictive, right? Because it's not surprising that food companies would attempt... Of course, they're competing to... Now, that's the thing, is that are they competing to please you or are they competing to addict you? And then the next question is, why are those different? Like, because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
The hallmark of addiction is maximization of short-term pleasure. Now, it becomes pathological when the maximization of short-term pleasure interferes with medium to long-term thriving, right? That's not a good combination.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
But it's a fine line. the line between addictive and pleasurable is, that's a thin line. And so if I'm a food company and I wanna make a product that's competitive, I'm gonna try to make it as delicious as possible and as easy. And then,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Yes, yes. Well, and the criminal dilemma for that matter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
38%. And the age range?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
38, yeah, that's terrible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Why not hold mothers responsible? Because one of the things that I think has happened too is that, and I don't know how to make heads or tails out of this, is that obviously what's happened is that food preparation has been taken out of the home and transferred to companies. Now, the advantage of that is that it's, Fast and cheap.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Right? And easy. And there are advantages to that. Let's not forget. I mean, when people were preparing, this would be particularly true of your home country. I mean, how many hours a day would women be spending preparing Indian food in the traditional way, like in a village? Like all day. Right, right. All day. Yeah. 100% of the time. Yeah. Now, and they were using...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
a variety of different spices and a variety of different fermentation techniques, and they're very complex. Like, I know that one of the reasons that modern bread isn't as edible as traditional bread is because we use fast-rising yeast, which speeds things up, which is a plus, because we like time, but it also...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
It's less effective in breaking down the proteins, and so they're harder to digest, etc., etc. I mean, all these traditional ways of making food were time-tested. Fermentation, for example. Now, we've substituted industrial ease for home food preparation. Now, the upside of that is, well, that's four hours a day, five hours a day that are freed up primarily for women.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
So then why go after the companies and why not go after the home and say like... Because if you're going to solve it, you need to solve the crux of the problem.
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519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Well, you can say the same thing about social media. Oh, totally. I know, I know. You have industry-sized enterprises focusing on maximizing short-term pleasure for commercial gain. That's right. Well, that's rough. And that is, it is like... It is a hard thing for the average family to compete with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
It's hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
All right. What were the consequences for you of the Senate hearing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Yeah, well, you know there's nothing more corporate-friendly than the left-wing media.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Like, how the hell did that happen? You know, it's so weird. I don't understand the current political situation at all because 20 years ago, if you stood up against the giant corporations, the left was all over you, regardless of who you were. The mere fact that you were standing up against the giant corporations was sufficient to validate you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And now, I can't really think of anything that should appeal more to people who are on the left than individuals standing up against gigantic corporations run by like cigarette companies. Yeah. Right. But no, that's not. Now, obviously, that has to have something to do with advertising.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
The Atlantic is done.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
The Atlantic disappeared five years ago. You know, I used to read it all the time. It was a great magazine. And then something, I think it changed ownership. It did change ownership. And I think that's what did it in. It became a propaganda magazine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And it was... Were you surprised that it was Ron Johnson who did this? I mean, this is the other thing that's so weird. It's like, okay, so it's the Republicans and more the traditional Republicans, not even the Trump types. The traditional Republicans are calling on food activists to go after the large food companies run by the cigarette companies. It's like, how the hell did we get there?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Well, luckily, it's just part of their demise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And so- Have there been companies, I mean, you talked about Chick-fil-A and they worked with you. Have there been companies that have reached out to you other than Chick-fil-A? to improve the quality of what they're offering. I mean, I know what's happening with Robbie Starbuck.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Now, it's quite frequently the case that when he reaches out to a company now, particularly, they make changes very quickly and adjust their... I mean, he said, when I interviewed him, he said that a lot of the executives didn't even really know what their DEI people were pushing fundamentally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Which doesn't surprise me in the least because what people don't know about DEI and its philosophical roots could fill many books. And one of the things about corporations that's a positive, I mean, there's many things about corporations that are positive, but they do tend to be quite responsive to the public. I mean, corporations that aren't responsive to their customers disappear quickly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And so you'd think there would be a pathway to cooperation on this front. And especially given, it's so weird though, eh? Obviously, the MAGA crowd have decided they're on the Make America Healthy Again side, which is weird, but it happened. And that's half the American population, at least. So you'd think there'd be a massive marketing opportunity there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
I guess part of the problem is that likely the corporations don't know how to market except through the legacy media. And the legacy media leans left in this weird way that's pro-giant corrupt corporation, which is also impossible to understand. So, you know, how much of it is that they just don't know, that they don't know what to do?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Oh, definitely, especially right now. Yes. Because the tide has obviously turned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Oh, and also to not market to half the American population, right? That's right. That's a big mistake. Big mistake. So what that also means is that companies that do pivot will have a definite advantage and quite rapidly. So, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
That's a good place to end this section, I would say. So for those of you who are watching and listening, you know we continue our discussion for half an hour on the Daily Wire side. And I think what we'll talk about there is what... what could be done with the new administration and the new health initiatives that are being put in place?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
I mean, the Trump administration people are sorting all of this out now, trying to figure out how to rejig the food system, for example, so that it doesn't produce the catastrophic consequences that we can see now. And so I think we'll get Fannie's
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
opinions about what she hopes the Trump team might do, like where's the biggest bang for the buck, so to speak, in terms of re-evaluating how we prepare food and eat it and what we serve to our children. So that's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side. So you could all join us for an additional half an hour there. Thank you very much for coming in today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Yeah, what a strange thing to have happen, eh? It wasn't anything that you'd predict in relationship to Trump.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Came out of the blue. It's very weird.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And so- Yeah, well, it's not obvious how much power the president actually has, right? Right. Because the system is very complex and there's weird things wrong with it that are that aren't obvious at all until you understand them. You know, like congressmen, this is something that just stunned me when I found it out. Congressmen spend about 28 hours a week fundraising.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
They can't do that in their own offices. So they have these ratty offices in the outskirts of DC. They basically act like telemarketers. That's a dismal way of spending your time. So they're spending, and if they don't do that, they're not funded by their parties. And then they spend a bunch of time campaigning because they have to be elected every two years. And then they travel.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
It's like they don't have any time to do their job. And it isn't a job I would take, you know. So that's a big problem. And it's only one of a multitude of problems. And, of course, the president's term is limited. sometimes to four years. And four years, you know, it takes two years just to figure out how to do a complicated job. Two to three years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
So there's a lot of things that have gone sideways. Okay, so let's go into this. Your past as a food activist. Okay, so why did you do that? Like, how did that happen?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
I had reason in my own family to look at nutrition very carefully, because it turned out that my daughter, who had a very serious illness, Michaela, was reactive to a very large range of foods. And that was rather a shock to discover, you might say. And I've been experimenting with diet for quite a long time in a radical way, far more radically than I like. That's the first thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
So asthma was one of them?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
What made you determine or discover that your health problems as a child were food related?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And then I would have ever expected to do. And that's had some pretty positive consequences. And I've heard from many thousands of people positive tales about the consequence of their shift in diet. And I've interviewed people like Chris Palmer who's a psychiatrist at Harvard who's been using dietary manipulations to treat intractable psychological disorders.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
What was your educational background?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
And— Is that why you got hired as a consultant? Did you do well in university as well? I did. Because it's hard to get hired as a consultant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
You mean like the whole center of the grocery store?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
I don't think I ever recovered from reading about the food pyramid.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
519. If Another Country Did This to Our Citizens, It Would Be War | Vani Hari
Really? It was like, really? No way. Not possible that it was... A marketing lie from beginning to end. When you first started talking, I thought, you know, I have qualms about activism as an entity. And there's a lot of, like, nutrition is such a complicated topic. It's like, there's so many ways this can go wrong. Why are we concerned about it? And then I think, people are so overweight.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
As you pointed out, after the horrors of World War II, there was a consensus around the world that we should never forget. The problem with never forget is that you can't remember what you don't understand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So Britain now is in a place where we can't- Diversity without unity is indistinguishable from chaos. Exactly. And the world is a multicultural place and it's rife with conflict and war. And there's some naive presumption that if you bring people from all corners of the world, to a particular geographical locale, they'll leave all the strife behind them and only bring the fruits of their culture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And that's, well, I guess partly what we're trying to do in this discussion is to determine why people believe that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Well, this is partly why we've introduced a stream into ARC that's specifically focused on identity, and it's also associated with our concern about the better story, narrative identity. And so the classic Catholic alternative to You could say that what the open society people did was replace tyranny with chaos, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
However, the upshot of that has been that Winston has become a emerging star in the alternative media landscape in the UK, which is behind the curve in the alternative media department, but coming on quite strong with people like Constantine Kissin, for example. And Winston's become a very astute, or has shown his ability as a very astute political commentator and cultural analyst.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So remove all the unifying institutions, nation-state identification, for example. There's something like an assault on marriage. There's an assault on the family. There's the assault on local identification. It's like all those layers of social identification get associated with something like oppression and fascism. That would be a variant of the patriarchy critique, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
The patriarchy, which as far as I can tell, is something like any form of hierarchical social arrangement, is in essence oppressive. Now, the problem with that hypothesis is that Something can become oppressive when it degenerates without being oppressive in its essence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And I think part of the reason that people are so lost now, and perhaps part of the reason that the ARC movement has become successful is that people understand that the destruction of those hierarchical identities has left them bereft. So, and I think that psychologists have actually contributed to the problem in a major way, sort of regardless of their philosophical orientation, because
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Clinical psychologists, including the famous psychologists like Freud and Jung, say, had this implicit idea that mental health was something that characterized the individual, that it was something like brain health, except it was the psyche, and that you carried it around inside you. And so that means if you were a well-constituted individual, you had a well-organized mind, but that's not right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
It's seriously not right because it eliminates the fact of our social being in a profound way. Freud sort of thought of the human being, let's say, as a collection of id-like drives and instincts, right? And that those were suppressed by the superego. So it's sort of, it's almost a, it's a combination of the viewpoints of Rousseau and Hobbes. Hobbes would have said,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
The human being left to his own devices is an internecine war of conflicting impulses. There has to be a Leviathan to impose restraint on that. And Freud thought the same thing in relationship to the superego, as the superego is an inhibitory structure, and that the relationship between the natural human being and the constraining elements of the social world is inhibitory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
You inhibit aggression, you inhibit sexuality. And that's not true either. And it's not true in a very profound way. If you are married, your sexuality is not inhibited. It's integrated into a higher order structure that's contractual, long-term, and social.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
We know it's not inhibited, partly because in the 60 years after the sexual revolution, the people who are having most sex are married religious couples. So no one would have saw that coming, but that happens to be the case. It isn't that sex is inhibited or that you're you're subject to the patriarchal oppression of marriage as a contractual obligation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
It's that sexuality finds its place in a higher order game. Well, if you're in a marriage, who you are compared to who your wife is starts to become extremely blurry, right? Part of your identity is husband, maybe 30% of it. And then you're...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
The integrity of your psyche, which might be the balance of your emotional function, is actually dependent not on something that's going on in your head, but on the integrity of the relationship, right? If the relationship is well negotiated, then you're not overwhelmed by existential angst and you have some hope. But the dynamic is external. And then you could add, well, children to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And the same thing happens. Now, you're a father. and your psychological health is dependent on the integrity of the social structure. The same with town, the same with state, the same with nation, right? And then you could ask, well, what's all that nested in? And the conventional answer to that is something like one nation under God, and that would be the ultimate superordinate principle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And then the identity becomes the harmony across those levels, it's not internal. And when you lose all that, which it, now that is something you'd lose if this open society idea is taken to its limit, because all of those social arrangements become part of the fascist patriarchy and have to be dispensed with, but that leaves people with nothing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And we spent our discussion today talking about, well, partly about the conference, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, but more as a means of interrogating
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah, the Americans didn't emerge from the Second World War with guilt. Right. Not really. Yeah. In fact, quite the contrary, right? Because as you said, they stepped in as saviors, so to speak, and quite successfully.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And you did, to some degree. Like, there was that strain of pride in that victory, but it did get suppressed across time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Right, so the glory of the World War II victory for Great Britain was eclipsed by the shame of the colonial enterprise. Some might say something like that. Okay, so you might ask, we could inquire into the nature of national identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Now, I think identity works the same way at all the levels we described, but to the degree that there is a national identity, I think the technical definition of a national identity is... shared participation in the same stories. So one of the things I've figured out, and we're trying to promote this view, let's say, at ARC, because we want to get the story right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Well, the first thing you need to know is that the story is everything. And there's a technical reason for that. And this is why I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment folks believed that you could orient yourself in the world as a consequence of the facts. But the problem with that is that there's an infinite number of facts and combinations of facts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And so you drown in the landscape of unmediated facts. So you have to prioritize facts. And that's what a value, that's what a value, a system of values does. A system of values prioritizes the attentional significance of the facts. So if you go to a movie and you watch the protagonist...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
the relationship between the story that sits at the base of a culture, that necessarily sits at the base of a culture and that provides people with psychological integrity and social unity, and the political structure that is nested within that. And we delved further into that and discussed the relationship between
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
You map what he attends to, what he gives attentional priority to, and that enables you to duplicate his emotions in your own body. And then you evaluate the consequence of that value structure as it plays itself out across time. And the reason we find that gripping is because there isn't anything more important to us than how to determine how to prioritize the facts.
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So a story is a description of the way someone prioritizes their facts. Okay, once you know that, the next question that emerges is what then is the correct story? But even independent of that, it leaves you with another conclusion, which is that you and I share an identity only in so far as we participate in the same story. It's the definition. It's like with your wife, for example.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
You might say, well, what unites you? Well, a shared vision of the past, present, and future. It's a shared story. And you can understand that if you also understand how it might fracture. So one of the... shared axioms of the story might be sexual fidelity. Okay, so that gives you a foundation. Because we're true to each other, all of these other things remain true, right?
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
We understand our commitment to the past, we understand where we are now, we understand where we're going. If you violate that, the story falls apart and, well, the whole relationship is plunged into chaos. There's no identity, there's nothing that's unifying. And so, A culture is the union of people around a story.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Right, right. And that's the same question as what are the core values. Well, okay, so this is an argument that runs parallel to your observation of the consequences of the open society philosophy. So it's a Marxist presupposition that the fundamental uniting story is one of power. Now, we can take that apart. Marx himself...
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the presuppositions of Christianity, or more broadly Judeo-Christianity, and the free, abundant, and productive societies of the West, trying to think through the causal relationship between those two, if any, and to delineate that. And so that's part of an ongoing conversation, you might say, about the reinvigoration of the West on first principles and something that's of...
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actually approached that in a relatively simple and in some ways straightforward and in some ways even accurate manner. He posited that the fundamental dimension of differentiation between people was socioeconomic position. And that is a fundamental differentiator. And it might even be the fundamental differentiator, you know, among many. But that was the Marxist proposition.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And then once you knew that the fundamental determinant of the interrelationship between people was comparative socioeconomic status, you could divide people into the oppressors and the oppressed. You could tell a story about virtuous revolution on the part of the oppressed, and away you went. You had the whole ball of wax, let's say. Now, the problem with that is that
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the basis of socioeconomic differentiation in a non-corrupt society isn't power, it's productive competence, right? So that's a big problem. Now it can degenerate in the direction of power, but it was obvious that Marx was wrong because capitalism ended up being so productive
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because it did free up genuine productive resources, and it was a voluntary game, that the impoverished pulled themselves out of poverty, even though the distinction between rich and poor remained.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah, well, the paradox of what you do about whether you tolerate intolerance, that's a terrible paradox. It's a place where, what would you say, the axioms of a tolerant society start to devour themselves. All right, so let's return to that in a moment. So, what happened to the postmodernists is they took that narrative of oppression by power and they made it multidimensional. Right.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So, in fact, they even deprioritize the economic because if you're white and poor, say, in the US, you don't get any attention from the postmodern neo-Marxist. But they're playing the same. They have the same assumption. Their assumption is that the orienting dimension of the world is power. There's nothing but power.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And Foucault, of course, is famous for this because Foucault denied the very existence of the goodwill that would enable genuine transformative dialogue. His sense was, you have your poor power orientation, and I have mine, and our dialogue is nothing but a zero-sum game between competing powers. competing ethos.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
There was no neutral or transcendent territory between us that we could appeal to and move forward to a higher mode of resolution. That was all delusion or maybe justification of our own power claims. Now, it seems to me, and this is something that I've been working out and I tried to clarify this to some degree at ARC, that there's something that the West has got
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that has got canonically correct, that makes a hash of relativistic claims or multicultural claims. Because we could ask ourselves, what's the essence of civilization? Which is what we are asking if we ask what's the core of our identity or the core of our story. Or if we're asking how we could have unity without the pathology of nationalism or of patriarchy, let's say.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Is there a principle that could unite us Now, power is one. You see that reflected in the mythology in the Lord of the Rings, right? Because the one evil ring that binds them all together is the ring of power. And power does, power can unite, but it's fragile and it requires force.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So it seems to me that the proper story for free societies, so free and voluntary societies, is not the story of power, but the story of voluntary self-sacrifice. And that's antithetical to the claim of power. Let's see, is this a good way of explaining it?
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extreme necessity, particularly in the UK and Europe, and perhaps in Canada and Australia as well. The tide has turned to some degree in the US, maybe, but the rest of the West is in relatively dire straits, existentially speaking. And so we spent our time discussing why that is and what conceivably, if anything, might be done about it. So join us for that.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
One of the things we've noticed, my family and I, as I've become more notorious, let's say, or more well-known, is that people approach me for a lot of different reasons. And some of those reasons aren't so good. They're self-serving, let's say.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
One of the ways we've determined how to distinguish between people who are after their own ends and people who are interested in a productive partnership is that They come with an offer and not a request. The point is, is that the basis of a genuine social interaction is something like an offering, right?
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So if you and I want to establish a relationship, it's a good idea for me to bring something to the table and give it to you. From what I understand, this is how warring tribes in the default tribal condition of humanity started to trade. So what seems to happen, human beings have been around for about 350,000 years, and we didn't seem to get our act together until about 20,000 years ago.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
You might ask what the hell we were doing for the 330,000 years before that. And one answer is tearing down anyone who had any modicum of success whatsoever and fighting endless tribal battles. And so then you might ask, how the hell do you get out of that? Because that's kind of a self-sustaining dead end.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So imagine a tribal group here and a tribal group here, and this group is watching this group and vice versa. And this group sees that this group has some cool stuff that they maybe would like to have and vice versa. Then imagine there's a no man's land of disputed territory between them.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Sometimes a tribe will get the bright idea of taking some of their valuable stuff and leaving it in the no man's zone, just abandoning it. and then retreating. Then the other tribe will come in and take the stuff. Now, they could just take the stuff and leave. But now and then, the other tribe figures out, well, if they left some cool stuff, that maybe there would be more valuables forthcoming.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
But the interesting thing about that initiation, that process, is there's a sacrificial offering at the beginning, right? You have to give something up. And I do think it's that act of giving something up voluntarily that actually defines, well, I think it defines the psyche with integrity, but even more importantly, it defines society. It's not power. It's not power. It's the antithesis of power.
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within the individual and between, yeah. I think we establish psychological integrity by having each of our inter-nessing drives give something up in relationship to an emergent totality. That's what happens when you mature, right? You start sequencing your whims in a way that allows each of them to attain their end, but in some order over some time period in relationship to some goal.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Some of that goal would be the establishment of genuine social interactions. All that's sacrificial. Now, It looks to me like the biblical stories are an examination of sacrifice, like an interrogation of sacrifice. And Christ being the ultimate sacrifice. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Because once you understand that voluntary sacrifice is the basis of civilization and community,
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
The next question that emerges is, well, what's the highest possible form of sacrifice? And that's actually the quest, you might say, that the biblical stories arrange themselves around, because you establish the principle of sacrifice actually with Adam and Eve right at the end of that story, but certainly with Cain and Abel, there's two patterns of sacrifice established there.
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pattern of Abel and the pattern of Cain. But then that's fleshed out as all the stories progress. And in principle, that culminates in the, well, what we construe as the ultimate sacrifice, which is something like a total sacrifice, right? So then you might ask yourself, is it true that a totalizing sacrifice is the basis of social abundance? This is why Christ is the miraculous provider of
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the water that eternally replenishes and the fish that multiply and the bread that doesn't end. The idea is that if you establish the right pattern of sacrificial identity, you produce a society that is endlessly abundant. It's like a meta principle. It's a meta principle of provision. And it's based on the idea of sacrifice. And it seems to me, I think what's revolutionary about our time is that
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So we just spent three interesting days, more or less together, or at least in the same environs, in London at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the second convention. 4,200 people as opposed to 1,500. We had people from 90 countries. What do you think?
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I think we can now understand that explicitly instead of it being buried in our stories.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yes, yeah. Well, that would be something like... You see that also in the biblical stories, say in the story of Abraham with the establishment of the idea of covenant. Yes, exactly. So what happens with Abraham, this is dead relevant as far as I'm concerned. So God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
He says to Abraham, if you leave your zone of comfort and venture out into the terrible world, I'll make you four offerings. One is your life will be a blessing to yourself. The other is, another is that your reputation will become enhanced among your compatriots for valid reasons. The third is that you'll establish something of multi-generational permanence.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And the fourth is you'll do it in a way that will increase universal abundance. And I think those four offerings each speak to the heart of man, you might say. People want status, for example. So what the story does is it stacks It's so interesting. It's so interesting.
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It stacks the developmental instinct, which might be that search for expansive adventure that would take a child away from his home and then turn him into a teenager and then a man. That willingness to venture into the world, it hypothesizes that that's a divine instinct and that its full manifestation will produce the proper result. social ordering.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So it unites the instinct for individual development with the social, the pattern of social interaction that produces permanent abundance. And that seems to me to be right. And so, well, so a national identity in part is going to be a variant of that offerings, right? You're gonna offer something to the community wholeheartedly.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And the consequence of that will be, there'll be an offering in return.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
They pursue power. They pursue hedonism.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Oh, well, thank you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Right, right. Well, we have exactly the same conundrum in Canada.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
I mean, it's so interesting watching Canada's response to Trump's proclamation that our nation should become the 51st state, because one of the consequences of that is that the same Justin Trudeau who announced formally that Canada had no national identity, that we were a post-national state, and that we had no unifying history, nothing but a...
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a legacy of oppression and racism, is now flying the flag, even though he has stated in no uncertain terms that there is no unifying force behind the Canadian project. But there is no difference between that and the kind of fragmentation that makes you desperate psychologically and unbelievably weak as a nation, because there is nothing pulling you together.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
But the fundamental question, obviously, the fundamental question is, Well, what is the proper unifying principle? Yes. Right? And so, you said, for example, that we threw out the nation and even intermediary patriarchal structures after World War II because we were afraid of the proclivity of those arrangements to degenerate into, say, fascism or communism. And fair enough. But...
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Diversity without unity is indistinguishable from chaos. National identity is shared participation in the same stories. The story is everything. And this is why I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. One of the things that you might ask yourself is, how do you stop national identity from sliding into fascist ethno-nationalism? Yes. Well, the American solution to that has been one nation under God. Yeah.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Well, the strange thing is, though, that the Americans only managed that because they were British. Right, I mean, America gave more explicit voice to the principles that English common law, for example, and English identity, for that matter, had already established. The Canadian take on the American War of Independence was always Englishmen fighting for their rights.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
You know, the Americans think about it really as a revolution in quality, but Canadians think of it as, no, it's a return to the Americans of the rights of... the British that they were denied. And I think that's more accurate. Now, the thing about Britain that makes it maybe somewhat different than the US or one of the ways is that that identity
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that unites the many and that is oriented towards God is more implicit. It's more coded in English common law rather than being part of a bill of rights. It's coded in the manner in which the monarchy evolved across time and in the relationship between the monarchy and parliament, but it's there. But still the question is what's at its core.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And this is where I think we can talk about the union between Christianity and the transcendent reality that puts the nation in its proper place. It shouldn't be the nation uber alles. The nation shouldn't be worshiped like God. Well, then the question would be what's above the nation? Well, the idea would be God. And then you might ask, well, what's God?
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Well, the Christian idea is that God is Christ. For all intents and purposes, well, Christ is at minimum, this you could speak psychologically or politically, Christ is at minimum the principle of maximal voluntary self-sacrifice. And that should be the superordinate end. So what that would mean, for example, is that the true king serves the poor, right? Because that would be how power would work.
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manifest itself sacrificially. And you see that, that's part of the Christian drama, is that the king of kings was in service to the lowest of all. And you see that echoed in the Old Testament stories continually too, where lowly people, so to speak, are given their due regard as made in the image of God, right? And that seems to me to be an appropriate principle of sovereignty, like what
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I don't know, you could replace it with the classic vision, like the Roman vision, which would be, if I can crush you, then you're weak enough so that I should. Right, that actually makes me moral. The fact of my power is an indication of my morality. And there's a logic in that. Right, I mean, that's the attraction of the strong man, right?
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
That might be the attraction of someone like Andrew Tate. If I can't hurt you, why shouldn't I? But well, then you think, well, we're not gonna turn to that principle. Well, what do you have as an alternative? the abdication of any sort of authority or power, and then you get nothing but weakness.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
The alternative seems to be something like the inversion of power so that the true sovereign serves the most dispossessed. That's certainly core to the Christian ethos.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah, the open society types prioritize the periphery over the center. That's a classic postmodern move.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
But no, no, I think that's, I think that, and that is a, I've had extensive discussions with Jonathan Paggio about this problem, and it's the problem of the center versus the periphery. Okay, so here's something cool. Original church, the center of the temple is the Holy of Holies, and the priest can only go in there once a year.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So part of the problem that conservatives have perhaps less so classic liberals, is the formulation of a vision. The visionary types tend to tilt in the liberal direction, traditionally, so to speak. And so conservatives do find themselves very frequently playing something approximating a reactionary role
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And that's where the ark was held, and the ark had, I think, Aaron's staff in it and some manna, something like that. And so Aaron's staff would be something like the living staff of tradition.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
The staff that can mutate and transform, but maintain its integrity. So that's like the living force of tradition. And manna is the descent of the food from heaven that nourishes the soul. It's something like that. So then that's in the sacred box, and that's at the center of the tabernacle. Okay, now, then the center is surrounded by peripheral structures, veils, right?
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So the holy of holies is veiled, and then the veils eventually end, and that's the boundary of the tabernacle, and then you have the periphery, which becomes the community. Well, that pattern, that's the pattern of perception itself. This is something very interesting to know, because it's germane to the point that you just made, is that every perception has a center, right?
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and a periphery, and the perception itself is defined by the center. And so like the center for the perception of this glass would be the union of function and matter that makes this a drinking vessel. Now, if I cracked this and there was a piece taken out of it, it would still be a glass, but now it's kind of a monstrous kind of glass, right? It's lost its ideal integrity.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Okay, so if you know that perception has a core, an ideal at the center, that's like Moses' staff, and then it's surrounded by increasingly distal peripheries, till it merges, say, with another perception, there's monstrous forms on the outside, that gives you some sense of the proper ordering of your priorities.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
The central has to be prioritized over the distal, because otherwise you can't even see. Okay, so the problem, part of the problem of the open society concept is, you know, you might say, in principle, you should care as much for the stranger The unknown stranger in a foreign land as you should for your own child.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Well, the problem with that, a problem with that is your finitude makes that impossible. There's no way I can pay attention to three billion children.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Right? I wouldn't have a second for each of them.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So there's no way of distributing my attention equally across the infinite landscape of possibility. So I have to localize it. Now then the question is, well, how best to localize it without ignoring the periphery? And it seems to me that's something like a circle of responsibility, which is the argument Vance made. It's like, well, I can't take care of all women, but I could take care of my wife.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And I could establish the pattern of taking care in my relationship with her, and that would propagate through my children and be an example for the community. And I can't take care of all children, but I could take care of mine. And if I can take care of my wife and I can take care of my children, and then maybe I can take care of some other people in my community, you can expand your
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domain of concern as your expertise grows, but you can't flatten out the bloody hierarchy and say, you owe the same amount to everyone.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
I think part of that's, I think that's part of the problem of the Pharisee So it's the Pharisees who crucify Christ fundamentally. And they do that because he really insults them, really effectively. He says to them, they're the religious hypocrites. So you have three categories of enemy. These are the classic enemies of, what would you say, of the sacrificial ideal.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
They can see when we've wandered off the path but aren't very good at specifying what the proper path might be. Okay, so we've noticed some things as we've run these two conventions. We've observed our speakers. We've had, I don't know, maybe 150 speakers across both conventions and also monitored the social media network responses to our broadcasts.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah, three enemies, religious hypocrites, Scribes, those are the academics, by the way, and lawyers, and they're still lawyers. So the religious hypocrites, they're the virtue signalers. They're the ones who use God's name in vain, right? By attributing to themselves divine motivation when they're only pursuing their own selfish ends. Okay, so Christ tells the Pharisees,
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You put yourself forward as mouthpieces of the prophets, he says. If you would have been around during the time of the prophets, you would have been part of the force that opposed and persecuted them. So that's a pretty vicious insult.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And then he says, the only reason that you portray yourself as ethically virtuous is so that you're recognized in the street and you can have the best seats in the synagogue. And so these are people who are... Pursuing reputational status, so that would be that second offering to Abraham, right? That your name will become renowned among your peers.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
They're gaming the reputational system by claiming divine virtue without making any of the sacrifices. The nature worshipers do that. It's like, well, I'm for the planet. Well, what does that mean from you? Well, I don't have to offer anything. I've got no skin in the game. I'm just saying that my transcendent moral orientation trumps any of your concerns.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
What could be more important than saving the planet? And then I have a pathway to moral virtue that's very straightforward, which is, well, obviously I'm a planetary savior because I prioritize the planet over your children, for example. Right, so that proclivity to accrue unearned moral virtue is a cardinal sin.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And that tendency that you described to prioritize the periphery ties into that perfectly. Right, because I can say, well, look how wonderful I am. And that's what the net zero people do, as far as I'm concerned, on the backs of the poor. It's like, we're concerned about the planet. And so obviously you're a repugnant character if you stand against that.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Right, but it's worse than that, because they're not actually prioritizing those other people. They're using the claim that they're prioritizing those other people, so that's their tolerance, to ratchet up their moral reputation. And so they're actually sacrificing their own children for the sake of their moral status in their community. Look how tolerant I am.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Look how widely embracing the arms of my maternal virtue are. I have the most peculiar child, and yet I'm such a wonderful person. I still love them. And you're right that they'll never admit to that, because if you saw yourself in the mirror and you were that person, you would never recover from that. It's so brutal.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
We tried to bring in very similar legislation in Canada with Bill C-63. Of course, yeah, exactly. Except it's worse, I think. It's on hold for now because Trudeau prorogued Parliament, but Bill C-63- it's part of the Online Harms Act, and it purports to protect children from sexual exploitation. Who could object to that? Exactly. But you have like...
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And maybe you can tell me what you think about this. If we invite a politician, regardless of their stature, and they do what you just described, which is to only point out problems, which would often be a critique of the people across the aisle, let's say, or if they speak in a partisan manner, They disappoint the audience that's there, and they get zero views on social media.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
the top part of the sandwich is protection of children, and the bottom part of the sandwich is protection of children, and the middle is the most authoritarian legislation I've ever seen anywhere, would produce a whole society of informers hell-bent on criminalizing non-hate crime incidents. Yeah, yeah, and it is, Associate, I agree that, you know, there is...
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sense that you don't want to start the ball rolling in the genocidal direction. And fair enough, but Before you intervene, you better make sure you have your causal sequence right and the diagnosis proper. And if your theory is, well, words of criticism lead to genocidal murder, then you should work on your causal reasoning a little bit more. The pathways by no means that clearly laid out.
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535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Well, I think that there are forms of embodied wisdom that are relatively resistant to Propositional derangement. If you're smart and you worship your own intelligence, which is highly likely if you're smart, you end up with this Luciferian temptation to presume that the world should fall at your feet because you happen to be intelligent. I guess that's how God curses people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
He blesses with a high IQ. You have this Luciferian temptation temptation, and the Luciferian temptation is to fall in love with your own well-reasoned presumptions, and the intellectual elite are very prone to such things, and so they can derange themselves with the quality of their own thought. Sensible working-class people who've put themselves together in the physical world, you might say, are
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
They're inured against that, I would say to some degree, by the harsh realities of their immediate existence. If you're a demented farmer, you're gonna be broke and miserable pretty damn quickly. Now, the problem the working class has is they can't articulate their wisdom worth a damn.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And so lots of people have come up to me and said that listening to me has helped them articulate what they know to be true, which is what an intellectual should do, by the way. I think that the populist instinct in that regard at the moment is very solid. You saw that the trucker convoy in Canada, in the farmer protests in Holland in particular, and in Britain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yes, well, it's a funny thing too, because those are the people who've benefited maximally from the structure. They want to play both ends against the middle. I mean, I saw this with Ivy League students, because... At Harvard, for example, and at the University of Toronto, when I was talking to left-wing students and they were talking about the oppressive nature of the elite, I thought,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
You're the elite. You might be on the junior end of it, but the fact that you're at Harvard means you're already a member of that club and thoroughly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
It doesn't matter who they are, they can be very well-known as politicians.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Right. Well, there's also that. Of course, there's that as well, which puts everyone in the West in that elite position. Well, yes, fair enough. But certainly the case for students at high-quality universities. And I thought, well, what's driving their... identification with the oppressed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And the answer is, part of it's guilt, because they've been given a position of privilege, let's say, without necessarily having thoroughly done the work to justify it. But we could leave that aside. There's a much worse motivation, which is that there's never enough for someone who's narcissistic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And so if Harvard opens its doors to you, and now you're a member of the elite, you might say, well, you could rejoice at that gift, or you could say, that's not enough for me. I want all the privileges of the elite and all the moral cache that goes toward the oppressed. So now I'm an ally of the oppressed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So I get to have all the reputational status of the oppressed and all the advantages of the elite, right? And that's the position that the, that the university educated the whole narrow society.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah, well, there's always a shadow side to moral proclamations, right? It's like, well, the postmodernists did point that out to some degree, but it's... One of the things you really have to ask yourself is, who pays the price for your moral proclamations? And if the answer isn't you, then you don't have any right to the proclamation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
I mean, one of the things that we're all trying to work through this in ARC, too, you know, because ARC is not a conservative right-wing movement. It's not a political movement. And you can see that partly... in our approach to energy policy, which is, well, we'd like energy to be as close to free as possible, insofar as that's commensurate with a free market society.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
We wanna do everything we can to drive energy costs down. Well, why? Energy is wealth for the poor. And that's the simplest way to put it. If energy was cheap enough, there wouldn't be any people who are absolutely poor. There'd still be people who are relatively poor. And so that's not a classic right-wing approach because it's concentrating on the people who are poverty stricken.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
We're trying to come up with answers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Well, the weird... Yes, sorry, I missed my train of thought there. One of the things that... struck me to the bone watching the political discourse over the last 15 years is that the radical left would sacrifice the poor to their planet saving pretensions in a heartbeat. And that's very surprising because you might think that the core of the ethical left is service to the poor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
But now you see with net zero energy policy, and I know the conservatives are also guilty of that, is that if push comes to shove and it's my pretensions to be a planetary savior versus you being able to heat your house when you're 70, it's like, we'll see you later.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah, when we opened our first convention a year and a half ago, Kevin McCarthy spoke, and it was pretty partisan, pretty Republican, American Republican. And it was a fine speech from the political perspective, but it wasn't a good opening to the conference, and it didn't do well, either at the conference or online.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Well, we're kind of hoping that. My sense is, I just talked to James Orr about this in his new podcast, that the conservatives... See, it seems to me that the classic liberal project... is viable when certain preconditions are met. And I think the conservatives stand for the maintenance of those preconditions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Now it's complicated because the preconditions for liberalism are probably not well-propositionalized. So you could imagine the thinkers of the Scottish enlightenment, it's sort of as if they did this. If marriage is the standard and functional families exist and the nation is Christian, then everybody can be an autonomous individual.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And then you can lay out the structure of autonomous individuality and you can engage on the liberal project. But if that understructure falls apart, then that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
system of classic liberalism can't maintain its integrity because there's nothing that's like every system depends on some axiomatic presuppositions to maintain its validity and the conservatives Technically, I think the conservatives stand for the maintenance of those axioms It's hard for conservatives to propositionalize what they stand for though because those actions usually aren't Explicit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
It's like the working-class identity British identity. Well, what's British? Well They know it when they see it, but they can't say it. But it's not surprising because it's very complicated. It's like, well, is the monarchy British? Well, it is in its British form. And what's the British form of monarchy? Well, you could unpack that for a month, right? It's something like...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
We had Kemi Badenoch and Mike Johnson open this time and Kemi's speech was more political. And although she's very articulate and it was a good political speech, It wasn't as effective, I didn't think, as Mike Johnson's. And Johnson's worked because he stuck to ideas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
You know, I think the American system lacks this to some degree. It's executive, legislative, judicial, and symbolic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
It's also why America produces dynasties. Right. Like the Kennedys and the Bushes. And so... And who knows where that'll go. But... the monarchy in the UK has this symbolic quality, it's extremely useful, and it does take a fair bit of weight off the executive branch. Because the prime minister isn't the king. And the prime minister himself has to kneel before someone. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
It tempers him. Right, and the king is supposed to be kneeling before God. And then the question, of course, arises, well, which God, and is God real?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Of course he does. Well, his god in some part is Gaia. And that's not a good substitute for someone who runs the Church of England. You know, and it's a degeneration into nature worship. And the nature worshipers say, well, there is no higher deity than the earth. It's like... Nature worshipers always end up sacrificing children. And you can understand why.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
You already laid it out earlier in the argument. You said, well, if you prioritize rats, you deprioritize children. That's a zero-sum game. Right, because it is zero-sum. Of course it is. Relative value is a zero-sum game. And so if it's the planet first, then children aren't first. And you can see the consequences of that because we don't have any children. So... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So, back to Britain. Let's talk about, well, I'd like to hear your view on the situation in Britain right now. I talked to Kevin Badenoch and I talked to Nigel Farage. You guys have a split on the conservative side. What do you make of that? And are you, well, let's talk about that more generally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And I mean, that's what we're trying to do, is we're trying to operate at the level of culture, let's say, which is, I think, the right space for conservatives to operate in. We're looking at the preconditions for a civil and free society, trying to sort out what those are. Now, we've also noticed something on the press side. So if we offer an invitational vision,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah, and qualified and useful candidates.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Well, there'll be some kind of deal, because at least the Conservatives at the moment have the advantage of being able to fight. Like, the fact... You see, this happened in Canada, right? Because Reform UK was named after the Reform Party in Canada. And what happened 30 years ago? Something like that. The right split in Canada. There were a variety of reasons for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Part of it was that the Conservatives were no longer... arguably sufficiently libertarian or socially conservative. And so there was a fracture in the ranks and Preston Manning pulled the conservatives back to the conservative side. That took a number of years and then the conservatives reunited. But it was a salutary operation, all things considered.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And I think now in Canada, we have at least some leaders on the conservative side who have some spine, and that was a consequence of this war. Now, you could imagine that because Badenoch faces Farage as ferocious opposition and vice versa, they could use that opportunity to really hash things out. So Farage is a little more daring at the moment on the net zero side than Badenoch.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
he hasn't come out and said that the whole bloody climate apocalypse narrative is a dehumanizing and parasitical scam, which it is, but he's at least making overtures in that direction. Now Badenoch, when I interviewed her, she pointed out that she was leery about the rampage towards net zero, especially on the economic side, right from the beginning and more power to her.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
But the thing is they can play off each other and see how far they can push the argument and what that does in terms of their popularity. There's an opportunity there. And that would be true with regard to all conservative policies. Like maybe within the Conservative Party, first principle arguments couldn't be undertaken, but now they have to be. So, you know, and they're both smart, I think.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
I was very impressed with Badenoch. I mean, she's an engineer, so she thinks like an engineer. which is really systematically and thoroughly, and she's also a lawyer, though she hadn't practiced as a lawyer, was at least trained in law school.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
and we specify something positive and we aren't partisan, then the speeches do very well in person and online. But also it's very interesting in relationship to press coverage. Mostly the press has been neutral to us or positive. Both times. There's some exceptions like the Guardian, but, you know, what do you expect from the Guardian? And that's mostly like second-rate carping anyways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Well, I think the way... So the Democrats in the US... There's a reason Harris didn't go on any podcasts. A couple of reasons. The first is that... The Democrats are so clueless when it comes to the alternative media that they might as well be living in 1970. We invited, by we I mean a group of major podcasters in the US, we've invited Democrats to speak with us
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
We've offered formal invitations repeatedly for eight years. And we mediated those invitations through one of the Democrats' central political messengers, and they got the invite. And we couldn't find one who would do it. Not one. Now, Dean Phillips talked to me after he got slaughtered in his presidential campaign because he got betrayed so badly by his Democrat peers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And I've talked to RFK and Gabbard who are, you know... heretical Democrats. But the thing about the Democrats that is very much worth understanding is all the people who have a voice left or got killed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yes, it certainly is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And it's worse than that. It's worse. And maybe this is a reflection of that totalitarian proclivity. The reason Harris didn't go on podcasts, apart from the fact that the Democrats are completely clueless about the alternative media, and like I said, live in 1970, is that a Democrat won't say anything that hasn't been workshopped. And the reason for that is they don't want to offend anyone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Well, if you're not going to offend anyone, you're going to say the most anodyne things, which, of course, Harris always sounds like she's talking to retarded kindergarten children. It's so demeaning. And you might say, well, that's
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
the level at which she's capable of conducting discourse, and that might be true, but there is this additional element of the absolute inability of the Democrats to say anything that would, say, offend their most sensitive progressive junior staffer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah, yeah. Well, you've seen firsthand that proclivity for... cowardly virtue signaling in the entertainment industry. And it's amazing to watch this in the theater community and in the motion picture community in the US. This is starting to fragment. I mean, Hollywood is in catastrophically dire straits.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
The projections are now that 50% of live theaters will close in the US in the next three or four years. And part of the reason for that is that who the hell wants to go watch a modern movie? They're dull beyond comprehension. Now, there are some bright spots. Sheridan, is that his name? Hunter Sheridan, who did Landman and Yellowstone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Well, Tom Cruise is not woke in the least, and he's about the only star left who can pull his weight at the box office. But there are, like I can see, there's been a number of, I've made contact with a number of Hollywood stars who are still private in their interest in what I'm doing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
It's nothing substantive. But it appears that the reason we've escaped from maybe serious protest as well, because there were no protesters. One or two. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A pretty weak showing on the protest front. But I think the reason for that, again, is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah, but there's enough of them now so that I can see that that's going to change dramatically. And so I don't know what that'll mean for a democratic reformulation. I've been talking to a friend of mine, the same guy who does the messaging for the Democrats, and
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
We could ask ourselves, what's the essence of civilization? It seems to me that the proper story for free societies is... Hello, everybody. I'm here in Cambridge in the UK today at the end of the ARC convention. I have as my guest today Winston Marshall, and I have a long and storied history with Mr. Marshall.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
I told him after the election that if he could go and find some Democrats that he thought had some leadership potential, that this podcast circuit, that the people I've been in communication with, we'd be happy to talk to them because all of us are... what would you say, sophisticated enough to understand that it would be real useful for the Trump team to have some opposition that wasn't insane.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
But my friend's response to that after a couple of months was that he couldn't find a single Democrat he thought had the chops or the moral force to manage a podcast interview. They're also... concerned with the soundbite and not offending anyone, that it would just be a disaster. Yeah, exactly. Podcasts brutally punish people who won't speak freely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Right. You just, the comment section will just, it's like being flayed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And it's clear Harris couldn't manage that and didn't even know that she should. Bless her.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
It would have been a very interesting thing to see. But I don't know, how do you feel about what's going on in the entertainment industry?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
if we're true to our mission and we are offering a positive alternative, then we get something approximating a hall pass and people are excited about it and interested. Now you said that you thought that the conference was very positive. And so what do you mean by that exactly?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
You thought, they're not even money. I know, I know, I know. They're not even motivated by their own self-interest. Yeah, that's a dangerous person, you know? Yeah, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Maybe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side is we'll talk about the shifting communication landscape in the UK and Europe, because it looks to me, in the United States, the the new media forms are now dominant. Not here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah, let's talk about that. Let's talk about that. And we can talk about how Trump observed that and catalyzed it as well, or at least put the finishing touches on it. And I'd like to talk to you more about the UK and about France and Germany, about Europe in general, and what you think the implications are of the emergence of this mega populism in the US.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
We can talk a little bit more about populism too, because we didn't get a chance to flesh out the advantages of a populist political movement and the disadvantages. And so we'll turn to that. So for everybody who's watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side. We'll continue for another half an hour there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And apart from that, well, any summing words for, any words to sum up your observations in relationship to ARC, let's say, because that's sort of the issue of the moment on the political front, as far as I'm concerned. Any closing thoughts about what happened there?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah, well, I think one of the things we're doing, the conservatives in Canada have told me that, and some of them in the US as well, have told me that the role I've played culturally for them is to establish a beachhead in relationship to difficult topics. So I can criticize climate apocalypse mongering, for example, and go substantially farther in that criticism than they would be willing to go.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
But by moving the beachhead 200 yards up the beach, let's say, they can come up 50 yards and that's fine. And I think arc, I think that's actually the role of arc is to push the envelope, and to do that intelligently and carefully and positively.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yes, well, the opposite of one falsehood can be another falsehood. Exactly. Right, well, you see the same thing with regards on the masculinity side with regards to the attraction of people like Andrew Tate. Right, and you can understand why he's an attractive figure because he's at least not a cringing milk sop.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
But... That's damning with faint praise, you might say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Yes, which is inevitable. That's another thing we could talk about, too. I'd like to talk about... talk with you about the dynamic between the cluster B psychopaths and the political, because that can happen on the left and the right. Okay, so we'll leave... Oh, definitely see that on the right. Yes, yes, definitely. So we'll leave that for the Daily Wire side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Thank you very much for talking to me today. And to all of you who are watching and listening on the YouTube side, your time and attention is much appreciated. to the film crew here in, well, we're in Cambridge, as I've got a speaking engagement here later. And so thank you for the opportunity on that front. And, well, we'll talk to you another half an hour on the Daily Wire side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Thanks, everybody, for your time and attention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Exactly. To not have that. Exactly. Right. So that might be more important than the specific... recommendations on the cultural side, the mere fact that we can gather together and say, well, there is clearly something here that's not destructive and worth preserving. That's a relief in and of itself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Right, and then we can figure out what it is, which is what we're trying to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
So let's unpack some of that. So let me see if I get your diagnosis right, first of all. So as you pointed out, after the horrors of World War II, there was a consensus around the world that we should never forget, that was one phrase, and never again. The problem with never forget is that you can't remember what you don't understand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And so you could say, well, we obviously don't want to replicate the horrors of the Holocaust, but that to manage that successfully means that we've mapped the causal chain that led to the Holocaust and that we did that accurately so that we're solving the proper problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
And your contention, as far as I can understand it at the moment, is that we reflexively identified something like nationalism as the core of the problem, maybe for the war as such, but also for the... exacerbation of ethnic identity that produced the Holocaust. And that the antidote was something like a borderless open society that transcended national identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Okay, so let's take that apart a little bit. So the first
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
I, in part, was in part responsible for the destruction of his musical career because he had the audacity to indicate to audiences the public at large that he didn't think I was entirely despicable and that didn't go so well for him or for the band and so that's on me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
If you're concerned about people who are struggling, as far as I can tell, there's nothing more important than energy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right, and we've even attempting to electrify things for 100 years, 150 years, we're up to 25 to 30% of what we use.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
I read that Ford Motor Company loses $45,000 on every electric vehicle it sells. on the trucks yeah the lightning yeah yeah yeah so they're all backing off yeah well tesla manages it but very few other people have been able to do it you need a hell of an infrastructure for tesla to work and i don't know what how well those vehicles operate in frigid temperatures
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
The most practical is that Scott will walk you through what you need to know to basically have a schematic understanding of the structures upon which your abundant world depends, the energy infrastructure. And he'll tell you a story that you won't hear from other sources, and it's accurate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right. Yeah, they're tough. Because then you have to cool.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Chimps chew eight hours a day.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right, right, exactly. And multiple times with multiple stomachs, right? Right. Because their food is not dense. They do a lot of the work for us, cows.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And many of the world's poor now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah, I think Bjorn Lohberg has estimated that each of us are served by the equivalent of 40 servants.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right. A million. A million times.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And you need to know these things because knowing them helps you understand what opportunities the future holds. And so much of what we're told about the future is transmitted to us by people who... ratchet their way to power by terrifying and compelling the population. And that's the sign of a kind of tyranny.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah, well, when you're using vehicles, they have to transport themselves. So anything that's energy dense means that there's much less that isn't useful to transport. It's interesting too, on the nuclear side, that we should just take a small detour here before going back to the grid.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Well, one of the things that really stymies me, and this is why it's also necessary to think about the story that's being told about such things, is that the banner of war that's flown by the Greens is the carbon dioxide apocalypse narrative. But the best solution to that is clearly nuclear. Clearly. And France has demonstrated that like no other country, I would say. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Because nuclear produces zero carbon dioxide. So if that's the enemy, then why would you do anything other than nuclear? But the Greens, as they're doing in Spain, as they already have done in Germany, they're anti-nuclear, which indicates more strongly than anything else that the story is not about carbon dioxide pollution. It's about something else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Now, we can talk a little later about what it might be about, but it's certainly not pro-industry. And the case you just laid out indicates that Well, the Industrial Revolution, seven billion of the world's people rest on the shoulders of the Industrial Revolution, and that revolution itself is a function of energy density and reliability. It is. Right, so that's a first principle story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yes, right. This is something Lomberg has talked a lot about, right? You get people up above $5,000 a year GDP, they take a long-term view of the future because they're not scrabbling around in the mud wondering where lunch is coming from.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
yes right right so isn't that cool such a that's such an optimistic observation that's incredible because if you understand that then you understand that the proper way forward to a sustainable future which is hypothetically the goal is to eradicate impoverishment correct right so that's that's great you'd think the left would jump on that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Scott offers something much more like an invitational vision, which is that we could have an abundant world for everyone if we set our mind on that. There's no fundamental scarcity of natural resource. There's no looming apocalypse that we can address by making the world a worse place.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right. You should say that again. And we know this is right. We can see what's happening in Europe. Because as Germany has rampaged down the idiot green road... Their power has become more expensive, more unreliable, and dirtier, right? They're failing on their own marker of success, as well as failing on the economic front.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
You know, if you're a degrowth advocate for whatever reasons you might be, that seems like success, but it's just rebranded failure. So we want to reiterate this point so everyone understands, if you actually care about the environment, You want to do everything you possibly can to put people in a situation where they can take a long-term view and take care of everything that's around them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And they can't do that when they're scrabbling around in poverty.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And that's an energy transition hierarchy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
that the pathway forward to abundance and plenitude and opportunity is through ample energy provision of all sources and the elevation of the poor in the world to the status of... Well, roughly of the developed West. Can we do that? Yes. There's no shortage of resources. That entire conceptual structure is faulty. There's shortage of will and resolve. And you need to know this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
That's the pattern of real economic development, right? More for less. It's awesome. Efficiency. Well, that's also an indicator of the utility of pursuing abundance, because it turns out that if you pursue abundance intelligently, you produce a innovative environment that allows us to extract far more from less.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
20 pair of blue jeans i'm literally not exaggerating instead of i just need two or three you know the c40 consortium the green advocates on the municipal side have posited that in order for us to reach net zero effectively there's 40 of the world's biggest cities are part of this consortium yeah we're only going to be allowed three articles of clothing a year Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
95% reduction in automobile ownership, too, because you don't need a car to do whatever the hell you're doing. Yeah. Right, right. That's a vision of scarcity. But your point fundamentally is that the pursuit of scarcity will exacerbate environmental catastrophe. It does. Yeah. It does.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And opportunity and the ability to live.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Spain's gonna make it work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
You need to know this if you're young, because... A world that's rife with apocalyptic fear-mongering is one that will demoralize you. You need to know this if you're going to have children because you have to understand what kind of world they could inhabit and what kind of world the doomsayers will doom them to if the narrative is wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Okay, so let's talk about nuclear and scarcity as well. I mean, okay, so- What are the objections to walking, running down this road, let's say? Well, it's pretty obvious that energy is harnessed to serve the poor. I think that's incontrovertible. The mere fact that there was 1 billion people and now there's 8 billion shows how useful energy is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And the immensely high standard of living, there are no energy poor rich countries. That's right. Okay, so now the next issue is going to be- There's some energy poor people in rich countries. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right, right. Okay, so now we face the issue of, well, we can't go to 1800. Because there aren't enough sources of energy. It's a finite resource. But you deal with that with... Okay, so layout why no is the answer. So we'll talk about... Okay. And what the intelligent mix is. My suspicions are that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And I don't know anyone who knows more about this and who's a more thoughtful and informed speaker about such issues than Scott. And so do yourself a favor and pay attention to this podcast. So Scott, I thought I'd start this with a bit of a story from Spain. I received this today, found this today from the Telegraph, which I sometimes rate for.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
The more we rely on nuclear, the more we can shepherd our use of fossil fuels, because fossil fuels are useful for fertilizer and for plastics, and nuclear isn't, and for transportation, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So is it the case that it's foolish to use fossil fuel in many ways for energy if it's replaceable by nuclear?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
The most appropriate way to serve the poor is to make energy radically available reliably, period.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
There's not much use just flying batteries around.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
What's its utility potentially for transportation? I mean, we've had nuclear subs for like two generations. Yeah, 60, 70 years. Yeah, four generations, really.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So what's the impediment being to small modular nuclear, given that we've actually had it since, when was the first nuclear submarine produced?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
We've had small reactors for a very long period of time. Yeah, it's like water. I know people are afraid of nuclear for, well, because of nuclear bombs, and so fair enough. But the bomb and the nuclear plant aren't the same thing. And I know these new plants, the thorium plants, are radically safe, fundamentally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
As you know, most people watching perhaps know, or at least some do, the whole country faced a blackout and more than the country, right? Into Portugal and France as well. Just a few weeks ago, I think it was the biggest, well, it's described in the Telegraph as the worst electricity failure in any developed country in modern times. So another number one for Spain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yes, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Well, that's a feature, not a bug to stop them from having children. Bjorn Lomborg estimated that each additional mouth on the planet produces four times as much as it consumes. That's the average. So the notion that not having children is good for the planet isn't a very wise notion. Maybe it depends what you do with the children.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Well, clean water to drink and sufficient food is 95 plus plumbing. That's 95% of the health problem solved.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
That's also a solvable technological problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
The stench of a cover-up hangs over Spain's giant blackout. Faith in the current investigation has reached rock bottom. The socialist government of Pedro Sanchez is trying to buy time with explanations that either make no technical sense or veer into absurdity. Red Electrica. there's a name for you, which runs the grid is accused of stonewalling everybody.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Again- Depends on what else you have to worry about.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Burning dung natural gas is not going to be that much of a problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So what does that mean in terms of like supply out into the future? Hundreds and hundreds of years. Let's add something to that too. Well, and it's complicated because what happens is that If scarcity starts to emerge, the price of the commodity rises and the rising price incentivizes innovative ways of finding more of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And while fracking is a great example of that, which the fracking revolution, which is essentially unheralded publicly, what propelled the US to energy independence in no time flat.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And there's no reason to assume we're out of those options.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah, well, price increase, that'll motivate more ideas. A lot of ideas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Sources in Brussels have told the Telegraph that the authorities were conducting an experiment before the system crashed, probing how far they could push reliance on renewables in preparation for Spain's rushed, phase out of nuclear reactors from 2027.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So that's the natural gas pools that far underground. They're not pools at all. They're micro reservoirs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah, well, I grew up in Northern Alberta. Cracking vertical.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
The government seems to have pushed the pace recklessly before making the necessary investments in a sophisticated 21st century smart grid capable of handling it. Okay, so what's the background to that story? They also put a woman in charge of the entire electrical grid who had absolutely no experience in the area and she's been an unmitigated disaster.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
That's such a revolution. Since 07.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Well, there's a great example of technological revolution.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Mm-hmm. Is it accurately estimated, do you think?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Do you know how the magnitude of those reserves that you're describing compares to reserves like the oil sands in Northern Alberta?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
But if the price rises, you could get it out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And so, well, that sort of sets the stage for our conversation. I mean, we've talked a number of times for everybody watching and listening. Scott's participated in the ARC Endeavor Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So the idea that we're going to run out of fossil fuel, especially if we shepherd our nuclear resources with some degree of intelligence, that's not a foreseeable future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right. Well, there's resources in Holland, right, in the Netherlands. Germany and Poland.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
What I'm describing is more expensive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right, so that's backed up by more expensive sources that are much larger.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And they haven't even produced them yet. How much larger?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And remember- Do you think all those stores have been discovered or is that still- They know where their source rocks are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah, surprise, surprise. Sheiks for shale.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
We're trying to build a visionary alternative on the international side for a future of abundance and distributed responsibility instead of top-down apocalyptic nightmare control. And so that seems like a good alternative. And Scott's been extremely helpful on the energy side because he shares the ARC vision of...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
That's when fracking becomes dangerous. It's going to cause earthquakes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Nonsense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Well, then you hope that the developed world would do it right because that's where you'd expect it to be done right. This is where you want it to be done right. Absolutely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
They're just getting more. The Saudi fields are like $5 a barrel to produce something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
To what degree does an oil field that's been abandoned replenish?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Okay, so they're really taken dry. They aren't dry. Absent new technology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So what do you think a reasonable timeframe, when we're thinking about ensuring future natural resources, let's say... Given the rate of technological transformation, we can't predict out 200 years. We certainly can't predict out 100 years. When we're thinking about whether we'll run out of something, do you have any sense of what a reasonable timeframe of computation would be?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
We don't run out of things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
This is why the economists are always at war with the biologists. Correct. Because the biologists have fallen into this foolish Malthusian thinking. And the economists say, no. No. We're innovative enough so that we switch directions. Correct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And that is... You see, the biologists should understand this because the fundamental distinction between human beings and all other animals is that our environment is not fixed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
low-cost, reliable energy distributed worldwide as the foundation for peace and abundance and direct aid to the poor in the most possibly effective way. And so we're going to run over that territory today. And Scott is very well connected among people who understand how the energy system works.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right? It's unbelievably malleable, which is why we can live everywhere.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And so, as you're... There's a biological reality underneath the economic reality. It's like... Well, we're going to run out of natural resources. No, we're going to run out of the game we play with that commodity now and then. We'll just switch to a different game with a different commodity. And in a complex industrial... There's many games like that that we can switch to going on all the time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
If this is all true, then why the hell aren't we doing it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
But we can make it with nuclear.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
That's in the ocean.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Also in the permafrost. Northern Russia, northern Canada. So that's the ice equivalent of shale rock.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Okay, okay, so the fossil fuel scarcity argument is nonsensical.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
It's expensive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So at some point, there'll be a threshold of price, hypothetically, where beginning to investigate the use of hydrates will make economic sense. And then what'll happen is people will figure out how to do it and the price will fall dramatically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've wondered about that. I've read about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
I haven't been able to make heads or tails of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Ausubel.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And he's going to, well, share his expertise with us so that we can sort out just what the hell's going on. So let's start with that. So comments about the Spanish situation and its implications for Europe more broadly and Australia for that matter, because they're experimenting with the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Molecules, electricity. There's regulatory impediments. There's narrative impediments. I mean, one of the reasons that we've started to communicate more and more publicly is because We have determined at ARC, this happened at least in part because I read analysis 20 years ago, and I think they were Lomberg's analysis, that showed that if you make poor people rich, they pollute less.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And I thought, oh my God, that's the magic key. It's like you can solve the problem of poverty, abject poverty, not relative poverty, the devastating form of life-threatening poverty, opportunity-destroying, stunting poverty, and you can solve the environmental problem at the same time. Like, why wouldn't you do that? That's such an opportunity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right, right. So then when we aggregated together ARC, one of our foundational platforms, this intermingling of energy and environment was, well, we need to change the, we certainly need to change the scarcity narrative, the Malthusian narrative. We're not gonna run out, folks. There aren't too many people on the planet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
There isn't finite resources in the way we conceptualize them and the way we conceptualize that because resource itself is a fungible, I think the idea of natural resource is essentially a Malthusian and Marxist idea at its core. Right? Natural resource. Yeah, like what? Air, maybe. Maybe air. Because you can just breathe it. You still have to expend the energy. Right? Clean water?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
No, that's not natural. That takes a lot of work. A lot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Every time, every time. Well, that's also where people kill and eat all the animals when they starve, right? And you only have to do that once. So there aren't any animals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
It's so perplexing to me. Because, see, I've tried to trace it back. And a lot of this comes out of the scares, the environmental scares of the 1960s, combined with the biologists' insistence that Malthusian realities dominate the world. And they're The environmental concerns of the 1960s had some grounding, but they were the kind of concerns that would only emerge in a rich country.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So that's the first thing we might wanna notice that. When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the fact that our industrial processes were creating a certain degree of havoc in some specified ecosystems was the sort of thing that wealthy people could afford to worry about.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And then did. And then Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, those people, man, they got a lot of sins on their conscience. And their notion was overpopulation in a world defined by finitude. Right. And that's had a... I can't think of a doctrine that's done more harm than that. Maybe the Communist doctrine, possibly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Possibly that. But apart from that, that notion of intrinsic Malthusian scarcity. Now, there's a great story about that, right? Because Paul Ehrlich, who is the master biologist of the Malthusian nightmare. So the Malthusian nightmare is the idea that human beings are best modeled as mold in a Petri dish.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
We'll multiply uncontrollably and rapaciously until we devour all of the biological substrate and then we'll all cataclysmically starve. It's like, no, no. There's nothing about that that's right in the human situation if things are mastered properly because we can switch the substrate. And that's actually why we have a cortex, right? I mean, our niche is substrate switching.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
That's what we have evolved to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Which may be the next problem we really have to face.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Well, that's the next issue. Well, the Malthusian hypothesis is one, but you put a dagger in its heart on the population side, because Ehrlich's fear, the Club of Rome, these desperate people, they presumed that there'd be a never-ending cycle of population increase. But it's not happening. No, the opposite of what they predicted was happening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Exactly, exactly, is that wealth produces a maybe cataclysmic decline in the birth rate. Now, that's something we could modify and likely will, but that's the opposite of what they predicted. And then there's the famous bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon, Julian being the economist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
who was a polymath and a genius in a completely different intellectual category than Dr. Ehrlich, I'm afraid. And they had a famous bet, I think it was in the 1970s, when Ehrlich was proposing that by the year 2000, commodity prices would shoot through the roof as a consequence of scarcity and everyone would be dying of starvation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And Simon bet him famously that he could offer his own basket of commodities and that... A weighted average of that commodity basket would be less expensive in 2000 than in the 1970s.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah. Simon won. Yeah. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right. And then the response of the Malthusians is always, oh, I just got the time frame wrong. And I can speak about that from a scientific perspective. You don't get to get the time frame wrong. You can't say eventually I'll be right. It's no, your theory has to define the time frame over which your bloody prediction remains valid. And so that failed. It was wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Elon Musk's robots will take care of that problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah. Some of his kids too. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
It's also not the problem we thought we would have. Or some thought. Right, right. Another indication that predicting the future turns out to be a very difficult thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yes, exactly, exactly. Well, and this is partly what started to make me, apart from the fact that I sorted out this relationship between abundance and environmental stewardship, which was so important, and opportunity. But then I also began to deeply understand the fact that the climate models are unstable and we stack economic models on top of that unstable foundation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
I read this week that, and who knows how accurate this is, that we've underestimated the carbon dioxide off gassing of the world's volcanic vents by a factor of four. Right. Only a factor of four, which means it wasn't an estimate. It wasn't even a guess. It was just an error. Right. And so we don't know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
um when you stack we don't know how to model the climate not properly and when you stack an economic model on top of that that purports to predict out a hundred years right well obviously no no yeah there's very uh important work that the ipcc yeah the intergovernmental panel on climate change itself has put out in its last major report ar6
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah, how far down?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
The much greener planet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Change has costs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
It's not just for them. People who have nothing to lose have nothing to lose. Right. It's very dangerous to put people in a situation where they have nothing to lose. And to enforce that on them, to say they can't develop their fossil fuel resources. Nuts. They have to transition. Africa has to transition immediately to green energy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Provide a way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Great. That's a good place to end.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Look, this is what we're going to do because there's still a part of this story that hasn't been told because Scott and I haven't managed to delve into the conceptual underpinnings of the fact that despite the reality that Scott has outlined, which is very positive and also factually grounded and benevolent in its essential intent, especially with regard to the world's poor, we still haven't cracked
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
the fundamental problem on the conceptual side, which is if this is all true, then why the hell aren't we doing it? And as fast as possible. And where did this count, this utterly destructive counter narrative come from? And why is it still being promulgated? And so I would love to cover that on the YouTube side, but we're out of time. And so we're going to cover that on the Daily Wire side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So you can join us there. Thanks very much for your time and attention. Thanks, Scott. It's always an education listening to you. I appreciate it very much. We need to get you to teach a course. for Peterson Academy on energy literacy, seriously.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Now we've got a lot of courses on there that are free market, economic oriented, because we'd like to bring our content to the developing world, especially to Africa, and that'll be happening relatively quickly, as soon as we can get the translation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
uh technology up and running but we'd like to teach free market economics and this energy literacy is energy slash environmental literacy this is crucially important okay to invert the narrative so and in the proper manner and you think for those of you out there who are listening and maybe there aren't very many of you who have a left-wing orientation you know one of the things you really want to ask yourself is are you going to serve the poor or not
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Because that's hypothetically the basis of your ethos. And the most appropriate way to serve the poor is to make energy radically available reliably. Period. So think it over from first principles and decide who's on your side and who's not. And why the people who are objecting to this are doing it. Because that's a mystery. We're going to talk about that on the Daily Wire side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Thanks very much, sir.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right, the grid's designed for stable inputs and relatively predictable outputs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
No fluctuations that burn out your electrical equipment or make it fail.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Okay, so there's two problems. At least. Yeah, at least. Okay, so let's lay it out from first principles. The first thing we could agree is that there's no abundance, and that means a plethora of starvation-level poverty. And hand-to-mouth existence in the absence of energy. There's no real difference between energy and work and no difference between work and wealth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So if you're concerned about people who are struggling, as far as I can tell, there's nothing more important than energy. Now, you made a case that on the energy front, there are two cardinal concerns. One is abundance of supply, but the other is regularity and predictability of supply. Reliability. Reliability. As important as provision.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And hospitals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Like jets, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
What's that German word for the wind drought?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right, and so there's lots of situations in Europe in particular so far where... The sun isn't available because it's a northern place fundamentally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Germany's cloudy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
And neither is the wind. Right. And then it's my understanding as well that to the degree that your grid is reliant on intermittent power sources, you need backups that, as you said, are instantly available. Right. So that means you can't start up a nuclear plant because that takes a long time. Correct. But also that... have the same capacity as the system you're replacing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So what that implies, as far as I can tell, is that if you build a primarily solar and wind grid, you have to have, so far, either a nuclear or fossil fuel backup that's ready online to go, which essentially means you have to build two systems.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So I had the opportunity today to speak with Scott Tinker, and I've spoken to Scott before and on a podcast, and he was a contributing speaker at ARC and delivered one of the most popular public speeches that we've ever put on the ARC platform on energy and the environment. Why should you listen to this podcast? Well, there's a bunch of reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
How many industrial processes rely even for their physical integrity on continuous power supplies? I know there are industrial processes where if they lose power long enough, steel smelters and so forth, it devastates the plant. Refrigeration, freezing, medicines, hospitals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Right, right. Cook, cook, cook, turn it off, boom, it's gone. Right. Natural gas is extremely clean, too, all things considered.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Hey, the plants love that, Scott.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Might be worth explaining in some detail this notion of energy density and its relationship to transportability, for example. Sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
So travel's a huge part of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Yeah, which feed, what, half the world's population?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right, because in principle, it wouldn't be detecting anything radically different. No. Okay, so that's the problem you're trying to address.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Okay, so let me sum that, sum up that just so that I make sure I'm following you. So the first, the objection you have to standard theories of trichromat perception is that the two of the color spectra that we see are so close together on the electromagnetic spectrum that there's no advantage to distinguishing them that's clear in the natural world as such.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And you're associating that with the enhanced ability to detect difference in oxygenation in the skin. And you're going to associate that, I presume, with emotional display. Is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Mark is very interested as an evolutionary biologist slash psychologist in the function of evolved traits like perception. And one of the hypothesis that we discussed, which is a very interesting one was his explanation, rather unique explanation for the evolution of color vision.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Do we know if people who are colorblind are deficient in facial emotional processing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
What would happen if you did rapid testing rapid presentation of angry faces, like almost at a subliminal level. Do you think that people who are colorblind would be less able to detect the difference between angry and non-angry faces, at least to the degree that that's signaled by facial flushing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Okay, so that's an experimental problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Okay, so you mentioned the glow of youth. And hypothetically, one of the markers that could drive transformation of color vision in the direction of emotion detection that was blood related would be for picking up signs of fecundity. And that would be a direct association. And there is evidence that I think is quite compelling that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
One of the things that makes women attractive to men are signals of health that are associated with enhanced fertility. All of those signals seem to be associated with what people conceive of as feminine beauty. And you picked one that was cardinal there, which is that flush. You call it the flush of youth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
He believes, for example, that we have additional color vision, not so much so that we could detect ripe fruit, for example, which was one hypothesis, but so that we can better attend to the emotional signals that people display as a consequence of alterations in their circulation, especially displayed facially.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Hello, everybody. I'm going to start today with a couple of announcements. The first is that I published this book, We Who Wrestle With God, Perceptions of the Divine. It came out November 19th. It's number one on Amazon right now, which I'm pretty happy about. And it's also the basis for a tour, which I started in November, continues through December, then January through April as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Hmm, hmm. And so how has that, so that's a theory of color vision as health detection.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right, it wouldn't only have to be one of those things anyways. Okay, well, could you make a separate case for emotion? Okay. So one of the things that I've read, I don't know if you believe that this is true, because everything turns out to be debatable among scientists, just like everyone else. But I've read that one of the things that shaped the evolution of our eyes is evolution.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
their shaping to be maximally visually evident to perceivers, right? We're unbelievably good at determining exactly where someone's eyes are pointed. So even if someone is sitting across the room from you, you can tell if they're looking at your eyes or at the tip of your nose, which is such a tiny fraction of movement at the eye level or a fraction of angle that it's almost amazing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's amazing that you can detect it at all and that we have the white background and the colored iris and the black pupil, partly because that maximizes the degree to which our eyes are salient.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
The hypothesis being that anyone in our evolutionary history whose eyes weren't salient was salient with someone whose intentions were very difficult to determine and was much more likely to be misunderstood, say, and killed in consequence, or much less likely to to find a mate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And so our faces have evolved at least at the level of our perception of the eyes of others to ensure that we can understand intent. And we do that by inferring attention by looking at eye gaze and you're making a strong case in your work for the relationship between perception, color vision and emotion perception. So
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So we have color vision so that we're better at detecting signs of health or ill health as a consequence of skin tone, but also detecting and reacting to emotional displays. And so join us if you're interested in evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, emotion, language, communication, and the behavior of mass groups. So I think we'll start our discussion by talking about perception.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
We talked a little bit about cues of health that might be associated with skin coloration and cues of fecundity. But tell me about the emotional cues that are associated with differences in color.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
That's a very specific response. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, that's so complex too, eh? Because it opens up the question, like, first of all, not everybody blushes. And the issue is, well, what does the blush signify? And it signifies something like self-conscious shame. And then the question is, well, why would you want to signal self-conscious shame to people?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I mean, because it's a shameful signal, but it does indicate that you're the sort of, one of the things that might indicate is that you're the sort of person who can't get away with What exactly? Violating the social norm? Something like that, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right, right. So yeah, that's right. It's a signal of your intent beneath your conscious awareness. Laughter, genuine laughter seems to be a signal like that too. And there's some evidence that Genuine smiles are like that too, right? Because if you smile falsely, your eyes don't smile. Although I think you can train yourself to do that. But generally speaking, if someone is... Yeah, it's hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
If someone is manipulating with a smile, they don't do it the same way they do when they smile spontaneously. And so those... Rapid onset implicit emotional displays are a signal about our genuine motivations. And if those signals are obvious, it's in principle easier for people to read us and therefore in principle easier for them to engage in
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
trusting negotiations with us because we wear our heart on our sleeve.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Okay, okay, okay. Does the theory that trichromate vision evolved at least... partly or perhaps in the main as a aid to emotion detection, contradict the frugivore theory? Is it possible that color vision also gave us an edge, at least in some environments, with regards to the detection of higher quality food sources?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Particularly given that they're so close together.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
That's the crucial issue.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And you've studied visual perception for a long time. And so I'd like you to outline, if you would, what you understand about visual perception. And then we can contrast our viewpoints and see where we can go with that. And I think we'll segue into emotion and language from perception.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, well, I mean, part of the problem, I guess, that people have with functional evolutionary explanations for the purpose of any given human attribute is that There's no reason ever to assume that any given attribute is singular in its function. It's sort of like asking what the hand can do. What's the hand for? Well, you know, the hand is for a lot of things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Is there a cardinal purpose to the hand? That's a hard question to ask, but there's no reason to assume that evolution wouldn't operate so that a given biological phenomenon would be other than multipurpose.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Oh, I see. So that's a good way of testing. Yes. What's the most cardinal element of the… Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So does that mean that our forward-facing eyes evolved when we were still in primarily arboreal environments? And are chimpanzees still primarily in arboreal environments?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, yeah. So the fact that we were on the African plain for some millions of years wasn't sufficient to…
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
We're very sneaky, us people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Okay, okay, okay. Well, that's an interesting account of binocular vision. If it's all right, let's turn our attention back to emotion perception and then segue from that into the development of language in this book, Expressly Human, which was published in 2022. You talk about the evolution of language, which is a relatively new phenomenon.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
You date it back several hundred thousands of years, and we could talk a little bit about that. But you also make the case that our linguistic ability, although it's relatively newly evolved, is scaffolded on an understructure of emotional display and emotional language. And so this is in keeping with the notions of perception that you put forward that are
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
faces, our skin surface, but primarily our faces, our emotional display mechanisms, and that we can read a tremendous amount about the intent of others, intent and desire of others, merely as a consequence of reading off emotions, and that language evolved with that as its underlying axiomatic, set of axiomatic presumptions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I mean, one of the things that, I can't remember even where I read about this, but it's the problem of infinite regress in language. You know, if I and how we solve it. If I tell you I was angry this morning, your likely question is what made you angry? Not what do you mean angry? And the reason that you don't ask what do you mean angry is because you know what it's like to be angry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And so we share the underlying psychophysiological platform and all of the experiences that are part and parcel of that platform. And then we can use words to refer to those. That's a situation where you can think of emotions, and I think object perceptions are the same, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Emotions are the axioms of our linguistic capacity, and you seem to be making an argument that's analogous to that in your book. Well, I...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
That also is a particular signal and it has something to do with happy versus... That confidence too, you know, that confidence must be something like the end result of an internal Darwinian competition between different competing motivational states, right? Because you might ask yourself, why should I accept your confidence as a signal of your competence?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And one answer to that would be, I know something about you and know that you can do things. And so that would be a consequence of me actually knowing you in a social circumstance. But another would be that if your evaluation of the situation is sufficient so that the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
emotion of moving forward and dominating isn't being challenged by a number of other potential emotional states, like anxiety, I'm going to be able to read that on your face. And so I'm going to know that you undertook the internal computations that were sufficient to at least convince you that you're correct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Okay, so you're building in, I think you're building in something like appreciation for the fact that the reputational exchanges that we're making are cumulative across time in a social community that's actually continually interacting. So it's never a one-off game.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, well, I've also been, well, I'm curious about what you think about this as well, because I've been working out the idea, it's not only me, obviously, but many people work on this idea that, and I think it's associated with the, it's the same idea as the idea of natural law in more pure philosophy, is that there's a pattern of ethos that emerges as a consequence of the fact of iterated exchange.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, sexual selection also amplifies that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So I'll give you an example of this from the animal literature. So when animal behaviorists first started studying rat play, and were trying to understand it physiologically and functionally, one of the things they would do was match juvenile rats together so that they could wrestle. but they do one-offs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And what they found was invariably that if one of the rats had about a 10% weight advantage over the other rat, that he could win the vast majority of times. And so the idea of play was something like, You put two animals into a ring. They compete with one another. The larger animal can dominate the smaller animal. And the purpose of the play bout is to establish dominance without damage, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But the problem with that hypothesis was that rats don't play with each other once. They play repeatedly. And it turned out that if you put rats together, juveniles, Repeatedly, the big rat has to let the little rat win at least 30% of the time or the little rat won't play anymore. And so this is, it's a remarkable discovery. This is Jaak Panksepp's discovery.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's an absolutely brilliant discovery because it shows, first of all, that the purpose of play is not dominance. It also implies that the social hierarchy order isn't dominance-related, but even more importantly, it shows that reciprocity is the basis for social organization, even among rats, and not the expression of power. And that's a radically different idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Now, Frans de Waal has found something like that, as far as I'm concerned, something very similar with his studies of chimpanzees, because it was thought for the longest time I think by Marxist-oriented evolutionary biologists fundamentally, that the substructure for dominance with regard to the alpha chimps was the physical expression of power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But what De Waal showed was that that happens now and then, you get a chimp troop where the major alpha is a bully and a successful one, but he tends to get torn to shreds as soon as he has a weak moment by like two subordinates who've had enough of being pushed around. These stable alphas are often smaller males, although that's irrelevant in a sense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
What they are is extremely good at continuous reciprocity. And they tend to rule over much more harmonious social troops and have a much longer reign. So the reason I'm asking about this is because You talk about the importance of staking social capital when making a claim for confidence. And I'm curious, I'd like to have you elaborate on that more. You used the poker game analogy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
You said, I'm staking something. And you implied that, well, if I'm wrong in my confidence and word gets around, it's going to damage my reputation, which means that the next time I act wrong, confidently, no one's gonna believe me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
The implication is that if you're reciprocating with people across a long span of time, then you're only going to make confidence claims where you're relatively certain that being wrong isn't going to damage your long-term reputation. That's basically the... Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Reject teleology itself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, yeah, that's weird.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yes, exactly, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Okay, so that would be the basis for, establishing cooperative endeavors over the medium to long run, but also properly regulating competitive endeavors so that they don't end in catastrophe, both of those. That would be the negotiation landscape. Okay, so why don't you tell us why you think that our emotional displays are optimized for solving the problem of cooperation and competition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
That's the study of ethics in general, right? The optimization of strategy. I mean, the philosophy of ethics is exactly that study. And it does have something, I think it has something to do with It's something like optimization of reproductive strategy, but over the largest possible number of environments and timeframes. It's something like that, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Because one of the things you pointed out with the poker example is the strategy that you use while you're playing poker is going to be dependent to some degree on how many times you're going to play poker with these people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right, so the rules there are even more constrained. Yeah, well, so this is a very cool thing to understand. And I think it's one of the things that's very powerful about your book is that I have thought for quite a while that... the analysis of reciprocal interactions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
This is something economists did very badly for a very long period of time because they thought of people as rational maximizers, but their notion of the timeframe across which you maximized rationally was one interaction. And that's just absolutely 100% not true. And it's also not how people behave, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
There's that famous behavioral experiment where you can take two people and you can say to one of them, You can make one offer to your partner. You get $100. You can make them one offer. You have to give them some money. If they reject the offer, neither of you get anything. And across cultures, the standard offer is 50-50.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And if you take poor people, they're even more likely to make a 50-50 offer rather than less, which is not what they should do if they're rational self-optimizers. But it doesn't take into account something you alluded to, which is we're very, very cognizant of the... manner in which our decisions propagate reputationally across our social space.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Because I think there isn't anything that, it seems to me that for social animals, there actually isn't anything more important than reputation. I know, for example, among hunter-gatherer hunters, there are rules for how you conduct yourself if you're a successful hunter. The rules are very interesting and they're quite stable across different cultures.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So imagine that you're the best hunter in the group. You still fail most of the time and you would fail almost all the time alone. So even if you're the best hunter, you need all the other hunters. And so... And even if you're the best hunter, you're going to fail a lot. So you can't only rely on your own skill.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Now, the problem with being the best hunter is that you can provoke jealousy and disruption in the group. And so people will be jealous of you and they won't cooperate with you properly. And so even if your skills are optimized, if you disturb the skill set of the group, you're all going to fail. And so one of the rules, for example, if you're a good hunter,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
in a hunting community is that you don't take the best cuts of meat for yourself. You distribute them. If you're the guy responsible for the kill and you also downplay your contribution.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
No, no, you know, you were very, very helpful. And the idea, it's quite straightforward, I think, once you understand it properly, is that you're storing meat the results of your current hunt, where you've actually brought down an animal that's larger than you can consume or that your family can consume, you're storing that in your reputation among the other hunters.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And that's by far the best way to store it. And you could think about that as a, I think you can think about that as the basis for something like natural law. It's like, because I was thinking about that. There's an injunction in the gospel accounts about storing treasure up in heaven rather than on earth where it can rust or where moths can consume it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And I have thought recently that that's what a reference to the utility of storing your treasure in reputation, because that's the best possible currency. If you have a stable social group and people think highly of you, they know that you've contributed generously in the past. If you hit a rough patch, the probability that you're going to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Invite reciprocity on the part of people you've aided in the past is extremely high. Okay, now your concept of the relationship between emotion and language is that we're using... We need to bridge that gap. We're using emotion to signal our... to signal our strategies in reciprocal interaction so that they're structured optimally. How do you see language emerging out of that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
We've got this emotional under structure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Or something that's interfering with rational discourse, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
They're archetypal emotional expressions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So it's a betting market on the validity of propositions using social capital as the... It's exactly what I said.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
You can find information about the tour at jordanbpeterson.com.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's like a condensed narrative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So let me ask you one of the things that I've been concerned about for whatever that's worth is –
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Online anonymity we know there's an endless number of I think valid social psychology studies Which is a very small proportion of social psychology studies by the way that show that when people are shielded from the reputational consequences of their actions, they're much more likely to misbehave and That that's why for example
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
If someone steps in front of you while you're walking down the street, you're very unlikely to curse. Whereas if they cut you off in your car, you're very likely to curse. So anonymity facilitates a more psychopathic and impulsive style of responding. And one of the problems we have on the net now is that Anonymity, I wouldn't say reigns, but it's very, very pervasive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And that means you can say whatever the hell you want with absolutely no reputational consequence. And so my view of the online world, this might be particularly relevant on X, is that anonymous signaling facilitates a psychopathic and sadistic form of social interaction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I mean— because it's an embodied environment, you're running on the habits that are a consequence of the fact that you are in something approximating an intact social environment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Because they're stable?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Okay, so... I can think of a variety of possible reasons for that. And I'd like your opinions about those reasons. I mean, you tangled together a couple of things. You said that even as an evolutionary biologist, if you start to tread in the water of teleology or purpose, you receive pushback from your colleagues. And then you mentioned that that was also a far left phenomenon.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Then you're not exactly... You're making a distinction between...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
High reputation anonymous is not the same as low reputation anonymous.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, it might even be that their pseudonymous identity is actually trumping their genuine identity if they have like 500,000 followers online.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Okay, well, that's a good objection. That's a good objection because you're basically pointing out that stable pseudonyms that extend across time and that accrue reputation, then become subject to the same regulating forces as a genuine identity. Okay, that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And there are anonymous accounts or pseudonymous accounts that I follow in X that I think are of high quality. So I don't think there's a necessary relationship between the use of a pseudonym and pathology. But
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, well, there's always the lurking possibility that they'll be discovered. But I get the... Okay, fair enough. Okay, so let's leave out the more reputationally significant pseudonymous accounts and concentrate on the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So a lot of the... I read a lot of comments, partly because I find that's a very useful way of, first of all, evaluating how people are actually responding to the material that I'm putting up. And that's very necessary if I'm going to be communicating with a very large number of people. But it also gives me a good sense of the tone of the social world at any given moment around any given topic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Now... There are a multitude of accounts that are anonymous, that are low reputation, no followers, no postings, right? And they're often exceptionally vitriolic. And I guess one of the concerns that I've had is that The lack of consequence that they experience because of their derisive and pathological utterances polarizes the social discussion in a manner that's genuinely counterproductive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So tell me what you think of this. So imagine that there's a distribution of attitudes around any given concept. right, or any given topic. And the more extreme attitudes are rarer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But if the extreme attitudes are emotionally amplified and there's no punishment that's consequential to that emotional amplification, in fact, perhaps the reverse, because if it's pithy and striking, even if it's derisive and denigrating, it's going to pick up more influence than it would under normal circumstances. So
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's about this new book, which is about biblical stories, but you should also understand that I'm doing the same thing with these stories that I did with the other tours that I had conducted before, and the other books for that matter, which is to take high-level abstract ideas, in this case foundational narratives, to explain what they mean, but also to explain why knowing what they mean can make a real practical difference in your life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I've wondered if the political polarization that characterizes our time is partly a consequence of the exaggeration of long-tail distribution opinions in a manner that would never occur in face-to-face social interaction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Sure, or they might have two dozen accounts to be in there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And so I'm curious about, it seems to me that the relationship with the far left is likely the fact that the far left, far-left political philosophy is predicated on a radical social constructionism, essentially, that every single thing that everyone does, especially human beings, but to the degree that the same thinking paralyzes speculation about animal evolution.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Of course, of course. Otherwise you'd have to have 7 billion people in your house all the time. Right, right. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, there's also not face-to-face emotional display as we've been discussing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, well, Musk is gambling with X that that's what will happen organically as well. Right. I guess part of the problem there is that we don't exactly know what the algorithms that operate behind the scenes, how they're weighting the discourse in manners that we might not understand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, you ran afoul of that, which is something that we're going to talk about more on the Daily Wire side of this. So, yeah, so you... So you don't seem to be as concerned as I am, potentially, with the pervasive polluting effect of the anonymous troll demon types amplifying viewpoints that, under normal circumstances, wouldn't rise to the top.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Could they make up for their effect in volume what they lack in specific following? Like the anonymous troll types, there's a pattern to their communication and they're relatively interchangeable. There's a lot of resentment and derision that characterizes the landscape of that kind of communication. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, it's going to be an evolutionary arms race. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
obviously and whether the rules can keep up with the most creative trolls is it's unlikely i would suspect i guess they never do i mean we wouldn't have criminals in in the real world if people couldn't gain even well-established reputational systems yeah so and but you know it's weird i guess we can think about this from an evolutionary perspective because
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
there's an insistence among those on the far left that there's no essential human nature. Everything's infinitely malleable. And I see that as a reflection of an incredible intellectual arrogance because the reason
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
A lot of online activity is criminal or quasi-criminal. Probably half of it, right? It's about 25% pornographic and about 20% outright criminal. So that's 45% right there. Then there's a periphery of pathological troll types that's got to add at least another 5% or 10%. And so one of the things we might ask ourselves is, like, is that a...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
devolution to the standard form of human interaction, because before there were well-established, free, rule-abiding, law-governed societies, it was probably something like a quasi-criminal Wild West. And it looks to me like we're duplicating that, at least to some degree, online.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I wonder if the fact that we've removed so many of the cues that help us regulate social behavior by abstracting up our communication patterns so intensely, like narrow channeling them, these 144-character tweets, for example, whether we've lost a lot of the systems that allowed us to regulate social interaction, like we've stepped out of our evolutionary landscape, so to speak.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, well, you never have an interaction like that in normal life, ever. I don't think anybody has ever spoken to me once in my life the way people speak in the troll comment sections.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, it's also not the same partly because, you know, you talked about the way that young men react to you or men in general. I mean, one of the things that regulates male communication, at least in the public space, is the probability if you say something sufficiently stupid, you're going to get smacked. And that's definitely not something that happens online.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
for the insistence that everything is socially constructed is because that allows for the possibility for everything to be 100% modifiable by those, for example, who would like to modify human behavior and what the image of their own philosophy. Do you think there's, is there anything else? Do you think that's going on with regards to the rejection of purpose or so-called design?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And you might think, well, that's good because we've abstracted ourself away from the violence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, well, that's another kind of stake. It's like there's hierarchies of stakes, right? So to begin with, you signal your willingness to potentially sacrifice your reputation. So it's sacrificial signaling.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right, but you'll take the risk. Well, yeah. That's the value of the signal is that you think that you're right enough so that you'll take the risk that you might have to sacrifice something.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right. Yeah. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right, right. Well, and not only win the immediate argument, but win in a manner that sustains your reputation across time. Well, when you jump out of that domain, you're in another domain of stake. Because when I move from reputational fighting, let's say, to physical fighting, what I'm putting on the line is my psychophysiological integrity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I'm willing to say, no, I'm going to stake myself on this particular proposition, even if it's at risk to my physiological integrity. And so we try to avoid that, obviously. I mean, anxiety is one of the things that helps us avoid that. Pain signifies actual physical damage and anxiety, just the threat of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But it's interesting that just as language grounds out in emotion, negotiation grounds out in something like willingness to contend physically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Of course, of course. With anyone with any sense, it's bluff until that's absolutely impossible. But it's not, it's a pointless bluff if the reality isn't there at some level. And people are always checking each other out to see whether or not that bluff is pointless as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So, yeah. So what are you working on next?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And is that the case?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
In those proportions?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So a pool ball... The white ball hits the black ball. The black ball hits a yellow ball. That black ball, yellow ball hitting is something like kuk, right? Starts with a consonant, ends with a consonant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right, and if it ran into something else, there'd be another consonant at the end of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
We wouldn't be able to dance to music if that wasn't the case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So you're mapping the basic structure of music onto the kinetics of human movement. Like I said, if that wasn't the case, the dance wouldn't work. That's right. And music is very evocative of motion. It's very weird that we sit in concert halls like in classic music.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Sit still. No one wants to sit still. We want to move our body in time. And not only that, it's interesting too because music unifies us socially as well. Because when we're moving in time to the music, we're all moving in the same way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So it's evocative of a pattern of movement that unites everyone. Right. Right, right, right. Right. Well, there's also the emotional display element. I mean, you can see in musical compositions argument, there'll be a proposition and then a counter proposition. Yeah, that's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Maybe it's something like, there's a lot of reasons for rejecting the idea of purpose One is to reject the idea of an ultimate designer. So there's a religious argument, say, lurking at the bottom of that. But it's also very convenient to reject the notion of purpose or meaning because it also allows you to reject the idea of any kind of implicit responsibility.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Emote very, very directly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right, but you draw a continuum because you're pointing out that even these abstract capabilities are grounded at a perceptual level in our ability to perceive phenomena that were real-world phenomena.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
That's very cool. I never thought about consonants as collisions, but of course that makes perfect sense. I like the idea of vowels as the ringing element.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
If nothing has any meaning, the disadvantage to... everything being meaningless is that things are meaningless. But the advantage to everything being meaningless and purposeless is that you can do whatever the hell you want. And so it's a very good rationalization for short-term hedonistic power-mad behavior.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, that's probably a good place to stop, as it turns out. That wraps things up quite nicely. You are making, in a way, a modified language instinct argument, it seems to me, although what you're doing is pointing out that the instinctual elements of language have to do with the fundamental elements of language and their ability to...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
what would you say, abstract out of a substrate that's associated with our evolved perceptions of the natural world. Right, so it's not language per se that is the instinct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
All right, so look, for everybody watching and listening, we're going to switch the topics up when we switch over to the Daily Wire side because Mark is also somewhat famous, I would say, for running afoul of the internet sensors in a very interesting way. I follow him on Twitter. That's where I've discovered him and his work. And I had two reasons for inviting him as a guest today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And one was because we share an interest in the evolution of perception and cognition and language, for that matter, and art, for that matter. And so I wanted to have that discussion, which I thought was very productive. But there's another element to Mark, too, which is his... his conflict with the powers that be behind the scenes at the social media networks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And he was subject to relatively draconian censorship in the COVID era. And we're going to talk about that on the Daily Wire side. So join us there. Thank you very much, sir, for coming in today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And if you combine that with the problem of infinite social constructionism, then you have a real problem. It's a weird thing that you would encounter that among at least among hypothetically evolutionary biologists and thinkers, because why would they be concerned with evolutionary biology if they are going to toss out Darwin, for example?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
You know, I want to bridge the gap between the abstraction and the reality so that you can put into operation the principles that I'm discussing so that it does produce a tangible improvement in how you attend to things and how you act. So come out to the lectures if you're interested in continuing with that. Today, I had the opportunity to talk to Mark Changhisi, who...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Okay, so that's a very interesting place to segue into perception itself because I got very interested, I don't know, probably 20 years ago in pragmatic philosophy, the pragmatic philosophy of William James and Peirce. And they were all part of the metaphysical club in Cambridge at the turn of the 19th century. And they were also extremely influenced by Darwin.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
and the the pragmatists have been deemed the only genuine American stream of Philosophy and the pragmatists were very concerned with function in fact their definition of truth was essentially functional that we determine what's true by examining the concordance of a proposition even in relationship to its effectiveness with regard to purpose.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And they've made a case for that on the scientific side of things, that things that we regard as true, we regard as true because they provide an effective means for us to move towards a desired end. So for the pragmatist, there was really no separation of truth itself, even at the level of perception of fact, There was no separation between that and functional purpose.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And I'm curious about your opinion in that regard in relationship to perception itself. Because the best models of perception that I've encountered, the ones that seem to make the most sense in keeping with everything else I know about psychology, are pragmatic models.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And that they're predicated on the idea that what we perceive, and this is part of the thing that I've argued about, for example, with Sam Harris, is that The radical empiricists who believe that we can orient ourselves in the world merely in consequence of the facts don't take into account the fact that when we perceive a fact, we're actually perceiving something much more akin to a function.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So for example, I was very influenced by a visual approach to ecological perception.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Gibson, yeah, yeah. not in all regards, but I found much of Gibson's work extremely useful, that his sense is that when we're looking at the world, we're seeing something like, I've broadened it a bit, but pathways to a desired destination, tools that can facilitate our movement forward, obstacles that might come up in our path, and a vast domain of irrelevance around that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And that's true for every perceptual act. It seems to be particularly evident in the case of vision. A vision is something like a navigation aid. That's one way of thinking about it. So I'm curious what you think about that. And well, if any of those ideas, how those ideas might be related or not related to the manner in which you're conceptualizing Object perception, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
as an author of this book, Expressly Human and a number of other books. And I wanted to talk to Mark for two reasons. One was because we share an interest in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, especially with regards to perception, emotion, language and mass group behavior. And so I've been trying to wade through the literature on perception
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Dr. Jalal's Intro to Neuroscience course at Peterson Academy, the relationship between neuroanatomy, brain function, perception, emotion, and behavior, the function of the dream state, the role of culture and conception in dealing with emotion, particularly fear, and the changing landscape of the modern university. It's quite a trip. Join us. Well, thanks for coming in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And then flinch if there's a threat to it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, okay. And that can be extended to something as inanimate as a table.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, you know, that must also be associated with a really profound, with our sense of what constitutes ownership. Right. You know, because the idea that something is yours or that something is mine there's no reason to assume that that isn't an extension of something like embodiment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It's certainly the case that, you know, if people's cars are attacked, let's say, or kicked, they respond to that very much as if it's a bodily assault. Right. And so it begs the question, how much of our embodied concept of ownership, like that concept on which we platform the philosophical and philosophy and conception of ownership, is actually...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
the underlying scaffold for that is our ability to extend our embodiment to even inanimate objects, right? Because then they start to become part of us, right? And part of what you're pointing to with your emphasis on brain plasticity is that identity itself, even in terms of perception and pain sensitivity, is fluid and dynamic to a degree that you wouldn't immediately presume.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, so is it a religion that overlaps physiologically between the different sensory integration systems?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Is it the same area that's used for silent reading? Silent reading, I'm not sure. Okay, well, the reason I'm asking about that from what I remember is that the region that we use for silent reading is the space, is the overlap between the auditory and visual cortex. Right. Which makes perfect sense, right? Because we're basically, when we read silently, we're using our eyes as ears. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, right. And those overlapping areas. Okay, so this area is a place between many of this, between a variety of the different senses.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Experiencing your perspective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So one of the things I thought while you were discussing that is the theory of mind, theories of autism, that autistic people lack theory of mind. But I've never really liked that theory because Autism is a really fundamental disorder. Autistic people generally don't like people and they don't like to be touched. That's not conceptual. Mammals like to be touched.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
If you don't like to be touched, then something's gone wrong at a level that's like under mammal. It's really deep and profound. It's not some... what would you say, alteration in philosophy. But one of the things that is characteristic of autistic people often is that they don't look at people's faces.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, so then you could imagine it's not exactly a lack of theory of mind. It's that if I don't watch your eyes, I can't infer your aim. If I can't infer your aim, I can't mimic you on my own platform. So I wonder to what degree I don't know if these experiments have ever been done. I mean, it isn't obvious to me exactly why autistic people don't watch the face.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Let's talk about Peterson Academy first. We just released a course of yours, Introduction to Neuroscience. Right, right. So I'd like to know, I think it would be useful to talk a little bit about the course, but I'd also like to know about your experience doing the filming and your reflections on the process and the project itself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It's very mobile and changing, and that is something that seems to upset autistic people. They often don't like furniture moved in a room that they're familiar with. But I wonder what would happen to their ability to experience empathy if they were... to attend to eyes, to learn to perceive the face properly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
If they're upside down, it doesn't work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly. This is very weird too, everyone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So that's kind of that process So let's go back to Ramesh Chandra. Yeah, I was really interested in his work for a long while especially on hemispheric lateralization and neglect and fast now some of the experiments that you described emerged because of Ramachandran's investigations into neglect, right, originally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So neglect, for those of you who are watching and listening, is a very strange phenomenon. So if you have a stroke and you have, correct me if I get any of this wrong, because it's been like 20 years since I thought about it, right parietal damage. Yeah, right parietal damage, yeah. You'll lose your perception of the left side of your body. But more than that,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
this is where it gets very weird, you lose the perception of left itself. And I've tried to imagine it sort of like, you know how everything that's behind you when you're looking forward, it isn't like it's missing. It's just simply not there at a level that's even more profound than missing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And I suspect what happens to people with right parietal damage is that the absence that characterizes your lack of perception of what's behind you extends so that now it's three quarters of the world instead of half. Anyways, weirdly enough, you lose your ability to perceive the left side of everything. And I have no idea how to conceptualize that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
But one of the consequences of that is that people with profound neglect will wake up and they'll become aware of their left arm or their left leg after they've had a stroke and they'll try to throw it out of bed because they think it's someone else's. Or, and if you get them to draw a clock, for example, they'll draw half a clock and cram all the numbers into the right-hand side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And if you give them a plate, they'll eat half the food. I still can't figure this out because how do you think that works? It's like, if I pick up my phone, Now, I look at the phone, so now the phone is foregrounded, but I'm not aware of the left side. Now, if I'm looking at the room now, do I miss the left side of the room? And in the room, do I miss the left side of all the objects?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Like, I just don't understand how the hell that works perceptually.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Ramachandran also did experiments with people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, well, I wonder too if that's an... is it a lack of capacity to update as well? Like, it seems to me that what must be happening is they're using a pre-stroke representation of their body. And the tissue that's been destroyed normally would update that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Because I remember too, with Ramachandran's experiments, when he irrigated, this is very weird too, everyone, Ramachandran would irrigate the ears, so pour water in, cold water in the ears of, left ear, if I remember correctly, left ear, of the people who had neglect, and it would make them shudder. Now that disturbed their vestibular system, which is involved with bodily orientation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And it would shock them into the realization that they had a paralyzed left side and they would break down emotionally, catastrophically with the realization that they'd been so badly damaged. But then the effects of the irrigation would wear off and they'd snap back into this And that's why I think it's not exactly a delusional state.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
I think they're stuck with the body representation that existed before the stroke and what's been eradicated. The systems that could update that, the right hemisphere systems, they don't exist. So there's no way of fixing it. There's no straightforward way of fixing it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Or alteration of self.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Well, so L. Conan Goldberg, I really liked his model of brain lateralization. Yep. Novelty versus routinization. And I know Ramachandran developed a theory that was either parallel or influenced by Goldberg. I can't remember. But... What that would imply, if the right hemisphere is associated with novelty recognition, so it recognizes anomaly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It makes sense that it would signal negative emotion because the first thing that should happen when something you don't expect occurs, because that means the routine you're running doesn't map the territory well, right? Because what I'm trying to do is whenever I run a perceptual routine, I have a goal in mind, and I'm presuming that my perception is adequate to the task.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
If something anomalous occurs, like if I tell you a joke and you don't find it funny, or maybe I tell you a joke and you get offended by it, then obviously the way I've mapped you is wrong. The way I've mapped the joke is wrong. God only knows how much error I've made. That's gonna be signaled by the right hemisphere. Anomaly, negative emotion. Okay, then you're gonna attend to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Now, the problem with depressed people is they attend to it catastrophically. So like if I make a, say if I'm depressed and I make a mistake like that with you, we're sitting here talking, I make a little joke and you either don't find it funny or you act offended. Even if that only took a brief amount of time, a depressed person would think, well, that didn't go over very well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Obviously, I'm not very funny. Obviously, I don't understand people very, I don't understand this person very well. Oh, that's because I really don't understand anyone very well. I didn't understand people very well in the past and I don't understand them well and I'm very unlikely to learn how to do that in the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
People who are unable to learn like that socially, they're not very useful people. Some people are so useless that it would be better if they weren't around at all. I'm one of them. And so I'm wondering if the, so you can imagine the right hemisphere when it's analyzing something novel, opens up that entire space of potential consideration.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
My suspicions are that the left prefrontal cortex probably puts a box around that continually. Because the right level of analysis, if I make a joke, with you and it falls flat. I should note that, but I shouldn't leap to catastrophic conclusions to begin with. I should just note it, like it should now become a, what would you say, an object of potential future significance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And I've noticed in my clinical practice that people who are well regulated emotionally won't undergo a detailed investigation into an anomaly until it repeats, let's say, three times, until there's a pattern. Whereas depressed people, they'll leap to the worst possible conclusion almost immediately.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And that does look like something like that left hemisphere, left prefrontal hemispheric dysfunction that you described. So you can imagine that the right hemisphere notes the novelty, elicits negative emotion, then opens up the search space, which could be indefinite. Like the reason your joke didn't go over might be because you are the kind of unpopular loser who
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, so it's an approach to the cultural from the bottom up, from the biological up.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
wreaks havoc wherever they go, but that shouldn't be your first conclusion, right? So you lose the left hemisphere system and that whole cataclysmic reaction is dysregulated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, so I would say... I'd like to know your thoughts about, so I'm very interested in archetypal psychology. Right. And Jung had a very specific, Carl Jung had a very specific hypothesis about dreams, which I really like. And this is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today, because you're interested in dreams. Absolutely. And you've talked about them as simulations. Yep.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So his idea about dreams, which is a brilliant idea, is that it wasn't hemispherically localized for him, because he didn't have the neuroanatomical knowledge. So imagine that you encounter an anomaly. Okay, that's the place You could say that that exploration that we just described, which is, you know, is there something wrong with me socially? Is it generalizable? Am I a cataclysmic person?
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533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
All of those are fantasies of a sort, right? And you could think of the fantasies as attempts to remap the anomalous situation, right? And then... Like, a shallow remapping would require just a tiny alteration of fantasy, but a large remapping would mean a whole reconfiguration of character.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly, and that it could be undertaken safely because you could explore different perceptual configurations in the safety of dreams without exposing yourself to any danger. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
You could imagine that, so the right hemisphere signifies, detects anomaly, and it begins this exploration process, but it's using the landscape of fantasy, which would be simulation, to start to explore. And you could imagine too that one of the ways that that might be triangulated would be, imagine that your right hemisphere has aggregated a couple of different anomalies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Not enough to be cataclysmic about them, but to have them sort of there as mysteries. Okay, now you search through the fantasy space, and one of the new fantasies explains like several anomalies simultaneously. My guess is that's something like fantasy related insight. Because you'd see that in therapy, you know where,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
someone will lay out a couple of different problematic scenarios, and then contemplate the commonalities, and sometimes they'll stumble across something that, oh, I see, I'm looking at this whole thing wrong. It's a restructuring of the theory, and then those three anomalies are all accounted for. And that's gonna give you a sense of conviction, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Because now you have a theory that accounts for the new information, and the dream is part of that process. It's the birthplace of that, the birthplace of that renovelization of conception.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, and you can explore deeply enough so that you can actually reshape not just your conceptions, but your perceptions. And that idea accounts for some of the bizarreness of dreams. If you're exploring at the level of perception, it's going to seem bizarre, obviously.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Restriction of inhibition?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
You had to force memorize them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Which is what you'd expect if it was an exploratory process.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, unconstrained. Unconstrained by prior conviction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Even though they're paralyzed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, I found that I got extremely interested in neuroanatomy, even at a detailed level, when I was reading scientists who associated the area with the function.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, so it's a safe place for... for simulation, for exploratory simulation that can be so extreme that it can verge on the bizarre. Yeah. But why not? Why not explore the outer limits under safe conditions? Well, I've also, I remember that if you wake people up from REM sleep, the most common emotion they report is anxiety. And that makes sense too if you think about this as part of the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
what would you say, the reconfiguration in the face of novelty process. Because the most appropriate first response to something anomalous is anxiety. Because technically what anxiety does is stop the operation of, it stops current operation. So that's like a prey, it's like a prey animal response. Freeze. Why? Because what you're doing has either not worked or exposed you to danger.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So now you're not where you thought you were and what you're doing isn't doing what you thought it was. Okay, now what? Stop. That's anxiety. Then, then what? Then explore. So like if you throw a rat into a, A new cage. Yeah, yeah. The first thing it does is freeze. Right. Okay, then what it starts to do is to look around. I guess to begin with, it doesn't even want to move its eyes, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Because it doesn't want to attack, attract the attention of a predator. So it freezes and crouches down. Right. And then... If nothing additionally terrible happens, it starts to thaw, it starts to look, and it starts to sniff, right? And then it'll start to explore and remap the territory. But that seems to be what's happening at the dream level, conceptually, as you imagine that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
You're encountering a landscape of anomaly or novelty that's signified by the right hemisphere. The emotion that's elicited is anxiety with a subtext of curiosity. Right, right. Because both of those two things would be at play. And then the fantasy landscape can be elaborated so that even perception itself can be reconfigured because of the air.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It was also extremely useful philosophically. One of the advantages, if you're a conceptual thinker, to studying neuroanatomy and neurobiology is that It puts limits on what philosophical propositions are plausible and possible. I really like that. It's like you have to play a game with two different sets of rules then, right? It has to make sense conceptually, so that would be philosophically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
If you're betrayed by someone, you could say something like, I can't even look at you the same way. Right, and that means that the betrayal has forced a reconception so profound that perception itself has been altered. Like, you could find someone attractive. This happens often when people are dating. You could find someone attractive or unattractive on first meeting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And then as you get to know them, Maybe you thought they were attractive to begin with, and that just goes away. Or you felt that they weren't that attractive to begin with, but as you get to know their character, let's say, then the perception itself shifts. It's not merely the theory of mind or the conception you have of them, right? You literally look at them differently.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Maybe it's because, in part, you actually see, I don't know, if you reconfigure the What would be the patterns of interaction in their face? You know, like someone graceful, for example, you're obviously perceiving something like a gestalt, and there's something charming and beautiful about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
My guess is if you see a person of high character across time, you can see their integration, and that that would make them... That would allow you to perceive their attractiveness in a way that you might not have been able to do superficially.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right. Well, it would make sense, too, that what you should look, the more sophisticated you are in your social perception, the less likely even encounters with dangerous people are to go wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
I'll tell you a story about that. Yep. So I had this landlord when I lived in Montreal, and he was an ex-president of Hell's Angels in Montreal. And he'd been in prison, and he was a rough guy. And we couldn't communicate that easily because he spoke Joual French, which is very hard to understand, even if you're French, and I spoke English.
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533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And there was quite a big class difference between us, and I was from Western Canada, and she was from Eastern Canada. But we got along, you know? He lived right beside me, and to the degree we could communicate, we did. And he did some artwork. He worked in neon, as it turned out, and I bought some of his pieces. And we kind of got to know each other insofar as we could.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Now, the problem, his name was Paulo. The problem was that now and then he would go on a bender and he could drink, well, like an unlimited amount of alcohol over a three-day period, like 90 beer. And he would drink himself to a point where it was not even obvious how conscious he was, but he was still upright. And then he'd drink up all his money
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And then he developed a habit of coming to my door at like three in the morning to sell me like a toaster or a microwave because he needed money, because he wanted to keep drinking. And so I did that a couple of times. He showed up at like three in the morning. Now he's a big guy and he's tough. I went out once to a bar with him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
He put me on the back of his motorcycle, which is a 750 Honda, if I remember correctly. He put his wife's helmet on my head, which is a little tiny helmet. And away we went. He said, if the cops come after me, I'm not stopping, just so you know. It's like, well, that was the beginning of a very interesting evening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And he got into all sorts of fights at the bars because people would come up and like, Challenge him essentially stupid people and that didn't go well for them. So he was touchy. Let's put it that way Well, I talked to my wife about this and Because she didn't like the fact that I was giving Paulo money for his like toasters and so forth because she knew that he was trying to quit drinking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
But then it can't. violate the principles of neuroanatomy and neuroscience that are already established. It's a very good way of initial triangulation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So, and then it also scared her that he would come over like at three in the morning. So one day he came over at three in the morning and he was standing there sort of swaying and looking at me. And I had to tell him that I wasn't going to give him any more money starting then. And I had to tell him why. And so I said, look, we know you're trying to quit drinking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Something was happening to me, and I was frozen and unable to speak, and I knew I had to wake myself up. Like, I'd try to throw myself off the bed. Sometimes I could yell to my wife. She'd have to come and shake me, and then I'd wake up.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And when you come over and I buy your toaster, then you go and drink. And I can't do that anymore because it's not good. And he looked at me for like 10 seconds. And I know why he was looking at me. He was looking at me to see if I was playing moral superiority games. Yeah, in which case the interaction wouldn't have gone very well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right. And so the reason I'm bringing that up is because as your social perception becomes more sophisticated, the probability that you can navigate well in a complex and potentially dangerous situation increases radically. So if you can practice that in a dream, now that should mean that you should concentrate on elements of social behavior that didn't go your way, that you don't understand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And that would take you into a landscape of, well, hard to tell, but possibly into a landscape of malevolence. That would explain, for example, why people go and watch horror movies and movies about serial killers and so forth. It's like... You want to sharpen yourself up.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So it has to be, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, I see. So it presents scenarios until one evokes a limbic reaction. Absolutely. But is it also searching for emotional reactions that are primarily negative or is it intensity?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, but it's tilted somewhat towards the negative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
We are generally, as human beings, tilted somewhat toward the negative. Absolutely, yeah. So, okay. Okay, so your brain is... Playing with various scenarios. Absolutely. And if one evokes an emotional response, so you see, the thing is, if it evokes a negative emotional response, that would indicate that your adaptation is weak at that point, right? Because you're much more likely to be
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
anxious about a situation that you haven't mastered. So you could imagine that the evocation of negative emotion is an indication of weakness in conceptual structure. So now the dream is playing with various scenarios around that evocation point.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Well, that should be associated with both the novelty-routinization dichotomy. So the question is, well, how do you approach something that's novel? Well, if it's novel, if it produces a normal, if you don't understand it, you haven't encapsulated it in language. It's not routinized enough so that you have a propositional description of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So you could imagine that during the day, when you're conscious, you're running... well-routinized, propositionalized routines. But some of them, don't work out as well as others. Okay, so now imagine the right hemisphere is sitting in the background, mapping the failures. Okay, so now you have like a collection of failures, it's something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Now it's nighttime, you shut down the propositional side and you open up the metaphoric side, and it's starting to explore that land. It's exploring, I think it's exploring unexplored territory, fundamentally, that's the best way to conceptualize it. It's the same as the landscape of insufficient adaptation, right? And that should be associated with negative emotion. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And now the question would be, what would be the utility of those metaphoric fantasies? Well, part of that's... Okay, so imagine that around any perception, there's a cloud of connotations. right, that are first order. We already talked about that. So like a first order connotation for you, if I saw you would obviously be male, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And so you said that when you went to do the recording that the process worked well. Very well. What about it worked well?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So, and then imagine that outside of that there's second order connotations and third order, and finally things that are so distinct that they don't seem to bear any conceptual relationship. Well, as you open up the metaphoric landscape, that connotation width should expand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And then you could imagine that what you're trying to do is to explore a new network of connotations that would map the territory more effectively, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And that is also happening in a psilocybin experience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, so that accounts in part for the overlap between the mystical experience and the dream experience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, so what do you think account? Okay, so you said something paradoxical about that, right? That it's a weird combination of intensely personal and cosmic, which means intensely universal. It brings those two things together. That's a strange conjunction because those two things are actually quite far apart. The more personal something is in some ways, the less cosmic, the less universal it is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
But the dream unites those two things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So I wonder... See, an archetype in some ways bridges the gap between the personal and the cosmic. So here's an example of something you can do with a dream that's very effective. So imagine that you have a client who's chased by something awful. in a dream and that repeats. And then you ask them what they do and they say, well, I run away or I try to hide.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, so then you say to them, well, here's what we're gonna do instead. I want you to sit there, close your eyes, then make them relax so that they get into a state where they can visualize. Say now, bring that dream to mind. Okay, now, Close your eyes, bring the dream to mind. Now, tell me what's happening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So they'll replay the dream and say, now, okay, now, at the end, instead of running, tell me what happens if you turn around and ask the criminal or the sadist or the monster what it's up to. Or... What happens if you approach it instead of running? Well, and then the dream will continue in their imagination most of the time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And generally what occurs in a consequence of that is that dream goes away. Now, I think the reason for that, and I think this is akin to this bridging of the gap between the personal and the cosmic is because their personal response to being chased is to run and hide. So they're prey animals. Now, if you...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
If you transform that into voluntary explorers, then what you're doing is you're inculcating an element of the hero myth into the dream landscape. It's like, no, the right strategy when you're threatened isn't to run. The right strategy is to turn voluntarily and to commence the process of exploration. That is what a hero myth is, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, so that's that overplay of emotion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, so you're contextualizing the emotion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, well, you know, I think we realized the importance of that, really. When I did the first Exodus seminar for The Daily Wire, we brought nine thinkers in, and we spent a fair bit of time on the hospitality side. And one of the things I realized, and I knew this in part from working at a university, was that a lot of the professors that we pulled in for that seminar
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, right, right. Which puts you, see, that shifts your identity in relationship to the thing that's chasing you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
I experienced sleep paralysis repeatedly for years. Yeah, especially if I slept on my back. That doesn't happen anymore, but I'm very familiar with sleep paralysis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Most of my experience was being unable to move. And I knew what sleep paralysis was. So even when it happened to be in my dreams, Usually my experience was that something was happening to me and I was frozen and unable to speak. And I knew I had to wake myself up. Like I tried to throw myself off the bed. Sometimes I could yell to my wife.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
I mean, literally in my life, I would yell and she'd have to come and shake me and then I'd wake up. But no, I didn't have the monster element to it. But I had clients who did in sleep paralysis. I think the reason that didn't happen is because I knew what was happening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
The monster, too, just out of curiosity, so you could imagine that with this interplay between the hippocampus and the amygdala, if the emotional systems are more active, okay, so now there's lots of emotions being triggered. Now the memory systems are interacting with those emotions. They're going to flesh them out, right? So here's the emotion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Here's the thing that would be most likely to manifest that. So if it's a panoply of emotions, it would be an amalgam of emotions emotion-evoking stimuli. And there's no difference between an amalgam of emotion-eliciting stimuli and a monster. Those are the same thing. That's what a monster is. So a monster is your worst nightmare come to life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
What did the monster look like?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So he's the monster of the oppressive patriarchy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
seminar, I wouldn't say they're exactly well treated at their institutions. And that's foolish because I invited the people who I did invite to the Exodus seminar because I thought they were great and I wanted to hear what they had to say. And there's every reason to make that obvious in every in every detail of treatment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
My wife had a dream like that about Richard Nixon. dressed in a general's outfit. So he was another figure. You could think about him as the monstrous form of the patriarchy. My wife kissed him. Right, right. So that was how she reconciled that conflict. Well, you can think about it. It's a funny move, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Because the monstrous element of the patriarchy, it's the negative side of the social order. It's something everyone has to contend with. That's a class of monster, right? Like giant, it's the same thing as giant. And in hero mythology, of course, one of the categories of monster that the hero fights is giant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
There's dragon, and dragon is a different, that's more like a representation of the terrible aspect of nature. That's a good way to think about a dragon. Okay, so you said you were in Libya? Well, I was in Egypt.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
What was happening around you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Oh yeah, you should never do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So we show- So those are categories of the monstrous.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, so what that would imply is that you could imagine that the cultural, okay, so let's say the core of the revelation is diffuse emotional activation, much of it negative emotion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, now the question is, What's the most basic form in which that could take perceptual shape? That's a good point. Okay, so the cultural narrative would be like a first-order elaboration of the core of that fear. So then it's not surprising at all that that's what your mind would latch on to when it was trying to clothe that emotion in reality. perceptual reality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, so then as you explore, does it move up the visual?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And that's it, and that's it. Are they most terrified at that level?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yes, of course, because you don't know what to do. Exactly. Yeah, so okay, so then you imagine that, oh, that's so cool. So then you imagine that adaptation would proceed in this manner. So when it's only shapeless form, you have no idea what to do because there's, There's no concrete action you can take against a shapeless form.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And so, you know, one of the things I offer people who we offer at Peterson Academy, people who come and lecture, because people ask me, well, you know, what lecture do you need? And that's not the right approach. My sense is that I find people whose views I want to know and share.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, so now you can imagine using this in behavior therapy to deal with fears. It's like, okay, first of all, because you're trying to get it to take form. Well, why? Because the more form it takes, the more delineated the strategy can be for dealing with it. So you're saying, okay, so first of all, you're doing a walk through the visual hierarchy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
You got just the shadows and the basic, and then you get the basic motion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay. And then it takes a face. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay. The next thing you'd need above that would be a behavioral strategy. Yeah. So if this named and faced figure now makes itself manifest, what do you need to do? So, see, this is... Partly what you do if you're trying to treat someone for post-traumatic stress disorder is you help them specify very clearly, so give form to the nature of the fear, but that's not enough.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It isn't enough to know your enemy, right? That's better than not knowing your enemy, because that's even more terrifying. But you want to lay out a behavioral strategy in relationship to that enemy that either quells the threat, so how do you deal with a criminal, let's say, or like the optimal strategy would be to take the enemy and to transform him into an ally, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
That's the highest possible level of adaptation. Because who needs an enemy? And partly what you're doing, like in therapy, you can go through someone's history and you can see where they might have had a repeated traumatic experience, like in a relationship.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Then you have to find out what is it that's absent in their representation of relationship that's exposing them time and time again to that threat, because it means there's something in their perception and their strategy. Because imagine this, imagine that you were selectively blind only for white vans that were approaching you from the left. That's not much of a deficit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
But your recurring experience would be once every two years, you get run over by a white fan. And you have no idea why. Okay, so that's the account of the lack of your perception and the repeat experience. Okay, so now you have someone who has a repetitive trauma. You think, well, you've got a hole in your adaptive structure. Okay, now you want to characterize that. So give it form.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And you want to... It's a perceptual and behavioral strategy to it. And that's what'll make the nightmare go away. And it's really remarkable. My experience clinically was that it took very few repetitions Of a repeating dream. Yep. Where you inverted the strategy, the dream would almost, my experience was that if you did that once, the person wouldn't have the recurring dream anymore. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right. And it's because you might say at some very deep level, they had conceptualized themselves in that situation as nothing but a prey animal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
You do the same thing with exposure therapy, with agoraphobia, right? As you get people to Imagine what upsets them and then begin to confront it. And the generalization element isn't the specific strategy of confrontation. It's the idea that they could be the one that confronts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And then I want them to do what they think would be best because I wouldn't bloody well invite them if I didn't think they knew what they were doing. And I don't want to put constraints on them. And then if we find the right people, we can sort out the curriculum rather than sorting out their curriculum and then forcing the participants, the professors into it. That makes no sense at all to me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It's got elements of psychogenic epidemic to it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So it's like a contagious maladaptive conceptualization.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Now she's got a scary explanation for it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And a funny thing is, too, it is a kind of possession.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
The grandmother transmitted the spirit to her.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, a meme. It's a monstrous meme.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Well, you can imagine how that would increase the probability that it would spread too. Because... She might tell a friend, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Look, you know from psychotherapy that the simulations that produce the most psychophysiological response are the most curative. So for example, when Edna Foa was treating people with PTSD, and I think she did this as well as anybody's ever done it, she would have people, this is counterintuitive in some ways, so imagine that the trauma was rape instituted. She'd have them
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
bring the rape incident to mind in as much detail as possible, voluntarily. That's the critical element, voluntarily. And then she did psychophysiological measurements, and the participants who showed the highest levels of psychophysiological response to the reenactment were the ones that got better faster.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
What did the monster look like? Well, I'll tell you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Now, that was still damn hard on them while they were doing it, but it makes perfect sense that the more hyperrealist simulation, the more learning would be associated with it, obviously. And you could see how that could be pathologized. So then the question would be, this would be the tricky question for a therapist is like,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Well, what do you do with a client that has a repetitive alien abduction experience? Because now that's a person who needs a strategy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So you're doing that with people when they're bringing the experience to mind?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, because you bring the notion of mother and maternal care as the antithesis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, so I'm curious, everybody who studies the brain in some depth has their own approach. It's like exploring a continent, let's say, they have their own approach. And so when you lay out the architecture of the brain, let's say the basic anatomy, tell me how you do that. I would like to hear how you conceptualize the brain. So do that if you would.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
I walked the Via Dolorosa with Jonathan Paggio, and we were talking about its significance. And so you could imagine that one of the things that you have to do in life is to, what do you say, reconcile yourself to the monstrous. Yeah. Well, walking the road of the crucifixion does that because it enables you to voluntarily simulate intense suffering in the face of malevolence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right now, you can imagine that because it's voluntary rather than something that's imposed on you, you're switching your framework from victim to victim. accept, it's very strange, accepting participant. It's like turning around to confront the monster. It's the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So you could imagine, we talked already about the figure of Mary, let's say, as, or briefly, as the maternal, as the antithesis of the monstrous, that's pretty obvious, but you could also imagine that practicing your ability to accept the reality of malevolence and suffering, that's a meta strategy for dealing with the monstrous itself. It's something like that. That's a good point.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
That'd be my guess.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
I wrote a little bit about it in the, story of Noah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right. Well, so Noah is an archetypically good man. Yeah. But in the culturally and personally limited sense in a way. Noah's as good a man as you could expect someone to be for the conditions of his time and place. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, we know from the anthropological literature on elders that people who are singled out as elders in, let's say, traditional communities are people who other people are motivated to go to for advice when things aren't going well. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, so now you might imagine, well, what sort of person would you have to be to be the sort of person who people would go to for advice when things aren't going well? Well, you'd have to establish a reputation of either having had things go well for you, so you could avoid the catastrophes, or having withstood a variety of catastrophes and still be highly functional.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, so then that would make you a certain kind of person. the insistence in the story of Noah is that if your orientation is upward, your intuition is valid. If your intuition is valid, you're a prophet, because you can see things coming when blind people won't see them. Right, so why wouldn't, like, there's no difference between forethought, and prophecy, except time span.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, so you might say, well, a mature person is capable of forethought. Okay, now if you are mature and maximally optimally configured in your moral aim, your capacity for forethought would extend. You'd be able to see things coming long before other people. And maybe some of that would reveal itself in like visions. Those are fantasies. They could be prophetic visions. They could come in dreams.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Imagine that your dream land, imagine now you're the sort of person who's dispensed with the first order monsters. Well, your dreams are still gonna be doing something. They're going to be concentrating on more sophisticated forms of anomaly. Then maybe you master those. Well, then now you're up another level, right? Those are the sort of people that would be prophetic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Because look, one of the ways of being a prophet is just by looking at things that other people won't look at, right? even in the landscape of media, if a story comes out about what's monstrous, most people will just, they won't look into it. They'll deny it. Well, imagine instead you delve into it, like you delve into the character of the monster in the dream. Well, are you less prepared or more?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Well, obviously far more. And I don't know, I don't think there's a limit to that. Because there's also an insistence in hero mythology that You go to the heart of darkness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Oh, yeah, right. You worked with him. He's a stunningly effective public speaker.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So I thought that was... Well, you might say that one of the strong functions of the religious is The religious is a meta strategy for dealing with the monstrous. That's not all it is. But that's one of the things that it is. Like how do we contend with... not, you could imagine, how do I contend with my neighbor who's being a pain?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Well, then how do I contend with the class of neighbors who are being troublesome? Well, then how do I contend with the fact that people can be malevolent? Then how do I contend with the existence of malevolence itself? You're getting deeper into the question with each of those iterations. By the time you get to the point
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
where your question is, how do I deal with the existence of malevolence itself? You're in the religious realm. I would say that by definition. So it was weirdly the case when I was working as a clinician, when I was dealing with people who were profoundly traumatized. So they had their reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
The language always became religious when we were talking about, you can't escape it because if you've really been hurt by someone who really wanted to hurt you, you've been touched by something like the spirit of malevolence. And when you're having a discussion about the nature of the spirit of malevolence, the language takes on like religious connotations and depth of its own accord.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Well, one of the things, you know, if we have a further conversation at some point, I'd like to talk about the... like neurological conceptualization of the religious by definition. Like, because I think we're at a point in our understanding of neuroscience where we could have a conversation like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So like one of the hypothesis, for example, would be, imagine, I think that perceptions are the axioms of thought. Yeah. Okay, now, and so an axiom is a very deep presupposition. Yeah. You can imagine in any conceptual structure that there are shallow elements of the conception, and then layers, kind of like the visual system, layers, and that there are axiomatic elements of the conceptual system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
If an axiomatic element is accidentally shifted, you're traumatized. If it's voluntarily shifted, you're a hero. As the level of depth of the inquiry maximizes, the inquiry becomes more religious in its nature. That's a definition. And so then you could imagine that the salience of the investigation magnifies in proportion to its depth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And so that would account for the experiential element of awe, for example. So that's something that would be very entertaining to discuss technically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Apparently.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, well, you see the same, we should close with this, and we'll move to the daily wear section, but you see the same thing with the onset of paranoid schizophrenia. is that say someone is watching television and part of the speech becomes hyper emotionally significant. So now it stands out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And the more intelligent schizophrenics are more likely to become paranoid, by the way, because they build up the conceptual structures around the perceptual anomaly. But it's the perceptual emotional anomaly that's the core of the pathology. It's like, well, why is that so significant? Well, because you get this emotional hyper response.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It's like, it evokes anxiety and wonder, it's awe-inspiring. It's like, well, it's like this, it's particularly significant to me. It's a message to me. It's a message, what? It's a message from the television station? Is it a message from the satellites? Is it a message from the Pope? There's no denying the reality of the experience, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So then the paranoid conspiracy, let's say, is overlaid on top of that as an explanation for something that can't be challenged because it's so visceral, right? It is dreamlike in the sense that you just described. And one of the things you also alluded to was that we actually base our sense of reality on that valence, right? So it's hyper real if everything's over valence and it's dead if...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Nothing has significance. Significance is the marker of the real. Right. Right. That's very different than objective reality. Okay, we should stop. Here's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side. You're at Harvard. Correct. And you're working really in the same... area in the Harvard Department of Psychology that I was in the 90s.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And so one of the things I'd like to talk to you about is your experience there and your thoughts on the university system in general. So let's do that for half an hour on the Daily Wire side. So all of you who are watching and listening, you can... Well, you can continue your investigation into exactly the topics that we described today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Obviously, at Peterson Academy, because I'm lecturing there and my guest is lecturing there, it's Introduction to Neuroscience. Correct. Yeah, yeah. So that's one of the newer courses in our offerings. And so if you're fascinated by this sort of thing, it's so useful to know the anatomy and the neuroscience, as I said, because it gives you much deeper insights into...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Well, the nature of the problems that you might encounter and also into the nature of their, of what? The universe of potentially viable solutions. That's a good way of thinking about it. And we're putting a tremendous amount together right now on the scientific and cultural front in relationship to the overlap between brain function, neurochemistry, physiology, and behavior.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
like profound philosophical conceptions. It's great to work at that interface. And so the courses that, well, this introduction to neuroscience course is one that focuses exactly at that nexus. We have several like that. So in any case, join us on the Daily Wire side for another half an hour.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
We'll talk about the state of the modern university, focusing in this case on Harvard and the Department of Psychology there, although you've been at other universities too, and we can bring them into the mix. So join us on the Daily Wire side. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yeah, really good to talk to you. Same here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Thanks to the film crew here today in Scottsdale and to the Daily Wire for making this possible. And finally, to all of you for your time and attention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Lay it out and explain it to people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Hi, everybody. I had the opportunity today to speak to Dr. Balan Jalal. He's a neuroscientist and author at Harvard and previously a visiting researcher at Cambridge University Medical School. He's been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other such publications.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, that's a very strange element of human perception, right? It must be strongly associated not only with our ability to map sensation onto our bodies, but also with our ability to use tools. So I know, for example, we're very good at it. Like if I pick up a screwdriver, it takes me virtually no time to use the tip of the screwdriver in a manner that very much approximates the tip of my finger.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And then when we go in a car, Essentially, what we're doing, especially once we're expert drivers, is that we expand the dimensions of our kinesthetic perception, our bodily perception, to include the car, right? So you're feeling with the tires, you're feeling with the brake, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And that's, well, part of my understanding of that is that that's very tightly associated with our tool using proclivity. Because a tool is a bodily extension.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
I read a paper not... Not long ago, if I remember the details carefully, they were looking at the difference either, I think the dimension was agreeableness, but it might have been psychopathy, which would be the opposite of agreeableness, let's say, that more agreeable people, so less psychopathic people, feel, have more pain activation to the perception of other people's pain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So you could imagine that part of the utility in being able to morph your pain sensitivity, even to represent something objective like a table, that's also a variant of my ability to map my own body, let's say, onto your body so that the empathy that I feel for you isn't conceptual.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And I've really been thinking about this in terms of how we understand each other because it looks to me like what we do to understand each other is I notice what your aim is, partly by watching your eyes, I infer your aim. Once I infer your aim, I can inhabit your perceptual space because if I know your aim, I know the objects that surround you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
The Telegraph and the BBC described him as one of the world's leading experts on sleep paralysis and the terrors and opportunities of dream, fantasy, and adaptation What did we discuss?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
But I also know how your emotions are configured because they're configured in relationship to the aim. If I can adopt that aim, then I can embody those emotions and perceptions. I can read off that embodiment and then that's... So the understanding is actually my simulating you on my own neural architecture and then drawing the appropriate inferences from that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And it looks to me like children probably develop that ability. Some of it's nascent, I would say. Some of it's there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right. So you're linking the visual perception to the kinesthetic perception? Absolutely. Absolutely. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, so let's just walk through this so everybody understands clearly. So you have someone with their arm on a table, let's say, their left arm. Their right arm is under the table, so they can no longer see it. Now, what you're doing then is you're interacting with their hidden arm physically. Physically, yep. But they can't see that. They can't feel it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
At the same time, you interact with the table where they can see it. Absolutely. So you're syncing their visual perception with their kinesthetic perception. Absolutely. But their visual perception isn't focused on their own hand. Now they start to react to the table like it's a hand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Okay, now you're extending this to the OCD situation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
People would start responding to a rubber hand as if it was their own.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, with their other hand hidden. Correct. They start to respond to the rubber hand as if it's theirs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
So if it comes back to bite us in the ass, we can say, well, it would just always said that it had the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign, not that it actually was one. Hint, hint, wink, wink, you know. And Zuckerberg, you know, I have some sympathy for Zuckerberg, actually.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
I've talked to him, and maybe I'm naive, and it's certainly possible because I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. But, you know, 10 years ago, if the White House came knocking at your door and said, you're running a very complex operation here. We have reason to believe that it has been compromised. We'd like you to aid us in our investigations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
You know, you can think you would have been like free speech advocate number one and said no, but most people will back off their free speech with a lot less pressure than that. That's for sure. And Zuckerberg definitely made mistakes. And you could say that his admission of guilt, you know, in the Trump era is...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
uh self-serving and i suppose you could you know that's that's something to consider but um you have to be pretty damn sure yourself to think you would have done better i'm not trying to excuse it or what happened on it or twitter which was way worse i mean
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Anyways, I got a chance to talk to Ezra and so we did a bit of walking down memory lane talking about, well, the strange situation that obtains in Canada, not least with regard to the new likely liberal leader, Mark Carney. We talked about the WEF and their machinations. We talked a fair bit about Tommy Robinson, a political prisoner in the UK. I did two interviews with him, and Ezra worked.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And there is misinformation and disinformation campaigns. It's not like TikTok isn't run by the Chinese communists. And it's warped a whole generation of young women because that's where they get all their information. And 18 to 35-year-old young women in the United States have political views that are way out of alignment with everyone else's, hyper-progressive and liberal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And there's no doubt, there's absolutely no doubt that the Chinese communists are fomenting discord using TikTok. Obviously, clearly, in a documented way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And that's what makes it so- Probably more, certainly explicitly more than you do, definitely. And the thing is- People won't admit to what they like.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Well, that's Musk's take on it, too, is that this is a dreadful war, this AI war, because these AI systems use reinforcement learning, and that's how biological systems learn. They're very lifelike, very, very lifelike. And Their intelligence is limited only by their database and the amount of power at the moment that's available, computation, computational ability, power, and the database.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And those are just growing like mad. And so, yeah, it's clearly the case that these systems, well, in some ways, without AI advertisers, The successful ones knew more about your preferences than you did. But with AI, well, that's a whole different ballgame, especially when they're starting to do things like analyze your eye movements.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Because eye movements are very, very indicative of attentional focus, right? They're almost a perfect window into the soul, which is why we look at each other's eyes when we talk, right? So these cameras on your phones can track your eyes with no problem. Well, and then the AI systems will know more about what motivates each of us and all of us than we will. They probably already do. So, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
So Musk's take on that is, well, better him than the Chinese. If it has to be someone, and it seems like it has to be, because what, are you going to stop AI? Good luck. There's no stopping it. There's not even hypothetically a way to stop it. Because you can't even define it, really. Like, what are you going to do, make the mathematics illegal? That's all statistics, by the way, so that's gone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
No, that's not going to happen. Let's go back to 2016. Okay, so, yeah, so that was a shock to me that day. That was a free speech. um, protest. Now that was advertised as mine, but it wasn't. I was just invited to speak by a bunch of students and I'd never been involved like anything, anything like that on campus.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
I wasn't a controversial figure politically by any stretch of the imagination, you know? And, uh, Yeah, these bloody radicals showed up. Well, first of all, the trans mob. So they were fun. And these serious radical types. And yeah, they brought these white noise blasters to drown me out. And I can't remember if I unplugged one or if there was a rough guy there who unplugged it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And then there was a bit of a skirmish around that. It's like, because I don't know, it's a tricky business. Do I have the right to speak in public? Does someone have a right to drown me out with white noise generator? Well, it's not exactly obvious whose right triumphs in that particular instance. It felt like a struggle session, in a way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Tommy Robinson was a journalist working for Rebel News for a good while. And we talked a lot about Tommy, who's in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in the UK for a civil crime, which was distributing a film called Silenced, which is probably the most well-watched documentary that the UK has ever produced. So that gag order didn't work very well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Oh, definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And those were... It wasn't the university that did that. That was the federal government. Yeah, well... Yeah, so one of your requirements as a professor, essentially, is to generate enough grant funding, usually from federal agencies. It's probably not a good idea, by the way, to keep your lab running to fund your graduate students.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And there's small grants in Canada, but one thing I would say in favor of the Canadian granting system is it doesn't take all your time to write the grants like it does in the United States. Anyways, not only does that fund your graduate students, some travel and some research costs, there's nothing in it that's personal, um,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
How would you describe the World Economic Forum?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
But it also funds the university to some degree because they take overhead costs. And I always got a grant. I had an ungroup. Until. Until then. Until. Oh, yeah, that wasn't accidental. I mean, it wasn't like I was a good researcher. I had an excellent research dossier. And, yeah, I don't know if I'm the most cited clinical psychologist in Canada, but I've got to be in the top 10. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
So still, by the way, so there was absolutely no reason for them to pull my funding, but they did. That's right. And then you did a fundraising campaign, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
That's where I met Lauren, too, that day. She was quite the creature. She wasn't very old then, eh? She was only about 18. Very young. She's had a rough time. Man, she's been through the mill, that girl.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, you were early adopters of that. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
It's happened in the universities, so... And in the UK, they're Ofcom.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
We talked a fair bit about Australia. We talked about the political situation in Canada and the UK. We talked about the trucker convoy and about the transformation of the news media from the corrupt government-funded legacy media in Canada, say, exemplified by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC, and the rise of the new media, apart from wandering down memory lane.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
But in the last couple of years... What was your... Okay, you talked about some of your motivation for doing that on the bureaucrat side, let's say. How do you think it was that you saw that that opportunity existed on YouTube? And I started putting my lectures on YouTube, I think in 2012 or 2013. It was really an experiment, right? What the hell is this video on demand?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
It was all cute cat videos at that point, right? It looked like nothing. That was before Google bought it. But I thought, well... Huh, on-demand video, eh? Permanent. That's a revolution, man. That's a revolution. So what were you thinking about in relationship? Was it specifically YouTube that you gravitated towards first?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, right. Because you're not supposed to print an image of Muhammad. That's right. Well, at least there's some interpretations of Islam that make that claim. Right. And the noisy ones definitely make that claim.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Almost the only people in the world. Very few did it. Very few, man. There were like three news outlets, I think, three or four. You were one of them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
It was news.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Exactly. My right to not be offended by you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
So a radical imam... Yeah, well, it was illegal in the Soviet Union to complain about your own pain. And that's the thing. The answer is... Where does...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Have you read Bill C-63?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Oh my God. You think Carney will pass that when he gets coronated?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And so, oh, I should mention something too. Even though Ezra was too shy to mention it during the podcast, which is not something that you'd normally say about Ezra Levant, too shy, he's got a new book coming out too, which is called Deal of the Century, The America First Plan for Canada's Oil Sands.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Well, they're playing with that in the UK.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
That's the truth. That's the new definition of truth, fundamentally. So... You know, that was a canary in the coal mine. You fought that for how long?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Before viral was a thing, really.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Hundreds of thousands. What year was that? I think it was 08. Oh, yeah. That's really early. That's really early. So that clued you into the power of that media. The asymmetry of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And so, well, keep an eye out for that because there's a lot of oil in the oil sands and there's every reason to use it. despite the myriad of reasons that were force fed about not using it. And so, you know, Ezra's a battler for the Alberta economy and for Western energy independence and the utility of being grateful, let's say, for the fossil fuel industry that stops us from
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
That's like $10 million now. They...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah. Well, he was out of the country, too, and he went back for his trial. He went back. He was in Spain. I know. We talked about that, you know. And, well, we discussed the pros and cons of him staying away or going back to face the music. Well, you know, Socrates, when he was sentenced to death by the Athenians, they thought he'd run.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Like they told him, we're going to try you six months from now. Hint, hint, wink, wink. Why don't you get out of town, you troublesome old goat? You know, because otherwise, you know, the axe is going to fall. And he went out and had a little discussion with his conscience, and it said, don't run. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
No, the optimal outcome for reducing immediate pain. Right. That's a big difference, man.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
freezing to death in Winnipeg, for example, in the middle of the winter when it's minus 30 and everyone's warm. And so that's deal of the century, the America first plan for Canada's oil sands. In any case, join me today for my discussion with Ezra Levat, head of Rebel News. They also, by the way, did a lot to publicize the trucker's convoy. Looking forward to it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
It's been over 100 days. Right. Now, they've also forbade anyone with a social media following to visit him, which is a weird—like, what does that mean, a social media following? I just got that letter. Like, three people?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
You can punish a psychopath with solitary confinement. That's how punishing it is. You can take the most antisocial person in the world— and put him in solitary, and he's social enough so that that's a punishment, right? A serious punishment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, he doesn't know what's going on, eh?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
The killer, the Southport murderer. Now, my understanding is that he requested solitary. No, untrue. Okay, so walk me through. Okay, so what I garnered or gleaned was that because the prison was so dangerous- and was full of the sort of people, let's say, that might not be all that happy about Mr. Robinson, like the last prison he was in where he got beat up very badly, that he needed protection.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
But you're telling me that's not true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
So we have lots to talk about today. We can talk about our mutual friend, Tommy Robinson, and whatever the hell is going on in the UK. We can talk about the WF, because I know you've sent journalists there and been there yourself. We can talk about the stunningly dismal state of the political situation in Canada. But I think I want to start with two other things. I want to remember how we met.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Which means peasants don't get cars. That's what ULEZ means. It doesn't mean you have cleaner air, folks. It means you can stay in your goddamn house and freeze to death in the dark.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Just so everyone knows, we certainly don't approve of the blade runners.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, right. Because the- That's what left-wingers used to believe, you know, back when they were on the left, instead of wherever the hell they are now, in the pockets of the WEF.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
How many times has he been arrested now? Five times last year alone. In Canada. In Canada. For being a journalist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
In Toronto. Jewish neighborhood in Toronto. That's fun. Yeah, and— And whoever thought we'd say that in Canada?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And I want to talk to you about what's happened with Rebel News since then. So I want to hear how you think we met and what happened when we first began our association.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Objected on what grounds? Um... That I'm Jewish. You can't take a picture of their protest?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And he's a shoe lever than journals. He reported on that trans professor from York who was on the swim team with all the 13-year-old girls and got kicked out of the swimming pool for pointing that out. You're exactly right. Which he should have pointed out. Yeah, and the parents let him get away with it too, the professor. I mean, what the hell? Seriously.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, it wasn't just for Canada either. Like that demonstration triggered all those farmers protests in the UK and it was a big deal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Confederate Nazis. You know Canada is full of Confederate Nazis. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
No, I wouldn't have guessed that. I've got to tell you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, and the court case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Lauren Southern was there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Well, thank God for that. That's an amazing thing in and of itself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, right. It's a joke.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah. How would you describe the World Economic Forum for everybody who's watching and listening?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, and the question is why? You know, I asked some Davos attendants who were very well positioned, like, who the hell Klaus Schwab is? It's like, how in the world did this cartoon exist? dictator of the world character managed to convene all these VVIPs, as you call them. And Klaus Schwab is a convener, fundamentally, and he's certainly not elected. He has no... He owns it. He's an owner.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Hello, everybody. I'm sitting here in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada today, and my guest is Ezra Levant, and Ezra Levant is the perpetrator of Rebel News, which was an early adopter of social media technology on the news front, one of Canada's earliest adopters, and really one of the earliest adopters in the world, and he's been rabble-rousing for decades.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Hear that? That's Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney, for those of you who are thinking about voting for them. A vote for them is definitely a vote for the WEF, and there'll be a lot more about that on this channel soon.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
It's such a comical, blackly comical reality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Oh, yeah, so that's where you're always lurking out there on the street, like an ambush squad. That's right, and I'll tell you in a minute some of our favorite catches.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Who is meeting with them? Technically, it's a fascist organization. And fascism means to bind together, right? And the fascists were big into the idea that, and this is kind of what defines fascism, that media... corporations, government should all be working together as a unit to push forward whatever the interest happens to be, whatever the agenda happens to be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And the WEF is a place where exactly that happens, is that the elites of all the different
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
power hierarchies meet and, well, conspire morally to improve the planet despite the fact that they have no democratic standing and, as you said, no opposition and no journalistic coverage and that it's a pay-to-play arrangement that's made Schwalben and his cronies exceptionally rich and that's really demented and twisted the world in unbelievably pathological ways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Net zero, that's a WF initiative. ESG, right, that stakeholder capitalism, that's all. pouring out of the WEF. That's the sort of thing, by the way, that Carney supports in spades. He's an architect of those policies and a distributor of them all around the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Carney believes that 85% of the world's fossil fuels have to remain in the ground and that somehow magically Alberta in particular is going to have even better jobs under this new green economy that he can't define. It's going to apparently run on hydrogen of all bloody things. All the... pathological idiocies you can possibly imagine. So he's like Trudeau on steroids.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And so, yeah, that's the WEF, man, in a nutshell. Every stupid idea you can possibly imagine the last 15 years has been promoted by the Davos crowd, all to virtue signal, because they're guilty about being, you know, I don't know, guilty about being rapacious billionaires, I suppose. They could work a little on the rapaciousness, a little less on the virtue signaling.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Well, it's still going on, except it's increasingly invisible. We have no idea how these giant corporations, Google in particular, manipulate behind the scenes to ensure that the right slant is brought to bear not only on the content, but on the viewership and the dissemination, which is even YouTube, for example, took us like about six months to figure this out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
So anyways, okay, so you're in the WEF and you're out there trying to, what? What are you doing? Well, we're outside the moat.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And if you go and watch the private jets- And think of all the lovely carbon that's being produced. Think of all the plants.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
It's probably got slightly greener around Davos in consequence. That's right, because of all the CO2.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
No, no, no, no. They're against fuel and food for peasants.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
They've got Tommy in isolation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And I feel like... Need a T-shirt that says that. A lot of strange things going on in the World Economic Forum. Rebel News.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
My YouTube channel, this was a couple of years ago, maybe even last year, our numbers were slipping, but my subscriber rate was continuing to go up and at a good rate. Like I accrue about 100,000 subscribers a month, which is quite a few. And we found that some subscribers flunky, maybe, who knows why, or on whose orders, scrubbed the name Peterson from the autofill in the search bar.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, because Vanguard has moved away from ESG to something.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And you never know what you're going to get there. Yeah, I'm very afraid that that's exactly the sort of attitude that characterizes Mr. Carney. And I'm more convinced about that after reading his book quite carefully, Values. It's like, yeah, he likes humanity, but, you know, food, shelter, clothing, and heat or air conditioning for you or your car.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
You know, do you get to have a car under Mark Carney? You know, the globalist utopian types, they'd like to see a 95% reduction in private car ownership.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, or else you'll bloody well be happy, or at least you won't get to complain. You'll own nothing and you won't get to complain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
You'd think the cops in Canada would get a kick out of it, too, really.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, it's a terrible thing to think of that harder-handed politicized police presence being part and parcel of Canada. That's really not a good thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, and I think you guys, you know, love you or hate you, or maybe a bit of both. You guys have been canaries in the coal mine for Canada for a long time. And also not just Canada, right? Because how much of your viewership is international?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Right, so 40% international. Is that primarily the US? Yeah, the US. Well, it's such a big population center.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
really follow tommy yeah how many people do you think were at that last rally that was what two weeks ago maybe something like that it's february 9th today and so it would have been about two weeks ago and that was a free tommy robinson rally right that's right and i couldn't get any reasonable estimate of the number of people that showed up and it was peaceful again there's been a bunch of rallies that robinson has been involved in or at the core of yeah
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
So if you typed in P-E-T, it didn't fill. It didn't fill for Michaela, my daughter, because she has a podcast, but for any Petersons, but it definitely didn't fill for me. And so that was a hard thing to ferret out, you know, it was a subtle manipulation of the distribution of the videos, because a lot of the way that people find new videos is by autofill, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
that have been, like the trucker convoy, markedly peaceful, right? And that's very weird because you'd also expect them to be sold with agents provocateur who are there to cause trouble, to discredit the organization. But even given that, those rallies have been peaceful. And you can see in the U.K.,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
that the working class, the genuine working class, like the actual inhabitants of Britain, are not happy and hold viewpoints that aren't well represented by the standard political parties and certainly not by the media.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
I know. Well, it's one of those crimes that— Look, look, I always think of my mother when I'm having a conversation like this. I took my mom to Australia, and I traveled with her and her sister, and they're conventional Canadians, and they were accustomed to believing CTV, believing Lloyd Robertson, believing the CBC. And, you know, for a long time, that wasn't completely unreasonable, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
The legacy media in Canada, like most Canadian institutions, was pretty damn solid, centrist, pretty reliable. And then, well, and then it wasn't. And that started probably 15 years ago, maybe something like that. About when you guys, you know, popped your head above the turret. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Imagine someone like her or her sister, these conventional, hardworking, middle-class or working-class Canadians who are accustomed to trusting their institutions, and then all of a sudden, all of that goes sideways, and they're asked to believe things like what we're talking about, you know?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
They're asked to believe that the food pyramid's a scam, and that the school systems were set up by fascists, and that the WF is a global conspiracy of crypto-fascists who want to take everybody's vehicles, and that there are rape gangs operating at a scale in the UK that involve maybe a million girls. No one knows, right? No one knows. And even that's like, is it 10,000? Is it 100,000?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Is it a million? Oh, we don't know. Well, maybe you should look into it. Well, if you're in the shoes of a person like that, you either have to believe that everything that you thought was true in your life is flipped upside down or that you're being scammed by conspiracy theorists. Well, of course you're going to believe the latter because why the hell wouldn't you? Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
You know, and you have to kind of be dragged. Even Michael Schellenberger, you know, he broke the WPATH story, right? That's that preposterous group of perverted psychopaths who purport to be experts in psychopathology and have defined the standards of care for gender-affirming butchery conducted on minors. That's WPATH, run by Marcy Bowers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
So that's just one example among many.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
I think it's Bowers or Bowes, who's a transsexual surgeon who was involved in the Jess Jennings case, which they made a reality TV show out of. Yeah, that WPATH. Well, Schoenberg told me when I interviewed him that I'd interviewed, was it Helen Joyce or Abigail Schreier? I talked to both of them who were early investigators into the gender affirming scandal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
He said when he first heard the interview, He couldn't believe it was true. And that's Schellenberger, you know, and he was a lefty back in the day and clued in and woke up and he's a hell of an investigative journalist. But even Schellenberger couldn't believe it. There's like 50 things that are happening that you can't believe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And that's, you know, one of the things that you guys have done in Rebel News is like you've been on the forefront of cracking these preposterous stories. And... and then you're arrested for your trouble in Canada. It's so preposterous. It's like, how the hell did Canada become a place where Well, first of all, muck raking journalists are necessary and they certainly are that bloody CBC, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
It's 1.5 billion a year plus $600 million in advertising from the federal government to have no audience. They have no audience, right? Except people over 60. And they've been struggling to get a purchase on YouTube for like 10 years. They've disallowed comments because that's how clueless they are. And no one watches their material. Like they literally get hundreds of views.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
which means that even the staff that made the shows don't watch them. Right. And so here we are in Canada, and Mark Carney's come along to save the... Canada, but really to save the planet, and Canadians are daft enough to start, you can see the scales tilting in his favor, you know?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
I mean, we were going to decimate the Liberals because Trudeau's been such an absolute bloody nightmare catastrophe in his narcissistic and incompetent manner, and now Carney's coming waltzing in from the Bank of England with his ESG and his DEI and his net zero, and his you don't need fossil fuels, peasants, or cars, and Canadians are lining up to vote for him. Jesus, brutal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
He's definitely gone. That's an art.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
It's 60% now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Has no national identity, but insults Daniel Smith for not being patriotic enough to sacrifice the Alberta economy to Canada, a Canada that's a patriarchal, oppressive, you know, what would you say, post-colonial identity-less state.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
We don't have much land, you know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Worse than nothing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And he's got these monsters like Musk on his side who are tromping through the grapevine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, and he just made a deal with the Japanese prime minister. A trillion dollar deal. Yeah, yeah. For a deal where Trudeau had, because the Japanese prime minister had come to Canada and Trudeau said, we can't make a business case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
I don't think Canada's learned a damn thing from it yet. I mean, the Quebec premier came out this week and basically said there was no damn way they were going to put pipelines across the country. You can't make an economic or a global case for that. It's like, hey, you know, have it your way, buddy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Where do you think your transfer payments are going to come from if Alberta decides to pack up and leave?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
He knows exactly what it means to the degree that he knows what anything means. He absolutely is the World Economic Forum candidate. And a leader rather than a follower because Trudeau was a follower.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Governor of the Bank of Canada. And Bank of England. Yeah, well, and he looks to Canadians, you know, and you can understand this. Carney looks like someone with vast international experience and credibility. He's got gravitas. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, he certainly does. Well, Trudeau looked a certain part to it quite effectively. But this is different. Carney has that senior statesman appeal, but values that, I mean... And then for Carney to announce his leadership as an outsider, it's like, that I see. So you're going to start off... On an American TV channel. Yeah, yeah. I'm an outsider.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
I think they'll stretch it out until September of 2026 because there is some grounds for presuming they could do so. Well, look, what's the alternative? You know, at the moment, unless things invert in the polls, if Carney led the liberals to an election, they're going to get decimated. So why would you do that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
The only reason we're still a first-ranked nation is because Europe has done itself in at about the same rate Canada has.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Show me someone who's ever liked that and yes. I like the paper straws that come in plastic, the single use paper straws that come in plastic wrappers. I'm very fond of those.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
The phenomenon that— People enjoyed that? Man, Toronto was rife with informers. It was something to see. I certainly understand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
I made the wrong decision. You're an indication of my cowardice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Well, and then there's the ever-present enjoyment in getting to rat on your neighbors. And we never want to underestimate just how pleasurable that can be. So I think 70% of people in Toronto would have worn a mask for the rest of their life if they could have continued to inform on their neighbors.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Oh, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Wasn't that the same Arrive Can app that the liberals paid $45 million for and that some team of hackers built over a weekend for $3.50? Indeed it was. Yeah, that Arrive Can app.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
So let's close with just a bit more about Rebel News in general, and then we'll go to the Daily Wire side. I think I'll talk to you on the Daily Wire side about the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, because I know you went to our first conference, and so we'll chat about that. We can talk a little bit more about the Trump administration and what Elon Musk is finding. and USAID.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And so if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side for that, please feel welcome to do that. The Daily Wire makes all these podcasts possible and follows me all around the world. I'm in Winnipeg today. I was in Florida yesterday and Washington before that. They set up the camera crews and everything wherever I go. It's extremely useful and handy and make all these YouTube videos possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And so we do an extra half an hour on the Daily Wire side and that's That's for subscribers only, but if you're inclined, follow. All my material from the last 15 years, including a bunch of specials I did too for The Daily Wire, Western Civilization, specials on marriage and vision and success, and on Exodus and the Gospels, that's all available there as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
You know, give it a shot if you're inclined. Ezra, why don't you let people know where they can follow Rebel News? Like, what's the best place to watch you or the multiple places to watch you and your intrepid, troublemaking, rabble-rousing reporters? Sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Sure. That's what Trudeau says.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
In Ireland. There's a crazy country for you. Man, if you want a country on the forefront of every woke nightmare you can possibly imagine, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better example than Ireland.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Well, we've got another half an hour to do for The Daily Wire. Good to see you, man. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming to talk to me. Thanks for having me. And to everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
like a good depends on how you count it but 10 to 15 years and we first came to each other's attention when i was participating in a free speech debacle at the university of toronto just after my comments about canada's infamous bill c-16 my well-reasoned comments i might add uh came to wide public attention and caused a furor that never ended and uh
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Well, I think in Canada, if I've got this right, maybe this is misinformation, so for everybody watching and listening, there's your misinformation warning for the day. I... came across information from a variety of sources suggesting that about 25% of the salary of the typical legacy media journalist in Canada is essentially subsidized by the government.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, but Ezra, they do get hundreds of views on their YouTube postings. Hundreds.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, well, the thing is, if it was an easy thing to separate out opinion from fact, the world would be a much less complex place. You know, today's fact is tomorrow's opinion, and today's opinion is tomorrow's fact. And partly we're exchanging information all the time to distinguish between the two, but it's not like it's easy a priori. And so many preposterous things have turned out to be true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
You know, I... I think the thing that shocked me most, two things that I discovered in the last 10 years, I suppose, were kind of at the list, at the top of the list of shocking realities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And one was that the public education system in North America, and in Europe, and in Japan, for that matter, was literally created by fascist industrialists in the late 1800s to make unthinking workers available for use in factories. They based the public education system on the Prussian military model. And the Prussians had decided they were going to train rural people to be soldiers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And the last thing they wanted them to do was think. And so that's like, I just don't even know what to do with a piece of information like that. But nothing's changed in a hundred. Well, that's why it's rows of desks and there's factory bells. And, you know, there was some reason for it. Rural people were pouring into the cities. Their kids were very likely to work in factories.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
You know, they had to learn to work by the bell.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
but the insistence that the products be unthinking you know because otherwise they wouldn't be suitable factory workers first of all that's a stupid theory because you actually want your factory workers to think so they can see what's wrong on the line and help you work to continuously improve your industrial processes the Japanese figured that out so it was a stupid theory to begin with but it's also dehumanizing and you know that's still the ethos of the public school system so that's appalling and then the next bit of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
you know, impossible conspiratorial reality that I uncovered was... Not that I uncovered it, you know, globally. I don't mean that. But for my own edification was that the food pyramid was formulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and it was a marketing ploy. And they knew that it was going to cause an epidemic of obesity and diabetes because their own experts told them that. It's like...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Oh, yeah, that's a dreadful story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Rebel News backed me in that enterprise and helped publicize what was happening and supported my research financially for a year or so at the University of Toronto when the federal government decided that I wasn't worth supporting anymore despite my stellar research background and unbroken history of previous funding.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Which are so throttled around elections. The Hunter Biden laptop story, that's another one, too. I talked to Miranda Devine. She broke that story for the New York Post. I've had her on as a guest twice. And that's another story that's just completely unbelievable. I mean, Hunter Biden dropped three laptops off. Not one, three.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Now, the first question you might ask yourself is, how do you water soak three laptops? Right. Right? One, okay, you dropped it in the pool during your cocaine-fueled misery binge. But three? And he did that a week before his father announced his run for presidency. And like a Freudian would sniff around that for about 15 years, and rightly so.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
And then there was a lot of damning material on there, which you think he might have thought about a little bit, unless he was out for revenge, let's say. And then... Well, then the story broke, and then just a calamitous tsunami of absolute lies. They knocked the New York Post off of Twitter, and that's the oldest standing newspaper in North America. Alexander Hamilton, I think.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Yeah, it's a bit tabloidy. Nonetheless, it does some very good work. And certainly the work it did on the Hunter Biden laptop story was good. And then they called it Russian disinformation. And this is like weeks before the election. I truly believe that that was enough to throw the election.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Now, it turned out maybe that it was worse for the progressives that Trump had four years to think in what would you call exile, you know, because here he's back and he's been thinking for quite a while. But And then all those intelligence agents signed that document that said it had all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign. It's such a funny phrase, isn't it? That's for sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
You know how conniving and miserable and wretched and deceitful and traitorous you have to be to come up with a line like that? It's like, well, we have to convince the American people that this is a hoax, but we know it isn't a hoax, so we have to walk through it. the line very carefully.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And then, well, the muscles are made out of cells, and they work, but I have no idea how they work, and if I was in charge of them, they wouldn't work. And so, that's just out of my purview, right? My consciousness doesn't enable me to either apprehend or to control my physiology at that level of detail. And that's only the beginning of the level of detail that I don't understand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
I don't understand how the cells work. I certainly don't understand how the proteins and other molecules and sub-organs within the cells work. I don't even know what they are. And much less perceive them or control them and then those cells and the molecules they're made out of are made out of atoms and they're a mystery and then atoms are made out of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Manners in which identity could manifest itself, and it's a mystery that it's become political. Now, it has something to do with what Jonathan made reference to, is when the sacred collapses, so that's the death of God, when the highest order of things collapses, it doesn't disappear, it's as if it plummets downward. And what's happened in our society is that the sacred has become political.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
subatomic particles, and no one knows what in the world those things are. And so the reason I'm telling you this, there's a very specific reason, is that even if you're a reductive materialist, what you can see is that there are elements of what you do, let's say what you do is part of your identity, there are elements of your identity that shade into mystery. Right? At the material level.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
You can move your hands, but that's about as far down into the physiology as you get. There's all these other layers underneath that, that... Who knows how they function? It's taken the world a very long time to create something like you that can operate with that degree of unbelievable complexity, that can have some conscious control over that,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
There's all that mystery underneath what we're capable of consciously apprehending. So our identities shade into the mysterious as we move down into the material realm. Okay, so that's a good way of thinking about it. We have a conscious domain that we can apprehend. There's a mystery on the material side. Okay, then you're writing down letters one by one. You're doing that to craft words.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And so you choose the words carefully if you're wise. What do the words mean and why do you choose those words? Well, that's complicated because each word, no letter has a meaning, right? A letter needs to be combined with other letters before you get any meaning. Words have meaning, but the meaning is partial and context dependent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
That doesn't mean words are meaningless, but it does mean that in order to understand what they mean, you have to assess them in relationship to other words. And so, a word is a unit of meaning, but barely. A phrase starts to be a little more meaningful, and a sentence is even more meaningful than a phrase, and then you understand the meaning of a sentence,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
in the context of something like a paragraph, like what a paragraph should be is a collection of sentences that address an idea coherently. And if you listen to someone who's sophisticated speaking, they'll speak in paragraphs, and the sentences within the paragraphs will have some relation of meaning to one another.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Otherwise, you think the person is all over the place, let's say, and could well be. And the more coherent you are as a personality, sophisticated your ability to erect structures of meaning at broader and broader levels of sophistication. And so a very sophisticated speaker or writer will pick the right word and put it in the right phrase and put that phrase in the right sentence
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
The sentence will be an accurate representation of the aim of the thought. It'll have a certain rhythm, a poetic rhythm. It'll have a certain beauty. It'll have the proper relationship with the other sentences that surround it. That'll make up a paragraph. Then the paragraphs themselves have...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
a harmonious relationship with one another so that when you read paragraph one and then you read paragraph two, paragraph one informs paragraph two and paragraph two perversely also informs paragraph one, right? And so, Part of this is a question of where's the meaning in a text, and the answer is, well, the meaning is at multiple levels simultaneously. It's like the meaning of the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It's not something you can exactly point to because it's everywhere in this entire hierarchy at once. Right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
So now you have the paragraphs in relationship to one another, and maybe they make up something like chapters, and then the chapters are arranged into a book, and then you might think, well, the book is the unit of meaning, but that's not exactly right, because you interpret every book you read in relationship to all the other books you ever read.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Thank you. Yeah, so I'm very curious about tonight's talk because I have a lot of things buzzing around in my imagination that are related to the topic of identity, and I'm very curious to see if I can weave them together. So I guess we're going to find out. It's a lot of fun to try to do something. I do a different lecture every night. I have a different question every night.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And that's really bad because there's a space for the sacred and there's a space for the political. That's why you render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. And you don't want to confuse the two because if you do, then God becomes Caesar and that's not a good thing. And Caesar becomes God and that is a much worse thing. And that's the situation that we're in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And not just the other books that you've read, but all the people you've met, and all the discussions you've had, and every thought you've ever managed to create, and every word you've ever uttered. All that bears on the meaning of the book. And then, all that knowledge that you have is a reflection of, well, the sum total of human knowledge, as it's encapsulated, let's say, in words,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
You will have sampled that as an encultured creature, as a speaker of your language and as a reader of the texts of your culture, and you're a partial reflection of that body of literature, and it's the interaction between you as a embodiment of that body of literature and the specific text that reveals the meaning of the text.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
But that's not all, that isn't where it stops, because the corpus of human knowledge insofar as it's written is a reflection of the social structure of humanity itself, the history of humanity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
That's a reflection of the psychobiology of the human, and the natural order, and that's a reflection of the material order, and that's a reflection of the cosmic order, and all of that operating at the same time is, all of that is operating at the same time with every single thing that you do. And it's the relationship between all of those levels simultaneously that's your identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And so, it's no wonder that when identity collapses, let's say, at the highest levels, that the problem is overwhelming because
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
In some way, in some mysterious way, everything that you do, every micro-behavior that you make manifest is a reflection of the entire order of things, all the way from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic and possibly beyond, because it's the religious presumption that even if you
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
stretched your identity to the further reaches of the cosmic order, that's not far enough, because the creator of the cosmic order is held to be outside of time and space itself, outside of the realm of the conceptual, and so your relationship to that ultimate transcendent element also plays a role in determining everything you do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
So, well, you can see that in a sense as a religious vision because all of a sudden you can envision what you do in relationship to all of those levels and see that that's the full reality of every gesture you make, let's say. And so, that's overwhelming. But there's no reason to assume that an accurate apprehension of who you actually are would be anything other than overwhelming.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
I mean, you're a very complicated creature and God only knows what you're up to or who you are or what you are in the final analysis. It's not like we know. And it's certainly not the case that you're divorced in any simple sense from everything else. I mean, you're certainly not divorced from other people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And if you are, well, God help you, because it's very bitter and horrible existence to exist in isolation. And that also highlights something. It highlights the fact that whatever your identity is, it's not merely subjective identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
You know, and this is something that our culture is, we're just tearing ourselves apart about that at the moment, because the claim of the hedonistic rationalists, essentially, is that your identity is whatever you say it is, or whatever you feel it is, whatever the hell that means, or, well, it's very much akin to saying that your identity is identical to whatever whim or desire grips you at the moment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And so that means, and this is part of the conundrum that we have, You know, and maybe it's part of what Nietzsche prognosticated too, because he believed that the consequence of the death of God would be that human beings would have to create their own values. And I believe that's wrong. I don't believe we can create our own values.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And that's just palpably untrue, partly for the reasons I laid out. It's like, there's a lot of things going on when you're doing anything, and what you want or what you desire or the desire that makes itself manifest within you is like one tiny little element of that, but why you would proclaim that to be your entire identity, that's merely a consequence of the fact that the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
transcendent order of identity is collapsed. We're so confused in our culture that we believe that our sexual preference is our identity, for example. And that's, well, good luck with that. You know, I mean, first of all, if your sexual preference is your identity, which means in some sense that that's, what would you say, that's the That's the defining element of your character.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
I don't want to be anywhere near you. I mean that because what you want from other people is you want their desires to take you and the world into account, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It can't... There's no possible way that things can work if it's not only all about you, let's say, but worse than that, it's all about whatever fragment of you, say, biological, instinctual fragment that happens to have the upper hand subjectively within you at the moment. That's just... There's no community in that, right? There's no consideration for other people. There's no future in that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
There's only the immediate now, right? And so that proclamation of radical subjective identity based on desire is the reduction of that whole cosmic tree, because that's what that is, to... A fragment of you now and to hell with everything else. And I use that language very carefully because the pursuit of that subjective identity is the worship of that subjective identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
That is a pathway to hell. And the reason it's a pathway to hell is because doesn't give a damn for the future or other people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And so if we all generate identities that have no consideration for other people, or even for your future self for that matter, because you know perfectly well that if you're only ruled by your immediate subjective whim now, all you're going to do is something stupid that's going to get you in terrible trouble in a week or a month or
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
you know, in a year or five years down the road, if you have an iota of wisdom, everything that you do in the present is bounded by your understanding of the repercussions of that action as they... cascade into the future, and there's not much difference between that, say, taking your future self into account carefully.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
But to give Nietzsche his due, which is always an important thing to do, because he was a genius, it certainly... is the case that we have to rethink, it seems to be that we have to rethink what identity is from first principles. Now, can we do that successfully? We're going to find out because the culture war is a war because of the difficulty of rethinking identity from first principles.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
There's not a lot of difference between that and taking other people into account. You know, in a harmonious marriage, for example, presuming such a thing exists, it's something to aim for, at least, in a harmonious marriage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
There isn't a lot of difference between taking care of your wife, say, or a wife taking care of her husband, and the husband taking care of himself, all things considered, or vice versa, because, well, the thing about being married to someone is, well, they're there right now, But they're also there tomorrow, and they're there next week, and they're there next month, and next year.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
So everything you do with them or to them, it sticks around. And so, conducting yourself so that their welfare is, let's say, your highest consideration, their genuine welfare, That's not what they want, or even exactly what they need, but their highest welfare. There's not much difference between making that highest welfare your aim and treating your future self optimally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
You know, because there's, you know this perfectly well, because there's almost no hell that's more miserable than a really bad marriage, because it's so immediate, and it's right there, and it's there all the time, and so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
You know, if you conduct yourself in your own life so that it's all about you, and you're married and so your wife takes second place, the probability that your relationship is going to transform itself into something that makes all about you hell is like, it's 100%. This is also why it's so useless to be selfish. It's like, what do you mean selfish exactly?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
What self are you talking about when you're selfish? Right? We think, well, selfish means that it's about me. It's like, no, it's way worse than that. Because it could be about you in the higher sense, right? It could be about you in a way that took you tomorrow and you next week and next month and into the future into account. That's kind of maturity. Right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
If you're mature, you're not bound to the present. And so you could be selfish in a way that was sophisticated so that you didn't do stupid things right now because they're entertaining or because they rectify a desire that would get you in trouble in the future. So when you say someone's selfish, that isn't exactly what you mean.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
You mean that they're bound to the present in a way that makes them only the servants of their immediate desire. And that's a form of radical immaturity. Because that's a mode of being that's characteristic, let's say, of two-year-olds before...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Well, before they have any cortical maturation at all, before they're sophisticated social agents, before they understand that the future exists, before they're able to take other people into account. And so, the notion that your identity is subjective in that narrow sense, so that only you can define it, for example, or that you should be the servant of your own desires.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
You're not the servant of your own desires. You're the slave of your own desires. If they're local and immediate, and you don't have the discipline or the wherewithal to control that, you're not the master of your own fate. You're not acting out your subjective self. You're just the prisoner of...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
the instincts of a two-year-old, but the instincts of a warped two-year-old who should have been two when they were two and not when they were 40. Right, so this identity. So why did we get obsessed with the idea of subjective identity? Well, I think this is where You know, I thought for a long time, if I had to classify myself politically, I thought for a long time that I was a classic liberal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And to some degree, and I mean really in the classic sense, I don't mean in the progressive sense, whatever that is, that the liberal philosophy is essentially the presumption that the cardinal... level of identity in a political system should be the individual. Right? And there's some things to be said about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
What is it? Is it political? Is it ethnic? Is it racial? Is it economic? Is it desire? Jonathan pointed to that. Are you nothing but what it is that you want or what something within you wants? Is it subjective? Like is your identity only something that you control? All of those questions, that's like 10 questions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
I think that a political system that shifts to the group as the locus of identity is very dangerous and unstable. So if it starts to become about race, for example, or ethnicity, or gender, sex, let's say, like we should say, sex, and If the emphasis is on the group, then you get the war of groups against groups, and that's not good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And the individual who's capable of suffering gets subjugated to the group, And groups get elevated above one another. That's a very bad solution. But the atomistic individual solution is also not good. The thing about classic liberalism, right, that insistence on the primacy of the subjective is, and the classic liberals knew this, that only works in a society, well, that's the question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
When does that work? And the classic liberals, they kind of knew this. They knew that The presumption that the individual was sovereign could be treated as sovereign, and could be treated as the cardinal unit of analysis, and could be treated as the locale, let's say, of divine right, natural rights. That was only sustainable in a culture that was intrinsically moral.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Right, so let's say, that's why, for example, your nation is established as one nation under God. You can pursue your individual happiness, but only, that only works if collectively and individually you're doing something like aiming up.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And what that would mean is that that surround I described as characteristic of identity, right, sort of stretching up into the cosmic order, that's intact and functioning. Now I would say a society that's integrated in relationship to its religious story has that surround.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And people who are acting out the ethic that might be associated with that religious surround can treat themselves as individuals. But if the surround disappears, then Every individual wars against every other individual, right? Things devolve into chaos. You need a unity of belief in the transcendent in order for the individual to be the proper unit of analysis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And then, of course, that begs the question, and that's certainly the question of our time. Well, what is that transcendent surround? How do you conceptualize that? That's another question about what constitutes identity. So let's dig into that a little bit. What beliefs, presumptions, elements of identity are necessary so that the individual can be free and sovereign? All right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
I used to ask my students, for example, why they were writing an essay. Why are you bothering with this, right? What's your motivation? Well, the thoroughly indoctrinated and thoughtless students would say, well, to get a grade. And I had students who literally could not think beyond that. They had no idea that there might be some utility in
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Every single one of those questions is extraordinarily difficult and we seem to be stuck with all of them. So, We're going to try tonight to see if we can take identity apart from first principles and see where we get with it. So let's start with something basic. One of the things that I thought through deeply when I was a university professor was how to evaluate someone's writing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
either thinking or writing, outside of the practical consequences of getting the grade. And I'm not saying that to denigrate the students, I'm saying that to indict the education system, because these were students, this was mostly at the University of Toronto where this happened, these were very high-caliber students. So they were the beneficiaries, let's say, of 15 years of education.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And many of them had no idea that thinking was useful. Right? Well, it is a bit of a mystery. It's like, why think? Well... If you think before you act, you decrease the probability that you'll do something cataclysmically stupid. So that's the issue. That's why you want your thought criticized. Because if you have a stupid idea and you act it out, then terrible things will happen to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And maybe if you discuss your stupid idea with someone who loves you, they'll point out critically why it's stupid, which will hurt your feelings. but you won't die. Right, and so parents do that for teenagers all the time. Right, and mostly they don't die as a consequence. So, what are you doing when you're writing? Well, you're writing, why are you writing the essay?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Well, let's say, on the philosophical side, to improve your thinking. Okay, I'm going to leave that aside for a moment. We'll return to that idea. I'll just walk through this a little more practically. Well, I have to complete the essay to get marked, and then I have to... Why do you care if you get a mark? Well, I can't pass the course unless I get a mark. Why do you care if you pass the course?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Well, if I don't pass the course, I can't finish my year. Well, why do you care about that? Well, if I don't finish the year, then I can't get my degree. So why do you care about your degree? There's an infinite regress in questioning here. Why do you care about your degree? Students start to get uncomfortable if you push them to that point, because they often...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
have been on a kind of automatic track, right? It's that, especially if they're conscientious students, they went to university because, well, that's the thing you do if you're smart once you graduate from high school, or it used to be the thing you do if you're smart. Now, I don't know what you do if you're smart. Maybe you go to Peterson Academy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
So... Well, $300,000 to become an idiot, nihilistic Marxist seems like a very bad deal to me. So... I think it'd just be more fun to become a nihilist at the bar. You know, so... Be cheaper, too. Probably better for you neurologically in the final analysis. Anyways. So, you want to get your degree. Okay, well, why? Why bother? Well... Because you want to get a job.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Okay, well, why do you want to get a job? Well... You need a job to keep body and soul together, but there's more to it than that, right? Maybe you want a job that piques your interest and compels you, so it's focused on something, what, something important to you, something that has some meaning to you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And then maybe if the person is wise, they're also thinking, well, you know, I need to take my place as a responsible person
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
social agent and if I have a job well maybe I can attract a husband or a wife and you know maybe I can provide for my children so maybe the career is nested in something like what what service to community service to family hopefully now you know that there could also be well I'd like to make a boatload of money and pursue my hedonistic whims in consequence which is a delusional dream but you know
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Young people and older people can certainly have that. And then you might say, well, why do you want to grow up, let's say, if we assume that establishing some responsibility and taking care of people is part of maturation? And that's a tricky question. Why bother maturing? And so that's the question addressed in the story of Peter Pan, right? So Peter Pan is... He's Pan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Pan is the god of everything, god of the wilderness, god of wild instinct. And Peter Pan is an eternal child, right? And he's got this Pan-like nature because to be a child is to be under the sway of primordial instinct. And there is something attractive about that. It's very spontaneous. Like, there's something very attractive about little kids, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
I mean, they're terrible little barbarians and they cannot... govern themselves. Like, there are no societies of successful two-year-olds, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
So, well, this is a really important thing to understand because, you know, people are enamored of the purity and brilliance of their toddlers, and I can understand that because they are remarkable, but they're also, they're not adults, and so they're not self-governing, they're not autonomous, they can't take care of themselves, and so all that wonder is fine, but It doesn't work, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It has to be replaced by maturity. Okay, but is the sacrifice of the spontaneity of childhood worth the burden of maturity? This is the problem that Peter Pan wrestles with. Now he has Tinkerbell, who I like to think of as the porn fairy. And so... Because she doesn't really exist. She's kind of an attractive little sprite, and enticing, and she flits around, but she's imaginary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And so she doesn't really require any real commitment. And so porn fairy works out quite nicely in that regard. And it's certainly the case that being enticed by the porn fairy is a way of... continuing a kind of pathological immaturity and foregoing a certain kind of responsibility because it means the possibility of sexual gratification with no relationship and with no adult status.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
When you're evaluating their writing, you're evaluating their thinking. And the purpose of evaluating their thinking is not so much to grade them, to put them in the appropriate bin, but to provide them with the corrective feedback that would enable them to become better thinkers. When you're criticizing someone, if you're doing it
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And you might say, well, who the hell cares? Like, if it gratifies my immediate whim, then why not... And you'd especially believe that if your identity was that you were nothing but your immediate desire. And so, you know, pornography is like 30% of internet traffic. This is not some trivial little social detail. This is a major problem. You know, and we're so... What would you say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
We're so accustomed to the pathology of pornography that we don't even notice what a cataclysmic problem it actually represents. We've just given up even being concerned about it, except, you know, on the periphery. So... That's not good, because it's an immense enticement to this sort of hedonistic immaturity that is one of the consequences of the collapse of our identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
But that isn't the only issue that Peter Pan wrestles with. Now, you may remember in the story that he makes friends with this girl, Wendy. And Wendy's an actual girl. And Wendy decides she's going to grow up and age... Right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And she gets married and she has children, and Peter Pan remains in Neverland, which is where everyone immature lives, in a land that doesn't exist, and he's king of the lost boys, which is a kind of king, but if all your subjects are lost boys, and you're the king, that kind of means you're the most hopeless of the worst, of the lost boys, not... It's like being...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
the tyrant of a totalitarian state. It's like, well, are you the most successful or the least successful? And I would say, if you rule over hell, you're the least successful devil in hell, not the most successful devil. And so, that's a good thing to know about tyrants. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Peter Pan maintains childhood, he refuses to move to maturity, he satisfies himself with the imaginary feminine, forgoing any relationship with a real woman, a sacrificial relationship with a real woman. Well, why sacrificial? Death of childhood, death of immaturity, the necessity to forego all other sexual opportunities, all that's sacrificial. Sacrificial in relationship to what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Maturity and responsibility. Well, why bother with that? Well, that's the dilemma that Captain Hook confronts Peter Pan with, because Captain Hook is a brutal, barbaric, power-mad, dominating tyrant, and when Peter Pan looks to adulthood and sees the face of Captain Hook. He thinks, I don't want any part of that. And Captain Hook is worse than a mere tyrant because he's a coward as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And what's he afraid of? Well, he's afraid of death and time. And how do you know that? Well, what chases him?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Well, it's a crocodile, and the crocodile is a predator, and time is the ultimate predator, and the crocodile's already got a taste of him, just like it has a taste of all of us, which is why he's missing a hand, and it has a clock in its stomach that's ticking, and so Hook is a tyrant because he's terrified of predatory time. He's terrified of his own mortality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
That makes him power mad, and then Peter Pan looks at Captain Hook, and he thinks, yeah, no, that's not for me, but He thinks that's a moral decision, but really what he's doing is maintaining his own immaturity so he can stay magic and not take any responsibility. This is not a good pathway to identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Right, and so you can see in that too that there's something, if you think that through, the way we thought it through, let's say, you can see that there's something that isn't morally relative about the idea of mature responsibility, right? It's actually a catastrophe that Peter Pan stays hedonistic and immature. It's not someone's opinion that that's not a good thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
in a sophisticated way, you're helping them separate the wheat from the chaff. And one of the things I learned as a grader of essays, let's say, was that one of the most effective things I could do to students wasn't to circle what they did wrong, which was often 95% of the essay. But seriously, like our school system does a very bad job of teaching people to write.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It's not a sustainable mode of being in any way. It leads to his own pathological degeneration across time. There's implications in the Peter Pan text continually that his most likely outcome is suicide. And his refusal to mature is a form of suicide anyways because he's killing his best future self. That's what you do when you remain immature, right? Is you kill your best future self.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And if you do that, then the temptation for actual suicide is eventually going to loom large because your life will be so miserable as a consequence of your isolated and unproductive loneliness that the weight of existence will become unbearable to you. And so there's nothing in that that's okay, right? It's not just an alternative pathway, that hedonistic immaturity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It's a complete bloody catastrophe. And it's not only a catastrophe subjectively, although that's not good. It's a catastrophe socially because, well, Wendy loves Peter Pan, but she doesn't get to marry him because he decides to stay in Neverland. And so that's not good for her.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And so the immature hedonist, terrified of the patriarchal tyrant, let's say, not only dooms himself to a mode of behavior that culminates in something like suicidally distressed nihilism, but also violates the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
the order of the relationship between men and women, because he refuses to grow up to become the sort of person that a woman could establish a relationship with, and of course that demolishes any possibility of future family. And so insofar as part of what gives your life meaning across time, as my wife pointed out when she started to talk, is the fact that you have children, That you might love.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
So that's a good deal for you and them. And then grandchildren as well. You cut all that off. And then what the hell are you going to do when you're 40 or 50 or 60? And isolated and alone. And still terminally immature. So the probability that that's going to be a good time for you is pretty low. It's not going to be a good time for anyone that knows you. That's for sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Because what the hell good are you? And it's worse than that. Because... the bitterness that will accrue to you as a consequence of that pathway to failure, that consequence of failing to make the right sacrifices, is that you'll become bitter and dangerous. And so, that's not good socially. And so, and none of that, there's none of that that's morally relative, right? That's as...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
That's as stark a fact as anything you could ever hope to run across, or maybe the starkest of facts. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
You write the essay and you get the grade and you get your degree so you can have your career, so you can mature, so you can be useful to yourself now and your future self and so you can be useful to your wife and your children and so that you can extend yourself across time and if you do that properly then
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Well, then that isn't where it ends, because maybe you're also a model for other people, you're a mentor for other people, at least by example, and maybe by practice, right? And you establish a mode of being that if replicated by others, stabilizes the whole social order and makes it trustworthy and productive, And then everybody can trust each other and cooperate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And if they all trust each other and cooperate, then they can do impossible things together and they can make the desert bloom and everyone can thrive. And so that's a good deal. We know that one of the best predictors of long-term success from a psychological perspective is trait conscientiousness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It's not as good a predictor as native intelligence, let's say, but it's a good predictor, and you want to hire conscientious people for most jobs, and conscientious people are willing to forego immediate gratification to take care of the future. That's a sacrificial gesture. They'll let go of what they want and need right now to stabilize things in the long run and for other people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And that's the very definition of maturity. In fact, it's likely that the reason we have a cortex, let's say the top part of our brain that makes us specifically human, is so that we can replace the immediate demands for gratification of our base instincts with a long... What would you say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
I had super bright kids in the fourth year of university who they were terrible at writing. And they could learn quickly because they were smart, but no one had ever taught them. That was an awful thing to see after 16 years of education. One of the things I learned was
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
A mode of vision and action that takes not only ourselves, our narrow selves into account, but the iterating future and other people. Right? So that's what you're trying to encourage in your children when they mature so they can take turns and share and play with other children and be good sports.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
You know, the sort of good sports that help their teammates develop and not just them and that can share the glory in victory and can tolerate defeat with some degree of nobility. And all of that's Well, what's the alternative? That bitter, resentful, immature, temper tantrum that's the alternative? There's nothing in that that's acceptable or good, and there's nothing about that that's arbitrary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Again, those are stark facts of life. Okay, so what that implies is that at the higher levels of your identity, let's say, out in the realm of maturity, The things you're doing locally, like right now, the words you're saying, the gestures you make, they're associated with this hierarchy of value that extends out into the future and the community.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And as you near the uppermost reaches, it's associated with something like mature responsibility. But that's not yet why be mature and responsible? Because you can ask the same question again. Well, we laid out the alternative. Immature and irresponsible, that's not going to be very good for you. It's going to cause a lot of pain and misery.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It's going to culminate in hopelessness and it's going to be pretty bad for everyone else. Well, what would be the alternative to that? Let's say, well, what are you pursuing when you're pursuing mature responsibility? Well, you could think about it in terms of duty, right? Duty to the future, duty to other people. That's a kind of a conservative approach to the idea of maturation, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Is that you... It stops being about you, it starts being about your family, your town, your state, your nation. Patriotism comes out of that, right? You're serving some higher order traditional structure, and it's the traditional structure that binds everyone together, if it's functioning properly. But there's more to maturity than that. There's more to it than that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Because being able to bear your duty, to bear up under your duty, and to be responsible, doesn't exhaust the realm of the possibility of your identity. And so, once we step beyond mere maturity, we start to step into the transcendent realm that touches on the religious. So, think about the story of The Hobbit. Think about an adventure story, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
You know, I'd be wading through a mess of cliches and second-rate thought and quasi-copying or not precisely Claudine Gay's sin, let's say, but close to it, plagiarism. And then, now and then, you know, it would be as if the student's actual genuine... intelligence popped up briefly through all the mess and they said something clear and useful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
So, we're attracted to adventure stories that portray a hero. Now, a hero can be a king who is the embodiment of the stable and just state. But that's typically not a hero in a hero story. A hero in a hero story is usually an adventurer. So you see that, for example, in the Hobbit. You see that in the Lion King, because the hero of the Lion King isn't Mustafa, the father.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
The hero of the Lion King is Simba, who's the son. The son is the hero. That's a good way of thinking about it. That's very typical in literary representations. The father is necessary, but the son is the hero. You see that echoed in The Christian story, because Christ is the hero of the biblical corpus, at least from the Christian perspective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And that's an element of the divine, the sun, and it's the element of the divine that's associated with adventure. Okay, so let's walk through that. Let's take a more prosaic adventure story. That would be the Hobbit is a good example. Everybody knows that story. So the Hobbit is sort of nondescript, Every man. There's nothing remarkable about him in any real, in any obvious sense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
He's certainly not a wizard. He's not an elf. He's not magic. He's a good, decent beginner. That's a good... That's a good way of conceptualizing him. He lives in this circumscribed area, right? So in both the Lord of the Rings and in the Hobbit, the Shire is, it's sort of like your neighborhood if it was only full of naive people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And all those naive people know that Eye of Sauron is gathering in the distance constantly. That's China, as far as I can tell. That all-seeing eye of the tyrannical state, right? That's over the horizon. That terrible dragon that has the capability of destroying everything, that's lurking out beyond what's really apprehensible. And all the ordinary people in the Shire
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
want nothing to do with that. They want to have their circumscribed lives, and you can understand that, and one of the things that makes the Hobbit himself, let's say, attractive as a character is because he does have that pull towards tranquil domesticity, and that's not a vice. It's only a vice when you insist upon that when the times don't allow for that. Right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And it's questionable at the moment, for example, whether the times allow for that. So far, yes, but I wouldn't count on that continuing. Not unless we become more assiduous adventurers. So what happens to the hobbit? Well, he's called out by a magical agent, it's Gandalf in this case, to have an adventure. Okay, so what does that mean? What's a magical agent?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
A magical agent is one of those things that you encounter in your life that transforms your aim, that transforms your identity. So you can imagine that you have a stable identity, from time to time, you kind of know who you are, but then imagine that, well, fair enough, but what about the possibility of further development?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Because if you were really who you could be, you wouldn't only be what you are properly, you'd also be moving towards something more. Right? And so if your character is fully developed, sort of at the outer edges of your identity, beyond mere maturity, you're not only mature and responsible, you're an agent that's transforming itself into something that's even better.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And what happens in your life is there are magical occurrences that transform your aim. And sometimes those are people that you meet that are... Mentors. Or who inspire you in some way. Or sometimes it's the call of your conscience. There's something bothering you deeply. And you decide to pursue that. Sometimes it's someone you fall in love with. Or an opportunity that falls in your lap.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And that requires you to sacrifice who you are. So that you can take the next step. To become who you might be. And that's what's portrayed in the story of the Hobbit. In a mythological manner. the hobbit, goes outside his zone of comfort, like Abraham in the Old Testament, and has to develop elements of his character that he had regarded as
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
undesirable even, the hobbit himself has to become a thief in order to become a hero. And what does that mean? It means that you never know when you might need the darker sides of your character integrated within you in a manner that doesn't terrify you in order to take the next step forward. You know, if you're not a bit of a monster and you encounter a monster, you're going to lose.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
So you need to have some of the monster within you. That's what happens to Harry Potter. That's why he is able to attain ascendance over Voldemort. He has a piece of Voldemort's soul hidden inside him. You can call on the part of you that has the capacity for mayhem to protect you and those you love when mayhem comes threatening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
But that has to be developed, and that's a terrifying thing morally, because it's easy to be dutiful and narrow and not allow that capacity to reveal itself, but you never know when you're going to need it, and you're definitely going to need it when the dragons come flying in. And so, well, why the dragon?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Because that's what the Hobbit eventually has to confront, and that's the oldest story of mankind, the confrontation with the dragon. Literally, the oldest story we have is the Enuma Elish from Mesopotamia, and it's the story of the combat with the dragon, the hero of the Enuma Elish. confronts the cosmic dragon and makes the world out of its pieces.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And you know, people do this in your relationships with them. You know, all the time is they'll offer you a kind of mishmash of what they think you want or maybe even what they think they want or what they should offer. And if you really listen, then now and then you'll hear the person say something that they really mean and that's true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Something echoed in the Old Testament stories in the representation of Jehovah as the force that triumphs over the Leviathan. So there's this idea of combat with, well, what's a dragon? A dragon's a predator. Predator as such, right? A dragon is a predatory cat, and it's a predatory bird, and it's a predatory reptile, and it's fire, which is its own form of predator, because fire is a primordial
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
threat. And so a dragon is an amalgamation of everything terrifying into one figure. And the hero who exists at the ultimate edge of identity is the ordinary person who takes it upon himself to transform himself into the hero who can confront the dragon and prevail. And what does prevail mean? Well, it means to gain the treasure that the dragon eternally guards.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And that's the next level of identity, that hero story on the outer edges of, what would you say, the cosmic reaches of human identity. But that's not the outermost limit. And you see, as you move farther out, or farther down or farther up, pick your metaphor, you wander into territory that's increasingly religious in nature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And so let me lay out a level of identity that's even beyond the mythological hero. And the easiest way to do that is to use the Christian passion as the example. What's the ultimate predator? Death and evil. So that's, what would you say, that would be an abstraction of the idea of predator, right? So death is the clock in the belly of the crocodile, right? And malevolence, well...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
The worst predator is the predator who isn't merely an animal that has its next meal in mind, but someone who, or something, that wants to take you out in the manner that makes you suffer most pointlessly, let's say. So there's the combination of death and malevolence is something like the ultimate challenge or the ultimate predator. And so... It's like the king of all dragons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
That's a reasonable way of thinking about it. Death and malevolence itself. And so the ultimate hero is the person who determines to confront the ultimate forces of destruction voluntarily. And that's the story that's encapsulated in the Christian passion. Well, why? Well, because it's a story of... It's an ultimate story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It's the story of the ultimate exposure to the furthest reaches of mortal catastrophe. So you can just think it through, I mean rationally, not asking for any suspension of disbelief here. I'm telling you how this story of identity works. So it's a terrible thing to die. That's tragedy. It's a worse thing to die young. It's the worst thing to die after being tormented when you're young.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It's the worst thing to die if you're tormented, if you're tormented at the hands of your own people, and you're betrayed by your best friend, and your own people choose to torment you even when they could have picked someone they knew to be a villain to substitute for you, even though they knew he was a villain and knew you were good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It's worse to face that fate at the hands of your own mob if behind that fate there is a foreign tyrant who occupies your land, right? The barbaric empire of Rome in the story of the Christian Passion. It's worse to have all that happen to you when you're young. It's worse to have it happen to you when you're young in front of the people who love you, particularly your mother.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And if you reward that, because you can if you learn to listen, if you reward that, then more of that will happen. Now, that can be daunting because you've got to ask yourself if you really want to know what your wife thinks of you, for example. But in the long run, it's probably a better idea than finding out in divorce court, you know, 25 years later. So...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It's worse to have all of that happen in the most unfair and torturous possible manner, which was the crucifixion, because that's why the Romans designed that punishment. And that wasn't bad enough, because crucifixion wasn't sufficient to satisfy the bloodthirst of the mob, so Christ had to undergo crucifixion a flaying before being crucified.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And none of that's bad enough yet because the worst possible tragedy is all that, but not only all that, all that inflicted on the least possible deserving person. Right, so that's an ultimate tragedy. And that's not enough yet. And so we're really stretching out to the furthest possible reaches of identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
There's a Christian tradition that after Christ is crucified, because all of that's not enough, he has to descend into hell itself. And what does that mean? It means that... At the ultimate reaches of human identity, it's not only the confrontation with catastrophe and death that's required, but the full-fledged confrontation with malevolence itself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And then the ultimate hero is the person who can do that voluntarily, without being corrupted, while maintaining his upward aim. That's identity. All of that's identity, right? That's that Jacob's Ladder. That stretches up from the earth to the heavens. Right? That situates every person in the confines of a heavenly hierarchy. With that ultimate heroic sacrificial gesture at the pinnacle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Well, why? Well... The person who dares the ultimate gains the ultimate reward. Well, that's represented in the Gospel text as the resurrection. That's represented as the reconciliation of God and man, right? As the antithesis to death and evil. And it is the case that to the degree that each person is capable of voluntarily taking on the burden of being
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
unto themselves and moving forward and upward despite that catastrophe that death is overcome and evil defeated. And so all of that's true, and the collapse of that truth leaves us in a situation where our entire identities are up for question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Now the alternative to that is something terrible, because the alternative is coming to understand what identity means, and coming to understand that means coming to understand what I just described, is that that's the burden that's placed on people who want to get to the bottom of what constitutes identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
is that you're called upon to maintain your upward aim regardless of the catastrophe of life. And the promise is that if you do that voluntarily, the spirit of the cosmic order will walk with you while you do it. Right, and that seems right because we know practically, we know psychologically that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
People will hide bits of wheat in the chaff, and what you do as a discriminating critic is Dispense with the chaff, but identify the wheat. This is a really important thing to know when you're mentoring people, when you're grading, but when you're communicating with people in general, what you're really looking for, if you're wise, are things to reward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
You become braver and better with every decision you make to confront what obstacle terrifies and terrifies you and stops you in your tracks, right? You develop into more of what you could be by constantly confronting The things that challenge you most deeply. And there's no end to that. And in principle, there's no end to the amount of development that can emerge as a consequence of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And that's another part of that upward spiraling Jacob's ladder that leads up into the... incomprehensible reaches of the divine itself. And then what you have in that is just as you fade into incomprehensibility on the material end of things, you fade into incomprehensibility at the transcendent end of things too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And that what your identity is, is the thing that bridges the gap between earth and heaven. And really, And that's who we are. And that's what we need to understand to set things right. And that's a much better story than you can do whatever you want whenever you want with anyone you want and to hell with the consequences. But it's a terrible burden.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It's a terrible thing to realize that that adventure is your moral responsibility and that If you accept it, then you set the world right, and if you reject it, then you destroy yourself and everything around you. And we're at a state now where we need to understand all that, and not only understand it, but act it out. With every word, with every gesture, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
With every impulse, with every fiber of our being. so that we can bring the order that's good into being in the world. And that's an investigation into identity from first principles. Thank you very much.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Now, you dispense with everything that's second rate, not because you want to criticize and get rid of or rise above the person that you're... criticizing morally, but because you want to get to the wheat. And it was frequently the case, for example, when my students were maybe writing the first essay of the semester, that literally 95% of what they wrote was just just painful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
Would have been easier just to rewrite the essay than to grade it. You know, and so, seriously. But, you know, one of the things I noticed is that if I circled a couple of sentences that were genuine thought, the students were so thrilled that someone had noticed
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
when they dared to put their head up above the parapet and say something they believed to be true and genuine, that the next time they wrote an essay, it'd be more like 30 or 40% that. And then if they got further reward for that, assuming they had the talent and the diligence, then perhaps by the end of the semester it would be like 90% genuine thought, genuine wheat.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It's a lot of fun to see if I can make something coherent out of a genuine investigation. It's kind of a high wire act, but it's very entertaining. It's fun to do it with an audience too because, and I can see simultaneously if I can manage to push my thought forward in a manner that's coherent, but also in a manner that's communicable and comprehensible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And then they were thrilled about that too, because people are thrilled to have the opportunity to offer their best, especially if it's received in the right manner.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
People will often obfuscate and produce what's second rate because they're terrified in their heart of hearts that if they did reveal themselves genuinely, which is also a way of making yourself vulnerable because it lets people see who you really are, if they did reveal themselves genuinely, that that would be rejected.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And so part of the reason that my students delivered such dross to begin with was because they had a history of... having what they offered that was good ignored or condemned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And so often they'd hide under the cliches, they'd hide under giving the professor what he wanted to hear so they would get a good grade because they had sickened of the risk of doing something genuine and having it be rejected. And that's something else to know in your relationships, man.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
You've got to be very careful not to punish the people around you that you love for doing something good because you can eradicate what's good with punishment quite rapidly. And so it's a deep thing to understand that you need to be watching the people around you all the time to see when they hit the target, and to point that out. And people love that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
If you do that to people around you, they'll be so thrilled with you, you can hardly stand it, right? Because people, all people, but those who are utterly nihilistic and faithless, will risk offering something genuine from time to time in the desperate hope that it is, in fact, noticed and appreciated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And if you can transform yourself into the sort of person who notices that and rewards it, then people will bring their best to you, and that's a great deal. Now, you know, it's demanding in a sense and frightening because if you...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
start to encourage the best in other people, and you set that as a standard, you more or less have to apply the same criteria to yourself, and that can be daunting, and so, you know, we tend to engage in a pathological dance with other people, and they offer what second rate
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
to us, and we accept it and offer one second rate to them, and we do that because we can shirk responsibility, and because it lets everybody off the hook. But, you know, there was a famous Soviet joke, typical Russian humor. They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work. Right, right, that's a brutal joke. That's a brutal joke. That's the sort of joke that destroys everything, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And did, in fact, because the Soviets were well on the way to destroying everything when they finally destroyed enough so that they fell apart. And thank God that happened without, well, without the Third World War, which we seem to be striving mightily to bring back right at the moment, by the way. Okay, so what are you doing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
When I was thinking through what I was doing when I was grading an essay, I asked myself, what are you doing when you're writing? What is a student doing when he or she is writing? What are you doing when you're thinking? And it's so interesting because if you think that through deeply, there's never anything that you do even at the micro level. There's never any word that you utter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
There's never any letter that you write, and I mean a single letter, that isn't infused with the spirit of your entire identity. And what that means, for example, if you're going to write an essay for a university course and you're going to do it right, it means that you have to write down the closest approximation to the truth that you can manage.
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We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And that's a very tricky business because to speak or to write the truth means you have to be oriented toward the truth and that you have to have made a practice of that. And there isn't anything about that that's temporary or fragmentary. It has to be... It has to be...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
It's a great privilege to be able to have that opportunity. So, identity. You know, we have identity politics. And that's a core element of the culture war. So identity has become political. It isn't necessarily the case that identity would be political. It could be psychological, it could be sacred, it could be patriotic, it could be national. There's lots of...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
part of your identity or maybe it has to be your identity and maybe what you're doing when you encourage people to bring their best to the table and you reward them for those offerings that are genuine is that you're encouraging their identity as upward aiming truth tellers and there's no difference between that and encouraging the manifestation of the logos, right? That's the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
The logos being the spirit of the word or the spirit of Christ, the spirit of God that broods on the water. the deep at the beginning of time, and that brings the created order into being. That's all the same thing. You know, and identity is a very deep, very deep phenomenon, and questions about identity are very deep problems. They go all the way to the bottom, or all the way to the top, or both.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
And this is the case. With every word that you write when you're writing. And this is a good thing to know when you're writing. You know, you might think that it's okay to be casual with your words. It's never okay to be casual with your words. There's a... It's part of the Judeo-Christian tradition that it is the word that brings reality itself into being out of potential. Right? And that's...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
That's the truth and what that means is you bloody well better be careful with your words because every word you speak is either a manifestation of the fact that you're made in the image of God or it's a rebellion against that. And there's no such thing as trivial communication.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
If you're communicating trivially or you're communicating about something trivial, that just means that you've wandered off the path. That's all it means. It's just as, it's an analog of this. If you find people boring, that's you. Right, because if you listen to people, they are not boring. They are so interesting that you want to get away from them. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
So there's no trivial, there's no trivial use of words. Okay, so now let's take that apart a bit as we investigate identity. We could do that. We could start the investigation with anything you do. But I'm going to use the domain of words. Because we all talk, we all communicate, we think in words. It's as good a place as any to start, or perhaps better than most.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
What are you doing when you're writing? Well, let's say you're using a pen. Well, you're you're drawing, you're drawing letters, you're moving the muscles of your hand, like at the kind of the highest level of resolution, at the most precise, the most precise formulation is the act of writing. It's a motor act, it's actually an action, right? And you have...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
voluntary control over that, but interestingly enough, what you're doing at that high resolution level, the mechanics of writing as an act, that shades into mystery, right? Because you can control your hand, but you don't know how, right? Like, I can move my fingers, but I have no idea which individual muscles I'm moving. So that's unconscious. It's unknown and unconscious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Some of it is escape into a world of abstraction. And so, He outlined his theory of social transformation, which is also deeply influenced by a skepticism about what low-level mimetic envy predicated status games, which I think has been a very wise target of skepticism. We walked through his thoughts on
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
So it sounds to me, now that you've clarified that, it sounds to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that what you're grappling with is... more of an attempt to account for where we are now and how it's different from, let's say, the post-war period or maybe even the Enlightenment to the post-war period. Like, things have shifted radically. And it sounds to me like what you're outlining is a...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
It's an attempt to characterize the nature of that shift, perhaps even more than an attempt to deny the idea that there's any progress. You said yourself when you were laying out your argument that it's very difficult to measure progress, but it's also undeniable that many, many things have shifted and we're not where we were, let's say, well, 10 years ago probably, and certainly not 30 years ago.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so you see this shift in part as a shift from the ethos of progress, the a priori assumption of progress.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Okay, so let me lay these ideas out again and summarize. So one of the threads that you were developing was, we'll do two at the same time. One was that the scientific process in terms of physical reality, maybe, in your view, peaked in the 1960s. And then you could imagine that you kind of outlined two, maybe, reasons for that. One was,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
social and technological transformation over a couple of hundred years, concentrating more on the last 60, and also began to flesh out a metaphysics that might ameliorate some of that nihilistic pathology and malaise. And that enabled us to at least begin a discussion about what metaphysical presuppositions are necessary for a society and a psyche to remain
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
fear of the apocalyptic consequences of that technology, and an escape into various forms of abstraction. So some of those abstractions were psychological abstractions, inner journeys, but some of it also was escape into digital abstraction. And then you also made a case that the avenue for exploration in the digital realm was still open. And so maybe we could understand this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Yeah, well, we can, we'll get back to that, back to the overlap, but so you could imagine that, okay, so the scientific approach, the method produced an explosion of technological consequences. Many of them were dramatic in the physical world. There was kickbacks against that. One of the kickbacks was the apocalyptic element. The other was the turn away from spirituality, you might say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But then there was also the counter position that always develops after any revolution is that things get tangled up in red tape in weird ways. Like the scientific... I was just in Uzbekistan, you know? they developed a pretty sophisticated industrial economy in the last five years. And part of the reason that they could do that was because there was nothing in the way, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Because Uzbekistan was kind of devoid of impediments to radical entrepreneurship in the aftermath of the communist default. Now, you could imagine that for a good time, the scientific method was so powerful that it was producing revolutions nonstop, and the legal and bureaucratic frameworks were lagging it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so they caught up quite remarkably by the 1970s, and that left the digital space still open. And it is kind of a free-for-all space.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Okay, let me make a counter-example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
well, not only healthy, but non-totalitarian and catastrophic. So, join us for that. So, the last time we spoke was by distance at ARC, and you said a number of things there that were provocative, and one in particular that I wanted to follow up on. It surprised me, although I think I understand why you said it. You're dubious about the rate of progress, so to speak, that we're making now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Richard Dawkins' despair.
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541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Much of the early science was done in the monasteries that turned into universities. You can think about that as concrete evidence of the underpinning of much of the scientific revolution in terms of at least the offshoots of Christianity. But I think there's something deeper there.
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541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Now that's interesting, because you're making the point that two opposite arguments are making that are both directed towards furthering Nietzsche's death of God, let's say. So then that begs the question, what's the actual motivation?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Okay, so let's pick up on the religious thread for a moment. I've been trying to understand the relationship between Christian Europe, let's say, and the dawn of the scientific age for a long time. So, let me outline something for you, and then I'll turn back to exactly what you said. It seems to me, I mean, much of the early science was done in the monasteries that turned into universities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so there's certainly a trail from Christianity through the monasteries to the universities. And so you can think about that as concrete evidence of the underpinning of much of the scientific revolution in terms of at least the offshoots of Christianity. But I think there's something deeper there. And so I've tried to make this case with Dawkins, for example,
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541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
not least after he called himself a cultural Christian. So it seems to me that for science to get going as a motivational project, there are some assumptions you have to make that aren't scientific. So there are axioms before the game gets going, and I think they're faith-based axioms.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
One is that the cosmos is intelligible, that it's intelligible to the human mind, and that diligent investigation of that intelligibility produces an increment in knowledge, both practical, both conceptual and practical, and that that increment in knowledge is good. But then there's maybe a deeper presumption, which is that increment in knowledge can be good,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
if the point of the knowledge pursuit remains encapsulated in something like the underlying Christian ethos. And then I would say that fractures in a way, perhaps Bacon's a turning point, where the reliance of the scientific endeavor on these
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
You feel, you seem to feel, I don't want to put words in your mouth, that the most innovative times are perhaps behind us, or at least temporarily so. And so I'm curious about... We've seen these revolutionary steps forward in principle on the large language model front in the last year, and our gadgetry is becoming much more sophisticated. There's tremendous advancements in robotics.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
metaphysical presuppositions is questioned or like when I presented Dawkins with that argument He just waved his hands over and he said he doesn't have any metaphysical and some assumptions underlying his brand of science but but and I think that that is what the more radical enlightenment French Revolution types thought is that no We've escaped from the underlying religious ethos.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Okay, the problem with that is it seems to me, and I think this might have to do with this apocalyptic kickback, is that once you unmoor yourself from the underlying ethos, which is even the ethos that defines what constitutes knowledge and progress itself, then the Luciferian element of the scientific endeavor can begin to loom extremely large.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so how do you conceptualize quantifying progress, scientific and technological, and why are you skeptical about the benefits or the rate?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
There's not a lot of difference between placebo effect and magic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Well, so one of the things you pointed out there that's very interesting is that Christianity, the rise of Christianity destroyed the pagan world, and that's a great mystery. But one of the epistemological consequences of that was the notion that deities weren't widespread. that idea had to disappear. You know, the Romans had gods for their archways, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
So there was an idea that there were invisible spirits, so to speak, that were operating behind the scenes that could easily be interpreted as causal mechanisms. But you can imagine then, I'm also trying to integrate this with what I learned from Jung, you can imagine that as the world's desacralized at the pagan level,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And the kinds of interpretations that you just described are no longer tenable, right? There are these invisible agencies, some of them personalities, that are operating. That isn't working anymore. That gets all aggregated into a monotheistic deity, and the magic gets pulled out of the world. See, Jung also pointed out that as the Christian...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
revolution transpired, the alchemical mythology started to become widespread, and that there was an idea that developed that there were mysteries lurking in the material world that had redemptive capacity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so you could imagine that as the spirits are taken out of the world, the suspicion, you already said this, the suspicion that there are other causal forces at work starts to make itself manifest in at least the imaginations of people who are on the cutting edge. And so I wonder if that's a, is that a inevitable consequence of the victory of Christianity over the pagan world?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Because it gets desacralized merely because everything that's divine gets united into a single figure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Or, yeah, unconscious manifestations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Yeah, it's a huge difference between us and other animals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
It degenerates into self-worship.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Okay, so let me pull apart. I'd like to talk to you about sacrifice and then again about imitation. I'm going to start with imitation. So the psychologist that I know best who is most conversant with the ideas that you put forward is Jean Piaget. And Piaget prioritized imitation as much as Girard. But Piaget's view didn't concentrate so much on the violent aspect of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
He didn't concentrate so much on how imitation can go wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Yeah, well, he wasn't concerned precisely, I would say, with notions of progress from an economic perspective. Like Piaget's notion was that it's very much like Girard's, you know, is that But the way that we organize ourselves socially and psychologically is through imitation. And so Piaget concentrated, for example, on games.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so his counter to Girard, but without invalidating Girard's point, by the way, is that But he was before Girard, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Yes, definitely. And so Piaget's point was that we actually organize ourselves into social hierarchies with imitation. When children, for example, when they're three or four, so for example, you can't do this till you're three. This is how it works developmentally. If a little boy asks a little girl to play house,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
She has to agree, and then what they do is they reciprocally imitate one another in relationship to a goal. So the goal in that situation is to abstract and model the domestic environment, but then there's a higher-order principle that regulates that, which is that in order for it to be play, Both of them have to be voluntarily in accordance with the aim, and they have to be learning dynamically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Yes, yes. Okay, so now your point, I think, was that... So now imagine a world where there's an indefinite number of these imitation predicated games, because there is an indefinite number of them. Now...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
what I think happened in the religious framework, particularly in the Christian framework, that that multitude of games, each of which is potentially a little Tower of Babel, is organized underneath a higher-order principle. Now, you said that Gerard's answer was you implied aim up, but you also implied go back to church. Now, see, let me just finish one thought.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
So imagine that there are metagames under which imitative games could be organized, okay? One metagame would be power. Another metagame might be hedonistic self-gratification. The Christian metagame is voluntary self-sacrifice, right? That's a radical reshifting of the metagame territory. And I think it is irreplaceable, and I think it has to be embodied and not propositionalized.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
So the pagan world, the Roman world, the Greek world, they were essentially predicated on power and hedonism, right? If I could, then I had a right to, and if I could impose force on you, then I was the better man. And that was inverted in Christianity, but it was inverted in a way I think that matches maturation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
I mean, your point seemed to be that the imitative capacity can go dreadfully wrong if the games degenerate into envious status competitions. And the other point, I think, was that they will degenerate into envious status competitions unless they're oriented towards something transcendent. So then the question would be, what would that transcendent orientation be?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
He was a study of normative development.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Right, but he did bind it by the necessity of voluntary play, right? That's an important distinction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And I think- Yeah, that's a very important question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
with a sort of traditional theological- Is it a movement away from the sacrifice of others?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Okay, so let's delve into this a little bit. I want to make this psychological and sociological as well as theological. So it strikes me that One of the radical characteristics of human beings, we talked about imitation, that's certainly one. Another radical characteristic is the willingness and ability to make sacrifices.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
So let me define that for a minute, and then we can see how it goes astray as well. So the more immature you are, the more your attention and behavior is under the dominion of biological systems that have narrow short-term gratification as their focus. That could be rage, it could be hunger, it could be temperature regulation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
A two-year-old is a collection of unruly, competing, short-term motivations. It takes 18 years for the cortex to develop. And you could think of the cortex as an inhibitory structure, so that's kind of a Freudian model, or you could think about it as an integrative structure, and that's a better model.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Part of Piaget's model is useful in that regard because we integrate within the confines of imitative games. But there's more to it than that. So as you become more mature, this kind of a definition of maturity,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
you focus more on tomorrow and next month and next year, so your temporal span of apprehension increases, and you regulate your behavior in the present in relationship to the future, that's a sacrificial move because you're sacrificing immediate gratification for the stability of the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But I don't imagine, but I don't think you believe that people can regulate that with mere rationality. Like it has to be deeper. I would say part of that regulation of short-term impulse that's so limbically driven, mere rationality won't do the trick. And the rationality itself would have to be encapsulated within a concept of what actually constitutes rationality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
So, like I could ask you, what's worth sacrificing your short-term pleasure for? Now, the pleasure speaks for itself, right? There has to be something that you're giving that up for when you work, for example, that you regard as worthwhile. And it isn't also clear to me that that's a purely rational move. Now, there's one more sacrificial element. It's like, as you mature...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
it becomes less and less about what the motivated sub-components of you want now, and more about how you find harmony in competition and cooperation in social groups. So, for example, one of the things children have to learn between two and three to be social is to take turns. And that's also a sacrifice because the default is, it's always my turn.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
That's what it is like for non-social animals, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Okay. There were things I wasn't willing to sacrifice to stay there. There's no doubt about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
I was unwilling to sacrifice my tongue. And so what I sacrificed was my job and my clinical career so I could keep my tongue. But there's a Christian element to that too, because the Christian insistence is that the truth-oriented word establishes the order that's good. And so... But I don't think we can escape the sacrificial language because I had to give up my job, both of them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
I had three because I had a private business.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
I'm certainly not unhappy about it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Yeah, yeah, well, I understand what you're saying.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Well, I think it also, to some degree, it stems, it likely stems from your saturation in the Girardian view, because you're, you can correct me again if I'm wrong, you're likely, and especially given what you said about Christ's sacrifice making further sacrifices in some ways unnecessary,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
your view is going to be to concentrate, it seems to me, on the more pathological end of the sacrificial process. I think the terminology can be confusing, because I would say what I gained was far greater than what I lost. Now, that doesn't mean that what I lost was nothing because it wasn't nothing and it took a fair bit of reconstruction to make things work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so you could say, well, if you gain more than you lose, is that truly a sacrifice? Now, the biblical stories are replete with paradoxes like that because the most intense one, obviously, is what happens with Abraham and Isaac because God calls on Abraham to sacrifice his son. And Abraham is willing to do so But the consequence of that is that he gets his son back, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so that points to the ambiguity of what constitutes sacrifice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And it is interesting that it's not written from his perspective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Right, that's why he says his yoke is light, which is a weird thing to say when it's an invitation to the cross.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Okay, okay, got it, got it. Okay, so I'm gonna stop us here. And so this is what we're gonna do on the Daily Wire side. All you watching and listening know we do an extra half an hour. I want to continue our conversation about the faith of a child, but I also wanna ask you, why you think, if you think it's true, that you are temperamentally inclined to focus on the dark side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And I'd like to know what the consequence of that has been. Because that's something we actually share in common. You know, unlike Piaget, I'm a psychopathologist. He was a developmental psychologist. And I've always been interested in the extreme case. And so I'd like to talk to you about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
this faith issue that you just described, I'd like to talk to you a bit more about Christianity, and I'd like to talk to you about what it is you think that it is about you that's focused you on that, on the more apocalyptic and dark edge of things. So, all right, so everybody who's watching and listening, well, this part of the conversation has come to a halt.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And thank you for everybody here in Scottsdale for making this possible and The Daily Wire. We're going to continue for another half an hour on The Daily Wire side with the topics that I just described. Thank you very much for coming to see me today and to talk. We obviously just barely got going.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
So I had the opportunity to sit down with Peter Thiel today. And Mr. Thiel is probably most famous for the role that he played in establishing PayPal, but he's been a canny investor for a very long period of time. And we didn't actually talk much about practicalities on the business side. We mostly talked about the nature of cultural transformation because his thought tends in that direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
He's a philosophically inclined person. And our discussion really walks through One of Peter's fundamental propositions is that progress in the material world, and not the digital world, let's say, has slowed substantively since maybe the 1960s, and that there are deep reasons for that. Some of it is apocalyptic fear of the scientific endeavor. Some of it is this hippie-like desire to look inside.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
The first thing to understand is that people see the world through their aim. Anyone can deal with the difficult today if they have a compelling tomorrow. If you leave your zone of comfort, if you move away from your father's tent, if you move away from what's familiar to you, and you do that voluntarily, and you make the sacrifices necessary as a consequence, this is what will happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Some of the same authors. Some of the same. UCLA. And that big a difference in group size. Yes. Because one of the criticisms of the study, obviously, was that there was a small number of people. Yes, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Well, clinical studies are very, very difficult to do. So it's very easy to criticize a study for having a small number, but it's very difficult to run a better study.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
That's actually what we started our conversation with, because Tony's program has been subject to scientific scrutiny, and it seems to have remarkable antidepressant properties. And so I'm very interested, like Tony is, in
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
It's like watching a toddler play.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Well, I'm serious about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So it's compelling and it's long lasting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So that's sort of like the biochemistry of a very enhanced flow state that's lasting a long time. And you're modeling that in an embodied form and people are mirroring that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
how people chart their life course and how they establish their aim and how they determine their strategies and how they describe their conditions for fulfillment and what fulfillment is and how it can be sustained and how it can be self-improving and how it can be brought to other people. And so that's really what we spent our time discussing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Yes, definitely. Right? Definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Okay, so I've got a story to tell you and then a bunch of questions. Great. So I know this biologist, Derek Cooper. And we did a podcast together. He's a very interesting thinker. And he's spent a fair bit of time looking at dopaminergic functioning and relating that in part to insect behavior, bees in particular. So I want to tell you something funny about bees.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And the reason I'm outlining this is because the biochemical principles that you describe are extremely fundamental, right? They're echoed throughout the living kingdom, all the way down to the insect level. Wow. This is ancient circuitry. Okay, so... Only you would have this kind of information. Well... I did a lot of studies of animal behavior when I was trying to figure out human motivation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
I wanted to hear his thoughts on the matter and how he construed and conceptualized his approach, and also what makes him such a compelling public speaker, how he prepares for that, how he relates to the audience, how he can sustain this energy for really remarkable periods of time, because I found myself quite exhausted generally after about three hours of full-out
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And if you can find extremely distal connections, it means you've found something very profound because it's been conserved over evolutionary history for maybe hundreds of millions of years. So you know you're onto something that's extremely fundamental. And you can tell that in the story that you described because it's reflected in hormonal changes. So bees communicate about sources of value.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So bees go out and they forage kind of randomly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And then if they find a good storehouse of value, which is like a flower bed that's not too far away and that's rich, then they go back and they dance and they indicate by the quality of their dance where the flowers are, but also how much energy needs to be expended to get there, but how much energy they will be acquired in consequence of the voyage. Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And they do that in part by intensity and duration of dance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Right. So now imagine what they're doing. You see what they're doing. So it costs a bee to expend energy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Right. So if another bee watches the bee that's communicating, expending energy, the lesson is something like this bee is so convinced that that energy source is worthy of investigation that it's willing to risk expending energy to communicate about it. Okay. So...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
so and it's starting to feel like a bee right now well exactly that gets the other bees excited but but it's a but it's it's not as you said it's an experience and not a it's not a it's not an argument yes it's like the bee is demonstrating by it's willing to sacrifice its energy that the end goal is worth the attainment okay so that's that's very much analogous to what you're doing on stage
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Because you're expending, you said right at the beginning, you're expending 11,000 calories in an 11-hour period, and you're able to maintain it. So people watch that and they think, well, they think, they see, and this is at a level that's so primordial that even insects can do it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
They see that you're willing to risk a tremendous expenditure of energy over a very long time to communicate a particular pattern of perception. Yeah. And so that's convincing because it's, what would you say, it's an existence proof. Okay, now you said some other things that are extremely interesting that I think are worth delving into. So you talked about pull motivation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Yeah, versus push. So pull motivation is positive emotion. It's the manifestation of the same emotion. dopaminergically mediated positive emotion that indicates the existence of a valuable store of treasure. And so that's kind of a quest issue. It's like, so we're wired so that we feel enthusiasm when we see ourselves moving towards a valuable goal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Okay, now you're, and then you said some other things very carefully. You said you're not a guru. And what that means in part is that you're encouraging people to believe that there is a goal and that goals are worthwhile, but they have to come up with the goals themselves. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Well, it's partly because they need to establish their own conditions for satisfaction, and they have to do that in consequence of their own contemplation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
You know, and by the way, I mean, you have a copy of my book here, We Rest With God. Yes. One of the ways that God is characterized, and I describe this in the book, is as the spirit of calling. Right, right. So there's two primary characterizations of God in the biblical writings. There's more than two, but there's two primary characterizations. One is the spirit of calling and adventure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So that's exemplified in the story of Abraham, for example. And the other is as the voice of conscience. And that... Spear of adventure, that's associated with this pull motivation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Public speaking, let's say, because that's a performance and you've got to be all in if you're going to do it right. But Tony does that for like 12 hours a day for four days in a row, many, many times a month. And so I was curious about, well, his technique and how that was similar to mine and how it differed. And so... Well, we talked about all that, and I suppose what's the core of it all?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Now... It's the hero's journey. It's the hero's journey. Yeah. Although the hero's journey also incorporates elements of conscience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Right? And there's a push element to that that's probably worth discussing as well. It's like... Calling says, here's the path, and conscience warns you when you're deviating from it. By the way, I just have to thank you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
I just want to say it. Thank you, sir.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Well, it's really worth, given the framework that you're using, it's really worthwhile understanding this technically. So here's a way of thinking structurally about the process that you outlined. Okay, so... the first thing to understand is that people see the world through their aim. Yes. And I mean that literally. I understand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And then when you hear the story of someone's life, you actually hear a description of their aim. That's right. Okay, so now you specify the aim. Now, the first thing that happens perceptually, and you talked about perception, the first thing that happens is that once you specify the aim, the pathway appears. That's how your perceptual systems work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And the reason for that is, well, if you can't see your way to get where you're going, then what good is it to see? Right, okay. You specify the aim and the pathway occurs. Well, that's the precondition for a quest. Okay, now the next thing that happens, so the pathway occurs, the next thing that happens is... That sets the frame for emotional experience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So now, everything that you encounter as an obstacle on that pathway elicits negative emotion. And everything that you encounter that facilitates movement forward evokes positive emotion. So one of the corollaries of that is no aim, no positive emotion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Well, and you demonstrate in the physiology of your lectures, the fact that that compelling aspect is possible and real, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Well, I think the core of it, at least in part, is something akin to the old Nietzschean dictum that if you have a why, you can bear any how. And so Tony helps people discover the why, well, and the how for that matter. And that is definitely akin to what I'm attempting to do when I'm lecturing and writing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
When you said memory... Well, there's a physiological explanation for that. Okay, so dopamine does two things. It produces that feeling of enthusiasm. That's why people take cocaine, for example, or most of the drugs of abuse that are stimulants. Okay, so it produces that feeling of reward, but that's not all it does. So imagine that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Imagine that there's a positive outcome and that produces some enthusiasm. Okay, now imagine that there's a chain of neurological events that led up to that positive outcome. Yes. Okay, what dopamine does is encourage the neural systems that were active just before that positive event occurred to grow.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So now that means... You're creating more wiring. And you're strengthening whatever connections were used.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So if you're... if you're increasing the energy and you're simultaneously getting people to configure their goals, and those two things are happening at the same time, that should increase the probability that the goals that they adopt will be instantiated permanently into memory. And then it's also not exactly the kind of memory that you would call to mind to talk about.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
It's the kind of memory that you see the world through. So that's procedural memory. It's a completely different kind of memory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
It's the kind of memory that... So let's say you practice applying a certain framework of interpretation to your circumstances. Okay, that practice reconfigures procedural memory. And that's literally... That's rewiring of the system through which you view the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
That's Man's Search for Meaning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And so, well, our discussion helped clarify that and flesh it out and make it more concrete and make it more accessible to people. And so you're welcome to partake in that. And that's what's on the menu for today. So, Mr. Robbins, I'm going to start by reading something. Okay. Because you did something that is very rare.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Yeah, that's right. So if you look at a great athlete,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Okay, so let's talk about that because you talked about eliciting motivation over a long period of time. So I'd like to know more about how you— Or I would even say the word, if I may, drive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
What drives you towards the right aim?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
That's what this experience is about. That's different than just being motivated. Okay, so let's walk. Okay, so I have an exercise that that people can do online called future authoring. And one of its steps, and I'd like you to tell me how this compares to what you're doing in your seminars, in your events.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So it's a conditions of satisfaction exercise, or it's a meditation and contemplation exercise, or it's a prayer. You could think of all the, or a request for revelation. But here's the idea. So it's, you can, You imagine for a moment that you could have what you wanted and needed in five years. Okay. But there's a condition. You have to know what it is and you have to specify it. Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Now then the question would be, well, how are you going to discover that? And the answer is you ask yourself, it's like, okay, like what, what would, it's, it's like the Viktor Frankl scenario, even hypothetically, what would get me out of bed in the morning on a very, very difficult day? Yes. Like, What could I imagine could come to me in my life?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
We'll get you up late, get you up early, make you fully alive. Yeah, well, what would make you persevere in times of trouble? Exactly. Even a more direct question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
You submitted your process, your life improvement process, your public life improvement process to a clinical trial. So I'm going to read some pieces from the abstract of the paper that was published in consequence of that inquiry. Okay. So the paper is called Effects of an Immersive Psychosocial Training Program on Depression and Well-Being, a Randomized Clinical Trial.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Yeah, it's not going to work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
There's certain ones that are going to be great relationships. That's actually the purpose of stories. Pardon me? That's the purpose of story. That's exactly right. Okay, so you said something that I think we could delve into technically too. Okay, so you said an aim isn't sufficient. It'll get you started. Okay, and then you said you have to have reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Okay, so let's think that through for a minute. So one of the things we do in this program that helps people rewire their aim is do a multidimensional analysis. And we step people through that. It's like, okay, now you've sort of figured out what you would want and need if you could have it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
But let's flesh that out so you could say, well, how would that positively affect your intimate relationship, your marriage, right? How would that positively affect your family? How would it affect your community? What would it mean to your future? Well, then you could imagine this, too. You could imagine that, like, in some ways, we're loose constellations of... multiple motivations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
The first thing I would say is clinical trials are extremely difficult to do. I've always been highly impressed by any scientist, physician, psychiatrist, psychologist who will do a clinical trial because there are... innumerable impediments. It's hard to get subjects. It's hard to specify the control group. It's hard to get ethical clearance. It takes forever. People drop out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And you want to meld those all together so they're serving the same aim.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
It means they're actually living out multiple stories simultaneously and they don't have the same aim. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
I don't know. It's got to be on your terms. So one of the things I discovered when I was walking through the biblical stories is they're The book itself is structured in a manner that's analogous to the pattern that you just described. So, what happens in the biblical stories is that a sequence of stories are put forward that each circulate around a form of high-order goal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So, I'll give you an example. So, in the story of Noah, for example, The voice of the divine in the story of Noah is characterized as the intuition that calls the wise to prepare when trouble is brewing. Right. So that's God for Noah, because Noah is described as a man who's wise in his generation. So he's the sort of person you'd go to for advice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And his ability to intuit is well developed in consequence of his practice of wisdom. And everyone recognizes that. And now he has a powerful revelation or intuition that all hell's about to break loose and he should take action.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
appropriate steps and that's his faith in god but god in that the highest goal you might say in that story is this intuition of the wise to prepare in the face of disaster okay that's very different than the god that makes himself manifest to abraham so abraham is someone who's resting on his laurels and who's privileged at the beginning of the story his parents are wealthy and there's no reason for him to lift a finger and he comes
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
God comes to him as the voice of adventure. And God says to him, it's very cool. This is the covenant by the way. And I'm sure you'll see the relationship between this and what you're doing in your seminars. God comes to Moses as a spirit of adventure and he offers him a bargain, which is the covenant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
He says, if you leave your zone of comfort, if you move away from your father's tent, if you move away from what's familiar to you and you do that voluntarily, and you make the sacrifices necessary as a consequence, this is what will happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Yes, and that's partly the element of his faith. Okay, so the deal is, your life will become a blessing to you. So that's that antidepressant phenomena that we're describing. So instead of living in misery, you'll live in something approximating hope and security. Okay, that's the first part of the deal. The second part is your name will become renowned among other people and you'll deserve it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So that's a good deal because people want social status and they want the security and the capacity to cooperate and compete peacefully that goes along with that. It's a fundamental... It might even be the fundamental human aim, but it's at least a fundamental human aim. That's number two. Number three is... it'll give you your best shot at establishing something of multi-generational permanence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
It's very difficult to publish. It's generally a very thankless endeavor. And you did it along with the authors of this paper. And the results are quite stunning. I'll read a bit from the abstract.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So that's a good deal because one of the things that people want when they search for what's meaningful is that they say, well, I'd like to do something that lasts or matters. Okay, so that's the third thing. And the fourth thing is, You'll do it in a way that'll be of a benefit to everyone else. So it's not a zero sum game.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And so what, it's so cool, this story, because what it does is align the calling of adventure. So that would be that calling or pull with those four outcomes. Okay, but then there's a meta move in the- Which gives you more reasons. Of course.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Yes, that's why you want to think through, if you do have an aim, what the benefit would be to the people that you love and to your community. That's right. Because it anchors it. Okay, the meta...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
claim in the juxtaposition of these narratives, this is so cool, is that the voice that tells the wise to prepare in the time of crisis and the call to adventure are manifestations of the same distal goal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So you could imagine that the ultimate uniting goal brings all the underlying potential stories together. Yes. And then that's developed through the biblical corpus.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And in the New Testament, that's fleshed out completely because the claim in the New Testament is something like the embodiment of the spirit that's characterized in multiple ways in the Old Testament is made manifest as the willingness to for voluntary self-sacrifice in service of the highest goal. And that's what's acted out in the passion story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And that seems to me to be precisely accurate is that there's that, because you said yourself earlier, you know, that a goal that is only serving yourself own, so to speak, narrow and proximal motives isn't one that's going to last. It has to be anchored in multiple ways and it has to be worthwhile.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So for everybody watching and listening, every scientific paper has an abstract that essentially summarizes the findings so that if you're doing, say, a detailed overview of a given field, you can get the gist of things rapidly. And so the abstract summarizes the most important elements of the study. Psychiatry stands to benefit from brief... Why? Well, you want things to be efficient.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
That's for sure. You're not there. Well, those are, you know, that concern thoughts of yourself and neurotic suffering are so closely allied statistically that you can't separate them. So if you were thinking about your narrow self.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Right, and it's not the same as propositional knowledge, which is the knowledge that you can discuss. Yes. Yeah, yeah, and it does require, and so you're, now, so let me ask you about- But I want to finish something you said, because I want to, I haven't done your process, I want to do this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Just doing it alters your state. How do you suppose you could... So the advantage to the system that we have is it's distributable online, it's highly inexpensive, it doesn't take very much time, and it's scalable, but it doesn't have that participatory element, right? So that's a problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Non-pharmacological treatments that effectively reduce depressive symptoms, which are very common. To address this need, we conducted a single-blind randomized clinical trial. So people were assigned randomly to group, which is...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
That's what religious practice is supposed to do. Yes, and I think that's what it does do. Well, so for example, in the story of Abraham... Yes. Okay, so the story is a sequence of micro-adventures that Abraham has, and they expand in scope as he progresses, which is the story of life, right? But at the beginning of each adventure, he...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
aims upward, and that's the rekindling of that covenant, and indicates his willingness to sacrifice. Right, right, right. So that's an indication of that, what would you say, humble willingness to change. And it's a prime, and it's a very useful prime, and it's one that you can actually apply. So for example, And I'd like to know how you do this technically when you go on stage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So before I take the stage, my wife and I do this. We have a musician, which is really helpful. He helps us focus and everybody in the audience focus. And there is something about music that does that entrainment, that physiological entrainment that you described.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Yeah, yeah. I could see that in your events, that there's a party atmosphere to them. It's like rock and roll. And there's a reason that people use music while in religious ceremonies, for example. Sure. Okay, so the next thing that I try to get the aim in mind, and my wife does too because she introduces me, and the aim for me is always a quest. It's like I have a question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
a marker for a well-designed study, assessing how a six-day immersive psychosocial training program, and that's Tony Robbins' program, followed by 10-minute daily psychosocial exercises for 30 days. What's a psychosocial exercise? Well, Tony will walk us through that, but
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And it's a real question, and I want to get farther in answering it, right? And so I don't know what I'm going to say, but I know the tools I'm going to use. But the aim is, I know the aim. The aim is a clear question. If I don't have that, the talk wanders and it's opaque, okay? There's an outcome.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Of course. Okay, okay, okay. That's one of the things I was curious about. Okay, so the other thing we do is take a moment, and this is a very serious moment, to remember that... 3,000 people took a lot of their time and energy and money to come and do this, and they're very happy to be here, and we should be very happy that they're here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Also, because it's highly unlikely, and that we should do everything we can to eradicate anything that isn't entirely grateful for the opportunity. So now we've got aim and the appropriate mindset and that's a prime. And then it is so interesting because I learned over time that I had to do a lot of preparation for the talks. Now I can do it with less now, but I do a lot, but
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Once on stage, I had to pursue that aim and I had to let the preparation go. That didn't mean I didn't have to do it. Okay, so now... You don't have the same beliefs. Okay, so I'm very curious about the way that you manage this because you're a very high intensity speaker and you're very charismatic and compelling and you maintain it for much longer than I do. I go for like 90 minutes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
I had lectures at the university that were three hours long. I was pretty much done at the end of that, but... but tell me, tell me how you prepare for, for one of these events. And then you also said, when you go on stage, you, you read the room. And I want to know what that means because you obviously was one of the things I taught my wife when she was learning to speak publicly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
I said, well, first of all, don't look at the crowd. It's not a crowd. Pick people because you can talk to people. You're talking to a person and you can do that. Right. And then So you get your attitude right and you, oh yes. And then if you look, I told her, look everywhere in the audience because everywhere you don't look, you're afraid of, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And so you wanna go on stage and you wanna position yourself. You look at these people and you look at these people and these people and these people and you see where you are, then you're not self-conscious. And then if you're pursuing your aim, so the aim is I'm gonna answer this question and I'm gonna be pleased that these people are here. You're not self-conscious because it's not about you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Right? Okay. Okay. So tell me what you do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
It's an exercise that's designed to optimize psychological functioning, but also social functioning simultaneously because it's very difficult to be healthy by yourself. And so you could think of mental health in particular, although also physical health as a communitarian or collective endeavor. So, and Tony definitely understands that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
They're self-conscious and they're done. Then it's about them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
If I'm going to a corporate- Why do you close your eyes?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
What do you watch and listen for when you're on stage? So you're processing- Before I get there, though. Yeah, okay. One more piece before I get there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Followed by 10-minute daily psychosocial exercises for 30 days improves depressive symptoms. 45 adults were block randomized by depression scored two arms. The immersive psychosocial training program and 10-minute daily exercise group, a gratitude journaling group, or a gratitude journaling group. So now the idea there was to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
That's a great way to establish a relationship with someone, right? Well, yeah, because people feel the difference.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
not only assess whether Mr. Robin's program was an effective treatment for depression, but whether or not it was equally or more effective than another treatment that wasn't pharmacological that had already been shown to be of demonstrated utility. Through positive psychology, yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And a gratitude journal helps people focus on what's positive in their life instead of what's negative, and people who are depressed tend to be preoccupied with what's negative. Depression severity improved over time with a significantly greater reduction in the psychosocial training program group. So that meant that Mr. Robin's intervention worked. About an 83% reduction in depression severity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Right, so that sets your attitude to them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Well, if you practiced universal love, you'd probably get better at it. Yeah. I would think so.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Okay, so tell me exactly that. So at the end of those 10 minutes- When you're running these simulations, you're making the case that you're not only thinking about it in words. No. So what are you doing? Are you in a state that's like a dream? Like, is it image-based? Now, you said there's emotions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So it's quite a multidimensional simulation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And by six weeks, virtually everybody in the intervention group showed remission in their symptoms. And six weeks is a pretty decent length of trial because one of the complications with clinical trials is How long do you follow people? A week? Two weeks? A month? Six months? Two years? You know, the best studies would attempt to do all of those, but that's virtually impossible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So you're ready to contend when you go on stage, and it's partly because you've prepared. That's right. And you manifested faith in yourself by showing the commitment to the preparation. Plus, you primed all those stories. Because one of the things preparation does for me... So I'll have the question in mind, and then I think of analytic tools that I can use to interrogate that question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And then I think through the stories, and they're stories I know, and I think through way more stories than I'll use, but now they're at hand. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Right, so that's partly why you put so much stress on the physiological element.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Right, sure, sure. Okay, so let's talk. That's why the results are lasting. When I, after we walked through, people through these stages of the process, we do then focus and specify strategy. It's like, okay, and the strategy is pretty, it's very concretized. And I try to do this in my lectures.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So I have a question, I want to lay out the structure of the question and the answer conceptually, but then I want to nail it down to transformations in perception and action. Okay, so that's strategy. That's right. Okay, so tell me how you link the motivational element, the drive element, let's say, to the... So motivation and drive are personalities, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
That's a very good way of conceptualizing it because they have a viewpoint. They have emotions. They have a philosophy. They're not just like cause and effect. physical sequences. So you're evoking personalities in people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
You know, you can know that. This is a very good thing to know if you're having a discussion with your wife and
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
men get frustrated with women sometimes because women on average have higher levels of negative emotion and so that means that they're more children well they have their reasons yeah yeah they have the reason they're prey the thing that they've done most of life men have been the thing that could screw yeah yeah yeah they have they're bigger and they're stronger but what it means is that they're more sensitive to environmental disruptions on average
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
and then they try to communicate that to men but it isn't necessarily the case that their alarm system which indicates a problem is differentiated enough to specify it precisely so partly what you're trying to do when you're talking to your wife and she brings you a concern is to find out the question which is what you just said there's a problem but there's a question in that right and one of the errors that men make when they're listening to women is that they jump from
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So this was, well, so I think we should talk about, we should start by talking about this. Because I'd like to know, and everybody listening would like to know, I suppose, first of all, what was the program? And then why did you submit it to a clinical trial? And How did you get scientists to participate in that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Well, Michaela was more difficult, but she was ill.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Right? But apart from that, I wouldn't say so.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
So you're going to go from where you are to where you want to be 10 times faster. Of course, of course. Yeah, you want everybody to be rowing in the same direction. Yes. Even if they're in their own boat.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
yeah so okay so i want to talk about if you would i want to talk about how you help people translate this aim and and energy now that you've established into strategy yes so so like how do you guide people through that process because that's well that's where the rubber hits the road 100 because they gotta you gotta get the experience in them
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
You know, because you just describe them. It opens them. Yeah, but why? Because you just described it as entertainment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
why does that make them open to the difficulty of change?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
But then you give it- That's what you said. You just said that's a consequence of the commitment that you're indicating by your, what would you say? Your, well, your commitment to the project.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Yeah, yeah. So it's like they have to do whatever it takes. And they get it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
When I do a Q&A with people, because I've met, I don't know, how many thousands of people doing that, and then I also learned this in my clinical practice, if you watch First of all, I kind of think of those Q&A lines like a wedding reception, you know, because that's a privilege, right, to have that happen every night. It's a privilege to have anybody show up to hear what you want to say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Oh, that's for sure. Well, then they want to stick around and meet you. You should be pretty damn happy about that. if you have any sense. But if you watch people carefully, and this is also a way of not being self-conscious or nervous, you see that everybody has a tempo. And I found that if I reach my hand out to shake their hand at their tempo, I immediately establish rapport.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And I think it's because I've indicated by something that subtle that I've watched them and I know them as well as I could know them given that I've only met them five seconds ago, right? So it really gets things off in a good,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
They feel like you're already doing that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to sit down with Tony Robbins and in the remarkable basement of his house as well. And so that's the setting. And Tony and I have got to know each other over the last couple of years and have had a number of discussions. And partly what we've been trying to puzzle out is are, what would you say, the similarities between our parallel endeavors?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And some people deep strategy without philosophy. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
I want to close this with a discussion. You have an event coming up. Yes, I do. So will you walk us through that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Where do people find out about this?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
They access it through Zoom. Zoom, exactly right. It's timetorisesummit.com. timetorisesummit.com. That's right, yeah. Okay, and that's open to everyone. Yes, everybody. Right, and so that they can see in real time all the things that we discussed today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
instead of some enthusiasm yes exactly vision with the strategy that's right combination you got it right right all right sir well that's excellent and so we'll put those links in the description as well i think what we'll do for those of you who are listening on the daily wire side there's been a sea change in the political scene well it's not just the political scene right it's it's the culture that is the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
cultural scene yeah i'd like to talk to you about that i'd like to see what you what you think about it and and what you've observed and so great um yeah so for everybody who's watching and listening who's inclined to join us on the daily wire side and for those of you who are already daily wire subscribers join tony and i there and we'll continue this for well the typical half an hour and in the meantime thank you very much for your time and attention thank you very much sir
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
How did I get into this place? Tell the story. Well, you tell the story. Yeah. Well, it's a very comical story. There's a garage above us. And in the garage, there's a trap door, which is stainless steel. And if you open up the stainless steel trap door, there's a stainless steel slide. And that slides you down. It's kind of lit up with purple lights, which is, you know, very disco-y and comical.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
And it slows you down nicely so you don't land on your tea kettle at the bottom. And then you're in this weird. an evil super villain lair, which is extremely comical.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
That's what I do. Yeah, it's very funny.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
This ARC conference that we run, this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, that's February 17th to 19th, by the way, for those of you who are watching and listening. And there are now tickets available to this. This is the first time we've done this at arcforum.com. One of our rules is that we want to do it with a sense of play.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
You know, one of the things I figured out, I think this is right, is that the antithesis of power... like compulsion and force, is play. Yes, I agree. That's the opposite. Play is power. It's a different form of power. Yeah, well, it's the kind of power that sustains and improves and requires no compulsion. That's right. Right. And that you enjoy while you're doing it. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
For reasons that aren't sadistic, let's say. So, all right. Everybody can join us on the Daily Wire side for the 30-minute conclusion of this discussion. We'll turn our attention to cultural issues and well into the current political scene. So join us there. Thanks, Tony. It's great.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Yeah, and to the crew here, thank you very much for setting this up. Yeah, it's very helpful to me and to all the viewers and listeners to have these podcasts made accessible wherever I'm traveling. We've got an army of beautiful people here. that made this happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
It's an army. They're very enthusiastic and hardworking and that's a precondition for making this successful. Okay, everybody. Ciao. Good to talk to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Do you have any idea? Has there been any longer-term follow-up? Yes, there has been. Oh, there has?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
I mean, Tony's, I suspect he's probably the most popular and impactful speaker, personal development speaker the world's ever seen. Oh no, I'm very fascinated by what he does and I've seen his events and I've reviewed some of the scientific literature pertaining to his achievements.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Right, right, right. That's not good. That's definitely not good. Hello, everybody. I want to tell you about Peterson Academy. So as I watched the universities deteriorate and become inexcusably ideologically rigid over the years, I started thinking about what might be done to address that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
We have the technology at hand now to film the best lectures on any given topic at every university around the world and to bring the results of that filming and distribution to a wide audience at a very low cost. And we also have the ability to do that with the best possible production quality. And so I started working with my daughter and her team
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
on Peterson Academy a number of years ago and we launched in August. We have about 40 courses on our platform now. We're producing for a month and I think I can say without hesitation that they're the best courses that you can obtain on topics associated with higher education anywhere. and they're beautifully filmed and produced.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
There's a very inviting and welcoming social media element to Peterson Academy and it's all available at an eminently reasonable price. We set out to produce the best education platform in the world and I think we managed that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Go to Peterson Academy and gain access to the kind of education that was once reserved at the best institutions for the most elite and privileged of students and change your life in consequence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins
Yeah, well, people's trust was violated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
You play, it's like a Bugs Bunny character in a sense, like there are these trickster characters in mythology that are troublemakers. Are you surprised that you ended up in the domain of comedy, making movies? You're a documentary star now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And they're often arranging funding, too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And the editor, the editing function I find particularly interesting. When I'm writing, I learn to edit from writing, and I write a lot more than I keep. And I probably edit for half the time that I write. You know, like I separate the functions. There's a writing function and an editing function. And I've become much more effective over the years at writing a better and better first draft. But...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Editing, and I've also seen this with my other ventures, with Peterson Academy, for example, and with The Daily Wire as well, how important, with the documentaries that I've made for The Daily Wire, how important editing is. I mean, an editor can make or break a project to time things properly with the music, to select only the best from all the excess footage,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
to make it stylish and punchy and well-timed. And so were you fortunate in your editorial team as well? And what kind of editorial role did you play?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
We talked about his role as a comedian, a straight-faced, Buster Keaton-like, monotone-speaking comedian. troublemaking comedian, social critic, a writer, a director, now an actor in these documentaries, playing a role, playing a character, what that was like, what he learned. his ambitions for the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, well, it's like timing a joke. I mean, all the words have to work and not too many. And so, yeah, well, and you say there's something interesting about in terms of assessing the creative process there, too. It's like one of the things that was striking about your documentaries is that you you were inspired, in my estimation, by an important question in both cases, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And you actually put them as questions, and the root word of question is quest, you know? And when I'm lecturing in public on my tour, I always have the question in mind before I step on the stage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And so you served as a sponge on the cultural side, as far as I'm concerned, sort of soaking up the zeitgeist and distilling down the central political concerns, and you landed deep down in those concerns in both cases. The first concern was Well, to what degree is the notion of sex itself something that's only culturally created? To what degree is it biological?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
How does that influence our sense of reality itself? And is there a role for secondary elements of sexual identity like gender? You know, and that was a hot button topic to say the least, right? And then your documentary laid out that question and you did the same thing with, am I a racist? That's right. Well, what does it mean to be a racist? And if...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
We talked about the political moment and what the implications are of the Trump victory for conservative commentary of the sort that Matt particularly specializes in and that I delve into from time to time. And we touched on some more topical issues in the last week. Matt has been involved in a
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
If we establish the meaning, to what degree does that apply to me? And those are reasonable questions. People have their own in-group preferences. We're somewhat novelty-averse, but also curious. Precisely what it means to be a racist is a complicated issue. And so you had those questions in mind.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
It might be useful for everybody watching and listening to think hard about what your comments about the first draft meant. Because one of the things I do when I'm teaching people to write, we've built this into some new software that we've developed called Essay, is encourage people to start with a question and then to write way more than they need. Right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And that gives you, it gives you some creative space to lay out the exploration. And I suspect that's what you saw when you saw the first draft of the movie, the first version. It's like, it's kind of all over the place. But But that doesn't matter if you can edit it down. You know, there's a different... The part of your brain that produces and the part that edits are separate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And if you get them both operating at once, like you try to write the perfect sentence, let's say, then they interfere with each other. You can't produce and you can't edit. So you want to separate the production function and overproduce, and then you want to edit. And that sounds like exactly what happened to you when you were... going through the first rough drafts of the movie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
But obviously the gold was there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah. So this character that you are in the movie is someone who's who's every man naive in a way, right? I mean, what you're doing, at least to some degree, is asking stupid questions. And I used to encourage my students, by the way, in my seminars to ask stupid questions, assuming they were paying attention, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
rather contentious war of words with a number of people online, including James Lindsay, who I did a podcast with just a week or so ago on the issue of the woke right. And so we delved into the controversies that are erupting on the conservative side of the spectrum, and that's the podcast.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Because if you have a question, and it's a genuine question, the probability that 80% of the people around you have the same question is very high.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
You know, assuming you're paying a certain amount of attention, and so you have this character, and correct me if I have any of this wrong in your estimation, who's butting his head up against what a very large number of people seem to presume is self-evident, but is actually preposterous. And you allowed the people that you were talking to in both cases to put their foot in it, so to speak.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And so I'm curious first if you think that's a reasonable characterization of what you're doing. But then I'm also curious, you play a kind of, it's like a Bugs Bunny character in a sense. Like there are these trickster characters in mythology that are troublemakers because of their, what would you say? Yeah, it's like the kid who says the emperor has no clothes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And so you're playing that, and you're playing it with a comedic edge, and it can also be pretty harsh. Are you surprised that you ended up in the domain of comedy, that you ended up making movies, that you ended up becoming, I mean, you're a documentary star now. What do you think about all that? And did you think that was a reasonable characterization of what you've been doing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Maybe that's a conservative function. I wonder if that's a conservative function, pointing out the obvious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
So join us for an update into Matt Walsh's life and another glimpse into the culture war and a bit of a slice of what's currently controversial. Hey, Matt, we were supposed to meet in person today. What the hell happened?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And that's where... You don't want to underestimate the utility of wit and play. You know, when I was lecturing at Harvard, I lectured about very serious topics. You know, I mean, the most serious topics I could... that I had encountered political catastrophe, atrocity, authoritarianism, brutality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And I had this little voice in the back of my head all the time that told me that if I was a real master of that, I would be able to do it with a light touch. And I thought that was pretty preposterous when talking about things like the Soviet atrocities. But what I came to realize over a very long period of time was that if you're a master of something, you do it in a spirit of play.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And that play gives you some leeway, because that's partly what play means, but it also means that you have that leaven of wit that stops you from being a scold. You know, when I first encountered Rush Limbaugh, this was quite a while ago, 30 years ago probably, I went down to California, and that's where I first heard him. And I knew a little bit, I knew about the fact that he was a...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
conservative commentator and that he was causing the progressive types a fair bit of misery and grief. But you know, when I first heard him, I thought that he was essentially a comedian. And there isn't a more effective mode of social commentary. I don't think that comedy... That's partly what makes Rogan so effective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And it's also so surprising, you know, if you think about it, how many of the top-rated podcasters were stand-up comics. It's a lot of them, right? Constantine was, Dave Rubin was. There's a lot of people. Theo Vaughan, obviously. Joe, of course. So there is a real art to... bringing in the right amount of wit and play.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And that seems to be one of the reasons that your documentaries were so successful. I mean, you're a funny kind of comedian because you're kind of a poker face like Buster Keaton, you know? You're not tremendously animated and extroverted. And Buster Keaton was absolutely remarkable at that. I mean, he kept a straight face no matter what he was doing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And that's also a funny part of the character that you play because your facial expression is generally pretty flat. And I think that amplifies the absurdity of the situations that you put yourself in. And I'm kind of also curious with regards to the absurdity of those situations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
I tried to put myself in your place when I was watching your movies, and I thought, Jesus, I don't think I could have done that. I don't think I could have stood the social pressure and the, what would you say, the... contempt, yeah, that was directed towards you by these ideologically addled neo-Marxist postmodern progressive types, but you seem to be able to withstand that with no problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And I'm not sure exactly why. How do you manage that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, typical uppity customer wanting explanations and everything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Right, and so these people also know that it's being filmed. And so what you're doing, okay, that explains it to some degree to me, because it means that you're sort of straddling the line between real life and dramatic performance, right? Because it's an investigation, but it is also an act.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
No, they certainly aren't. No, they certainly aren't. And I think the situation is even worse in Canada. I presume a 50% delay rate at the moment. The U.S. seems better, but it's still hit and miss.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And then because the people who are being filmed know they're being filmed, they're also straddling that same line. And I guess that's also helping me understand, to what degree, what was your attitude towards the people in the moment and then later who revealed themselves so unpleasantly and awkwardly on camera? I mean, I'm thinking particularly maybe of the scene with Robin D'Angelo
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
where she was enticed or tempted into making a reparation offer in cash on the spot. I mean, that's a pretty damn awkward situation. And I had real mixed feelings when I was watching it. I mean, part of my feeling, I'm not a Robin D'Angelo fan, to put it mildly. I think she's done an unbelievable amount of damage. But the agreeable part of me, which is pretty...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
characterological, nonetheless felt bad for her watching her make a mockery of herself in that manner and having that captured. And so I'm wondering, this isn't a criticism, it's a genuine question. I'm wondering what you thought about the moral propriety of doing that. Let me preface that with a brief story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
I had to dispense with some people in my lab at one point when I was a professor, and I was having a hard time stealing myself to fire them. And I talked to one of my friends, who's kind of a professional at that, about how he dealt with the emotional consequences of having to fire people. And he gave me a pretty good five-minute spiel about why he actually enjoyed it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And his attitude was that he was sent into corporations to find people who kissed up and kicked down and who took all the credit and did none of the work and did nothing but cause trouble and backbite and bicker and gossip and pretend to be working and sabotage. And he'd find out who they were and tell them and send them on their way. You know, and that was...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
a very different attitude than the one I would have taken because I tend to be, you know, overly sympathetic to people, arguably. And so, but I felt that same tension, you know, watching your movies. And so I'm wondering, you explained that to some degree because you're playing a part and there's a movie being made. And so there's a sense of fiction about it. But personally, like,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
I mean, you obviously didn't do Robin D'Angelo any good on the reputational side, and I'd say that was the case with many of the people that put themselves in your films. So what do you make of that, Matt?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
You talked about exposing people and exposing fraud and a certain amount of righteous judgment. You know, I've been thinking hard about the use of anger. It's very physiologically activating. It's one of the sources of energy that I draw on. And I want to talk to you a little bit about The Daily Wire too, since we're both part of it, because I'm struggling in a sense with Hello, everybody.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, well, Matt, who needs merit? Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's something we could talk about too. You know, there are actually technical definitions of merit, by the way, that psychologists were bound to consider when they were doing such things as generating practices for hiring. And even though those are instantiated in the law, in many ways they've been thrown aside.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Right, frauds. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Deep, deep, self-aggrandizing, naive, moralizing, hyper-agreeable, deluded, reputation-savaging, cancel-culture frauds. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
So anyways, before we get into any of that, why don't you tell me what you're up to? And I want to talk to you a little bit about The Daily Wire too, because since we're both part of it, because I'm struggling in a sense with trying to figure out exactly what the proper role is of our style of communication on the political side, given the new political reality in the United States.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Right. So let me ask you one more psychological question about that. So you talked about exposing people and exposing fraud and a certain amount of righteous judgment. You know, I've been thinking hard about the use of anger because anger is a... very powerful motivational state. It involves a mixture of negative and positive emotion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
The negative is sort of defense preparation and the positive is assertive approach. And it's very physiologically activating. And it's one of the sources of energy that I draw on when I'm lecturing, especially spontaneously, you know. But it's a tricky thing to manage because too much of it makes you hectoring and finger-wagging and self-righteous. And too little of it kind of makes you insipid.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Now, you talked about your stance of judgment, you know, with regard to the people that you were exposing. And so, Is it possible for you to characterize the emotional inputs into that sense of judgment?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Because you're making the case that you used your belief that you were uncovering fraud and malfeasance, which I believe to be the case, by the way, and that that justified cornering people who you couldn't talk to otherwise and actually exposing them for what they were doing. And is there... Is it reasonable to presume that the emotional source that you're drawing on there is anger?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Is that correct?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, resentment's a bad one. Resentment's a very dangerous emotion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, yeah, they're raging. Yeah, yeah, rage comedy. I've seen quite a bit of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
So tell me about what you're up to first, though. What's going on with you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, well, discrimination matters, like targeting matters, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
So I would say that anger is not the- Maybe the horror of it is the casualness. Exactly, yeah. And the delight.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, I think that's a fair comment. Okay, so I know you can't speak specifically about the projects that you're working on, although we've obliquely referenced them. You put your finger on two questions of sufficient general interest to generate a fair interest or a fair audience, a great audience, really, for your documentaries. Can you tell me what issues...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
you believe are of that level of concern presently. And maybe we can use that as a segue into a broader conversation. I mean, I've been trying to puzzle out since Trump took office exactly what the role of the kind of more political commentary that I was doing on my podcast now is. Because as you know, and like you, I've been a...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
fervent adversary of the woke, cancel culture, progressive, Marxist, resentful, race-baiting mob for, you know, 10 years. And there's been some victories achieved, great victories achieved in the last couple of years. Like, well, for example, It looks to me like the back of the climate apocalypse narrative has been broken. It's still dangerous.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
The guy who just got elected in Canada, Mark Carney, the new prime minister, he's a net zero advocate, and the Labour Party is still pushing that in the UK, and Europe's still possessed by it. It's really half the people online now I think know it's a scam. And you can say that quite publicly like I just did without risking your professional neck.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
The whole podcast that I did with Joe Rogan, when I first really broadly broached the climate narrative problem, that was submitted to the College of Psychologists as a complaint against my license. And they upheld that as a valid complaint. So, in any case, that's changed. And Trump was elected, and there's a conservative sweep, at least in the United States.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And, you know, in the UK, the Reform Party just did extremely well at the level of council elections. And I don't know what you think about the AFD in Germany, but... And I presume they have their problems, but there's certainly conservative voices being heard in Germany and in France and in Sweden and in Italy and in Hungary and in Poland.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And so the question is now, what do you think the crucial issues are for conservative commentators like yourself and maybe even more broadly for The Daily Wire? Where is your interest gravitating with regards to what kind of issues you want to focus on and comment on? comment on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, it's pretty fundamental. It's pretty fundamental. Yeah, that's kind of a foundation, that one.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, well, the fact that men and women are so split, especially when they're young, in their political affiliation worldwide, and that that split seems to be growing, is evidence for exactly that claim. There's a real reckoning that needs to be had with regard to the resentful feminists because it is an ethos of resentment like Marxism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Also, Matt, I think that wokeness per se won't ever go away because I think it's the political expression of immaturity. I think the reason that Marxism and its enviousness and its resentment and its preposterous naivety is so difficult to eradicate even in the face of overwhelming evidence is because immaturity has its political expression.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Like one of the things psychologists knew, by the way, is that this is how it's been phrased. People become more conservative as they get older. It's like, that's one way of looking at it. There is plenty of evidence for that. But another way of looking at it is that conservatism is the expression of maturity. And conservatism is something you have to learn.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
You know, where is that notion of equitable distribution and something that's for everyone? That's like native to a family ethos, right? Even Ben Shapiro told me that he was a communist with regard to his own children. You know, so I think one of the ways to understand what's happening is that there's always a war against immature political ideas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
movements, you know, with their insistence on immediate self-gratification and sexual identity. It's the golden calf worship, you know, orgiastic golden calf worship. And it's just immaturity. And so it's never going to go away. It just finds different guises. And then with regards to this family and feminism thing, my wife and... Janice Fiamengo is a really good source on this, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
She was an English professor who woke up about 20 years ago and decided that what she was teaching was destroying young men and became a real scholar of feminism and a real critic. The feminists, the hardcore feminists, they were cluster B types, psychopathic narcissists. ruled by nothing but resentment. It's a movement.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
The more you look into feminism as an intellectual movement and into the historians of feminism, for that matter, who haven't done their job at all, the more pathological you see it is. It's really the expression of resentment. You could see that in Betty Friedan's book, you know, that famous 1960s work where she complained about the boring lot of suburban housewives.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
You know, I mean, really, those people had time on their hands and wealth. And all they could do is complain about how bored they were and how that was oppressive. You know, that's pretty bloody pathetic, you know, when you're putting a book like that out in a world of people who are struggling to make ends meet. I have too much free time and I don't know what to do with myself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
It's like, that's because the whole patriarchal structure is corrupt. It's like, yeah, maybe you could have a little gratitude and then look what it's done on the family side. It's absolutely catastrophic, right? I mean, you know, the stats now, 50% of Western women are childless at the age of 30. Half of them will never have a child and 90% of them will regret it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
So one woman in four is already doomed in our culture to long-term isolation and childlessness. And it hasn't even become an issue of public discussion. You know what's going to happen to those women as they age and they have no one to protect them? Boy, they're fodder for psychopaths in nursing homes and hospitals, I can tell you that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Because no one will be paying attention to them and taking care of them. So, yeah, this is a big deal, the family and the feminist issue. What else, Matt?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, from the very beginning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
It's based on monogamy. Yeah, well, the idea that monogamy is intrinsically oppressive to women is as backward as the idea that a man can become a woman. It's utterly insane. You know, we know this even, Matt, you know, the... imagine that there are men who prefer long-term relationships and who seek that in a dating partner and men who prefer like one-night stands.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Okay, it's easy to identify those groups of men. Well, then you can profile them in terms of their personality. And so what do you find, lo and behold? The short-term maters are Machiavellian, psychopathic, narcissistic, and sadistic. Right, so you start a sexual revolution because monogamy is intrinsically oppressive to women.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
You punish the men who are actually in it for the long run, and you privilege the manipulative psychopaths. You know, that's not a good outcome. That's not a good outcome. And it is absolutely the case that, because I've looked into the history of feminism in some detail, and Janice Fiamengo is a very good source for this, by the way. It was psychopathological from the beginning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
some of the main players were like literally carnival grifters. You know, it's completely awful. And it isn't only the claim that the patriarchy is essentially oppressive and that the war between men and women is eternal, it's also envious. And there is hardly a worse sin than envy. It's like, men have it so easy. It's like, no, I don't think so.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And I don't think women have it particularly easy either, but to... make the radical claim that one sex is somehow privileged over another in a fundamental way, and that both aren't playing a causal role in that, it's so preposterous. You know, even in these cultures, these Islamic cultures where women are oppressed, and they are, old women do plenty of the oppressing of young women, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
It's not a man-only thing. You know, I know in Ayaan Hirsi Ali's family, for example, her exposure to genital mutilation was a consequence of her grandmother when her father was gone. And that's not atypical. The old women like to keep the young women in check and they have their reasons. So that's the evil queen motif in fairy tales, by the way, the poisoned apple deliverer, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
That's women and not men. So, okay, so family feminism, what else?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, well, let's delve into the previous projects a bit. So you already named them, What is a Woman? and Am I Racist? I thought those were both spectacularly well-timed and also pitched at exactly the right public level. You know, you have a real knack for taking a topic that is, in a sense, intellectual and philosophical at its core, but
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And by the way, that's not a good precedent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And I think that we are— That's that Marxist envy, right? You divide the world into oppressed and oppressor. Identify with the oppressed. And then the ultimate extent of that, and there's a feminized element of this, which is all perpetrators are actually victims, right? I mean, that's how they treated criminals in the Soviet Union. The actual criminals were victims of the state.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
That was the official doctrine. You know, they tortured and tormented the political prisoners far more than the actual criminals because the criminals were destined to their criminal status by their oppressed status in relationship to the state. Yeah, and you're right. That narrative is being taught to kids nonstop. Well, that's a place where the conservatives have fallen down so terribly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
It's just appalling. You know that half the American state budgets are K-12 education? Yes. Half, right? And that's just government subsidy for the worst academic discipline, which is education. The worst faculty, the worst students, the most radically progressive, and conservatives have just rolled over with the possible exception of homeschooling and let that happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And so you're pointing to how that underlies this terrible emergent racial tension, which is also being fanned by the psychopaths, right? Like the people who are raising money in the aftermath of committing a crime. And then you have all these hand-waving, dim-wit, progressive, liberal moralizers who say, well, every perpetrator is a victim, and of course we have to support the oppressed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Even, like you said, in these terribly egregious cases where some high school kid got stabbed. So yeah, okay, okay. That's a big problem. You know, we were doing pretty good in the 90s with regard to racial matters until it became an intellectual shibboleth to stir the pot. Goddamn universities. I tell you, man.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
investigating that in a way that makes it very accessible to, sufficiently accessible to people so that you can ensure a very wide audience and commercial success and also communicate something. So why don't you bring everybody up to date with regard to what is a woman and am I racist? What level of success, what level of reach did those projects bring?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Like Harvard, like Columbia, like all the universities. Yeah, it's appalling, Matt. And that's gonna be a big mop-up operation because as you mentioned, Harvard changed its diversity office's title. You know, but they kept the same people. And there's nothing slipperier than a radical progressive with language.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
I think they call it community and, I don't know, what's some bloody horrible combination of cliched words. You know, community and well-being are something, you know, that should just make you gag if you have a bit of sense. But it's the same old players. I think the universities are in, they cannot be fixed. They cannot be fixed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
I just did a podcast on that topic and I looked into the data and the stats, you know, the 3% of the faculty at maximum at Harvard regard themselves as conservative and it's worse among the administrators. And the typical faculty member and administrator is not centrist American, you know, where that 80% of Americans sit. They're progressive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
How the hell do you fix an institution that's riddled from top to bottom with progressives and that's gerrymandered its hiring, promotion, and publication processes to privilege the woke mob?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
You can make a fortune. Well, Harvard has seen a precipitous drop in applications.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And what opportunities has that opened up for you on the documentary and film horizon?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Maybe. You should look at what the medical schools have done to their curriculums. You might think twice about that, too. I tell you, man, no doctor is better than a bad doctor. You know, medical error is the third leading cause of death. Heart disease, cancer, medical error. So you get yourself in the hands of a bad doctor and you are one unhappy camper.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
It sure is. Well, I was just at Oxford at the Students' Union there, and although I tell you, the students were on my side, and there was about 300 more of them lined up outside trying to get in. But it was so unpleasant and so corrupted. It was just... It's so sad. It's so sad. I see this with no satisfaction. The same with Harvard because it was a great place.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Matt, let's turn our attention to something a bit more topical to close this out. I know that you've been in a war of words of sorts, and I don't want to put words into your mouth, with James Lindsay. And I just had James on my podcast, and we talked about the danger of psychopaths to political, to the political, to the world really, but to the political most particularly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
The hypothesis basically being that there is three to five percent of the population that's essentially psychopathic and they gravitate to wherever the power is and utilize it. That can be on the religious front like the Ayatollahs in Iran or the Islamists in general. or the false Protestant preachers, for example, that do it for no other reason than to aggrandize themselves. But it also occurs...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
In the political realm, many of the so-called agitators on the left side, they're just psychopaths using the naivety of young women, for example, for their own purposes. And I'm seeing some of that also emerging more clearly on the right, especially in the form of a particularly pernicious kind of anti-Semitism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And James and I talked about that, and I understand that in the aftermath of that, and perhaps not directly as a consequence of the podcast incident, You and James have been exchanging words, and I'm kind of curious about that. Do you want to lay that out a bit and tell me what's going on?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
So just- Right. There come the psychopaths, the people who are keying Teslas, resentful to the core, cowardly beyond comprehension, perfectly-
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
But that's about the only one that's left that's really taboo. All the curse words have lost that, but that one hasn't.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Right, right. Yeah, well, the acceptance of that taboo if you're white and part of the oppressor class, let's say, acceptance of that taboo and justification of it is compliance with the oppressor-oppressed narrative and a proclamation of your culpability as essentially morally equivalent to a slaver. So it is a really big problem. It's a really big problem, right? It's not trivial.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, well, your argument is serious. I mean, the counter-argument's pretty obvious, which is that she shouldn't be rewarded for her actions. But, like, both of those arguments stand, you know what I mean? And the question is the nuance in between. Have you thought about talking to Lindsay? I mean, I've found James... You can have a conversation with James, you know, and I'm wondering.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
I've had moments of pretty severe dislocation, even with friends. You know, and one of the things I've learned is that, and I'm not trying to lecture you at all, but one of the things I've learned is that, you know, a month of reconsideration and then the, what would you say, taking the opportunity to actually talk, That's pretty useful, to take a longer view, you know?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Because people can be stupid. People are stupid in the moment. And the things that James said about you obviously don't seem to be productive. But it would be good, you know, if the conservative side of things could model a bit more wise, sober second thought, you know? And so... And I like James and I've had productive conversations with him and he's a force for good, all things considered.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And I would say the same thing about you and it's, It'd be unfortunate to see unnecessary fractures in a side that's already pushed pretty hard to the wall, you know? So anyways, that's my two cents on it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Well, you know what I think we should do? I think we should, let's talk about this woke right issue on the Daily Wire side. We've got another 20 minutes. We could do two things on the Daily Wire side. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about where you see the future of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
The kind of critical political commentary that you've been doing and that I've been doing, especially in the light of the Trump victory, we've fleshed that out a little bit. And you talked about some concerns that you think are part and parcel of the broader culture war that still need to be rectified in a major way. But I think we could flesh that out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And I think we should talk a little bit more about this issue of gatekeeping versus unfettered This issue of gatekeeping on the conservative side and what that might mean and how that's related to issues, profound issues of free speech. So for everybody who's watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side and we'll continue this. And Matt, I think we'll bring this to a close.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Is there anything you want to say in conclusion before we move to the Daily Wire side?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, great, great. Well, it's really nice talking to you. It's nice catching up. And thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale and to The Daily Wire for making this possible. And we'll spend another 20 minutes to half an hour on The Daily Wire side talking about the woke right and about the future of conservative political commentary. So looking forward to that. Thanks a lot, Matt.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
It's always good to talk to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Yeah, well, that's really cool. I mean, obviously, the first one is by far the most difficult, like the first customer that you have in a new business or your first book sale, anything unlikely. But it's very unlikely that a film ever gets made. And then it's... within the category of films that get made, it's very unlikely that they'll be successful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
I had the privilege, the opportunity to sit down today with one of my fellow Daily Wire creatures, Matt Walsh. And you should know Matt, I suspect. And if you don't, well, then you could. was the force behind two of the most successful documentaries in the last few decades. What is a woman? That's a question he actually answers. And am I racist? Two deep and soul-searching questions, apparently.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And I would say that's particularly true for documentary releases theatrically. And it's also really good to hear that, and I think this is a lesson too, in a way, that it's not a zero-sum game, right? You can, because the market, the potential market is so huge, the fact that you did release in theaters, as you said, had a boosting effect in the other theaters
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
avenues that you wanted to walk down effectively, right? To bring subscribers, for example, to the Daily Wire and viewers. And so your theatrical release was nothing but additional icing on the cake, eh?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Well, it's also hard, I think... to bring the proper critical eye or have the proper critical eye brought to your work, say by your friends.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Like I find that as soon as I'm personally involved with someone, maybe I've solved this in relation to my own work, but as soon as I'm personally involved with someone, if they send me something to evaluate, I find it quite difficult to evaluate it as soon as that personal connection is there, right? Because you lose that necessary distance. So look, you did two movies in a row.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
that did well, and they were similar in quality and format, I would say. They were markedly of the same approach. What role did you play in constructing and supervising the editing and in overseeing the people who were involved to make sure that it stayed on track? Because as you intimated, you don't need very many weak links in the chain before you've got quite the catastrophe on your hands.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
I don't know, are those the cardinal questions of the last 10 years? Maybe they were. Anyways, Matt had a remarkable facility, has a remarkable facility to put his finger on central issues in the culture war, to lay them out, to inquire into them, and to show their appalling underbelly. And so we talked about that. We talked about how he managed that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
Oh, that's for sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
So you worked on, oh, two questions. I want a technical question first, because I think this would be useful for the viewers and the listeners. Do you want to distinguish between the roles of producer, director, and editor? Sure. You know, these terms are bandied about all the time, but that doesn't mean that everybody who encounters them knows exactly what they mean.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
549. Matt Walsh on Making Movies, the Woke Right, & Winning
And so if, in your experience now, how would you characterize the role of a producer?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So it's very frequently the case that people who are having psychological trouble, so excess anxiety and depression, let's say, they feel like they're the only people who are in that boat. So they feel isolated and alone and sort of singled out. And part of the reason you explain that The prevalence of a given diagnosis even to someone is to say, you're not alone. This isn't unique to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
serves as the medical director of the Center for Trans Youth Health and Development at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. That's currently the largest transgender youth clinic in the U.S. Dr. Olson-Kennedy has authored or co-authored numerous studies on transgender youth concerning such topics as chest reconstruction and its effects, the development of so-called gender identity,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
In fact, it's quite common. These are the symptoms that are commonly associated with it. These are the reasons for the symptoms. And, well, in the case of the symptoms that you describe, the typical pattern is that even... adolescents who are radically gender dysphoric adapt by the time they're 18. At least 80% of them. This has been known for, well, I'd say four decades, five decades.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
It's been known a long time. It's been replicated many times. It's a very stable finding. So the... Reliable clinicians and physicians have concluded, especially before all of this got politicized, that if a child is severely gender dysphoric, the best thing to do is nothing until they're 18. Most of them are... what would you say, reconciled to their fate by that point.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And that's also not that atypical because puberty throws a monkey wrench into everyone's works. Now, you were at particular risk for that, and you said why. Now, when you went and saw Olson Kennedy and the counselor, tell me her name again. Susan Landon. Susan Landon, right. Right. Did you tell them about the abuse? I did not, but they didn't ask.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, so they didn't know about that, but they didn't ask. So what kind of history did they take from you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
How long was the diagnostic meeting, approximately?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So with Olson Kennedy, how many times did you see her? How many times did you have a chance to have a clinical discussion with her of some length?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, now you said when you first went and saw her, and then how long after you saw her, like what was the sequence of events that led you to Landon?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, well, there's been a variety. See, that's a tricky issue, Abe, because in Canada, for example, and I'm familiar with this because I'm Canadian, although it's the same in many places in the United States, the standard of care is gender affirmation, the legal standard of care, the professional standard of care, which is appalling. It's appalling. And what that means is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
I believe it's actually a felony in Canada for a psychologist or a physician or anyone else for that matter, anyone operating in a professional capacity to question, let's say your feelings. Now the problem with that is, well, you know what the problem is, but the problem is What if you're confused?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Now, virtually every adolescent is confused. So then the question is, if you come to me, and I'm a physician or a therapist, and you said you'd been living as trans, and so there's evidence already that you decided you were in the wrong body, so to speak, you were acting that out in some ways,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
I have to step damn carefully not to actually do something illegal or sufficiently unprofessional, so to speak, that my license could be at risk. So we're increasingly in a situation where the probability that someone like you at 12 would be told the truth is zero. And this is independent of the actual, let's say, professional knowledge of the... physician or counselor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
the physiology of response to gender-affirming hormones, and the consequence of pharmacologically induced puberty blockade. In 2015, she led a $10 million NIH-funded research project to study the effects of so-called gender-affirming medical practice aimed at youth. This study was a major enterprise and very financially significant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So, for example, we might ask why you weren't given this elementary information that I described. I think that should have just happened baseline because that has nothing to do with your feelings. But then it is the case that the physicians and the therapists would have to tread on very thin ice indeed to ask you any questions of any sort. So I'm not trying to excuse this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
I'm trying to outline for people who are listening and you why such things might happen. Now, with Olson Kennedy, there's some evidence that she's a fairly avid advocate of the gender-affirming process. And so that's a slightly different situation. Okay, so tell me... Tell me exactly what you think the discussions consisted of with Olson Kennedy and then also with the therapist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
it's a minority, as it is with girls, but a minority of boys are more comfortable associating with girls, and that also might be situation-dependent. And it's, I think, even more common that girls are more comfortable associating with boys, but that in itself is absolutely 100% no determinant marker of which gender you are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So, I mean, otherwise, it would be impossible for boys and girls to have cross-sex friendships without their biological identity being cast into question right okay so you didn't talk much about the past now all right you said that you'd been living transgender for a few months before you went and saw Olson Kennedy yes okay so what did that mean what did that mean what were you doing
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Essentially. But you also implied... in the run-up to that statement, that part of your motivation was to have it taken out of your hands because it wasn't something that you particularly wanted to deal with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
People were calling me Kai at the time. Kai. And the school was informed that you were now male? Yes. Okay. And what you said, you correct me if I get any of this wrong, because I want to get it right while I'm talking to you. You said that was a relief to you, fundamentally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So how did that change your status at school? First of all, before that, before that, before you started talking to the guidance counselor and so forth, how would you describe your social status, let's say, at school?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
by the standards of clinical investigation, one deemed publicly the largest such project in America. What were the study's results? As far as we can determine, no evidence emerged whatsoever of improvements in mental health in consequence of pharmacological blockade of puberty, which is, by the way, the purpose of such blockade. Why or why not?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, so let me take that apart a little bit because you could imagine, when did you start taking testosterone?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
What was the effect on you of the drug?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Do you think that the changes that testosterone induced had anything to do with your shift in social status? Absolutely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, when did you or did you ever start to discuss what had happened to you when you were six?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Oh, so it was quite a while afterwards.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
What sort of things were the whispers saying?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Well, that would be the obvious. Right. Do you remember, as I said before we started the interview, you don't have to answer any of these questions, right? So do you remember what the voices were telling you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, and that was all happening around 17?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And has that resolved completely? Completely. Okay, and how come? Why did it resolve?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right, so there is some benefit to the psychological treatment. If you had to guess, or maybe you know, was the primary benefit with regard to the psychosis symptoms a consequence of the psychological treatment or the cessation of testosterone?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Well, Olson Kennedy hypothesized after the fact, which is not a scientifically appropriate thing to do fundamentally, that this was because most of the children were already doing well when the study began. Why the need then for puberty blockers, given their clear danger and the dangers of the surgical road ahead they so often establish?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, so if I've got this right, you didn't discuss the sexual abuse with Olson Kennedy or Landon. No. And then that was forestalled until you were 17, and the reason you didn't discuss it is because you thought that you had an alternative route. Had you ever revealed anything about the sexual abuse to your parents? No.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So this was all happening in secret. Did the teachers know? So do you know why you didn't, why you weren't able to or didn't?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right. Well, I'm not, look, I'm also not suggesting at all that, you know, there was a more appropriate route to dealing with this. It's very, very complicated than what you just said. Well, there's moral quandaries, and you pointed them out. When is it appropriate to go to an authority? You said you were ambivalent about that. And then you had other reasons for not revealing it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And it's a very complicated thing to reveal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Like, how do you talk about it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Well, you know, if you're confused, if you're deeply confused about something... Part of what confusion is, is the experience of a very large number of emotions, right? Because part of the way you resolve the confusion is to experience like a panoply of emotions to see which ones fit. So that could be shame, anger, guilt, rage, pain, anxiety. What else?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
curiosity, excitement, all of those, that's all part of being, you know, deeply confused. And while you had reason to be confused, okay, so you had to keep this to yourself. And it started to happen to you when you were very young. And so Now, I asked you if you'd discussed this with your physician or your therapist, and you said no, not until you were 17.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
But you also mentioned that the conversations that you had with the therapist and the physician were fundamentally centered on what you wanted in the future. Well, how much investigation into your history...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Discomfort with your body and feeling disconnected with girls, that's called puberty.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
In any case, the notoriously progressive New York Times reported that Olson Kennedy elected not to publish her study results so that political opponents of gender-affirming care could not use the results as an argument against the use of puberty blockers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Discomfort with your body and feeling disconnected from girls, that's called puberty. Right, exactly. Right, right. Now, it might have been, as we already discussed, it might have been exaggerated in your case, likely exaggerated in your case, at least the discomfort and the confusion. and perhaps some resistance to the process.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
I mean, that seems like in some ways self-evident, given what you just said. But very little of what you just described deviates from what's strictly normative and expected. Right. Okay, and so you said... You also didn't provide a history that indicated that prolonged dysphoria that in principle is associated with being born in the wrong body.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
It's a very strange conceptualization, but one that you can imagine these sorts of things being more justifiable in the case of someone who has that kind of lengthy history. But it wasn't the case with you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, now let's talk about your parents a little bit. Sure. So now you're... dressing as a boy at school, or at least dressing in... Were you dressing as a boy?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Well, that's also not uncommon early pubescent female behavior. Right, right, okay. And you talked to a guidance counselor at school, and the guidance counselor, you said... focused in on gender dysphoria and your hypothetical identity as a boy as a resolution to your confusion. Yes. And then it was taken out of your hands by, in some ways, by the turns of events that emerged in consequence. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
The announcement of your pronouns. Now, then you said you lost a variety of friends. Mm-hmm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right. So a lot of the people that had been associating with you didn't know what the hell was going on. Right. And they didn't know what to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
It shouldn't be necessary, except in this insane time, to point out that the artificial suppression of undesirable findings warps the entire scientific and medical enterprise. and that's the point, as well as being utterly unconscionable, given the degree of public funding for the inquiry and the motivated psychological and social consequences of abandoning it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, well, that's enough to cause collapse of friendship right there because, well, one of the characteristics of friendships is that you know the person and you know what to do. Okay, so then you had some period of time, I presume after that, where your social status was... and then it switched in a more positive direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, well, see, one of the complicating factors, of course, too, is that once you start to take testosterone, the thing about testosterone is that it can quell anxiety and depression as a pharmacological agent, right? So that makes differential diagnosis of its effects very complex because you could say, well...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
the reason that you're not as depressed and anxious as you were is because you finally found your true identity. Right. Or you could just point out that it's a side effect of testosterone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right. And it's very difficult to separate those.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right, right. Yeah. Right, right. Okay. So the sequence is 12 years old. When do you start dressing in this ambivalent fashion and your name changes? Is that 11? Yeah, or 12. Okay, but it's also a 12 that you put on puberty blockers. Yeah. Okay, so describe the route to puberty blockers and the duration it took from first contact with the physician to... to diagnosis and prescription?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Session?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay. Now it takes some time to convince your parents. Okay. Do you have siblings? I do. I have a brother. Older or younger? Older. Older. Okay. I'm just trying to situate you in the family. Okay. So now your parents, why do your parents take you to Olson Kennedy?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, so would you rather have a live trans kid or a dead kid? Those words exactly. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so why did they take you to Olson Kennedy, though, rather than to someone who specialized, let's say, in depression and anxiety? Was that—I'll just let you answer that first.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, I never got to tell my parents. You said at school that you'd already started, you'd had conversations with the guidance counselor, and you'd already been set on this gender transition path. Right. Okay, so now your parents know you're depressed and anxious, and that it's manifesting itself in this transition path. Then Olson Kennedy becomes a logical person to go see. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, so she tells your parents... on the initial encounter that puberty blockers, that you're definitely a male, and that puberty blockers are the appropriate course of action, and that that reduces suicide risk.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay. There is no evidence of that suicide risk. That is a lie, and it's a pathological and manipulative lie. I don't think that I've... run across any deeper lie told by psychological counselors and medical professionals than that gender affirming care is the only alternative to suicide, the safest alternative to suicide for kids who have gender dysphoria.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Olson Kennedy is not the only person named in the lawsuit mounted by today's guest, nor his replace of work, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, the only institution identified and affected. Dr. Scott Mosser, a surgeon in San Francisco, has served or exploited, depending on your viewpoint, transgender, non-binary, and gender expansive patients for more than 13 years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
I don't think there's a shred of evidence anywhere in the clinical literature, no matter how you look at it, to support that. Conclusion. Right. So, okay, so now your parents are in a bind.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, so what's happening with them? You said it takes a few months. Tell me what happens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
How many times do you suppose you and your family were instructed by Olson Kennedy, let's say, that— there was an ever-present risk of suicide, that that was real and immediate, and that this was the appropriate treatment. How many times do you suppose that was discussed?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Got any estimate of a numeric? Probably a dozen. Okay. And you said as well that that was the only treatment pathway. That was the only treatment pathway. It was what she would assert. So you could imagine two models of unhappiness, right, that would be relevant in your case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
One model would be you're gender dysphoric because your identity is reversed, inverted, and the depression and anxiety are a consequence of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay. There's a problem with that assumption. The problem is, is that there's almost no let's say, psychiatric condition that isn't primarily depression and anxiety. Right. Right, because people don't go to consult with a physician or a psychiatrist or a psychologist unless they're miserable and afraid and unhappy. Because why would they?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Narcissists, for example, very rarely go to see psychologists because they're not particularly distressed by their condition. Same with criminals. Okay, so the logical answer inference pathway is that the primary disorder is depression and anxiety.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And then there may be secondary manifestations, but you have to be damn sure that the secondary manifestations are real before you make the depression and anxiety secondary to that. So one alternative treatment in principle would have been treatment for depression and anxiety. directly, and then to see if the gender dysphoria resolves, let's say, on its own.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
I'm not saying that would have been the only alternative, but it is the appropriate default alternative, especially when the alternatives are puberty blockers, which aren't trivial, hormonal transformation, which is a major medical and psychological intervention, to say nothing of surgery, right? Because the other default...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
that psychiatrists, et cetera, physicians, surgeons should adopt is don't do anything harmful and permanent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right, okay. Okay, so now your parents are told that you're definitely a boy despite the fact that you've been feminine your whole life and that if they don't do something all hell might break loose. Yeah. And you're told you better get at it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And that there's no alternative treatment. Yeah. You're certain of this, eh? That this is how it played out. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Now I'll leave it at that. Okay, so now your parents... How do they come to a decision and what happens in your household while that's occurring? You implied that there was a fair bit of back and forth between you and your parents.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
He's board certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgeons. co-founder of the American Society of Gender Surgeons, and founder of the Gender Institute at St. Francis Memorial Hospital. That workplace formalized its Gender Institute in 2016, has received numerous grants to fund gender-affirming healthcare services, and is also a target of the suit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Exactly. That is the purpose of that threat. Right. Because there's no clinical evidence for its validity, right? First of all, even the medical organizations that purport to address the long-term viability of... gender-affirming treatment state that partly because of prejudice against gender dysphoric people. There are no long-term studies. Well, you can't have it both ways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
There's either no long-term studies or you don't know what the suicide risk is. Plus there's an additional issue. People who are depressed and anxious are at higher risk for suicide. That doesn't mean that they're at higher risk for suicide because they're gender dysphoric. Those are very separate issues.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right. So, okay. So now your parents... They've been delivered a warning by a medic. What's the therapist doing at this time?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, so that's convenient for you in the short term.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Did you, okay, this is a hard question, not that the other ones haven't been. When you were thinking your private thoughts at this point, when you were listening to the therapists and the physicians, what did you believe? What did you doubt?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
The thing about being an adolescent... is that you know how people are, they're always on the cases, on a teenager's case to not be so susceptible to peer pressure. It's actually, being susceptible to peer pressure is developmentally appropriate for a teenager. So imagine when you're a child, you're susceptible to the influence of your parents.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, well, when you're a teenager, you're not ready to be on your own. Who should you be susceptible to? Well, obviously your peers. Why? Well, they're going to be your community. So if you're a normal teenager, what your peers think matters.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, so now you're already in a milieu at school where you've got your pronouns, you've got your male identity, plus there are figures of authority who are driving that home. I don't think that the fact that you are susceptible to that is indicative of what I would describe as naivety. It's what you'd expect.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
The other thing that's useful to know is that imagine that two things determine how you respond in a situation. One might be your personality, your temperament, even your knowledge. The other might be the... demands, the social demands of the situation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, then you might ask for the typical person, which is the greater influence? And the answer is clearly the social influence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
That's what it means to be social. So here's an example. People decide... when they're not hungry by noticing when they've eaten the same amount of food on the same size plates as everyone else at the table. So even something as biological as hunger and its satiety is actually mediated by social observation. Well, why? Well, you don't want to be the person who habitually eats all the food, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Now that we have these players and places named and established, Let us turn to my guest. I was privileged today to speak with Ms. Clementine Breen, currently a 20-year-old UCLA theater student and detransitioner. I discovered Clementine's story through one Chris Elston, a fellow Canadian known best by his online handle, Billboard Chris.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
You're not going to make yourself popular, especially when food is scarce. People are very sensitive to social pressure, pressure, norms. That's appropriate. Okay, so now your situation is you're confused. Well, puberty does that, but you had additional reason. And now you've been delivered an identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
By the time I was there... Why the specific doctor?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And it's in your interest in a variety of ways to accept that because it actually solves a complex problem in principle, which is what the hell you're supposed to do with your fear. And then people are promising that it's going to work. Then you also have this situation where… at least in potential, that testosterone is making you more confident. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, so I don't think you should have necessarily expected yourself to sort that out. I am curious, though, and it's worth thinking through. You told me already that you had a conflict. You knew there was something in the past, or did you? How much did you know that this thing in the past hadn't been addressed?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay. And so that's, okay. So how did you come to the realization that it might've had something to do with the abuse?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, well, the thing is, too, you know, you're also getting older during all this period of time. And that means that, you know... As you age and mature and gather more wisdom and are less naive even, let's say, you take a different view of things that happened to you in your past. Right. Right? So you can realize the significance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Like, you're not, what the hell is a six-year-old going to do about understanding sexual abuse? Yeah. Yeah. No, that's not going to happen. So then at what point do you start even seeing that it was abuse? And then at what point do you start, well, delving into its effects?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Maybe you could make a case that you weren't ready or able to do that until you were 17, especially given that you had an alternate hypothesis and strategy at hand. Okay, so things are getting worse, and they got better, yes? Yes. And then they got worse? Uh-huh. Okay, now, 12 years old, you're on puberty blockers. And what were the consequences of the puberty blockers?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
You know, one of the questions looking at your history is like, when did you pass threshold? I know that it's relatively common for people who start taking puberty blockers to proceed to the surgical route.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And that that begs the question of like, when do you make the fatal decision, so to speak, the big decision? And you might say, well, that's just before surgery. You might say it's just before testosterone. You might say it's just before puberty blockers. So as far as you're concerned, if you had to decide, when did you make the determining decision? At what point? The decision to have surgery?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, the decision to, yeah. Well, the decision to see this all the way through, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right. Okay, okay. And so... Tell me how you were evaluated before the surgery. You're 14. There's two things I want to know. How you were evaluated before the surgery, and then what you think of now about the fact that you were giving consent for that surgery, or for the puberty blockers. Puberty blockers at 12, testosterone at 13, and then a double mastectomy at 14, right? So...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Clementine encountered Chris on one of his sidewalk appearances at universities across the US and Canada, specifically this time at UCLA. She told him her story, which went viral, not least as a consequence of her age when the events recounted occurred. It was in consequence of this encounter and some later research that I invited her to my studio as a guest. Puberty blockers at 12.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
No medical procedures are supposed to be administered without informed consent. And informed means you got all the information. And consent means you understand what the hell you're doing. Okay, so evaluation before the double mastectomy. What kind of evaluation did you get from the surgeons?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Why the specific doctor?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah. And that's part of Olson Kennedy in principle, from what I understand, opposes, what does she call it? It's not blockade exactly. Gatekeeping? Gatekeeping. Yeah, that's the word they use. Right. And those who oppose gatekeeping assume that more harm is done the longer the delay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, that's exactly what that's called. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, it's as vague a term as you could possibly invent. As vague and harmless a term. Yeah, right. And that's purposeful and motivated, like bottom surgery, which is... although it's difficult for things to be worse, that's worse. So, okay, now you said, okay, top surgery. Now you're marked up and you're ready to go. You already have some ambivalence about the way that you appear.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, yeah, okay. And now the surgeons have decided that you've already been cleared by the people who need to clear you for surgical appropriateness. Okay, I guess one of the things you're going to discover legally is, how much additional responsibility surgeons have to ensure that the people that they're relying on to clear people for top surgery have done their jobs properly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yes. Okay. So now you wake up after surgery. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, so that's your state of mind going into surgery?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Hormonal transformation, that's testosterone, at 13. And a double mastectomy, camouflaged terminologically as pop surgery, that evil phrase, at 14. It's a terrible story with, at the moment, a thankfully happy ending. on with the show. So thank you for coming to Scottsdale today, Clementine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
How was the issue of your reproductive status dealt with by your physician, your counselor, and your surgeon?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah. Okay. Okay. And what about sexual function? How was that dealt with and discussed?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Because of vaginal atrophy. How much did you understand when you were 14, do you think? And let's try to give the devil his due, right? Because you'll have to do that in court, for example. How much do you think you understood of what you were doing in terms of its permanence and significance?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Did you have any... How did you reconcile the... I mean, you had top surgery, but you didn't have bottom surgery. So how did you... reconcile that obvious difference between you and the man you were supposed to become. And how was that dealt with by your physician, your therapist, and your surgeon?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
But prior to that, yeah. Okay, so that's interesting. So, oh, okay. So let's delve into that a little bit. Sure. Because I guess that's associated, because one of the things we haven't discussed is why did you detransition, right? And you've made some reference to that now, I think. Okay, so now I guess we'll just keep walking through it chronologically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
You've undergone surgery, but not bottom surgery, let's say, but that's in principle offering itself in the future. Okay, so now what happens? You... Was there any reconciliation of your discomfort about how your upper body appeared? No. After, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And you're 15 now? Yeah, 14, 15. Okay. Now, when do you find another therapist? 16, 17, I believe. Okay, and you said that that was effective. Yes. Okay, tell me that story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
I know that this is likely to be a difficult conversation, and so we'll try to not make it any more painful than absolutely necessary. I think we should probably start just by... You telling people who you are and why you're here, what you're up to and why you're here, okay?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Oh, I see. Okay. So once they had the other details, they could put two and two together.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And so they encouraged you to find another therapist? How did that play out? They helped me find another therapist. Okay. So you found another therapist. Why didn't you... Why did you find a different therapist?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
I see. Okay, okay. And then you open up to... Okay, so then you start more deeply considering the potential effect of the sexual abuse.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Then you talk to your parents. Then they help you find another therapist. Right. Okay. How does that therapist differ from the previous therapist?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
How was your new therapist trained? What was their specialty? DBT and CBT were their therapies. PhD psychologist? Yes. Do you know where they were trained? I'm not sure. Okay, fine. Was it a PhD psychologist? Yeah, PhD psychologist. Okay, okay. And it was a more behavior therapy-oriented approach. Okay, so, and what did they do with you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, why do you think that, what did you talk about that you think was helpful?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right, so femaleness as the cause of your suffering. Yes. Okay, okay. And this therapist was effective. Yeah, very. Okay, and so what were the consequences for your symptoms of depression and anxiety? Okay. Just really resolved pretty quickly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Oh, yeah. That was when you were still taking testosterone? Yes. Okay, so you went off the testosterone?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
You went off the psych meds before you went to therapy? Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
But your depression and anxiety resolved, even though you stopped taking testosterone. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Why do you think your depression and anxiety went away?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
How did you resolve it? I mean, you had reason to blame your female illness, so to speak, because that did make you vulnerable in that way. So how did you and your therapist, what reconfiguration of the way you looked at things worked for you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
How did you discover what your goals were?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
How did you, or did you, and if so, configure your view of being female?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
That's a complicated realization. I mean, you had to Okay, that really requires some unpacking because that's actually really hard. If you wait 40 minutes for a bus that's supposed to be there in five minutes, it gets harder and harder to move away from the bus stop because you've already invested 40 minutes, right? That's the sunk cost fallacy. Well, you...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
You had a social community around you at school that established your identity. Your parents had gone through hell too, and you as well, along the way to establish this new identity. You took puberty blockers, you took testosterone, then you had surgery. How in the world did you reconcile yourself to the realization that that was not right. There was a lot at stake.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
No doubt. No doubt. But even that could be an impediment to like admission that the path was wrong. Yeah. There's a lot of things you have to realize that the path was wrong. Your parents were deceived. That would be part of the realization. You were hurt and damaged in consequence of it. There's all these years that you spent in limbo, at least, that were misapplied.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
You have to admit that not only you were wrong, so to speak, but everyone around you was wrong, including the authorities, the so-called authorities, which means that now your relationship to authority is also altered. I still don't exactly understand how you managed it. The therapist helped?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Therapist helped. Okay. Now, partly because you said that you were focused on some things that you actually wanted to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
That weren't gender related.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
You started to plot out a pathway into the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And it just felt wrong. Yeah, I talked to another young woman who... She didn't go as far down the path as you did, but one of the things that stopped her eventually, she started living as a boy at school, and she didn't let her parents know, but she was on the path, and then they found out. But one of her realizations was she said she...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, now you're involved in a notorious, I would say, a notorious lawsuit. Not that notorious means unnecessary or bad, but it means well-publicized and likely impactful one way or another. And as far, I'm going to name the people who are involved and you tell me if that's correct, right? So, one of the physicians involved was Dr. Johanna? Johanna? Johanna. Johanna. Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
fantasized about being a father, let's say, about being an adult male at some point in the future and thought, no. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So had you not done that before? No. Was there no projection into the future that far? No. Yeah, well, that's not atypical either. I've worked with adolescents, young adolescents, trying to get them to plan out their future to some degree.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
By the time you're in your early 20s, you might be able to do that for five years into the future. My sense with 13 and 14-year-olds was... A few months into the future is a long ways, and even tomorrow is quite a distance, right? And that's part of cortical maturation too, right? The more you mature cortically, the longer time span you can take into account.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So you just hadn't projected yourself that far into the future?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Two things I guess I'm curious about now is why the lawsuit? Three things. Why the lawsuit? Why the podcast? And who else have you talked to broadly, publicly? Why the podcast? And also then maybe finally, your attitude towards being female now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yes, it's seriously not true. Yeah. Right, and while it's worse than that, because as I pointed out at the beginning of this interview, it's illegal and unprofessional. If this was a clinical interview, what I did in this interview would be illegal and unprofessional. Right, it'd be enough to get me barred from my practice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
In fact, my practice is actually under threat for questioning exactly this kind of process. Yeah, well, it stops... I was in a fortunate position to some degree because I'm not dependent on my professional status for my financial support or for that of my family. But most people don't have that option. Right. So that means I would have to lie to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right, and that's not good, to say the least. Yeah. Because the last thing you need when you're 12 and confused is some idiot professional lying to you. Yeah. Especially when they're trying to justify their own ideological stance. Right. Okay, so when did you publicly announce the lawsuit, and what have you done – publicly on the detransition front.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Who else, like, have you spoken and interacted with other detransitioners?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Tell everybody who Billboard Chris is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yes. And he travels all over the world doing this, standing on sidewalks. Yeah. And often being harassed. Yeah. Yeah, he's quite the strange character. Yeah. Yeah. And he's obviously very committed to this. Okay, so you just happened to bump into him. Yeah. Okay, so tell that story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And she's at the Center for Trans Youth and Human Development at the Children's Hospital in LA. Yes. Correct? Correct. Okay. And she's also president-elect of USPATH, which is an advocacy group, I suppose, or a hypothetically scientific organization. consultation group focused on transgender issues. Another defendant is Dr. Scott Mosser at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
I mean, he gets some attention. He definitely gets attention on his own. But no, I think that's actually where I became aware of you. I think it was that event that triggered my reaching out to you initially. You know, I found out afterwards about the lawsuit and that it was also aimed at Olson Kennedy, who's someone I'm interested in for a variety of reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
But I think it was that Billboard Chris interview. So why do you think, What's your understanding of why that was so widely viewed and attended to?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah. Right. Yes, well, you also... You're also quiet and soft-spoken and eminently reasonable in your public presentation. And so that probably didn't hurt, right? So, right. Okay, so the lawsuit. Are you mounting that? Are your parents... How is that progressing and how is it supported? It's expensive. How are you doing this?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So this is really new. Pretty fresh, yeah. And what are the... What are you asking for? What are the claims and what is the... Describe the suit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So now you wake up after surgery.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right. And then with regards to the public impact of this, what are you hoping for?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
What would you like to see be the case?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Well, the standard of care before all of this became politicized was, some of this was established in Alberta at CAMH, and the man who established it, he was just a clinician. He had his career destroyed. He had been working with kids with gender dysphoria for a very long period of time, and his conclusion was the overarching condition is depression and anxiety.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Some of that's focused on bodily concerns. The basic standard of care should be focused on the depression and anxiety, and you should leave well enough alone at least till the age of 18, whereas people...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
It reconciles, just like puberty reconciles for most people. Right. And his career was destroyed for that once it became politicized.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right. And he launched a lawsuit against the people who destroyed his career and was eventually vindicated. But it took like, I don't know how many years, a very long period of time. Wow. Right. So that was a perfectly sane and professionally appropriate standard of care. And it's based on the principle of first do no harm. Exactly. Right. Which is a good rule of thumb. Right. Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So what are you doing with your life at the moment apart from the lawsuit? Right now I'm just in college and trying to get things done. Are you at UCLA? Yes. Hmm. So what's that been like now that you have a certain degree of notoriety and UCLA is quite a politicized campus?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Does that cover the territory?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, well, it doesn't have to happen that often. You don't have to be accosted hostilely by strangers very often for it actually to be a concern. Right. Is it possible for you to continue at UCLA under those conditions? I hope so.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Susan Landon. And she was a psychotherapist? Yes. I was referred to her by Dr. Olson. Okay, you were referred by Dr. Olson. And what's Susan Landon's professional designation?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay. So maybe we'll close this part then with a discussion. You went through dialectical behavior therapy and with some marked degree of success under relatively trying conditions. So that's quite surprising. And maybe that's a testament to your persistence and honesty and also to the skill of your therapist. That would be my guess. And now your attitude towards your sex has changed. Mm-hmm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay. Yeah. You said partly that was because you, what exactly? You understood what happened when you were six? How did you reconcile yourself to that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right, so that takes some of the guilt off you. Right. Well, this other kid was 10? Yeah. Right. So it wasn't like he was particularly well supervised. No. 10 is also not very old. Exactly. Right. So there's a story there too. Yeah. So, you know, from the perspective of a six-year-old, a 10-year-old might as well be an adult.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
But from the perspective of a 17-year-old, a six-year-old and a 10-year-old are both kids.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
What's that like?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So, okay, so you could contextualize it more effectively. Right. And that removed some of the guilt, shame from you. Right. Or all of it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, well, who knows what the history of that kid was.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Well, that would be at least something you would investigate if you're trying to figure it out, because something happened. And then you'd also wonder, well, how was it situationally that this could occur repeatedly in secrecy?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right, because that's part of the situational determinants. Okay, but you work through that. Okay. And then what, that alleviated some of your concern about being female as well?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And so, okay, so... Why do you think that fear and PTSD reconciled, resolved?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So, well, let's go through these people one at a time. I'm very interested. I'm interested in the... I'm really interested with you, I think, in focusing on... the personal and clinical elements of your case. And we can get to the legal and social and political implications later. You said already that you were not... Your focus, you don't regard yourself as involved politically particularly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right, so once you identified it and walked through it, reconfigured it, so that took out... the shame and the guilt, but also some of the fear of being female. Yeah. Okay, now you said at the same time you were also starting to think about, say, having kids. Yeah. So you were starting to contemplate in the future... well, the preeminent advantage of being female, which obviously is to have kids.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And that, what? That became attractive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right. So now you could see, I see. So once you shed the guilt and the fear and the shame, you could see opportunity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right. Right. Well, that's a good definition of reconciliation. So as far as you're concerned now, how would you characterize your identity now?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, so if you were going to—and you are, in fact, doing this— What words do you have to say to someone who's 11, who's female, who's confused? So you can address people like that right now. You've been through the mill, let's say. Yeah. So what do you say to someone who's to you when you're 11?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
What do you say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Mm-hmm. And so it should be dealt with in that manner.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right. So don't look to your body first.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, well, that's very much akin to the principle of minimal necessary intervention, right? Don't use surgery where discussion would suffice, for example. Right, or more than suffice in your situation, it normally suffice but was curative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right, and so that should have been attempted first, obviously. Yeah, exactly. Right, so your depression and anxiety should have been... dealt with you know i talked to chloe cole yeah and i structured the conversation similarly at least in so far as delving into the particulars of your diagnosis right there's no excuse for not telling you that that dysphoric state is common right that it's it's
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
It's part of what young women experience when they go through puberty, that exacerbation of depression and anxiety that can be severe, that desire to hide. and that elevated sense of concern about bodily appearance. Obviously, you're going to be concerned about bodily appearance when all sorts of strange things are happening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
They indicate a new status and vulnerability that you have no real idea how to deal with, and you're mutable. So, it's inexcusable that you weren't told that. Now, I would say with regards to the abuse, that's more complex, right? Because you didn't tell them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay, that's fine. And I don't really think that this is fundamentally a political issue. I don't think so at all. You don't think so at all. Okay, so let's start at the beginning. So... What procedures did you undergo and how old were you? Let's start with that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And then that begs the question of whether, you know, that was just abject refusal on your part or whether some additional time and a bit more a little less jumping to conclusions. Well, let's end with that. How much questioning do you think it would have taken when you were 12 to to find out from you that something had happened to you when you were little.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Okay. Well, I think we'll leave it at that. I think what we'll do for everybody watching and listening, I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side is delve a little bit more into issues of identity, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Because one of the subtexts in this conversation was, and this is a consequence of the reign of a particular sort of ideology, is that identity is best conceptualized, let's say, in gendered or even sexual terms. And That's by no means obvious. And there's a fair bit of reason also to assume that that in itself is harmful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
So one of the things that personality and clinical psychologists know, for example, is that narrow self-concern and misery are identical things. Statistically and conceptually. Any ideology that enhances narrow self-consciousness necessarily produces negative emotion. So we'll talk about identity on the Daily Wire side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Then that gives us an additional half an hour for this conversation for those of you that are inclined to join us there. Clementine, thank you very much for coming to talk about this. And you do it in a remarkably calm and composed manner, given the, what would you say, severity of the situation, right? Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thank you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
All right, so let's go back before you were 12. Mm-hmm. Obviously, there's a reason that you were put on puberty blockers at 12. Right. How did you come to be put on them? So I guess that means how did you come in contact with Dr. Joanna Olson Kennedy? Yeah. How did you come in contact with this therapist, Susan Landon? And... And why.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And so you go back as early as you want, detailing out your childhood and early adolescence. Tell us what brought you to the physicians and the counselor or the psychologist counselor first.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Can you detail to the degree that you're willing to or capable of what happened to you when you were six?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Hello, everybody. My guest today is a young woman who has quite a terrible story to tell, but before you can understand why I have her as a guest and why she's doing what she's doing, there's some individuals that I need to familiarize you with in some detail to set the context properly, and I'm going to read that. First and foremost among those is Dr. Joanna Olson Kennedy. Dr. Olson Kennedy
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Can you... That's a typical response for a child, but it isn't exactly so much as that you might say that you don't need to think about it. It's really that you can't.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Right? I mean, part of what happens to kids if they're hurt, and this is worse the younger they are, let's say, is that they don't have any framework of reference or any philosophical tools to understand what happened and certainly not why. They don't understand the motivation of the perpetrator. They don't understand their own vulnerability.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
They don't understand the failures of the systems that were designed to protect them. They don't have anybody to talk to. And so there's actually no way of processing that. It's not only a matter of like whatever avoidance there might've been on your part. It's that it's just, it's not really possible. What details of the abuse are you willing to share?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And now there's a reason I'm asking you that is because I want to know As much as you can, tell me. I want to know how severe what happened to you was, how long it lasted. And the reason I want to know that is because I want to understand why it was that you became apprehensive when puberty hit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Because you can tell as much of the story as necessary to explain your anxiety as far as you're concerned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Yeah, okay. So, you know, there were early psychoanalytic theories about anorexia, for example, and one of the theories—and I'm not vouching for the validity of this theory, but it's an interesting approach, and I think sometimes it's valid—is that some of the impetus for anorexia for some women, for some girls, particularly those who were sexually abused, was the attempt to forestall puberty.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And because of apprehension around the emergence of sexual capability, let's say, and also the possibility of sexual predation. And you can imagine just generally that it is perfectly reasonable for young women to be apprehensive about puberty because new dangers emerge.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Now, there's actually a biological response to that, you know, so I don't know if your therapists told you this or your physicians, but it's necessary to know. So, boys and girls under the age of puberty don't differ much in their proclivity for negative emotion, anxiety and depression. At puberty, that changes. This is cross-culturally stable, and it's mostly biological.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
And we know that because... the differences are most pronounced in gender-equal societies. Right, okay. Women become more anxious and depressed than men, more sensitive to negative emotion at puberty, and that never goes away. And so then you might ask, why? Well, sexual vulnerability makes the world a dangerous place for women.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
Then you might say, well, women also have to take care of infants, so being threat-sensitive is reasonable because they're going to be more sensitive to dangers to their baby, but they also become sexually vulnerable, right? And their boys and men become physically much more powerful than women at that point, too. So it appears as though
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
what nature does to address that imbalance is increase the negative emotion that women feel. That happens at puberty. But there's one more twist to that. And I'd like to know if any of this was explained to you, because it should have been. The typical pattern that negative emotion takes in young women is bodily concern. And it's partly because women are evaluated
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
for better or worse, in consequence of their physical appearance. And so it's very commonly the case that if a woman is anxious and depressed, is experiencing high levels of negative emotion, that expresses itself as hyper-concern about bodily appearance. Right. Now, when you... were brought when you were little. Maybe you don't remember even, but how much of that was explained to you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
None of that was explained. Okay, so one of the things I'd like to point out to everyone watching is there's no excuse for not explaining this. If you're a physician who's trained well enough to dare to meddle in someone's gender identity, and if you're a counselor who's counseling someone who hypothetically has gender dysphoria, especially someone female, then these are elementary facts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
531. Irreversible Damage at Fourteen | Detransitioner Clementine Breen
The first thing you do when you deal with someone who is anxious and depressed when they're female and they're entering puberty is to explain this. It's psychology-based. I wouldn't call it 101. It's developmental psychology 101. And so that's minimum necessary information. Now, there's a reason that that should be explained to you, you know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Every drive wants to philosophize in its spirit. Exactly. Okay, so let's unpack that. If you understand that aim constrains entropy, then you get some sense almost immediately why people cling so desperately to their frameworks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So let's delve into that. Okay, so... When psychologists first started talking about drives, who was that? I can't remember the name of the psychologist. He was an early behaviorist, but a sophisticated one. The name will come to me later. they were working at building a model of the nervous system really from the reflex up, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And so their behavioral hypothesis was, don't explain anything using any more complex terminology if you can explain it in terms of reflex. And you can get very basic neural systems that are reflexive, that are basically spinal, and they really run in an automatic way. And so then you could imagine chains of those reflexes
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
You can imagine those reflexes chained together so that more and more complex behaviors could come about, and there's some truth in that. But the problem with the drive metaphor is that it's kind of like a wind-up doll, right? A drive implies, first of all, that it's motoric, that it's movement-oriented, and second, that it's algorithmic or deterministic. Now, and Nietzsche...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
offered a more sophisticated view than that when he said, when he associated drive with philosophizing, because a mechanistic and deterministic motoric algorithm doesn't philosophize. And if you can piece this together from Nietzsche's work, and it's really clear in Jung, that it's much better to conceptualize what we think of as drives, as personalities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And then the huge advantage to that is that it brings in perception. And you already pointed this out, at least implicitly, when we were discussing the painting. If I'm angry with you, okay, so now you could say I'm under the grip of a drive, but it's much more sophisticated and accurate to say it's no, that the personality of defensive or predatory aggression now has me in its grip.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
It's dominant from a neurological perspective. It's suppressing all other personalities. And so then what that's going to mean is that when you talk to me, any word that you say that I could interpret as irritating is going to be much more obvious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And anything that you say that would be peacemaking, I would regard cynically, let's say, and I would be looking in my interaction with you for pathways to victory. And it wouldn't only be that I would see that, But also, if you asked me to justify my actions while we were arguing, even if I became cruel, that drive that's a personality would have all those arguments at hand too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So it's a full-fledged personality. It also has its own emotional systems because if I'm gripped by rage, I could easily be happy to see you suffer, right? And if I'm gripped by compassion, say, well, seeing you suffer is going to put me in pain. And so I think...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And so we talked about brain architecture, we talked about brain chemistry, we talked about the role of aim and intent, the role that aim and intent plays in determining perception, which is a very interesting philosophical issue because
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
it would be very helpful if the psychological field in general updated its model of drive, so to speak, or even motivation for that matter, to concentrate more on this personality-like model. Now, and you talked as well in the book about the diverse range of, I don't know, I think you used the word personality as well, the diverse... I call it a team of rivals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, that would be calculated, my suspicions are, is that enough of those rivals aggregate together, they can inhibit everything else. That's exactly right. So they'll join forces and then their rivals will sink into silence because they likely grip the neuropharmacological circuits that can inhibit the rivals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Now, some of that would be calculated unconsciously, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
But then maybe we could hash this out a little bit. Yeah. Imagine it's something like this. So you're making a decision. A lot of these you make pretty quickly. And so what I would presume that would mean is that the rival systems that are doing the computations already have a behavioral pathway specified in practice that's in keeping with their aim. So nothing new has to be instantiated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
what would you say, the enlightenment view of the world, the empiricist view was that we create our structures of reality by aggregating something like objective data. But the science of perception casts a dim light on that presumption because we prioritize our perceptions and we do that using our aim. And so we don't have perceptions that are devoid of value.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
But imagine that there are situations where a novel situation arises and you Rivals emerge, but there isn't a clear pathway, even if one system obtains dominance. I suspect that's when you have to become conscious and you have to think. Because one of the mysteries in your book, and it's a mystery period, is given that we can compute so much unconsciously,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And given how narrow the focus of consciousness is, and even how limited its ability to control, let's say, what's it good for at all? Now, we do tend to become conscious, at least in some times, of things that are novel. So novelty seems to have something to do with it. So I'm curious about what you think about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Where you have a system that's automated, another system that's automated, but the conjunction produces a paradox. Okay, so we can think of the reason for the emergence of the cortex in that regard, because... Agreed. So... I read a series of brilliant papers on hypothalamic cats, right? So these are cats whose entire cortex is decerebrate cats.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Their entire cortex has been taken out and most of the limbic system. And these are mostly female cats for various reasons. Female cats are more functional with only a hypothalamus as it turns out. And if you keep them in a simple environment like a cage, they can pretty much do what cats do. Now they're hyper exploratory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
which is pretty damn weird for an animal with almost no brain, because that's not what you'd predict. And by the way, they can also walk on a treadmill. Right, right, right. Well, they can mate, they can eat, they can regulate their temperature, they can defend themselves. Okay, so now imagine this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So now you have all these automated systems that you described, but they can produce conflicts, and they can produce conflicts in the moment. and they can produce conflicts across time, and they can produce social conflicts. Okay, so now you need another part of the brain that emerges, as you said, to mediate those conflicts, and that's what the cortex does.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So that would imply that some of that lengthy socialization that you described, actually what that socialization is, at least in part, is the environment-specific means in which those conflicts that will arise in consequence of built-in motivation will be mediated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And so we talked about that a lot as well. And so if you're interested in a walk through brain science from the structural perspective, the philosophical perspective, the neurochemical perspective to some degree, if you're interested in perception and emotion and motivation and drive and the competition of personalities and motivational states in the psyche, then this is the podcast for you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Yes. That's also a conflict mediation process, future planning. Yeah. So that the present doesn't interfere with the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Would you... Okay, so a couple of things. So you could imagine a mechanism that would allow that to... Okay, so here's two potential mechanisms. So like system A has a goal and system B has a goal and now they're locked together. Okay, so now you need a superordinate goal that's higher than both of those that can be used as a reference point to rectify the conflict, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And you can imagine chains of those superordinate goals, right? So we get stuck in a conflict here, we're going to do this. We get stuck in a conflict here, we're going to do this and so forth, like ad infinitum. Okay, so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
the cortex is going to produce those melding goals then that would that might be something like sequencing i'm hungry and tired so what i'm going to do is i'm going to eat now and then sleep or i'm going to sleep now and eat and that way the conflict between those two things is reconciled in a higher order frame that wouldn't that would take the future into account yeah right and so but then the physiological maybe the physiological mechanism is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So let's say you could turn left in the maze or you could turn right in the maze and you're spinning because you're in this conflict. The mechanism for resolution could be that the inhibitory mechanism capacity of the free cortex, so it's not bound by any given motivational state, is shifted in favor of one of the systems, right? Because focus of attention seems like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So if I'm angry, for example, and I really focus my attention, well, I could inhibit the rage or replace it with something, but I could also amplify it. Voluntary attention seems to be something like the capacity to amplify it. You'd think that would be something like the the turning of spare multipurpose neural tissue to one side of a particular operation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Right, so you're gathering more resources to that phenomenon.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, it's a major mystery because nobody can figure out what the awareness element is for, right? Especially since it's so limited, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So you just recorded a course for Peterson Academy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, that's it. It's in the moment, right? It's got to be something like that, because you could imagine that there would be quests that are automatized so completely that the circuitry is completely there, right? But then there are new quests, so to speak, that, well, because they're new, the circuitry isn't there. Now, Goldberg...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
pointed out when he was looking at his L. Conan Goldberg, he was a Luria student. He pointed out that when we are learning something new, much broader areas of the cortex are activated. It's much more energy demanding. And then as we learn something and automate it, this is in the typical right-handed male. So first of all, it's the patterns of cortical activation are very widespread.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And there's a lot of energy that's being what used probably because perceptions aren't well specified and there's many potential pathways of action.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And then the activation pattern shrinks away from the right hemisphere into the left and then it moves from the left front to the back, and as it moves, it becomes a smaller and smaller area until a little machine is built, essentially, that's automated. And once that's built, well, you don't need consciousness, and it's hyper-efficient.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Right, right. So you could think about consciousness as something that's continually climbing up a ladder of automated processes, right? So you think and practice, And that all automates and you become hyper-efficient in your perceptions and your actions. And that disappears in some ways from consciousness. It becomes part of the substructure of consciousness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
But then consciousness itself climbs on top of that. So it's like consciousness is like the bleeding edge of adaptation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Help me distinguish between the dopaminergic and the acetylcholinergic functions. So if my understanding is that if I, and this is part of the structuring of perception, if I posit a name, my perception is first going to specify a pathway to that aim. So that's how the world organizes itself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And then things in the world are going to stand out for me as things that will facilitate my movement forward and things that will interfere. Everything else is irrelevant virtually. And there's a social equivalent. So people who will facilitate my movement forward are friends and people who won't are foes, right? And so you have tools and friends and obstacles and foes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And you can also perceive things that'll transform your aim. I think those are magical things, by the way. That's that category and narrative that's magic. It transforms your aim and puts you into a new game. Okay. The dopaminergic system will tag progress towards a goal and it'll reinforce the systems, neural systems that were active just before that progress was made to make them more dominant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Now, that's partly an indication of relevance because what's positive towards a goal is relevant. I don't understand how that differs from the cholinergic marking of relevance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So it's a broader marker of relevance? Yes. Yeah. Is it like potential relevance? Is it something like that? And is there an emotional experience that's associated with that? I mean, if you block dopaminergic receptors, people lose positive emotion. Yeah. But what do they lose if acetylcholinergic transmission is blocked? What do they lose subjectively? I don't know the answer to that in humans.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
That's partly why I can't figure out how that damn... I can't get a handle on to understand how that system functions. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So, for example, let's say you take... That's a major function, caring. Oh, yeah. And that's a weird emotional condition because it doesn't exactly have a valence. It's more like... Like, does the feeling of this matters? Could you characterize that as positive or negative? Because it could matter in a negative way, right? And it could matter in a positive way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So it seems like that would be something like the broad category of potential significance. What happens to I? to pupillary diameter if acetylcholine increases? Do eyes dilate?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So it sounds like it's a broader marker of relevance. Okay, well, I'm going to have to look that up and see if I can specify it more particularly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Okay, and if you strap down the functional hand and you used a cholinergic suppressor, would that stop the person from learning?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Right, and that seems to be, would they still try or would they just stop trying?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Right, because you could imagine the acetylcholine might mediate trying or intensity of effort or duration or rate. But you could also imagine that it would mediate capacity to learn if the practice was occurring. You know what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Okay, so back we had a bit of a, I wouldn't call it a dispute, but a slight difference of agreement in relationship to this model of personality. And you talked about rivals. I mean, rival is a narrative-like metaphor, right? To have a rivalry is a rivalry between beings, generally speaking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
But I think there's something worth taking apart, because maybe you could say, well, if the rivalry is primarily played out at an unconscious level, then the metaphor of personality is not quite accurate. And so I'm just trying to think through if that's true, because if the systems are automated completely... I wonder if they're automated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
I thought we could walk through perception because it doesn't work the way people think it does.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
I don't know if they would come replete with perceptions and thoughts exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, that's a good idea. That's a good idea. Okay, so that would account for the archaic conception of possession. It's something like that, right? Well, obviously, if a drive comes to dominate your behavior, it's taking possession of your personality. Like, clearly. Nice. Okay, so then you can imagine that there's... Okay, so maybe it's something like this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So imagine in a motivated state that there's an automated core. And that automated core isn't going to be accompanied by a tremendous amount of consciousness. But the more additional neural system it aggregates around it, the more consciousness it accrues, right? And that would partly be because it's actually building something like a novel structure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
It's got this automated core, which we would consider the drive, but then it's pulling in different elements of the totality of what's available, and that would make it more and more personality-like.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So I've been trying to. in keeping with this model of like superordinate aims that executive function could refer to to mediate conflict, I've been trying to understand if there are principles by which those superordinate aims are constructed so that they're valid. What do you mean by valid? Well, that's a good question. not likely to produce conflict, for example. So for example, here's an idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So you and I, we can think of each other as a loose aggregation of potential motivated states, but we can come to an agreement. Okay, now then we could judge the quality of the agreement, I think, by there's a variety of standards. We could say it's a higher quality agreement if it can sustain itself across a broader range of contexts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So if we have a friendship, which is a kind of contractor agreement, and we can get along many different places and under many different situations, then we'd think of that as a deep friendship. So it's well-constituted friendship. And then we could also imagine that if the friendship maintained itself across time, then it would be, that's another indication of its validity, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And then we could imagine a third dimension would be if it was stable across context and stable across time and it improved while we implemented it, that would be a third criteria. That would be like, that would be a good evaluation strategy for a good marriage. It works everywhere. It works for a long time. And as you play it out, it improves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Okay, so then I've been trying to think through if there's a set of rules that obtains, like there may be like principles of ethics that bind those kinds of agreements. So I'll give you an example. So Piaget spent a lot of time analyzing how children... learned to play games with others and made friends. Okay, so the first rule of a game is something like both people have to want to play it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Okay, then the next rule is something like You get a turn in the game and then I get a turn, right? So I have to sacrifice my turn to you, but vice versa. And that's a stable arrangement. Now, and the reason we're willing to do that instead of me fighting to have the turn all the time is because it's a better game if I get to play it with you. So I'm okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So then you could imagine now, if we come to a voluntary agreement about the aim, We unite our perceptions, we unite our emotions, and then we reciprocate. Okay, now if we can do that once, then we've established a precedent. And if we can repeat that, we have a friendship. Okay, but then that implies that the friendship is based, like there's rules. The aim has to be shared.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
The aim has to be voluntary. The participation has to be reciprocal. Now, Panksepp showed this with rats when they were playing because Panksepp, first of all, took a kind of dominance approach to play. He showed that if you took two juvenile rats and you paired them in an arena, they'd work to play, but that the rat that was 10% bigger across rats could reliably pin the smaller rat.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So then that sort of provided... proof, evidence for a dominance theory of play. But then Panksepp realized that rats don't play once. They're communal. So then he paired them repeatedly and he found that if the big rat didn't let the little rat win at least 30% of the time, the little rat wouldn't play anymore. So you could see there that there's an ethos that's emerging.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Now, the reason I'm mentioning this is because
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
That and across people, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So I'm trying to figure out the preconditions for something like a stable social community. What works across time to mediate conflict? And then what works across people? And that's like a bounded world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Let's talk about perception. I was reading, let me just, the secret, incognito, the secret lives of the brain, and you spend... a fair bit of time in that book talking about perception. And so I thought we could walk through perception because it doesn't work the way people think it does.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
I think religion is this religious, the religious enterprise is the, what would you say? It's the establishment and analysis and experience of those higher order contracts. I think that's a way of defining it. So you can think of the higher order of the contract, the more religious-like it is. That's another way. This is a definition, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Okay, well, so let me ask you a couple of questions based on what you just said. Okay, because there were two ways you went, as far as I could tell, and I can't reconcile them. So we started talking about games, and you started talking about the manner in which these teams of rivals interact, and there was a suggestion there for a moment that there is something game-like about it, so that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
rival systems might be integrated into a higher order agreement, which is essentially what a game is, right? I mean, when two teams are competing on a playing field, you could say they're competing, but they're also cooperating in that they're playing the same game. Like if the game degenerates into a fist fight, a basketball game fist fight and a hockey fist fight are the same thing, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
They're not basketball or hockey. They're a fight. Okay, so you can imagine a higher order agreement that has a... Okay, so then the question would be, Is the mediation between rivals best conceptualized as a game? And you pointed in that direction for a minute, but then you switched to the Ulysses contract. So I'm wondering, how would you contrast a game with a contract?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And the fact that it doesn't work the way people think it does has, I think, profound philosophical implications. So I want to walk through some ideas that I've been developing with you and see what you think about them. So one of the things you pointed out, for example, in the book was that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
It seems to me that there's a deep analogy between that Ulysses contract and something like the rule of a game. I mean, if you set up a basketball game, there are moves that are forbidden, right? And so... You can think of games as enabling principles. Here's things you can do in the game, but there's rules that are forbidding as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Is it with the Ulysses contract concept that you're looking at the rules of the game that forbid? Is that the fundamental concentration on the Ulysses contract side? There are limitations rather than enabling conditions? Because you have both in a game, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Things you can do and things you can't do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Yeah, well, let's take that example because I think it provides a very concrete representation of the relationship between superordinate and subordinate goals and future and present.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Okay, so you already outlined the reasons to eat the chocolate cake, right? It's delicious and it's delicious because it is a source of energy and a high-impact source of energy. So there's reason to eat it and the reason is immediate and it's tied to immediate gratification. But now you're So that's one game, the game of immediate gratification and energy acquisition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
But you're putting that underneath a higher order game. Okay, so one of the questions we might ask is, well, what game are you playing when you forbid yourself the cake?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So self-control, discipline, attractiveness, health. Right. And so now one of the things we might ask ourselves, see, this is what I was trying to get at, you know, two discussions ago, trying to lay out the preconditions for what constitutes a higher order game. Because one of the things we could ask is why prioritize the constraint over the eating?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Like there's a reason for that because you value the constraint more. Now, but why? Why is the health higher? You alluded to that. You said, well, part of it's future. There's more future, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
If you get people to look at a painting, which you might think of as a process akin to what a camera does when it takes a photograph, but you ask them different questions about the people in the photograph. So if I remember correctly, the example you used was a picture of a family in a domestic scene in a house. And you could ask them, people who are watching, who are looking at the painting,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Okay, so you brought in maturity. Okay, so that's, well, that's. That's an extremely interesting move, and it seems to me to be precise and accurate, because we could think of cortical development as maturation. We could think of socialization as maturation. Okay, so here's some principles for socialization. Those are the same, in a sense. I take turns, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So that means that I regulate my lower-order immediate motivations communally. Right. Right. But then there's another axis, which is I regulate them in relationship to the future. And the more mature you are, this is a definition again, you can tell me what you think about it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
The more mature you are, the better you get at regulating the immediate in relationship to the future, but also the local in relationship to the communal. So if I'm really mature, I'm going to sacrifice the present for the future and the communal. And that's better. That's a definition of better, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So we're starting to lay out a taxonomy of value, right, in terms of conduct and in terms of perception.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
I don't think there's any difference between your future self and a stranger. I think they're the same thing. So here's an example of that. This is so cool. I figured this out along 30 years ago. Psychopaths have no compassion. but they don't learn from experience either.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And so that means that not only does the psychopath have no compassion for you, he has absolutely no compassion for himself tomorrow. And then you think, oh, well, those are the same thing, right? There's no difference between those two things. That's the, because both, why, why?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, you're not feeling what your future self is feeling now any more than you're feeling what someone else is feeling now. Like a normal person, Can a mature person, you might say, can think of their future self and they can think of the experience of that self and it matters. Just like they can think of the experience of someone else and it matters.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
The psychopath either can't or won't do that, right? But it's the same mechanism. You said, well, there isn't a conflict between future orientation and communal orientation. I don't think there is. I think they're the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Yeah, well, that begs the question, right? Which is, what are the preconditions for people to form an alliance with their future self? And it could easily be—tell me what you think about this— There was a psychiatrist, a very famous psychiatrist. He used to be taught personality theory all the time. And I can't even remember his name now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
But one of the reasons that he was taught personality classes is because he studied the development of childhood friendships like Piaget. But one of his hypotheses was that, essentially, that the close friendships that children develop in early childhood, like a best friend.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
A best friend was something like, first of all, a practice trial for a long-term marriage, but also the way that you learn to take care of your future self. So that it was through taking care of someone who wasn't you that you developed the capability of making a relationship with something that was abstract and that that would transfer to your future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Right, so some of it's directly experiential. Exactly. You do learn that if you do X today, two days from now isn't so good. Yeah. And you can make that connection, and that wouldn't be intermediated by some other person. Right. Well, there's no reason to assume that there aren't multiple experiences. sources of information that would mature you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
what those people were doing just before the painting image was fabricated, or you could ask them how wealthy they are, or you could ask them how old they are. And while you're doing that, you can track the movements of the viewer's eyes. And what you see is that the pattern of visual movement, so of eye movement,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
that even if you work out a harmonious game, which is probably not a bad model for a well-integrated psyche, right? It's a well-integrated game because you're not across purposes to yourself, let's say. There's enough novelty that's constantly being infused that conflict's going to emerge. I mean, even imagine you have a stable marriage. Yep. Right, but a new problem emerges with a child.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, that doesn't exactly mean that the marriage contract has been violated, but it does mean that now you have a new complex situation to deal with where you might say that not only is conflict inevitable in that situation, you might say that it's desirable. Because now imagine that your child has hit puberty or something, and so new problems emerge.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
The truth of the matter is you actually don't know how to deal with those problems. And so conflict would be useful there insofar as it's identical with diversity of opinion. And then you can imagine your wife has a temperamental take on the problem. And classically, that would be she would be more compassionate and more upset. And you would be more judgmental and less upset.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
That's the classic male-female dichotomy in terms of temperament. But you can imagine that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
those are useful stances to begin the problem-solving process, too, because it's a completely open question of whether or not the child would say needs a more stringent, future-oriented disciplinary structure, let's say, and to have that imposed, or whether they need more careful understanding so that you can understand what the problem is. There's no way of mediating that without conflict.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And so the fact of the conflict also wouldn't necessarily indicate that the initial contract was faulty. It's just that You're never going to have a contract that will deal with all possible novel situations, hence possibly the reason for consciousness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
is similar across people depending on the question that's asked, but different in consequence of the question. So, for example, if you ask people how rich the people in the photograph are, they'll look at the clothing and the material objects in the painting. And if you ask them how old they are, they'll gaze at their faces. And a painting isn't
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Okay, now you said something else too that I don't think I've thought about exactly before. We're talking about the different functions of consciousness. We would never presume that there's a single function, although dancing on the edge of chaos is not a bad comprehensive shorthand. Consciousness also seems to be the place where these visions of variant future play themselves out, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So that's the theater of the mind. And so... You could imagine that if a new opportunity or crisis emerged, you could envision a variety of different futures, which would be a variety of different contracts or solutions or people that you wanted to be. And you play out those in the theater of the imagination. That seems to be conscious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And it's logical that it would be consciousness if it's associated with novelty, because these new response patterns to this new emergent reality, they're not automatized. They can't be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, then you could make a rule with our principle for that, which is the deeper the crisis, the less automated circuitry is at hand to deal with it. That's a definition of deep crisis, right? So for example, moving houses in the same city is not as complex as moving to a house in a new city. And it's because more of your subroutines can be maintained if it's just moving within a neighborhood.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
That's right. See, Carl Friston, a neuroscientist, he's derived a pretty decent model of anxiety as an index of entropy. And so, right, right. Cool. Right, right. And so that would be anxiety as entropy and entropy as disruption of automated subroutes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
That's what it's for. But then the higher the degree of possibility... the less reliable the automated systems.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Yeah, and it's very localized too because when the child is starting to play soccer, his field of attention is going to be like this big, right? He's going to be thinking, how many different ways can I move my foot? And that makes him a pretty spectacularly horrible soccer player because he's not paying attention to anything that's going on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
You said something else too that I don't think I've thought about exactly before. Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity to speak to David Eagleman today. David is an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. He doesn't run a lab there anymore because he runs two companies, Neosensory and BrainCheck.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
When you're looking at a painting, it isn't necessarily that big an object, but there's still pinpoint perceptions that have a pattern that are, and the pattern reveals the relationship between the goal of the perception and the perception. I've got that. Have I got that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
In Gretzky, for example, the hockey player, one of the things he was renowned for, and you can imagine this as a consequence of layered expertise, was that he was paying attention to what was happening everywhere on the ice. Well, why? Well, because he didn't have to pay attention to skating. He didn't have to pay attention to how he was holding his stick.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
He didn't even have to pay attention to where the puck was on his stick because that was all automated. So he can move up to higher and higher levels of abstraction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, and you do that when you learn to drive. Yes. As you get to be a better and better driver, you look farther and farther down the road. That's also the case too. They've studied this with expert piano players who are playing with sheet music. They look ahead of where they're playing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Right. And so what they're doing in some sense, I think probably what they're doing neurologically is disinhibiting automated subsystems. And that's essentially, so I can give you an example of that. It's an example that sort of reconciles the free will deterministic conundrum. So if you do this, This is a ballistic movement. You wrote about these in your book, right? So if I do this...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
The lag time for neural transmission from here to here and back is longer than the duration of that movement. So then the question is, how do I control that movement? And the answer is, well, I've automated this routine, which is why I can stop my hand, because I can't stop it voluntarily, right? So what happens is I have the routine at hand, I disinhibit it, and it runs, runs automated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Now, I have no free will during that ballistic movement. And so what seems to happen with free will, so to speak, is that as the horizon of the future approaches, free will disappears. We devolve into automation as the present makes itself possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, but I mean, we could reconcile that. we could integrate what we discussed earlier with a free will view because you could say, tell me what you think about this. I mean, obviously our choice isn't unconstrained. We're not omniscient. There's lots of things we can't do. So even if we're free will absolutists, we're still playing within a confined domain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
But can't you say, given what we discussed throughout this entire conversation, that you choose what to automate? I mean, like you have, like, imagine this. So you have a novel situation. You envision these variety of different futures, and there's some volunteerism in that. But then you can direct your attention towards what you determine to practice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
But I guess the question then would be, if that's the case, why would it be useful to have the multiplicitous futures make themselves manifest? If there's no choice between them, why have an array?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, I think we probably have the question formulated wrong in some fundamental way, which is why it can't be resolved. But there's also likely such a constant play of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
indeterminacy and determinacy at every level of decision that you actually can't parse them apart right because i think your argument that we lay out these different simulations and then we evaluate them well that's obviously what you do when you go see a movie is like you're evaluating the decisions that different characters are making and you're feeling that and that is informative and you could think about that as deterministic but then with that argument you have the problem well
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
The reason those simulations feel the way they do was because you chose the aim that you were using to inhabit while you were doing the evaluation. And so it just flips you into the problem right away again.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And you said you were writing a new book. Yeah. We're running out of time on this side. So tell us, I'd like to know where your interests are going and what your new book is about.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, this is why Friston's work, by the way, is so helpful. Well, if you understand, at least in part, that AIM constrains entropy... then you get some sense almost immediately why people cling so desperately to their frameworks. It isn't just that the framework lays out the pathway or specifies the perceptions. It restricts entropy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, and then there's actual physiological consequences of that because what happens if you, especially involuntarily, enter a high entropy state is, you start burning up future resources. You burn up resources that could be conserved in the future, in the present. And what that actually does is age you. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So that's, that's an elevate, imagine a chronically elevated stress response in response to additional uncertainty.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So that's the other thing that happens too, is that this is, I think the other side of the emotional landscape. So, A specified and constrained aim reduces entropy. I think that's the crucial issue. But it also sets up the framework within which hope is possible. Because to the degree that hope is dopaminergically mediated, it's a consequence. See, Friston actually had a unified theory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
He told me about this when I interviewed him. Because I had worked out the anxiety entropy theory with my lab in a separate paper. But he said something that I didn't know at all. Dopaminergic pleasure is also an entropy reduction phenomenon. And this is why it's so cool. So imagine that you have your aim, your goal, and now you can compute the energy required to get there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Now, the farther you away from their goal, the more uncertainty there is in the pursuit. Now, if you take one step toward your goal and you do that successfully, you get a mark of positive emotion from that. That's a dopaminergic kick, but that does indicate an entropy reduction. So both positive and negative emotion regulation are associated with entropy reduction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Yeah, no kidding. Well, that's a key thing to know when you're thinking, why are people so glued to their worldviews? It's like, well, because their positive emotion is dependent on and the regulation of their negative emotion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, you can see that. Given what we talked about with regard to perception, you can see why that's the case. Once I specify an aim, what I'm going to see are things that move me towards the aim. That means the contradictory information not only is irrelevant, should be irrelevant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Like, if I'm trying to walk across the room, I shouldn't be attending to every potential obstacle that could conceivably exist, right? I've already simplified things, so the obstacles aren't even there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So hallucinogens seem to blow that into pieces, by the way. That's what they do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
You pay attention. Everything becomes relevant. So that's the awe-inspiring element of the experience. But it's also very, very, very high entropy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
You used a couple of words that were interesting in that description. You talked about being... You said something approximating being on a mission to answer a question. And then you talked about data. And so I want to take those two things apart. So one of the sub-elements of the word question is quest. And a quest is a journey. And a journey is a mission.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
That's not a bad definition of a kind of a true confidence, right? Yeah. Right? But it is the model of sophisticated thinking because one of the things you do when you think is voluntary enter into a higher entropy state. Because to really think something through is to allow internal conflict to manifest itself. Everything...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
The different ideas you have are different manifestations of different aims. And so when you think, this is what we're trying to train people in university, it's like be resilient in the face of voluntarily confronted entropy, at least on the cognitive side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So there's also evidence, this is very cool too, There's evidence that if you do that involuntarily, the entropy state is higher than if you do it voluntarily. And the evidence is very profound. It's very profound. And so if you take a stance of voluntary confrontation with conflict, the stress consequence is much minimized over when it happens voluntarily.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
That's partly why exposure works in behavior therapy. So if you have someone who's traumatized and they're involuntarily exposed to a trigger, they get worse. But if they voluntarily expose themselves, they get better, right? Even though the stimulus, so to speak, is the same. Oh, interesting. And I think it has something to do with a high-order meta-narrative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Like the highest-order meta-narrative should be something like, I can contend successfully with, maybe with entropy. It's certainly with chaos. That's the sort of creature that I want to be, that I should be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Right, right. Because then when it comes up, you don't,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Yeah, well, the social element of that is also an entropy issue, as far as I can tell. Because imagine that... This took me a long time to parse through. So, the higher you are in a hierarchy, social hierarchy, the lower entropy your state... Your connection networks are better. Your shelter is better. Your security is better. Like that's all part of being higher in hierarchy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Okay, now the question is what gives you the right to that position? And the answer to that is something like the accuracy and your accuracy and view and your competence, right? If it's a functional hierarchy. Okay, so now I come along and challenge you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Okay, so part of that, I'm going to cause internal distress in the manner that we described, but I'm also questioning the validity of your grip on the position in that hierarchy. So imagine a faculty meeting where you make a presentation or a professor makes a presentation and a first-year graduate student stands up and issues a successful challenge.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Now, some of that's ideational, and you might say, well, maybe he's got a better theory, but some of it is a challenge to the validity of the fact that you're higher in the hierarchy than he is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Right, and you know that's played out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
So, yeah. So that's also an entropy issue, even the sociological element of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, I think a fair bit of the, what would you say, the fundamental psychological necessity of something like hero mythology is the inculcation of the attitude that you just described as characteristic of Einstein. It's like... Here's a challenge. It's like, I can handle that. I don't have to get defensive. It's not going to throw me off. Maybe there's opportunity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Now, there's a big difference between being on a mission and gathering data. You know, like the empirical view of the world, I think we'll stick with the empiricists particularly. The empiricists believe that we gathered data about the world and that we could do that in an objective manner and that we built the world out of that data gathering process. But that's not the same.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
That's the dragon and the treasure, by the way. Maybe there's opportunity here in this challenge. That's a very high order match. It takes very high order maturation to realize that. In every challenge, there's opportunity. Right, right, right. And that's something you can practice. It's an attitude that you can practice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Okay, we should stop this. We're going to move to the Daily Wire side. What are we going to talk about on the Daily Wire side? I think we should delve more into your book. Can you have some ideas?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Okay, so everybody who's watching, if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side, for an additional half an hour. Please feel free to do that. Apart from that, thank you very much for your time and attention. Thank you very much for coming here to Scottsdale today. Much appreciated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And for teaching our course on the Peterson Academy, which has got a lovely trailer, which I think we're going to incorporate into this podcast, actually. And I know that the reaction to your course has been very positive so far. And so we're thrilled about that. You can catch that on Peterson Academy, by the way. Thanks for your time and attention, everybody.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Thank you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
It's really seriously not the same as...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Answering a question or being on a quest taking a journey or being on a mission because a mission is goal-directed and I've been trying to work out a paradox in recent years that emerges because of those the difference in those two viewpoints Data and you and you use both those metaphors in your in your analysis of the eye movement patterns data implies something
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
directly, that's value-free, but mission implies value, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And all your various aims. Yeah, well, so this is... The reason I focused in on the philosophical implications of this is because... the empiricists, the philosophical implication of the idea of data as reality is that reality itself is value-free and value is added to the data. But mission is a whole different way of conceptualizing things because
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
If the basis of data is perception, and perception is mission-driven, then insofar as perception is reality, reality is not value-free. And that's at the level of perception, right? So this is why the difference is so crucial, because the empirical presumption is the data is there, you add value to it. It's like, no. the value is built into the perception, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And there's no place in the perception where the value isn't built in. You talked about those micro, so when your eyes move, how many different levels of saccades are there?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Right. And then you can also move your eyes voluntarily. So there's lots of patterns of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And then the fact that I can do this and then I can do this. Sure. And then also, one of the things that's interesting about, you could say, the perception of perception is that we're very much inclined to watch other people's eyes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Like generally when we're conversing with people, when we're interacting with them, we see their eyes and we can see their face, although somewhat less their whole head, but at least their face, which is an emotional display system around the eyes. And the reason that we want to watch someone's eyes is because we can see what they're looking at.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And the reason we want to do that is because we can infer their mission. We can infer their motivations, which is crucially important. Well, if you're in a defensive situation or a sexual situation or, well, any situation for that matter. And so by watching someone's eyes, you can infer their mission. But one of the corollaries of all of that on the philosophical side is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
this is such a bizarre thing to understand, is that our aims structure our perceptions, right? So I've been separating that. I want you to tell me what you think about this. So I came up with a hypothesis when I was writing my last book, which is that a story is a description, you could say, a story is a description of the Value hierarchy that structures perception.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
David recently did a course for Peterson Academy called Brain Plasticity, and in the largest sense, that's what we talked about today. Plasticity, to some degree, is an archaic term and based on an archaic metaphor, but it's been well adopted, thoroughly adopted in the neuroscience literature, and it means something like adaptive flexibility.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
That's actually what a story is. And so part of the reason that we're so interested in stories is because, as you pointed out, when you look at the world, there's many, many ways you could look at any scene. Many. An infinite number of ways, in fact. So you have to navigate your way through every glance and experience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
The structure of navigation you use determines the purpose of the perception, but it's also a strategy. And so if I know your story and I can see that you're successful, then I can adopt your mode of perception, right? It's not your mode of adding value to the world. It's way more fundamental than that. Is that... Does that... Yeah, tell me what you mean by adding value to the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Well, you could think of the world as a place of dead facts, that they're all equally perceivable. It's like, well, no, because perception's value-based. Because we've always thought, in some ways, folk psychology is... perception first, right? And then it's motivation or emotion after that, let's say, and then it's cognition and that, and sort of in a linear chain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And that turns out to be like, it's staggering. It's not just wrong. It's staggeringly wrong because the values inform the perception so deeply that in many ways, they determine the content of the perception as, as we were talking about with regards to the painting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Every drive wants to philosophize in its spirit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
And human beings are unique in their degree of adaptive flexibility. Now, the advantage to that is that we can change our environment and we can change our perceptions and we can adapt each generation to a radically new environment. And the price we pay for that is an intensely long period of socialization.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, as you shifted your position up the political hierarchy and are poised really likely to take the reins in Canada at some point in the next year, you've listened to all these people. And so what have you learned? And what has it made you convinced of, let's say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And it appears very probable that Pierre Polyev is the heir presumptive and will be the next Prime Minister of Canada. And so I talked to Mr. Polyev two and a half years ago, which was quite shocking to me. I thought it had been more recently than that. And... A lot has transpired in the meantime. What did I talk about with Pierre?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And that's about the time when people think about downsizing from their house.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Yeah, well, there's been a real conservative swing, especially among young men. Well, no wonder, because they've been demonized for, what, 30 straight years for every aspect of their masculinity, from their play preferences to their proclivity to destroy the planet with their ambition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And so there's definitely an opportunity there, and clearly your political party and you are capitalizing on that, that you have the support from... from young people increasingly right across Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, I think mostly what I did was give Canadians and people on the international side a chance to see who this man is. In an hour and a half of discussion and the extra half an hour on the Daily Wire side, you have enough time to get a sense of how someone responds personally. spontaneously and emotionally and cognitively to complex and challenging questions in a manner that's not rehearsed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right. So the unhappiness that you're seeing among young people seems to me to be a consequence of the mismatch between the opportunity they see right in front of them and their frustration at the fact that that opportunity can't be capitalized on, even if they're contributing their fair share.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, when I was a kid in Alberta, I could work in the summer, and I didn't work on the rig, so I didn't have one of the high-paying jobs. I had a more, what would you say, a job that was secondarily associated with the resource economy. I could make enough money in the summer, in two months, four months, to pay for the tuition and my entire year's rent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, that's a genuine breakdown of the social contract, right? Absolutely. Because the deal, like you said, the deal was supposed to be, if you do things right, you'll be rewarded. Yes. Right, and that's the intergenerational compact, essentially. And there isn't anything that defines hopelessness more clearly than... seeing that if you do all the right things, the pathway is paved to failure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right. Right. So that's so demoralizing. And, you know, what's even worse about that is that the people who are most demoralized by that are precisely the people who would be most productive and hardworking. Because the ones that are sponging along, they don't give a damn anyways, right? They're not losing any glorious future and they're not sacrificing for it anyways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
But it's really not good when your economy is set up to punish people who are entrepreneurial and hardworking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit. So I've been tracking economic statistics in relationship to Canada and sort of left me open-mouthed in amazement at our dismal condition. So from what I've been able to understand, the richest people per capita in terms of GDP per person, gross domestic product per person, so that's total productivity, is Ontario.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
That's the huge advantage of the podcast format. We talked about all the stories that Mr. Polyev has heard in his thousands of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And Ontario inhabitants are now poorer per capita than inhabitants of Mississippi, and that's the poorest American state. So the inhabitants of Canada's richest province are poorer than the inhabitants of the United States' poorest state. And that's actually occurred primarily In the last 10 years. Yes. And because we were basically at parity before that. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And had historically been not quite as rich as the Americans with some, you know, blips above them, but pretty much tracking them one-to-one. Yeah. And now it's, 60%, something like that. And that's not all the bad news because it's 60% in terms of absolute wealth and a real estate market that's twice as expensive approximately on average.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right, so now- It's really bad.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
event interactions with Canadians in industrial settings, in manufacturing settings, in academic settings, so that he could inform himself about the true situation that's facing Canadians struggling to make ends meet despite their best efforts now, which is a dismal reality in Canada with its excessive housing prices and diminishing economy. Most importantly, perhaps,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
This is per capita?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
So how is the Canadian worker- That's investment in future productivity?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
There's a real, real- It's a pretty stark and easily comprehensible statistic. Yeah. I mean, if you work and you produce $80 worth of goods and services in an hour, compared to working and producing 50, obviously that's a substantial shortfall. And is there a starker indicator of the economic disparity between the US and Canada than that? Or do you think that's the primary statistic?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Yeah. And we're paying more. We're paying more by a lot. Yeah. Right, and most of that's transpired in the last 10 years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
What is his vision of the future that both threatens and provides opportunity for Canadians? How is it possible for the citizens of this great country to dig themselves out of the malaise and pit that has been dug for them and by them over the last nine years? And what could be done to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so that's another problem. So that's the inflationary problem. Now, the problem with inflation, there's many problems with inflation, but one of them is that it particularly punishes people who are thrifty and who save.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right, right. So inflation punishes the people who forego gratification to invest in the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right, so that's a very bad idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
So the socialist policies that, provide goods and services to Canadians, let's say, or denizens of other countries by printing money actually punish the poor brutally in consequence of the inflation that they generate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so what...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Remove the impediments such that this country could become the dynamic industrial powerhouse that it certainly could easily become. So, join us for all that. So, sir, it's been almost two and a half years since we sat down to talk the time before. So, I guess the first thing I'd like to know is, what have you been doing during that time? I'd like to hear...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay. So what would you do to, to stop inflation?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Define the deficit, yeah, for people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
It's usually calculated on a yearly basis. That's right. And the debt?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
I thought it had a ceiling of... 41 billion, yeah. Wasn't that a ceiling? Guess not, eh?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And you have a plan for that in principle?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And the percentage of a new house price that's a consequence of government taxation and regulation?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Now, does that include the land and the house?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
I'd like to hear about your day-to-day schedule and your week-to-week schedule, like lay out your job.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
You mean like to Germany and Japan, even when they ask? Exactly. And are offering multi-decade supply contracts at at at distressed prices because they're so desperate for energy right and we can't make a business case for that famously yes this is i think that was perhaps the single stupidest thing i ever heard a politician say and that's a really hard contest to win
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And you figured out a way to monetize cold weather.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
It's a very difficult thing to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right. The thing about human brains is it turns out that the remarkable thing about human brains is how smart they are for how little energy they use.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right. Whereas we're building machines that are super intelligent, but they're very energy hungry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, yeah, the tech companies are absolutely desperate for it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And Microsoft revitalized Three Mile Island.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they bought all the power that it's going to generate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
We can try to organize things so that energy superpower wasn't an insulting phrase.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, that's obviously the moral thing to do with regards to the alleviation of absolute poverty as well. Because there's an environmental case to be made for that too, which I learned about about 15 years ago. If you...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
if you alleviate absolute poverty the people who are now comparatively wealthy so say starting to move into the middle class take a much longer term view of their lives and their children's lives and their grandchildren's lives which are now relatively assured and they're much more likely to take environmental action at the local level so it looks like the fastest pathway to a genuinely green and sustainable future
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
is through the eradication of absolute poverty. Right. And the most effective route to that is cheap energy. Right. Absolutely. So it looks like we could have a green future and eat our cake too, so to speak. And Canada could definitely be at the forefront of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so I want to turn back to some numbers. The deficit this year was $61 billion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Sorry, last year, last year. And there's 40 million people in Canada. So that's $1,500 billion. Per person, federal overspending, and that's $6,000 essentially per family. So just for everybody watching and listening, your federal government spent $6,000 of your family's money last year going over their budget. That's just what they spent in excess of what they had originally budgeted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so it's also the case that we haven't gone into diagnostics yet, but it's also the case that the Trudeau administration has increased the federal bureaucracy 40%? In bodies, yes. In bodies, since its inception, right? Yeah. But despite that, they've also radically increased the amount of money that they're spending on consultants. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Who are about as expensive, they're as expensive as employees go. Oh, they're way more expensive. Yeah, as any employee you could ever possibly have, right? $600 an hour, something like that. Right, so they've massively increased the size of the federal bureaucracy. Right. but also massively increase the degree to which they outsource the work that hypothetically the bureaucrats should be doing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
I think that was perhaps the single stupidest thing I ever heard a politician say. Your federal government spent $6,000 of your family's money going over their budget.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right. Immigration, poorest border. I think our per capita immigration rate exceeds that of the U.S., even given the U.S. open southern border.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
With what was the approximation of a public apology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so that's a lot of... I just talked to Terry Glavin, a Canadian journalist this week too, and he did about a five-dimensional analysis of the trouble that Canada was in. It was blackly comic in some ways because we realized at the end of the conversation or near the end of it that we hadn't even discussed the ever-present threat of the Quebec separatists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And I was thinking, oh my God, like Canada's in a pretty dismal state when... the threat of Quebec separatism is number sixth on the list of threats to the integrity of the country. Yes. Right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Yeah, I know, I know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And ironically... A more out of desperation than anything else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so this has really transpired in large part over the nine- to ten-year period that Trudeau has been governing. And so when you... are trying to put your finger on what went so wrong, so calamitously wrong. What do you think the major contributors were?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
I mean, there's a lot of hydras whose heads we're encountering at the moment, and I imagine it's relatively difficult to trace a causal pathway, but what did we do wrong as a country?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right, that have demonstrated themselves as disastrous continuously throughout the 20th century.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so one of the things that I think is particularly striking, I saw Stephen Guilbeault, who's probably the minister in Trudeau's cabinet, who's most fervently Yeah, he describes himself as a socialist. Well, this is the thing. So he described himself as a socialist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And so for all you international people listening, Canada has always had a socialist party, and that's the New Democratic Party, the NDP, which is currently run by Jagmeet Singh, who's propping up Trudeau, all his protestations to the contrary. And Canadians have always been, about 20% of Canadians have protested
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Stably supported the socialists, the NDP in Canada, and that's been true since about 1962 or something when they first popped up as a federal party. Now, the Liberals, and that's Trudeau's party, have been a centrist party, historically speaking, and they were the home of the classic Liberals. all things considered.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And they like to steal good ideas from the left and from the right and chart Canada's course down the middle. The thing about Trudeau's liberals is they're not liberals, is they're far-left socialists. And they came to power in the guise of liberals, and that meant that they're bloody. Their government was fraudulent. technically speaking, from the beginning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Because Guilbault, for example, obviously should have been a member of the NDP and not the classic traditional Canadian liberals. But he didn't care because he knew that had he run for the socialists, he would have ended up with 20% of the vote because that's what they always do and never had any clear pathway to power. And so Trudeau brought a bunch of people in who were so radically left that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
that they left the NDP in the dust, essentially. And they've been running the country on false pretenses for nine years. And if you ally that with the fact that Trudeau is clearly, he clearly has narcissistic personality characteristics and runs the country, I think as a testament to his own grandeur, it's something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And one of your caucus members recently stood up in the House and I think listed something approximating 60 scandals. I mean, I've been scandalized by that because my observation, I've been watching the Canadian political landscape for, you know, five decades, and the Trudeau government has skated through at least,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And you said 600 events. You made illusion when we were driving over here that the weekends are particularly packed, that you'll do like 10 events on Saturday or Sunday.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
a half a dozen scandals that under normal circumstances would have provoked an honorable government to resign. And then that doesn't count the other 54. And so at the moment, Trudeau's grip on authority is very shaky. His deputy prime minister resigned last week in a cloud of catastrophic surreal manipulation. He shuffled his cabinet this week. At least a third of his caucus doesn't,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
have any confidence in him, but he's being propped up by the socialists, Jagmeet Singh in particular, who also continually proclaims publicly that he is an opponent of the Trudeau government and is standing up against him while refusing categorically to do anything to do the thing that's actually in his power to bring down the government. So do you want to, I just can't understand this at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
So do you want to walk us through this?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
As the NDP themselves admit, the previous leaders of the NDP.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And so what A typical event, what do you enjoy about the events? Why are they useful, and what do you learn?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
But I will remind people... How do you account for that from a motivational perspective? I mean, the scuttlebutt in the Canadian press is that Singh is propping up the government for personal reasons, say, regarding his pension. Now, you're making a much more political case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
But I can't understand how he can reconcile himself to himself because what he does is so at odds with what he says that it couldn't be more different. Like... If he allied him... The other thing I can't figure out, maybe you can shed some light on this, is like, when Singh agreed to act as Trudeau's support, why the hell didn't he negotiate a cabinet seat?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
I mean, why didn't he make it into a formal coalition? I know that's not... a traditional Canadian move, but it could happen. And so he sold his soul to Trudeau fundamentally, decimated his own party, and gained nothing in return, including what he could have gained had he bargained properly. That's how it looks to me. And what do you think about that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay, so what do you see on the horizon in the upcoming year? I want to talk about two things. What do you think is going to unfold, well, even in January, I mean, once Parliament reconvenes, and what you expect from Trudeau in terms of his political action, then what you expect...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
As the Liberal Party tries to reformulate itself, like I can't imagine a scenario, not really, where Trudeau leads Liberals into the next election. That seems to me highly improbable. It wouldn't surprise me if he has to be removed kicking and screaming, so to speak. But I'd like to hear your thoughts on what are Canadians to expect in the upcoming months?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
When does his pension kick in?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so that problem's off. That's right. So March is the earliest, as far as you can see, that election could be called.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
God knows how long that would drag on for during- You think approximately in March, no earlier than March, as far as you can foresee.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And so who do you see as contenders on the liberal side? I mean, Freeland, I think, is going to make a run for it. But Carney, do you think he's going to throw his hat in the ring? Now, he famously rejected the opportunity to become Trudeau's finance minister.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Why would have he decided to take that job to begin with?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, God, you can't imagine stepping into a more thankless role.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, Carney already has a reputation. It seems to me that if he has prime ministerial ambitions, he'd just wait for the Trudeau liberals to cataclysmically degenerate even further and then step in as the savior.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Yeah, I want to turn to that in some detail. Let me ask you about the parliamentary side too, because I think it'd be useful for people to know how you prepare for what you do in parliament and It isn't obvious to me that people exactly understand the business of being in opposition at a really practical level. What do you see as your major function?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, okay. So what do you see? Let's do this. I want to know what you see as, like... Frankly speaking, I don't envy you your job. Or the people, by the way, in the Trump administration, because it's very glamorous at the moment for them. But if they're going to cut government inefficiency in a serious manner, they're going to be doing hard administrative labor. for a very long period of time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Now, you're going to take the helm of Canada when there are five dimensions of trouble brewing. And serious, more serious trouble on all of those dimensions than I've ever seen plague Canada in my entire life as a Canadian. And it's worse than that because I suspect that the true picture is a lot more dismal than we know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so that's going to be dumped on you sometime in the next year. And so... How are you going to deal with that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Like, how are you going to deal with the fact that the easiest thing to do for Canadians and for the remnants of the legacy media will be to wait until the Trudeau government collapses completely, dumps the economic mess on your shoulders, and then two months later proclaim that it's your fault?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, and it will be your responsibility at that point. And so, like...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Oh, you definitely are going to get the hangover. There's no doubt about that. And that's a formidable set of problems. Now, as we've already pointed out, Canada has a tremendous number of natural and cultural advantages. But still, like, there's a lot of... Now, you have a Senate that's packed with liberal progressives. Let's call them by their proper name.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
You have a Senate that's packed with progressives. You have a judiciary that's packed with progressives. You have municipalities all across the country that are progressive. Even once you win, there's going to be a lot of opposition to your movement forward, and you're going to inherit all these problems. So, like...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
It's rough, man. And so, I mean, I want to know why you think you're ready. It's been two and a half years since we've had this conversation like this. And what's your plan? And who are the people you have in positions to implement your plan? And why should Canadians have confidence in them?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
I know you're there to push back against the government and to question and criticize, but it isn't obvious how you go about preparing for that or how you decide what issues you're going to focus on and how you distribute the responsibilities among your caucus and your broader team.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And are there businesses that you're talking to? These are larger businesses, I presume. Do they understand your concerns? Are they on board with your suggestions?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, the energy companies have been towing the green line, which seems to me to be a very bad strategy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Mm-hmm. So one of the remarkable things that transpired on the American front, and rather precipitously in the last three months of the election, was that a remarkable team of people aggregated themselves around Trump.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And that, well, that was heartening because each of those people had their own track record of stellar accomplishment, but it also helped decrease people's concern about Trump as a individualistic autocrat, let's say. Now, you're very well known in Canada, I would say, and increasingly internationally. I'd say that's less true of your team.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And so could you tell us, like, can you point to some people who will be key in your administration and highlight their, I'd like to know what you think their strengths are. So let's walk through the core elements of your team. And also, I'd like to hear a little bit about where you think you guys still need to learn and might need further development.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
It's worse than that because I suspect that the true picture is a lot more dismal than we know. Okay, so that's going to be dumped on you sometime in the next year.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Who do you have on the energy side, federally?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so your fundamental plan is to eliminate obstacles, let's say, bureaucratic obstacles, procedure obstacles, and to facilitate growth out of Canada's current malaise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And you see that... A lot of what you've talked about today is on the resource front. And you have premiers who are going to back that. Canada is also a sophisticated nation. We're more than hewers of wood, let's say, and drawers of water and purveyors of energy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Why don't you talk a little bit about... Let's presume, for the sake of argument, that you have two terms, eight years, let's say, which is not an... I think that that's a reasonable prognostication if things go at least moderately well, right? And so eight years from now, what is the candidate that you are planning to lead? What does it look like?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
It's a place where... So that's the best rejoinder to the Americans, I would say. Fundamentally, for Canadians who are concerned about undue American influence on Canada, the best possible rejoinder would be to make Canada a place so welcome to entrepreneurs that the U.S. would pale in comparison.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
That's a tall order because the Americans are deeply entrepreneurial and have a very business-friendly society. At every level, they reward entrepreneurial activity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right. So that's like $40,000 per Canadian, something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
So we can bring that back. $20,000 per Canadian, $80,000 per family.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
You know, I've heard great things about the tech graduates from the University of Waterloo. They're phenomenal. The people I know in Silicon Valley. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Yeah, well, they feel that they're the equivalent, at least, of the graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology. I mean, the Indians have had a massive influence in Silicon Valley. Yeah. Canadians, well, that's only one place where Canadians are not making nearly the use of their resources that they could. That's on the human resource front with regard to engineers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so what are you going to do when you take office? What does that look like practically? So what could Canadians watch you do in the first months of your administration that would help reassure them that this is going to happen?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And what will that look like, a crackdown on crime?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right, right. 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes. Right. Is that right? Yes. I didn't know that. Yes. Well, criminals specialize just like everyone else, right? And the best predictor of offense in the future is repeat offense in the past.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Yeah, well, that's exactly a consequence of that specialization. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so what's your evidence for that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Yeah, the best deterrent turns out to be probability of conviction rather than length of sentence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
So it doesn't matter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, Canada historically had a very effective immigration policy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Yeah, it was clearly viewed as a net benefit by the immigrants and by Canadians. Absolutely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
That's the shadow side of multiculturalism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right, so we can abandon the post-nationalist state rhetoric and presume that Canada does have a Western identity founded on the a priori principles of Western democracies and that that is a uniting ethos for the people that come here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right, so people are positive in consequence of that. So it's a lot easier to lead an organization when it's successful. Obviously, people are much more enthusiastic. Why do you think you're in that position? What's going on that's setting the stage for that? And I don't just mean the failures on the Trudeau side. I mean, what do you think you guys are doing right now?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
reinserted well invented even invented in many ways when i moved to toronto it was as race blind as any country as any city could be right right and that's flipped and it's flipped because of that obsessive concern with race right that was something we 100 did not need in canada right it's we we basically what would you say imported and invented racism in canada Right, as a consequence of policy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
All right. So we started the conversation with a description of the manner in which the intergenerational compact that makes up the nation had started to become violated or frayed, right? You said that young people in particular, you talked about middle-aged people and business people as well, but you said young people felt that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
even if they did act responsibly, and even if they did undertake the adventure of their life, the entrepreneurial adventure of their life, that the probability that they would be successful, even in the centrist, middle-class manner that Canadians had become accustomed to, that had become an unlikely possibility. That had become an unlikely outcome.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And so your vision, it sounds to me, is to at minimum restore that social contract so that young people who are interested in adopting responsibility and taking some risk can be assured that that will meet with success. And you think that you have the team that's in place that can make that possible. Yeah. So what have you... Let's close with this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
How are you a different person than you were two and a half years ago?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right, right. So that hasn't demoralized you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Right, right. All right, well, thank you, sir. It's very good to talk to you. Hopefully it won't be two and a half years before we speak again. No, we should do it more often. Yeah, well, it's a very good forum for apprising people of your plans and your progress.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, thank you, sir. It's been a privilege, far more than a price, definitely. And it continues to be that way. All right, so for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Mr. Polyev for another half an hour on the Daily Wire side, as you know. And I think probably what we'll do there is drill down a little bit on Canada-U.S. relations. The DW audience is... very American-oriented.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And so that seems to be perfectly appropriate. And it's something that we didn't cover in any great detail on this side of the conversation. And it seems particularly apropos, given that Trump has been making jokes about Trudeau being the governor of the 51st state and has also threatened to put 25% tariffs on Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Eight years from now, what does it look like? Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity and the privilege today to speak with Mr. Pierre Poliev, who is the leader of Canada's Federal Conservative Party, but also, barring catastrophe and God willing, Canada's next Prime Minister, a transition in power in this country. is likely to take place sometime between March and October or November of 2025.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
which I think is more of a ploy than a genuine threat, but it's definitely something that needs to be discussed. And so we'll talk about the trials for Canada of having the Americans as their southern neighbor, but also the immense opportunities that go along with that. Well, we occupy the same continent, so it'd probably be best if we got along, you know, swimmingly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
So that's what we'll discuss on the Daily Wire side. So be more than welcome to join us there. Thank you again, sir.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
So every day when I'm in Parliament... So that's a very local vision in a sense, right? It doesn't have the grandiosity of an international utopian vision, for example. It's very down-to-earth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Despite producing all that nasty carbon dioxide.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so there's a lot of distrust, generally speaking, in relationship to, I would say, establishment organizations and political elites all across the West. A lot of that well-earned. Why should Canadians believe that the vision that you just laid out is something that you hold personally dear and not merely, what would you say, a set of carefully calculated campaign slogans?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so one of the things that's been very distressing to observe, I would say, and I'm going to use the UK as an example. I mean, the UK had 14 straight years of conservative government. Yeah. And, you know, as far as I'm concerned, thank God for that, because it could have been labor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
But having said that, they fell 100% prey to the blandishments of the net zero types and brought forward really a catastrophic energy policy. And the UK is suffering dreadfully for that. And their immigration policy, I mean, Keir Starmer apologized for it, which was something remarkable to behold. And so did Kemi Badenoch, who now runs the Conservatives in the UK.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Now, the reason I'm bringing them up as an example is because, Well, they were a conservative government, and they certainly didn't govern by anything approximating conservative principles.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
And so how do you feel about the probability that if the conservatives in Canada take power, that they'll be enticed into this global utopian delusion that seems to have enveloped so many leaders, kind of regardless of their political stripe? What do you think, if anything, can inoculate you or has inoculated you against that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, elaborate. What do you mean?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Well, you can see the temptation. I mean, I think many leaders fall prey to the temptation to shine on the international stage, right? I mean, I can't remember who it was in the UK. I believe it was the previous Labour Party leader who said that decisions in Westminster were essentially irrelevant because all the important things were happening internationally, right? And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
if people are involved in status climbing and they hit the national pinnacle, as always, then there's the international world to, you know, what would you say, to dominate or to impress. And that's, I think, that the power of that temptation or even of that peer pressure can't be underestimated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
Okay, so now you've been, these events, these 600 events that you've gone to, so let's say that's something approximating 1,000 to 1,200 since we last talked. You spent a lot of time speaking to, and I presume listening to, ordinary Canadians. I heard you made a speech in the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
511. Canada's Next Prime Minister | Pierre Poilievre
I heard you make a speech in the House of Commons that went viral in the last couple of weeks, and you spoke very persuasively on behalf of working class Canadians. And so tell us what you've learned, what you've heard over the last couple of years, and how that's shaped you and changed you, let's say, as you've moved from...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Well, the Democrats didn't exactly cover themselves in glory with regards to their support for Israel after October 7th. Quite so. So, you know, I think the Israelis understand more clearly because of necessity which side their bread is buttered on, let's say. Yeah. But, like, this really is... It's really a pernicious twist, right? Because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
I do see the victimizer-victim narrative driving this radical increase in left-wing antisemitism. And I don't see any way... That's one way of understanding it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
So there's that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Four hours later, Barry Weiss wrote to me and said, you should talk to Terry Glavin about his recent article. And I thought, well, she thinks so too. And so, well, so we did that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yes, and also the fact that when you describe the trajectory of the left, you're also now describing the trajectory of the federal liberals, which wouldn't have necessarily been the case for the last 10 years. Well, here's how it goes. Okay, lay it out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
With the collapse?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And Terry probably made me more pessimistic about Canada's future than I was, which is really saying something because after nine years of the unmitigated catastrophic disaster of the Trudeau administration, I was already plenty pessimistic. But he detailed out, for example, the pernicious effect of the Chinese Communist Party on the political situation federally in Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
So how do you see that in parallel with the politicization of Israel like the pro-Hamas movements in Canada. There's things running in parallel here. We talked about the victim-victimizer narrative. We talked about the, what would you say, the alliance between the progressive left and the claim that Zionism is part of the colonial movement, which includes Canada and the U.S.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Now you've introduced Canada's role in the U.N. and our historical allegiance with the U.N. How do you see those tangling together?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And I was less cognizant of the depth of that than I was after the podcast. So you can listen and weep if you're Canadian. But, you know, again, that is also something with international implications, because it's not as if the Chinese are only... producing their machinations to the detriment of the West in Canada. It's a threat to the West in general.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
So Canada's historical alliance... It becomes susceptible to it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Okay, so let me summarize that and tell me if I've got it right. So we've seen the rise of this progressive insistence that projects like Canada and the United States, et cetera, and Israel are part of this colonial, capitalist, oppressive enterprise. Now, that's permeated Canadian society to some degree, but it's also permeated the UN.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And Canada has been historically aligned with the UN, and our foreign policy has been determined by that alliance for a very long time. Well, influenced then, if not determined, influenced. And that was a matter of pride in Canada when the UN was a quasi-functional organization, let's say. But so you see the emergence of that post...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Soviet Union Marxist-inspired colonial rhetoric in the UN and in Canada, and the fact that Canada's been allied with the UN has also shaped our foreign policy in a rather unthinking manner, especially under Trudeau, who has no, what would you say, has what? No knowledge, no imagination for, like, how do you explain?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
He was the poster boy for the... He is the poster boy for the progressive movement internationally, I would say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And he is the... Well, and the narcissism element, you know, you talked about him to some degree as an empty drum, let's say, and I have made reference to him as a narcissist. I mean, my observation in that regard was driven by the manner in which he adopted the leadership of the Liberal Party, because I felt at the... I'd like your opinion about this...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
When he emerged, I thought, I kind of had two... I was of two opinions, right? People went to him and made the case that he would be a credible and popular leader of the Liberals, not least because of his name-brand recognition. And I can imagine...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
being in that position, let's say, and thinking, OK, this is a risky enterprise because I don't have the CV that would indicate that I'm capable of running a G7 country. But if I don't run, then the conservatives who were my father's foes, let's say, and aren't aligned with me politically, have a really good crack at victory. And if I put my name forward, maybe we can forestall that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And then maybe I could put my nose to the grindstone, and I could learn. I could surround myself with high-level experts, and I could learn to play the part if I was open to that kind of learning. Okay. That's an unlikely scenario, that one. But he did, in fact, adopt it. But he didn't do any of that, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And so Canada is a strange canary in the coal mine. We talked about, well, the pro-Hamas protesters in Canada, the absolute devastation of Canadian universities, the terror that Canadian Jews are feeling, tiny minority of Canada's population, much smaller, by the way, than the Muslim population, which is relevant in this instance, given what's happened in Palestine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yes, well, he's charming, and he's elegant, and he's good-looking, and he knows how to behave in public, and he's got an easy smile, and women find him essentially irresistible. Very photogenic, very charming, as you say. Well, and he's been in that milieu his whole life, and he's been groomed for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Tell that story for the viewers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
He was a Harvard professor at the time when they invited him back to Canada. He'd been down in Massachusetts for like 20 years, something like that. Yeah, and a lot of people said, well, you're not really a Canadian. He'd been out for quite a while.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Well, he's certainly much more credible as a leader of a G7 country than Justin Trudeau, at least on the basis of his... Yeah, what we've got basically, you know, it's so difficult to explain this to people from away.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Under whose advisement did he bring in McKinsey? Do you know? Like, was that his idea? I don't imagine. Well, it is a small town.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
We talked about, well, our sorrow as older Canadians to see our country descend into this kind of 1930s-like Kristallnacht demonstrating that characterized Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver and Calgary and things we never saw, never thought would happen in Canada, and the threats to Canada's integrity economically, politically and ethically in general.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
You know what I mean?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
It's just the Chinese Communists. You know, what they kill, 100 million people. Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Well, people were optimistic. Because he was so glamorous, right? We were also optimistic, I think, in the West for a reasonable amount of time that if China integrated itself into the Western economy, that they would liberalize across time. Some of us were. Well, it was a case you could put forward if you were aware with all due caution of the potential risks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Right, but... Yeah, that's what I'm told. Look, I'm trying to give the devil his due here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Okay, so now we've got three things operating here. We've got the rise of this kind of neo-Marxism. We've got the UN influence, and now we have the China nexus, right? This is all shaping what's happening in Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Right, and there's background rumors about a number of liberal MPs being unduly influenced on the financial side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yes, well, that was evident in many of his pre-election utterances.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
With no identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Terry's Substack is available at The Real Story on the Substack site, and that's something that should be of substantial interest, well, not only to Canadians, but to people in general. So check that out. And, well, welcome to a relatively dismal discussion of the situation in Canada, and by implication, the rest of the West. Well, as you know, I reached out to you for a variety of reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Ah, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
How do you do nationalists? Where do you get that idea, like Trudeau? Because, first of all, it's an idea. So it's surprising he had it at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Anyway, where were we? Okay, well, we're weaving a web here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
There's no national interest by definition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yeah, definitely. They're the canaries in the coal mine. They are, and that's very true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
It was unbelievable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Oh, I didn't know that twist on the story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
But the most compelling, I would say, and immediate was the article that you just wrote in the Free Press, which is, I would say, a rather damning screed, all things considered. And I'm very interested in that particular issue. And I'm very much looking forward to discussing that with you and the sorry state of Canada in general. So maybe you could start by just outlining, well, how...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
How do you understand the relationship between, okay, so now we have a lot of balls in the air. We have the post-national state. We have the idea of the colonialist state. We have the perversion of the UN. We have the rise of neo-Marxism in Canada. we have the pernicious influence of the Chinese communists on Trudeau's campaign and his worldview right from the beginning, stemming from his father.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Okay, so now we have to take all that, and we have to tie it back to this rise in anti-Semitism. Now, the nexus there, at least in part, is the colonial, the ideology of colonialist state.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Turtle Island being the name for Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yes, I'm sure that it has like nothing to do with indigenous.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
What article I'm referring to and why you wrote it, and then let's go into the content of the article.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Right, because we need another dimension of complexity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Wasn't it Melanie Jolie who commented that people have to pay attention to the ethnic makeup of her writing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Former leader of the federal New Democrats, the Socialist Party of Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And I have, actually. A stunning response. Yeah. A stunning, amazing she would say that. Yeah. You know, I mean, first of all, it's reprehensible that that's the case. But the fact that she would be so blatant as to say it is really quite the miracle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yes, it's done that a number of times without him actually disappearing. No, I understand. I understand. For everybody watching and listening, his deputy prime minister resigned yesterday, also his minister of finance, and like the fifth powerful woman, so to speak, in his feminist cabinet that has had to abscond because, well, for a variety of reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
One of them apparently being that Justin Trudeau finds it impossible to deal with women who have anything approximating their own opinions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
The Yanks would have a lot of fun with that. You don't think being Trudeau's babysitter qualifies him to be finance minister of a G7? Just wondering, just wondering. I don't know. Yeah, well, that also speaks to this weird... We could throw this into the mix, too. I don't know what you think about this, but...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
It seems to me as well that the way that Canada is constituted, especially with its emphasis on bilingualism, that it dooms the entire country to domination by the 13% of French-Canadian bilingualism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yes, under something approximating a national identity. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Right, right. Or maybe even just the desire to keep the country together and functioning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
If we couldn't go all the way out for passion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Well, we've had more than half a million come in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yeah, by a substantial number.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Well, the whole world's upside down, so that's not surprising. So what the hell... Whatever the classic political distinctions were 15 years ago, whatever they are now bears no relationship to what they were 15 years ago.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Well, I don't know if he can comprehend it. I mean, I regard myself as a moderately sophisticated political observer, and you've made me more pessimistic today. Sorry. Well, I was already very concerned about the state of Canada because I think that... Well, I'll give you an example, and you probably know this already, but before Justin took office...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
for barry weiss and the free press i've had dealings with barry complex dealings with barry for quite a long time and i read terry's piece on the rise of anti-semitism and all of the associated what would you say pathological political and quasi-political movements that accompany by necessity, a rise in antisemitism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
GDP per capita in Canada was approximately at parity with the U.S. Okay, now our richest province, Ontario, the inhabitants of our richest province by per capita GDP are poorer than the average inhabitant of Mississippi.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Last thing I... The people in our richest province are poorer than the people in the US poorest state, right? That's a nine-year decline. It's an absolute bloody catastrophe. And we know Trudeau just announced a $62 billion deficit yesterday, which was $22 billion higher than the pessimistic estimate that his finance minister had come up with a few months ago.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Whatever state we think the country is in, is nowhere near as grim as the state the country's actually in. And what my fear for Polyev is that he's going to take power in October, because I think Trudeau will hang on to them, but maybe not. We'll see. And things will be revealed to be demonstrably worse than they are on multiple dimensions. You've outlined like six in our discussion today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And he will be saddled with the blame. And so he'll have a four-year term while he muddles through the absolute bloody nightmare that Trudeau has left. And then the liberals are connived their way back into power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Okay, so you're less pessimistic on that front than me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yes, well, yeah, I think the probability, like the most likely outcome in an October election in 2025 is that the Liberals are essentially decimated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
I mean, they could remember after Mulroney After the Mulroney government collapsed, essentially, I think the progressive conservatives were reduced to three seats federally, right? That could easily happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yeah, that's also happening in the UK. You know that... Farage fashioned his party after the Reform Party in Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Oh, definitely not, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Oh, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yeah, another hate crime.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yeah. You define that sort of thing after the fact.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
It's not liberal. So let's return to the beginning of our conversation and the topic that we had begun to investigate, because I'm curious about what it was over the last year. Tell me the story of your engagement with the rise in anti-Semitism. phenomenon by phenomenon, you know? I mean, the things that leaped out for me were the riots in Montreal. I mean, I just hate to see that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
I lived in Montreal for seven years. I loved Montreal. It was a great city. It was safe. Like, you could walk... A woman could walk anywhere in Montreal at three in the morning with no problem. There was no poor areas. And it had an unbelievably rich nightlife and culture and... It was a wonderful place to live, extremely peaceful, and it was diverse in the most positive possible manner.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And to see riots, to see the sorts of things that are happening in Concordia, the sorts of things that are happening on the streets in Montreal, it's just, it's appalling beyond belief. And then, of course, I was embarrassed as a former, well, a current, I suppose, professor at the University of Toronto. to see the encampments there and the encampments at McGill.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
I got my doctoral degree at McGill, and I loved McGill, and it was a great university. And so there's terrible things afoot in Canada that I would have never dreamed of occurring here. And, you know, I have a particular and personal animus against the Trudeau government for a What you've seen, like, I don't even know how politically aligned you and I are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Funny coincidence, that wouldn't happen to line up with Trudeau's... Strange how that works, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. With Trudeau's reign, economic catastrophe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
I mean, that's a complicated thing in today's world. But you're obviously very disturbed by what you're observing. And we have a lot of international listeners and viewers on this show. And so what have you seen emerge in Canada today?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And in the court of public opinion as well, not just legally or electorally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
How much knowledge do you think typical Canadians have about what's going on? Very, very little. And why do you think that is?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Well, the conservatives in the UK weren't very conservative for the 14 years they governed. Well, yeah, I mean... And we'll see what happens in Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Well, you know, one of the things our discussion is sort of highlighting, I think, is that Let's say you adopt the narrative that the center is corrupt and patriarchal and oppressive and Canada's destiny is post-national. Okay, now... One hypothetical problem with that is, well, what rises to take the place of the center?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And you've pointed to all sorts of things, like a demented kind of neo-Marxism, the rise of an authoritarian UN on the foreign policy front, the dire and dismal influence of the Chinese Communist Party, the rise of the Islamist faction of the increasingly large Muslim population.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And then, well, okay, that's for, and then the rise, and the associated rise of the, yeah, yeah, the colonialist narrative that casts Israel as king of the oppressive states, right? Well, so it's this fractionation, you know, once that center collapses, instead of everybody becoming free, you get this absurd fractionation, and then a war between different nations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
what would you say, centers of power. And we're trying to flesh out the pattern of that. I mean, you pointed to a lot of things that are going wrong simultaneously, and there's some thread that unites them, but some of it's just emblematic of a kind of chaotic collapse of identity, right? And so, and Trudeau's going to step out of this, leaving us in Canada in a terrible mess.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Let's talk about Polyev a little bit. I mean, I know him, and what I've seen so far, I'm happy about. I mean, I've been talking to Conservatives in Canada ever since 2016, really, when I sort of burst onto the scene in my opposition to Bill C-16. And the Conservatives that I talked to eight years ago were a much more timid bunch than the Conservatives that are emerging in Canada now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And so, Polyev and Daniel Smith, they're both tough people. And so, that's heartening as far as I'm concerned. Whether Polyev is in a position to right the ship that Trudeau has inverted, that's a whole different question. I mean, I wish him well, but I'm also pleased in a, what would you say, personal sense that I don't have his job.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Because, I mean, I look at Canada with a kind of horror at the moment because... We are in very bad shape economically. And, I mean, just the fact that just Canadians now make 60% as much as the average American, and our real estate is twice as expensive. Yeah, and the trajectory is downward, right? And I think it was, was it World Economic Forum or the World Bank? I don't remember which agency.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
their projection for Canada was worst performing economy over the next 30 years in the G7. Well, and that's on top of the fact That's adjacent to the fact that if Canada had its act together in anything approximating a realistic manner, at least the West could be rich beyond belief, because it's definitely the case that the world is dying, fighting for our natural resources.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And I mean, you saw the fact that the German chancellor and the Japanese prime minister came cap in hand to Trudeau and said, Give us natural gas. How about some natural gas for your friends there, buddy? And his argument was, I can't make a business case for that. And the thing is, that was before Canadians re-elected him. And they just re-elected the NDP and British Columbia.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And so I look at Canada and I think, we're in serious trouble and we have by no means even begun to learn our lesson. And that's a relatively terrifying prospect.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Because there's another dimension of complexity that tears Canada apart, which Canada is in such bad shape that when we're talking about threats to Canada, we didn't even mention the separatists. Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And, yeah, I mean, I... Well, the Canadian, or the Quebec independence movement would never regard itself as post-national. Right. I mean, far from it. Far from it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Okay, so now, why did you feel compelled to shed light on rising anti-Semitism? Why is that something... Like, you talked about a lot of things today that could have... occupied your attention and obviously have.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Now, you and Barry at the Free Press put a lot of time and effort into this particular article, and it's a pretty hard-hitting article, and it's quite distressing, if you have any sense at all. Why is it the phenomenon of rising anti-Semitism, or is it even anti-Semitism? Is it the dominance of the pro-Hamas movement? Is it the rise of the radical left? Is it like, where...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Why did you focus on antisemitism per se, given the range of your concerns about Canada? Why did you bring that to international attention, let's say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Okay, now, and do you see that as a canary in a coal mine phenomenon? Yeah, you could put it that way. I know you said that that's not all of it, and fair enough.
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508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yeah, yeah. Well, tell me, it's funny, you know, because I read your article, because I follow the Free Press, and I've had some dealings with Barry Weiss, and positive dealings with Barry Weiss. Complex, but positive dealings with Barry Weiss. And I read your article and I thought, I should probably talk to Terry about this article. and maybe Barry too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And then like four hours later, she wrote me and she said, you know, I really think you should talk to Terry about this article. And so, you know, that was propitious, as was the fact that I'm out on the West Coast here so I can talk to you directly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yeah, well, I'm shocked by what's happened to Canada. I mean, one of the precipitating factors in my recent move to the United States was Bill C-63. I don't know if you've managed to delve into the weeds with regards to Bill C-63, but it's a bill that's so awful that every time I read it, I think, because I'm not a lawyer, I think, there's no way I'm understanding this properly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
You know, and then I read it again and I think, yeah, well, you know, usually I can understand what I'm reading. And this is I mean, it's such a dense web of stunning, incompetent malevolence because it starts with these pronouncements about predicting children from online education. exploitation and pornography.
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508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Simultaneously, of course, the biggest pornography network in the world operates out of Canada, right? That's Pornhub, which operates out of Montreal. To call it a despicable organization is to barely scrape the surface. Trudeau and his minions were the least bit serious about protecting children from online pornography. There's a lot better places they can start than Bill C-63.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
But virtue signaling at the beginning, virtue signaling at the end, we're protecting children. It's like, yeah, I don't think you are. But then in the middle, there's all these clauses detailing out first the construction of a bureaucracy, which as far as I can tell, would have unlimited power All the power of the court and the power of unlimited growth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And it says right in the bill that that court system, a new parallel court system, would not be bound by the traditional standards of evidence. That's right. I read that and I thought, what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Well, they'd succeeded with me. Well, you haven't shut up. No, but I really thought through Bill C-63. Like I've already had my fair share of trouble with the Ontario College of Psychologists because they have weaponized, they have allowed activists to weaponize their complaint process.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And what could be done to be under the auspices of Bill C-63 make what happened with the college, who I've managed to successfully battle off so far, look like nothing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yeah, that's perfectly in keeping with the way they... And this is all about just shutting people up.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
So that would include support for the fact of Israel's existence? The mere support for the fact of Israel's existence as a Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Let's tie that into Bill C-63. Yeah, well, there it is. Well, so in Bill C-63, there's a provision, which I've read several times, that if...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
I am afraid, because that's the language in the bill, that Terry might utter something hateful in the next year, so let's say that would be your support for the existence of Israel, then I can bring you in front of a provincial magistrate, and he can fit you with an electronic bracelet, and you can be confined to your home for a year.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And all of your social media posting will be disallowed, and whoever you see will be regulated. And, and this is something I just can't figure out at all, it's so preposterous that it beggars belief, you will be required to donate body fluid on a regular basis to your physician to have it monitored on a daily basis. I wasn't aware of this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Absolutely, to make sure that you're not consuming anything illegal or anything intoxicating. Now, I think what happened... Okay, that is beyond the pale.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Well, I think the reason is... I'm going out to get a gun license. Where the hell did they get this? But I think probably where they got it from was legislation on domestic abuse.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Because if you want to protect a... If you want to mitigate the probability of domestic abuse, limiting the abuser's alcohol consumption is actually a logical move. I'm not claiming that on ethical or legal grounds. I just mean that alcohol does increase the probability of abuse substantively. And I can't imagine where else they would have got the idea. But that's in that bill in black and white.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
So we have not only hate crime—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yeah, well, I have many other reasons for being there, but— You see, I wonder about that, because my experience with the Ontario College of Psychologists, I would say, suggests otherwise. Because none of my professional colleagues, including physicians, with pretty much zero exception, have stood up publicly and said that what's happened to me is wrong. And I know why. Are they afraid?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Of course, they come to me privately. And why are they afraid? Well, it's very, very simple. They're afraid because the professional colleges have unlimited power of regulation over the over the members of regulated professions, which is pretty much what my Supreme Court challenge denial indicated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And if a professional is brought to task, let's say, by their professional college and loses their license then, They're terrified.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And I looked at C63 carefully, and it would produce a parallel bureaucracy, a bureaucracy that would regulate the speech and conduct of all Canadians in almost precisely the same way that the professional colleges regulate the speech and conduct of regulated professionals. I don't think Canadians would stand up. I've seen no evidence that they will.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
So, now, I do understand that Trudeau's on his way out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Well, I think we've seen the answer to that question. I'm not saying this with any... I'm not happy about this. There's no pride in this. I think it's appalling. And I've talked to many physicians in particular, because it's mostly physicians I've talked to who are terrified of the Ontario College of Physicians, for example, because they'll... make their life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
I mean, this bloody court cases for me has gone on eight years. It's eight years. It's cost me like $600,000. And it's not like I'm winning. Like they can't take me out because I have independent sources of income and a reasonable public voice. But You have to be in a pretty unique position to be able to withstand that sort of lawfare for that amount of time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Anti-Zionist?
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508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Like I don't practice as a clinical psychologist anymore. And that became impossible in like 2017, just like being a professor became impossible. So like these, the forces that can be brought to bear against you if you dare open your mouth are more than most people can or will bear. And I can see why. You know, I had three sources of income. when I opposed Bill C-16 and I lost two of them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Right, the third one was entrepreneurial and it was under my control, but two was a lot and three would have been, well, catastrophic. And so if you only have one and that's your professional practice, well, it's not surprising that people are cowed and intimidated into silence. And so, okay, well, we have to wrap up on the YouTube side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side is, well, we'll continue our discussion about Canada. I'm curious about your thoughts about, well, the Conservatives under Pierre Polyev. I want to know what you think about him. You said that you're habitually an optimist and that you're still optimistic about Canada in general. And there are reasons to be optimistic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
I mean, Canada is a remarkable country and... The run-of-the-mill Canadian is a decent and law-abiding, orderly, trustworthy person. And that's not trivial. But there are some serious cracks in the foundation, more than I've ever seen in my lifetime by a lot. I mean, you named five of them. And as we said, we deprioritized the Quebec sovereignists, right? So you can see how...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And they've been a fundamental threat to Canadian integrity for like 40 years. So on the Daily Wire side, let's turn our attention to Canada's future, dire and positive, you know, because we can flesh out both alternatives.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And I think for you international people who are listening, you know, the reason to be concerned about Canadian politics, which have actually become of some interest internationally in the last nine years, is because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Like the Jews in Canada and in the U.S., maybe in the West worldwide, Canada is also a canary in the coal mine because Justin Trudeau is a poster boy for the progressives worldwide. And whatever strange political tangents we're
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
meandering down in Canada are isomorphic with the political threats that exist in the UK and the United States, although now less to some degree, Australia, New Zealand, the West in general. And so delving into what's happening here and how that might be rectified is an enterprise that might be worthwhile on the international front as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
So join us on the Daily Wire side if you're inclined to do that. Terry, thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Yeah, really nice reading you. I suppose, very nice to meet you too. Thank you very much. Yeah, and I certainly appreciate the article in the Free Press. I've been writing about What would you say? Pathological group conflict for a very long period of time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And it's a terrible thing to see it rear its head in Canada. It's a terrible thing. And it's very useful to draw attention to it. And you did that very effectively internationally. And it was very good of Barrie to publish it as well. And hopefully it'll clue more Canadians into what's going on and into the seriousness of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
for the Jews, which is not trivial, as he pointed out, in and of itself, but also as a bellwether for just exactly where we're headed. All right, sir.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
He detailed that out quite extensively in this Free Press article, which is notable not only for its description of a relatively radically transformed Canada on the social front, on the political front, the ethical front, but also because Terry was pointing to a phenomenon, the rise of antisemitism in the West in general after the atrocities of October 7th.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
I want to read something from your article, Kay, that's directly relevant to that. It's from a section called It Was Like a Dam Burst. And so this is right after October 7th. And these are comments by Robert Krell, who's the former director of postgraduate education in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
The impression that the violence unfolding around them is somehow invisible to the state responsible for their protection has overwhelmed not only relative newcomers to Canada, like Rugheimer, man you discussed, but also Jews who have lived in Canada for decades. Then you refer to Robert Krell. And next section is,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Almost none of these verbal or physical assaults, okay, so we're talking about repeated demonstrations, for example, all across the country, long-term occupations of the university campuses, most particularly at McGill and at the University of Toronto, with like sporadic outbursts at Concordia, which is its own kind of rat hole, and then in a variety of other places across Canada, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Riots in Montreal as well, downtown demonstrations in Toronto. Almost none of these verbal or physical assaults are coming from white supremacists, a very rare breed in Canada, or anti-Semites of the right-wing variety. Now, those people exist. I mean, when I joined forces with the Daily Wire, one of whose...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
lead spokespeople, let's say, is Ben Shapiro, who's probably the most well-known Orthodox Jew, American Orthodox Jew in the world. The right-wing anti-Semites came after me in droves, and they had been doing that for years for a variety of reasons. So those people exist, and they're entirely detestable in 15 different dimensions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
But they're not organized in the same manner as these left-wing anti-Semites, and they don't pose anywhere near the danger. And, well, this is what you describe in your article. They are being carried out by self-described progressives, Arabs, and often recent immigrants who are operating inside an ideological framework of settler colonialism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
which casts Canada, the US, Australia, and most of all Israel, as irredeemably illegitimate constructs of imperialism, capitalism, genocide, and racism. It's an ideology that has found a comfortable home in Trudeau's Canada. Okay, so let's zero in on this a little bit. So I wrote an article about Jewish support for the Democrats about three months ago for a UK publication.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Hey, everybody. I had a chance today to sit down and speak in person with Terry Glavin, who's one of Canada's premier journalists. And I've been following his work for quite a long time, as has many Canadians. But there was a particular reason for talking to him now, and that was that he penned a piece called
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
It was, I tried to publish it at the National Post and at the Telegraph, and they'll usually pretty much take whatever I send them, but they found this one too contentious. That's odd. Yeah, you saw it. No, I say that's odd. Where did it appear finally? It appeared in, oh, let's see. I can't, you know, it escapes me momentarily.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
And so not only is it a detailed analysis of something particular that's happening in a particular place and country, Canada, it's also a broader description of a movement that threatens the integrity of the West in a fundamental way, much more broadly. And so I was very interested in the article. And when I read it, I thought I should really talk to Terry and maybe to Barry on my podcast.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
I'll send it to you. But let me just tell you, it's just, because in the U.S., the support among Jews for the Democrats is very high. It historically runs 75 to 80 percent. Now, you draw some relationships in your article, which I think are very much worth drawing, because
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
I don't know, maybe this took the Jewish liberal community by surprise, but it's completely unsurprising if you understand the progressive ideological agenda that the Palestinians were cast as victims. And if people are going to play out a victim-victimizer narrative, which is a progressive narrative, the Jews are always going to be cast as victimizers because they are
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
overrepresented in positions of authority and preeminence, radically so. And now, my interpretation of that is that the competent rise to the top, and there's a variety of reasons for excessive Jewish competence. And it's marked, for example, in the fact that the Jews have produced an overwhelmingly disproportionate number, let's say, of Nobel laureates. And so it's a culture that produces
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
places tremendous emphasis on intellectual ability, and there's more to it than that. But the alternative hypothesis is that it's a cabal, and it's a cabal that dominates, and it's a worldwide cabal, and... If you buy the victim-izer-victim narrative, which is key to the progressive agenda, then the Jews are going to be at the top of the list.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Well, if the rule is, if your ethnic group is overrepresented statistically, you're an oppressor. then that puts the Jews at the top of the oppressor hierarchy. Okay, so now, one of the things I'm curious about, I'd like your thoughts about this, is that I don't exactly understand why the Jewish community didn't see this coming. Because this is a logical consequence of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
508. Anti-Semitism and the Fall of Trudeau's Canada | Terry Glavin
Yeah, well, I think that's true for many people. They didn't vote for Trump.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
We hear a lot of noise about how cows are contributing to global warming, which is an idea that's really struck me as rather specious right from the beginning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And I found someone to talk to, and there's other people who I could talk to as well, named Joel Salatin. And Joel has written a number of interesting books, and this will give you a sense of him right off the bat. The latest one was Homestead Tsunami, which is a description of, well, the dawning interest in homesteading as a potential choice of life, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Because you're allowing them to graze. Because we're allowing that forage. Why doesn't everybody do that? If there's five times the efficiency gain, it seems self-evident.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Okay, so now you have this land. It's all full of gullies. It's not doing very well. You start planting trees to rehabilitate it. What do you do about the gullies? How do you get grassland to grow? How do you introduce the cows? And then tell me more about the electric fencing and how you learn to move them, move the cattle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
A lot of the real steep— Now, you built ponds where you took the silt out of? Yes, yes. So now— So the erosion had washed the soil, and you found where that had washed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Are you filling it in with... Do you fill it in with filler first and then topsoil?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
He's also written, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, which I love as a title, You Can Farm, which is partly what we discussed, and Pastured Poultry Prophets, which is a book that documents a particular form of agrarian lifestyle. as a solution to the economic problems that young people might be facing. So it's a pathway to a profitable, sustainable, and socially useful economic future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So it's relatively straightforward if you have the machinery. Yeah, that's right. And you had enough capital for the machinery.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Okay, now I wanted to ask you specifically about that, too, because we hear a lot of noise about how cows are contributing to global warming, which... you know, is an idea that's really struck me as rather specious right from the beginning. Because, like, the buffalo did that too. Like, I see so huge herds of grazing animals are bad for the planet. That strikes me as highly unlikely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So, and I know they talk about methane, but, you know... People talk about a lot of things. Now, you said that you regenerated the ground with the cattle and with the careful management of grass, and now you're producing, say, a foot of topsoil on top of this rock. I presume that's also a carbon sink.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Plants take in carbon because they're made out of carbon.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Yeah, well, one of the things that's really struck me as incomprehensible about the carbon debate is... So I know, for example, that over the last 30 years, something like that, the planet has greened quite radically, especially in semi-arid areas. And that seems to be a consequence of increased... atmospheric carbon dioxide, some of which is arguably human-made.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
But the net consequence of that, it's so interesting to see, is immense green. It's something like 20% of the Earth's area, which is like, that's a lot. And the fact that it's in semi-arid areas means that exactly the desert-like areas that were supposed to expand, according to the climate doomsayers, have actually shrunk. And I've been thinking that through
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Again, more recently, I talked to Patrick Moore, for example, and he was one of the founders of Greenpeace. Moore has produced these, he's not the only one, but he's produced these graphs of carbon dioxide levels across like 500 million years instead of 250. And we're definitely at a carbon dioxide low. And so if we tap it up even a little bit, it makes a big difference.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And so we spent a fair bit of time talking about all of these things to do today. And so if you're interested in that, then this is the podcast for you. Well, Mr. Selliton, why don't you start just by telling everybody what you do? Let's start from the beginning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
But that's all to say that... Plants like carbon dioxide a lot. And then when there's more of it, they grow and sequester it. And they do that rapidly. And then I read a paper here recently that indicated that the typical climate model underestimates the rapidity at which plants utilize carbon dioxide by... 30%, which is like a fairly large margin of error.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And so it just seems to me to be self-evident that if we set the preconditions, plants would mop up any excess carbon dioxide in like no time flat. And so you're saying that if we improved even our grazing habits, so that grass was allowed to grow longer before it was grazed on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
You don't need much of a percentage in how effective the plants sequester carbon to take whatever excess carbon there is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So... So where do these ideas come from then, given... Because we here follow the science all the time, but then if you look into the science, first of all, there's plenty, there's a plethora of opinions, right, at minimum. And so, and just... Now and then, you know, when you're looking at data, you kind of have to stand back and use your head a bit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And you start from maybe the presumption that any idea that large grazing herds are bad for the planet is to be regarded with extreme skepticism to begin with. Because large grazing herds are exactly the sorts of things that the environmental types worship when they're happening naturally in Africa. So you can't have it both ways. That's right. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
I've just always thought the idea that pastured animals, properly pastured, being bad for the planet somehow, and that's as bad as equating factory farming with regenerative farming, for example, because they're not the same thing at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
regenerated soil that, well, not even soil, they actually made rocky areas into soil that could then be, well, first of all, a carbon sink, if you care about such things, but also productive grazing land. And a big part of the trick there is to manage the grass properly and to move the cattle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Oh, yes. Well, that sounds plenty scientific.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Are they moved too?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Okay, so the chickens follow the cattle and you move the chickens as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So this then allows... So why sanitation exactly? Delve into that a bit more, because while the cows are are manuring the land as they graze, and the sanitation problem, it doesn't decompose rapidly enough without the birds? Like what exact role do the birds play?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Okay, so you move the cattle for two reasons then, actually. One is to allow the grass to maximize in terms of density, but also to allow the land to clean. Yes. So that when the cows come back, they're eating grass, right? Rather than their own waste products. That's right. And the chickens help with that. And then you collect the eggs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Okay, so now the problem comes down to, essentially, how do you move the cattle, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So let's get an idea of the... So let's say we have a field and you want to move the cows. What do you have that's permanent that's fencing exactly?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Because they know the food will be better?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Now they're advantaged to doing it at the same time every day because you establish a habit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Animals love routine. So do people, as it turns out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So why do you need defenses at all then? Why do you need defenses at all? I mean, it stops them from going back.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So how did you figure out what to plant as well?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Okay. So how did that get started then? I mean, because we were talking about the gullies and the rocks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Well, all the plants that weren't good at that don't exist. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And why as many different kinds of plants as possible?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So they take advantage of all the available sun and resources if you have a diversity of plants.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Right, right, so that means, oh, so that's so cool because that means that you can- So the diversity Right. So you can maximize for biodiversity at the plant level. Yes. And that means that you have a mix of plants that can take advantage of different kinds of soil and different growing conditions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And your pasture is resilient because there's multiple species. And so some will grow better in dry years and some will grow better in wet years and cold versus warm. And so your plants are resilient. And then the animals, because they have a varied diet, can derive from that variation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
the balance of nutrients that will make them grow best and be healthy, and that gives them a higher nutritional value. That's correct. So that's a good deal, and you don't have to plant. Okay, well, let's go back to the planting idea just for a minute. I mean, are there ways that you could augment the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
productive quality of your pasturing by doing some planting or is it just better to leave it natural?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Okay, how does the dollar return on your cattle, say, compare to what you could make while using the land for other purposes? If you had a monoculture, for example, if you planted corn. I'm very curious about the economics of this because farming is... famously a very low margin, high labor enterprise, very difficult enterprise. And so there's a variety of things you can do with land.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And obviously many people plant massive monocultures and they use chemicals and they use chemical herbicides. And I'm not a priori critiquing that. You decided to go with cattle and chickens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
That's for the pawns, the ducks, I presume?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Yeah, of course. Well, that's typical for many, many, many enterprises.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Right. The marketer is the one who lets everybody know that the products exist, which is very important. And then the last one? Is distributor. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Really what you are is a communicator and a network builder. Well, why do I need to be fluent in my communication? Why do I need to write? Why do I need to learn to speak?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Right. So he takes all the risks in the natural world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
But they're also not dependent on any single farmer. That's right. That's right. So their risk is distributed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Urban drop points. Farmer's markets?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Relatively low volume, I would presume.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Yeah, well, marketing is such a funny enterprise because people... First of all, it's not even named very well because what you're doing when you're a marketer, really what you are is a communicator and a network builder. And, you know, people say things like, well, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a pass to your door. And that's a lie. You're absolutely right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
It's just not true because... First of all, it isn't obvious they want a better mousetrap, and they're pretty set in their mousetrap habits. Plus, they don't know your damn mousetrap exists, and they actually don't care.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So one of the things that shocked me when I started making consumer products, which was like 30 years ago, was because I thought I'd invented this process with my colleagues that help people identify and hire more effective employees. And the first error I made was thinking that large companies actually cared about that, which they don't at all, which is quite a shock.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
They say they do, but they actually don't when it comes down to it. But more than that, I also realized that if you have something new, that's actually a... a risk and not an advantage because most people are so risk averse they won't try anything new they want to know that many other people are using this and haven't died because of it and then No one knows your damn product exists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And so I would say for the average enterprise, you tell me what you think about this with regard to your enterprise. The product is 5% of the problem and communication about the product is 90% of the problem. I know that leaves 5% for noise, but like it's exactly the opposite of what most people would think. Marketing is communication and it really matters.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
No, not at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Okay, well, tell me how you guys did that. And I'd like to know more about the details of your network. You talked about many inroads for sales.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Okay, but both of you wanted to go have a farm life. Oh, yeah. Why did she want that? I mean, did she come from a farming background? She wanted to be with me. Okay. Oh, well, fair enough.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
But did she come back? Yeah. She grew up on a farm. Okay. Okay. So she had some familiarity with that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And she had bought into the idea that you had put forward. Absolutely. And she was enthusiastic about it. Because that's important. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Well, that's probably the biggest reason. Marriage fails, all things considered.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
But that little- Well, that's not too bad to start a new business.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
A lot of new businesses fail. And the first part of it, when you're not making any money and you've got no network, what do they say? Getting from zero to one, that's very hard. That's right. One to two is still hard. Two to three is getting a little better.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Well, there's another issue there that you're highlighting that's extremely relevant with regard to our discussion of marketing. It's like one of the things that people don't understand, and this might be more true of people who, like, let's say, have an interest in practical matters like trades or even engineering. It's like, well, why do I need to be... fluent in my communication.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Why do I need to write? Why do I need to learn to speak? It's like, well, if 75% of your business problem is communication and it certainly is, right? What are you selling? What do you have to offer? How do you talk to people so you find out what your employees, that's right. How do you negotiate? How do you make contracts?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
All of that's like you, there isn't anything more worthwhile than you can learn to do than how to Get command of the language. And that's so interesting in your situation because you might think, well, that might be true except for farming. Now, I know you shouldn't think that, but it's just not true. No. Because communication is so crucial.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Right, right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
The second thing— Okay, so that's also something that we shouldn't skip over lightly. So I think the most valuable—I have millions of social media followers, and I don't know how many, 20 million, some, lots. Right, right. The most valuable of all the things we own are our mailing lists, and I think—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
I don't know what my mailing list has on it, 350,000 people, something like that, which is a pretty small fraction of the total social media network. But it's by far like if we're trying to advertise for tickets for a lecture. So you're going out there and you're collecting individual people who are interesting. Like how many people interested in what you're doing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
How many people like that did you need before you were successful?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So that's really worth knowing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So you just said something like with both those that's unbelievably worth noting because one of the things you can do in your family well, even for yourself, to promote positive change that's unbelievably effective. I'll give you an example of this. So there's a famous psychologist, B.F. Skinner. And B.F. Skinner was the father of reinforcement learning theory. And that's a big deal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
These large language models, these new AI systems, they're trained with reinforcement theory. So like this was a major deal. And B.F. Skinner was a master of this. And In World War II, he trained pigeons to guide missiles by pecking on photographs as they were flying across the sky, right? So Skinner could train animals to do anything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Now, he noted that you could use threat and punishment to shape an animal's behavior, but the best thing to use was targeted reward. And so what he would do is his animals were hungry because they had to be motivated to work for food pellets. And so he'd have a hungry animal,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Maybe you're trying, so imagine there's a rat in a cage and there's a little ladder and you want the rat to go up on the ladder and then walk across and go down the other side. It's pretty complicated behavior. So here's how Skinner would do it. He would just watch that rat. And as soon as it got near, as soon as it made a move near the ladder, he'd give it a food pellet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Right. Well, you're also an interdependent web with all of the... manufacturers that you're dependent on as well, right? And they're, they're cutting your, they're nibbling away at your profit margin, which of course they have to do as well to survive. Sure. But right. Okay. So your dad and your mom, your dad was an accountant and your mom was a school teacher. Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Then it would start hanging around the ladder. And when it was hanging around close to the bottom of the ladder, now and then it would put a paw up and he'd give it a food pellet. And then now the rat was doing this quite a bit. And then now and then it would do this, food pellet. But the key issue was that he was observing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And then when he got an increment of behavior in the direction he wanted, he signified that. Well, that's what you're doing with your customers, is you're paying very careful attention. And then one of your customers does something that you'd really like them to do more of. Mm-hmm. You notice, you tell them, you reward them for it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And then now the other thing you said that was very cool was that people are dying for this. It's like, if you watch people, you'll see that they do some tentative good things kind of secretly. It's like they're hoping that someone will notice, but generally people don't. And so they'll do something good that's a little bit extra. They'll do this with their boss or with their wife.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And generally people are kind of opaque to that. But if you notice that, You say, ha, with kids, you see this. With kids, you see like, I see that you spent a little extra time like putting away your Legos today. And like you moved all those Legos from there to there. And that was really good. I'd like to see more of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
The kid is just like, if you can catch them in the act, oh man, they're so happy about that. And so that's, so now you've got your hundred people who are on your side and you're watching them very carefully. And if they do, if they put in a good word for you, which they don't have to do, by the way, Yeah, you want to say, we saw that, we appreciate it. Here's a little gift. Thank you very much.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
That's all. You don't have to say, please keep doing it. That's right. That gets that exchange going, right? And those person to person, like one of the things we're very careful on tour, for example, I mean, I see thousands of people. My staff know this particularly. The rule for my staff is do not ever,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
annoy any of the people who are interested in coming up to me or being at the shows because yeah yeah because if you annoy one person they will tell a thousand people if you annoy a hundred people Enough, so they start talking about it. You're done. Your business is done.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's probably an underestimate. Well, and also people remember the negative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So they don't know anything about farming. Oh yeah, they do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
You don't want the decision cost, Stephen. No. No, or the risk. Nobody wants to make a decision. Well, the incremental benefit is basically zero. The risk that you, first of all, it's difficult. You know, there's a whole consumer literature on this, hey? So imagine, you might think that if you went into a shop, and here's your options. You have 200 shampoos to pick from, or four.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Okay, or one. Okay, people don't like one, because there's no choice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
But they don't like 200 either, and part of the reason for that is, Imagine there's the best one in 200. Okay, what's your chance you're going to pick that? You're going to pick the best one. One in 200. It's called paralysis of choice. Exactly, exactly. Paralysis of choice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
This is all about— Well, a customer is often someone whose eyes you want to pull wool over, whereas if you have patrons, let's say, you know— Then you treat them properly. You treat them hospitably and you're damn happy they exist and you want them to know that and you remember it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So that's another example of you identifying the problem that people have.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So here's some... We're hospitable. Here's some evidence. You can trust us. Try our product. You'll see it's high quality. Now, because you can trust us, there's a whole bunch of problems you don't have. That's right. Right. So you can solve them all in one fell swoop. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Well, and you said earlier, and this is very useful for everybody who's watching and listening to know, it's like, well, how do you sell effectively? Well, you know, the crooked used car salesman approach to that is,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
sell junk to idiots and laugh at them when you pull the wool over their eyes and that'll work once right right but you make an enemy and if you do that 50 times and they tell a thousand people you have 50,000 enemies and you're done and so what you want to do instead is tell people the truth and develop that relationship right and so and you also pointed out that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
You wanna tell stories to people so that they're interested in what you're doing and so they can come along in an adventure, but you also wanna listen to them So you know what their problem is. And so that's a really good way of thinking about sales is when you go out to sell, you're actually seeing if you can establish a partnership.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And you can't establish a partnership if you have nothing to offer. And you have nothing to offer unless the solution you have matches the person's problem. Exactly. Right, so you go and say, the first thing you want to know from someone new is, well, what's your problem? Yeah, what do you need? What are you looking for?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And if the answer has nothing to do with what you're selling, you should find someone else to talk to. You might be able to say, well, I know some people who could help you with that, but they're actually not someone you should partner with because your offering and their problem don't match. And then if you force that by convincing them or lying to them even, then...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Well, they're not satisfied because you didn't solve their problem. Plus, they're annoyed at you. Plus, even worse, if you do have a partnership with them, they're going to bend you towards their problem. And that's definitely not something you want. So you've got to think of the first sales approach as an investigation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
All right, well, look, this has gone by very rapidly, so let me do two things. I'm going to tell everybody what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side. It's something I would have liked to have done on the YouTube side here, too. I would like to talk to you a little bit about how people can... I would like to talk about...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
the practical steps that people could take if they're interested in knowing more about this, just conceptually or as a lifestyle, right? So let's do that on the Daily Wire side. I want to recapitulate what we've discussed and then give you an opportunity to add anything that you might want to this broader audience while you have the opportunity. So you talked about the fact that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
and there's so many things we could have touched on still, that there is an agricultural enterprise, which is roughly termed now something approximating regenerative farming, which requires the use of multiple species and a particular approach to pasture management.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
The pasture management is a diverse, natural landscape, multiple plants that's grazed upon by herbivores that move like they do when they're migrating, that you mimic artificially. You use multiple species to fill in the ecological niches. You use birds to track the herbivores, the cows. and to sanitize the ground that they've grazed on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
You rotate the cattle through use of paddocks around your land. You maximize the amount of product that your grasslands are producing so that that's hyper-efficient. You regenerate the soil so it gets thicker. That sequesters carbon. You produce high-quality meat, and you can do that profitably while you're pursuing a lifestyle that's enjoyable and serving a dedicated and committed customer base.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
That's about that. Anything else? That's pretty good. It is pretty good. It is pretty good. It is pretty good. And it's a good deal for everybody. It is. Yeah. And so you're still an enthusiastic advocate of this after 40 years as well. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Yeah, well, and we didn't.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
There's so many things that are advantageous to this that we didn't even discuss, too, because the approach that you're taking, if that was duplicated at a larger scale, also makes for a much healthier livestock with a much higher quality life and much more resilient farms and more decentralized food production and less reliance on chemicals and both fertilizers and pesticides.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And pharmaceuticals and pharmaceuticals. Well, right. And no antibiotic overutilization, which is a very major thing. And regeneration of the soil and carbon sequestration. So, you know, we hear all this nonsense at high levels among the globalists about the fact that agriculture is a net pollutant and that we have to radically...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
back, for example, on our meat consumption, which is something that's like, oh, I see. So everybody's going to have a little brain because they eat nothing but plants. That's your damn theory, right? And so, you know, you hear about these. If we're all eating beans, that might solve the gas problem. Yeah, well, that's also.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Well, apparently Bill Gates has a solution to that that's pharmaceutical as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, exactly, exactly. There's a put in the cart before the horse. And so it's very optimistic to hear about such approaches because they seem to be producing a variety of social goods simultaneously in a truly resilient and sustainable way. So, well, thank you very much, sir, for coming to talk to us today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And we'll turn to the Daily Wire side, and I think we'll go more into the nuts and bolts of this, maybe talk a little bit more about the issues of resilience and sustainability as well. But if you're looking for a practical guide to how this sort of lifestyle might be well, at least participated in, but possibly pursued, then join us on the Daily Wire site.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And thank you very much to the film crew here. Where are we today? Evanston? Evansville. Sorry, story to everybody in Evansville. Evansville, Indiana. Yeah, yeah. And so I had a show here last night. And so it's a lovely place and we've been happy to be here. And it was very good to meet you, sir. It was wonderful. Thanks very much for the conversation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Thanks to all of you on the YouTube side and join us over on the Daily Wire side for a continuation of this conversation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So I've been very skeptical about these ideas stemming from the WEF globalist types that there's something pathological about the agricultural sector and the dawning concern as well or the building concern about the notion that pasture animals like cattle, for example, are bad for the planet. That just seems to me to be absurd on the face of it. I'd have to see a lot of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
So he bought 100 acres that were open and 450 woodland. Yeah. So— Let's let everybody listening and watching know about farm size. So compared to traditional farms, let's say of the 1920s and compared to modern farms, how does the farm that your father purchased, how is it configured in terms of size, of comparative size?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And how much of the land, you talked about the gullies and the rock and the fact there was very little vegetation, how much of the 100 open acres was damaged in that way?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And why did he think that exactly? Like, I mean, lots of people do take that route. Some people make it profitable. And so why did your father, why had he decide, what was the alternative route precisely? And why did he decide to take that, especially back then?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
data, so to speak, before I would regard that as credible. I'm also interested in meat-based diets, for example, because they seem to be very health-promoting and highly nutritious. One of the things that I've wanted to do for a long time is to spend some time investigating the landscape of so-called regenerative farming.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Okay, so walk us through that. So a typical farm would have a fenced-off area, and the cattle will graze there. And the problem with that is they'll graze the vegetation right down to the ground, and then that's not good, right? And so—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
hypothetically, if you could imagine a huge circle, you could rotate them around the circle at some speed and they wouldn't be able to graze at some of it and that would grow in behind them. That's right. Then their waste products would also fertilize the land and the grass would stabilize, be stabilized against erosion. Yeah. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
And so, okay, so now you said you'd experimented with 10 days and then four and then one. And gradually got it down to where... Okay, so how do you build the electric fences and how do they move?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And Mark has been a investor in Silicon Valley circles for 20 years and is as plugged into the tech scene as anyone in the world. And the fact that he's decided to speak publicly, for example, about such issues as government, tech,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
the entire history of the productive West, let's say, is to ground young people who are smart and who are likely to be leaders in something approximating the religious and humanist, religious slash humanist slash enlightenment tradition. It's part of that golden thread.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Now, part of the problem I would say with the large language model systems is that they're hyper-trained on, they're like populists in a sense. They're hyper-trained on the, on the overproliferation of nonsense that characterizes the present. And the problem with the present is that time hasn't had a chance to winnow out the wheat from the chaff.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Now, what we did with young people is we referred them to the classic works of the past, right? That would be the Western canon, whose supremacy has been challenged so successfully by the postmodern nihilists. We said, well, you have to read these great books from the past, and the core of that would be the Bible, and then you'd have all the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
what the poets and dramatists whose works are grounded in the biblical tradition that are like secondary offshoots of that fundamental narrative. That'd be people like Dante and Shakespeare and Goethe and Dostoevsky. And we can imagine that those more core ideas constitute a web of associated ideas that all other ideas would then slot into.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You know, you could make the case technically, I think, that these great works in the past are mapping the most fundamental relationships between ideas that can possibly be mapped in a manner that is sustainable and productive across the longest possible imaginable span of time. And that's different than the proliferation of a multiplicity of ideas that characterize the present.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Now that doesn't mean we know how to weight, you know, so if you're going to design a large language model, you might want to weight the works of Shakespeare 10,000 times per word as crucial as, what would you say, the archives of the New York Times for the last five years. It's something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
There's an insistence in the mythological tradition that people have two fundamental poles of orientation. One is heavenward or towards the depths. You can use either analogy. And that's the orientation towards the divine or the transcendent or the most foundational. And then the other avenue of orientation is social.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
That'd be the reciprocal relationship that exists between you and I and all the other people that we know. And if you're only weighted by the personal and the social, then you tilt towards the mad mob populism that could characterize societies when they go off kilter. You need another axis of orientation to make things fundamental.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
collusion, and that he's turned his attention away from the Democrats, which is the traditional party, let's say, of the tech visionaries, and they're all characterized by the high openness that tends to make people liberal. The fact that Mark has pivoted is, what would you say, it's an important it may be as important an event as Musk aligning with Trump.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Now, I just want to add one more thing to this that's very much worth thinking about. So the postmodernists discovered, this is partly why we have this culture war, the postmodernists discovered that we see the world through a story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And they're right about that because what they figured out, and they weren't the only ones, but they did figure it out, was that we don't just see facts, we see weighted facts. And the weighting system, a description of someone's weighting system for facts is a story. That's what a story is technically. It's the prioritization of facts that direct your attention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
That's what you see portrayed in a characterization on screen. Okay, now, the postmodernists figured out that we see the world through a story, but then they made a dreadful mistake, which was a consequence of their Marxism. They said that the story that we see the world through is one of power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
and that there is no other story than power, and that the dynamic in society is nothing but the competition between different groups or individuals striving for power. And I don't mean competence, I mean the ability to use compulsion and force, right? It's like involuntary submission. I'm more powerful than you if I can make you submit involuntarily.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Now, the biblical canon has an alternative proposition that's nested inside of it, which is that the basis of individual stability and societal stability and productivity is voluntary self-sacrifice, not power. And that is, those two ethos, they are 100% opposed, right? You couldn't get to visions that are more disparate than those two.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
It's also, I think, the case that the new communication technologies have also enabled reputation savages in a way that we haven't seen before.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Now, the power narrative dominates the university and it's driving the sorts of pathologies that you described as having flowed out, let's say, into the tech world and then into the corporate and the media world and into the corporate world beyond that. One of the things we're doing at ARC is trying to establish the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
structure of the underlying narrative, which is a sacrificial narrative, that would properly ground, for example, the technological enterprise so that it wouldn't become dystopian. And, you know, you alluded to that when you pointed to the fact that there has to be something outside the technological enterprise to stabilize it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You alluded to, for example, a more fundamental ethos of reciprocity when you said that one form of combating the proclivity for top-down force, for example, in this one-way information pipeline is to make it two-way. Right, well, you're pointing there to something like, see, reciprocity is a form of repetitive self-sacrifice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Like, if we're taking turns in a conversation, I have to sacrifice my turn to you, and vice versa, right? And that makes for a balanced dynamic. And so, anyways, one of the problems we're trying to solve with this ARC enterprise is... to thoroughly evaluate the structure of that underlying narrative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And we could really use some engineers to help because the large language models are going to be able to flesh out this domain property because they do map meaning in a way that we haven't been able to manage technically before.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so I wanted to talk to Mark about his vision of the future. He laid out a manifesto a while back called the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which bears some clear resemblance to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Policy Platform, that's ARC. which is an enterprise that I'm deeply involved in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's take that apart, because that's very, very important. Okay, so I've played with Grok a lot and with ChatGPT. I've used these systems extensively, and they're very useful, although they lie all the time. Now, you can see this double effect that you described, which is that there is...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
conscious manipulation of the learning process in an ideological direction, which is, I think, absolutely ethically unforgivable. Like, it even violates the spirit of the learning that these systems are predicated on. It's like, we're going to train these systems to analyze the patterns of interconnections between the entire body of human...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
of ideas in the corpus of human knowledge, and then we're going to take our shallow conscious understanding and paint an overlay on top of that. That is so intellectually arrogant that it's Luciferian in its presumption. It's appalling. But even Grok is pretty damn woke. And I know that it hasn't been messed with at that level of, you know, painting over the rot, let's say. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So I think we've already described, at least implicitly, why there would be that conscious manipulation. But what's your understanding of the training data problem? And I can talk to you about some AI systems that we've developed that don't seem to have that problem and why they don't have that problem. Because it's crucially important, as you already pointed out, to get this right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And I actually think that, to some degree, psychologists At least some of them have figured out how to get this right. Like it's a minority of psychologists and it isn't well known, but the alignment problem is something that the deeper psychoanalytic theorists have been working on for about 100 years. And some of them got that because they were trying to align the psyche in a healthy direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You know, it's the same bloody problem fundamentally. And there were people who really made progress in that direction. Now, they aren't the people who had the most influence as academics in the universities because they got captured by, you know, Michel Foucault, who's a power-mad hedonist for all intents and purposes, extraordinarily brilliant, but corrupt beyond comprehension.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
He is the most cited academic who ever lived. And so the whole bloody enterprise, the value enterprise in the universities got seriously warped by the postmodern Marxists in a way that is having all these cascading ramifications that we described. All right, so back to the training data. What's your understanding of why the wokeness emerges?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
It's present bias to some degree, and what other contributing factors are there?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so I wanted to talk to him about the overlap between our visions of the future and about the twist and turns of the tech world in relationship to their political allegiance and the transformations there that have occurred, and also about...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Right. It should be an improvement, actually.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Well, and also you don't have the advantage of all the technological progress.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
How is that done, Mark? Like, what does that look like exactly, you know? I mean, it's really nefarious, right? Because that means that you're interacting in a manner that you can't predict with someone's a priori prejudices. And you have no idea how you're being manipulated. It's really, really bad. And so, first of all, why is that happening?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Like, if the large language model's value is in their wisdom, and that wisdom is derived from their understanding of the deep pattern of correlations between ideas, which is... like a major source of wisdom, genuinely speaking, why pervert that with an overlay of shallow ideology? And why is the ideology in the direction that it is? And then how is that gerrymandering conducted?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
The problem of AI alignment, so to speak, how do we make sure that these hyper-intelligent systems that the techno-utopians are creating don't turn into cataclysmic, apocalyptic, totalitarian monsters? How do we align them with proper human beings? interests and what are those proper human interests and how is that determined? And so we talk about all that and a whole lot more.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Oh, good. Oh, that's great. Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah, yeah. I couldn't imagine a worse outcome than that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So the terrifying thing here is that we're going to produce... hyper-powerful avatars of our own flaws. Right, and so if you're training one of these systems, and you have a variety of domains of personal pathology, you're going to amplify that substantively.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You're going to make these giants, like I joke with my friend Jonathan Paggio, who's a very reliable source in such matters, that we're going to see giants walk the earth again. I mean, that's already happening, and that's what these AI systems are. And if they're trained by people who
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
well, let's say, are full of unexamined biases and prejudices and deep resentments, which is something that you talk about in your manifesto, resentment and arrogance being like key sins, so to speak, we're going to produce monstrous machines that have exactly those characteristics, and that is not going to be good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And you're absolutely right to point to this, as you know, to point to this as perhaps the serious problem of our times. If we're going to generate augmented intelligence, we better not generate augmented pathological intelligence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And if we're not very careful, we are certainly going to do that, not least because there's way more ways that a system can go wrong than there are ways that it can, you know, aim upward in a...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
unerring direction and so okay so why is it these people who were this is so awful i didn't know that that were say part of this safety and trust issue at twitter who are now training the bloody ais how did that horrible situation come to be
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so join us as we have the opportunity and privilege to speak with Mark Andreessen. So, Mark, I thought I would talk to you today about an overlap in two of our projects, let's say, and we could investigate that. There should be all sorts of ideas that spring off that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Well, can you imagine developing a super intelligence that's shielded from evolutionary pressure? Like that is absolutely insane. That's absolutely insane. I mean, we know that the only way that a complex system can regulate itself across time is through something like evolutionary competition. That's it. That's the mechanism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so if you decide, what, that this AI is correct by fiat, and then you shield it from any possibility of market feedback or environmental feedback, well, that is literally the definition of how to make something insane.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so now you talked about in some of your recent podcasts, you talked about the fact that the Biden administration in particular, if I got this right, was conspiring behind the scenes with the tech companies to cordon off the AI systems and make them monolithic. And so can you elaborate a little bit more on that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So I was reviewing your techno-optimist manifesto, and I have some questions about that and some concerns, and I wanted to contrast that and compare it with our ARC project in the UK, because I think we're pulling in the same direction. And I'm curious about why that is and what that might mean practically. And I also thought that would give us a springboard
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Okay, okay. Well, so there's so much in there that's pathological beyond comprehension that it's difficult to even know where to start. It's like, who the hell thinks this is a good idea? And why? Like, who are these people that feel that they're in a position to determine the face of... of hyper-intelligence, of computational hyper-intelligence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And who is it that thinks that that is something that should be regulated by a closed government corporate cartel? I don't understand that at all, Mark. I don't know if I've ever heard anybody detail out to me something that is so blatantly both malevolent and insane simultaneously. How do you account for that? I mean, I know it shocked you. I know that's why you've been talking about it recently.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Now, it should shock you because it's just beyond comprehension to me that this sort of thing can go on. And thank God you're bringing it to light. But how do you make sense of this? What's your understanding of it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Worshippers of power. Worship. Remember, it's one ring of power that binds all the evil rings. Yeah, well, it's worshippers of power. And the damn postmodernists, you know, when they proclaimed that power was the only game in town, a huge part of that was both a confession and an ambition. Right? If power is the only game in town, then why not be the most effective power player?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
off which we could leap in relationship to, well, to the ideas you're developing. So there's a lot of that manifesto that, for whatever it's worth, I agreed with, and I don't regard that as particularly, what would you say, important in and of itself. But I did find the overlap between what you had been
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Well, so at ARC, we're trying to formulate a set of policies that I think strike to the heart of the matter. And the heart of the matter is, what story should orient us as we move forward into the future? And we're going to discover that by looking at the great stories of the past and extracting out their genuine essence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And I think the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice is the right foundation stone. And I think that the proposition that society's built on sacrifice is self-evident once you understand it. Because to be a social creature, you have to give up individual supremacy. You trade it in for the benefits of social being.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And your attention is a sacrificial process too, because there's one thing you attend to at a time and a trillion other things that you sacrifice that you could be attending to. Now, I think we do understand, we're starting to understand the basics of the technical ethos of the sacrificial of the, what would you say, of the sacrificial foundation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
It's something like that, and I think we understand that at ARC. We have some principles that we're trying to use to govern the genesis of this organization, which I think will become the go-to, and maybe already has, the go-to conference, at least, for people who are interested in the same sort of ideas that you're putting forward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
We had a very successful conference last year, and the one that's coming up in February looks like it's going to be larger and more successful. We have spinoffs in Australia and so forth. And so part of the emphasis there is that we want to put forward a vision that's invitational.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And there's a policy proposition, there's a proposition with regards to policy that lies at the bottom of that, which is that if I can't invite you on board to go in the direction that I'm proposing, then there's something wrong with my proposition. If I have to use force, if I have to use compulsion, then that's indicative of a fundamental flaw in my conceptualization.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Now, there might be some exceptions for overtly criminal and malevolent types, because they're difficult to pull into the game. But if the policy requires force rather than invitational compliance, there's something wrong with it. And so what we're trying to do, and I see very close parallels to the project that you're engaged in, is to formulate a vision of the future that's so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
What would you say? So self-evidently positive that people would strive to find a reason not to be enthusiastically on board. And I don't think you have to be a naive optimist to formulate a vision like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
We know perfectly well that the world is a far more abundant place than the Malthusian pessimists could have possibly imagined back in the 1960s when they were agitating madly for their propositions of scarcity and overpopulation. And so, okay, so what's the conclusion to that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
and the ideas that we've been working on for this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in the UK, quite striking. And so I'd like to highlight some similarities, and then I'd like to push you a bit on some of the issues that I think might need further clarification. That's probably the right way to think about it. So for this art group, we set up as...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Well, the conclusion in part is that this AI problem needs to be addressed, you know, and I've built some AI systems that are founded on the ancient principles, let's say, that do in fact govern free societies. And they're not woke. They can interpret dreams, for example, quite accurately, which is very interesting and remarkable to see.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so they're much more weighted towards something like the golden thread that runs through the the traditional humanist enterprise stretching back two or 3,000 years. And maybe there's 200 core texts in that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
enterprise that that constitute the center of what used to constitute the center of something like a great books program the great books program which is still running at the university of chicago now that's not sufficient because as you pointed out well there's all this technological progress that has been made in the last hundred years but there's something about it that's central and core and i think we can use the ai systems actually to untangle what the core
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Idea sets are that have underpinned free and productive abundant voluntary societies. It's something like the set of propositions that make for an iterating voluntary game that's self-improving. That's a very constrained set of propositions. And there's something in that that I think attracts people as a universally acceptable ethos.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
It's the ethos on which a successful marriage would be founded or a successful friendship or a successful business partnership where all the participants are enthusiastically on board without compulsion. And Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, had mapped out the evolution of systems like that in childhood play.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so he got an awful long, he was trying to reconcile the difference between science and religion in his investigations of the development of children's structures of knowledge. And he got a long way in laying out the foundations of that ethos.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so did the comparative mythologists like Mircea Eliade, who wrote some brilliant books on, well, I think they're sort of like the equivalent of early large language models. That's how it looks to me now. Eliade was very good at picking out the deep patterns of, narrative commonality that united major religious systems across multiple cultures. That was all thrown out, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
That was all thrown out by the postmodern literary theorists. They just tossed all that out of the academy. And that was a big mistake. They turned to Foucault instead. It was a cataclysmic mistake. And it certainly ushered in this era of domination by power narratives, which is underlying the sorts of phenomena that you're describing that are so appalling. So...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
What's happened to you as a consequence of starting to speak out about this? And why did you start to speak out? And how do you – you said you were involved in this. And so what's the difference between being involved and being complicit? I mean, I know people learn – well, these are complicated problems, and people learn. But, like, what's – like – Why are you speaking out?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
How are people responding to that? And how do you see your role in this as it unfolded over the last, say, 15 years?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
what would you say, a visionary alternative to the Malthusian doomsaying of the climate hysterics and the centralized planners. Because that's just going nowhere. You can see what's happening to Europe. You see what's happening to the UK. Energy prices in the UK are five times as high as they are in the United States. That's obviously not sustainable. The same thing is the case in Germany.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Plus, not only are they expensive, they're also unreliable, which is a very bad combination. You add to that the fact, too, that Germany's become increasingly dependent on markets like they're served by totalitarian dictatorships, essentially. And that also seems like a bad plan. So one of our platforms is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Okay, let's go back to your manifesto. So... I wanted to highlight a couple of things in relationship to that. I had some questions for you too. Tell me to begin with, if you would, why you wrote this manifesto, maybe let everybody know about it first, why you wrote it and what effect it's had
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then I'll go through it step by step, at least to some degree, and I can let you know what ideas we've been developing with the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and we can play with that a little bit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
We should be working locally, nationally, and internationally to do everything possible to drive down the cost of energy and to make it as reliable as possible. Predicated on the idea that there's really no difference between energy and work. And if you make energy inexpensive, then poor people don't die. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You said that something changed quite radically in 2017. I'd like you to delve a little bit more into the breakdown of this deal. Like your claim there was that for a good while, center-left positions politically, let's say, and philosophically were compatible with the tech revolution and with the big business side of the tech revolution.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Stop there for just a sec, because we should delve into that. That's a terrible thing. Hello, everybody. So I had the opportunity to talk to Mark Andreasson today, and Mark has been quite visible on the podcast circuit as of late.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But you pointed to a transformation across time that really became... unmistakable by 2017. Why 2017 as a year and what is it that you think changed? You painted a broad scale picture of this transformation and also pointed to the fact that It was no longer possible to be an economic capitalist, to be a free market guy, and to proclaim allegiance to the progressive ideals. That became impossible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And in 2017, what do you think happened? How do you understand that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Because any increase in energy costs immediately demolishes the poorest subset of the population. And that's self-evident as far as I'm concerned. And so that's certainly an overlap with the ethos that you put forward in your manifesto.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You predicated your work on a vision of abundance and pointed to, I noticed you, for example, you quoted Marion Tupe, who works with human progress and has outlined quite nicely the manner in which over the last 30 years, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall, People have been thriving on the economic front, globally speaking, like never before.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So in your manifesto, you list some of these ideas that were pathological, let's say, that emerged on the left. And I just want to find the... Well, for example, you say... Technology doesn't care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, etc.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Listing out the dimensions of hypothetical oppression that the intersectionalist woke mob stresses continually. Now, you point your finger at that, obviously, because you feel that something went seriously wrong with regard to the prioritization of those dimensions of difference. And that's part of the movement of diversity. That's part of the movement of equity and inclusivity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Let me just find this other... Yes, here we go. Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades. against technology and against life under varying names like existential risk, sustainability, ESG, sustainable development goals, social responsibility, stakeholder capitalism, precautionary principle, trust and safety, tech ethics, risk management, degrowth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
The demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past, zombie ideas, many derived from communism, disasters then and now that have refused to die. And that's in the part of your manifesto that is subtitled The Enemy. That's an enemy of the enemy you're characterizing there as a system of ideas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And I guess that would be the system of woke ideas that presumes, and correct me if I get this wrong, presumes, that presumes that we're fundamentally motivated by power, that anybody who has a position of authority actually has a position of power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
The best way to read positions of power is from the perspective of a narrative that's basically predicated on the hypothesis of oppressor and oppressed, and that there are multiple dimensions of oppression that need to be called out and rectified. And the DEI movement is part of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so you point to the fact that these are zombie ideas left over, let's say, from the communist enterprise of the early and mid 20th century. And that seems to me precisely And you said you thought those ideas emerged on the corporate front in a damaging way first in big tech.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You know, I probably saw that most particularly, evidence of that most particularly in relationship to the scandal that surrounded James Damore. Because that was really cardinal for me, because I spent a fair bit of time talking to James, and my impression of him was that he was just an engineer. And I don't mean that in any disparaging sense. He thought like an engineer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And he went to a DEI meeting, and they asked him for feedback on what he had learned. observed and heard, and James, being an engineer, thought that they actually wanted feedback, you know, because he didn't have the social skills to understand that he was supposed to be participating in an elaborate lie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so he provided them with feedback about their claims, especially with regards to gender differences. And James actually nailed it pretty precisely for someone who wasn't a research psychologist. He had summarized the difference in the literature on gender differences, for example, extremely accurately, and they pilloried him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And I thought, that's really bad, because it means that Google wouldn't stand behind its own engineers when he was telling the truth. And there was every attempt made to destroy his career. Now, why do you think that whatever happened affected tech first? And what did you see happening that you then saw happening in other corporations?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
We've virtually eradicated absolute poverty and we have a good crack at eradicating it completely in the next couple of decades if we don't do anything you know, criminally insane. And so you see a vision of the future where there's more than enough for everyone. It's not a zero sum game.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You're not a fan of the Malthusian proposition that there's limited resources and that we're facing a, you know, either, um, what would you say, a future of ecological collapse or economic scarcity, or maybe both. And so, um, The difference, I guess, one of the differences I wanted to delve into is you put a lot of stress on the technological vision.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Okay, okay. So let me ask you a question about that. You know, it's a management question, I guess. So... I had some trouble at Penguin Random House a couple of years ago after writing a couple of bestsellers for them. I was contracted with one of their subdivisions, and they had a bit of an employee rebellion that would be perhaps reminiscent of the sort of thing that you're referring to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
They kowtowed to them and I ended up switching to a different subdivision. Now, it really made no material difference to me. And I was just as happy to be with a subdivision where everybody in the company, visible and invisible, was working to make what I was doing with them successful rather than scuttling it invisibly from behind the scenes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But my sense then was, why don't you just fire these people? And so, and I'm dead serious about that. It's like, first of all, I'll give you an example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So we just set up this company, Peterson Academy Online, and we have 40,000 students now and about 30 professors, and we're doing what we can to bring extremely high quality elite university level education to people everywhere for virtually no money. And that's working like a charm. Now, we set up a social media platform
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
inside that so that people could interact like they do on Twitter or Facebook, et cetera, Instagram, because we try to integrate the best features of those networks. But we wanted to make sure that it was a civilized place. And so the fact that people have to pay for access to it helps that a lot, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Because it keeps out the trolls and the bots and the bad actors who can multiply accounts beyond comprehension for no money. And so the mere price of entry helps. But we also watched. And if people misbehaved, we did something about it. And we kicked four people out of 40,000. And one of them we put on probation. And that was all we had to do
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You know, there was goodwill, and everybody was behaving properly, and like I said, there was a cost to entry. But it didn't take a lot of discipline. It didn't take a lot of disciplinary action to make an awful lot of difference with regard to behavior. And so, you know, I can understand that Google might have been apprehensive about activating the activists within their confines, but...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And sacrificing James Damore to the woke mob because he told the truth is not a good move forward. And I just don't understand at all. You see, and the same thing happened at Penguin, at Penguin Random House. It's like, you could just fire these people. Like, they were people there who wanted to not publish a book of mine that they hadn't even read.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You know, they weren't people who deserve to be working at what's arguably the greatest publishing house in the world. So why... You alluded to it a little bit. You said that people were taken by surprise, you know, and fair enough.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And it was the case that there was a radical transformation in the university environment somewhere between 2012 and 2016, where all these terrible, woke, quasi-communist, neo-Marxist ideas emerged and became dominant very quickly. But I'm still...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Why do you think that that was the pattern of decision that was being made instead of taking appropriate disciplinary action and just ridding the companies of people who were going to cause trouble?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And I think there's something in that that's insufficient. And this is one of the things I wanted to grapple with you about. You know, there's a theme that you see, a literary theme. There's two literary themes that are in conflict here, and they're relevant because they're stories of the psyche and of society in the broadest possible sense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
We should also point out that's not a delusion. It's also, I think, the case that the new communication technologies that make the social media platforms so powerful have also enabled reputation savages in a way that we haven't seen before. Because you can accuse someone from behind the cloak of anonymity and gather a pretty nice mob around them in no time flat with absolutely no risk to yourself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And there's a pattern of antisocial behavior that characterizes women. And this has been well documented for 50 years in the clinical literature. Antisocial men tend to use physical aggression, bullying, but antisocial women use reputation savaging and exclusion. And it looks like social media, especially anonymous social media,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You have the vision of technological abundance and plenty that's a consequence of the technological and intellectual striving of mankind, but you also have Juxtaposed against that, the vision of the intellect as a Luciferian force and the possibility of a technology-led dystopia and catastrophe, right? And it seems to hinge on something like how the intellect is conceptualized in the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
what would you say, enables the female pattern of aggression, which is reputation savaging and cancellation. Now, I'm not accusing women of doing that. You've got to get me right here. It's that there are different pathways to antisocial expression. One of them, physical violence, isn't enabled by technology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But the other one, which is reputation savaging and exclusion, is clearly abetted by technology. And so that's another feature that might have made people leery of putting their head up above the turret. You know, like in Canada, well, I'm still being investigated by the Ontario College of Psychologists, and I'm scheduled free re-education if they can ever get their act together to do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And I fought an eight-year court battle, which has been extremely expensive and very, very annoying, to say the least. And I don't think that there's another professional in Canada on the psychological or medical side who's been willing to put their head above the parapet except in brief interchanges. And the reason for that is it simply is too devastating.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so I have some sympathy for people who are concerned that they'll be taken out because they might be. But by the same token... If you kowtow to the woke mob for any length of time, as the tech industry appears to be discovering now, you end up undermining everything that you hold sacred.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
I mean, you alluded to the fact that you'd hope that at least the shareholders would be appropriately oriented by market force forces. greed, to put it in the most negative possible way. And you'd hope that that would be sufficient incentive to keep things above board, because I'd way rather deal with someone who's motivated by money than motivated by ideology. But even that isn't enough to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
ensure that even corporations act in their own best economic interest. So it is a perfect storm. And you alluded to government pressure as well. And so maybe you could shed a little bit more light on that because that's also particularly worrisome. And it's certainly been something that's characteristic and is still characteristic of Canada under Trudeau.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Absolutely. Men will use it. They typically don't in the real world. But if the pathway is laid open to it, On social media, let's say. And there's a particular kind of man who's more likely to do that too. Those are the dark tetrad types who are narcissistic and psychopathic and Machiavellian and sadistic. Lovely combination of personality traits. And they're definitely enabled online. So...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So stop there for just a sec, because we should delve into that. That's a terrible thing, because we can think about this arithmetically. It's like you have to have proportionate representation of all protected group members in all categories. Okay, there's a lot of horror in those few words because the first problem is those categories are multiplicable without end.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
in the deepest level of society's narrative framing. So if the intellect is put at the highest place, then it becomes Luciferian and leads to a kind of dystopia. It's like the all seeing eye of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings cycle. And I see that exactly that sort of thing emerging in places like China.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And you see this, for example, with the continued extension of the LGBT acronym. There's no end to the number of potential dimensions of discrimination that can be generated. And then... So that's an unsolvable problem to begin with. It means you're screwed no matter what you do. But it's worse than that when you combine that with the doctrine of intersectionality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Because not only do you then have the additive consequence of these multiple dimensions of potential prejudice. So, for example, in Canada, it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender expression. Okay, that's separate from gender identity. So now there's a multitude of categories of gender identity, hypothetically. I mean, the estimates range from like two to 300.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But gender expression is essentially how you present yourself. I think it's technically indistinguishable from fashion, fundamentally. And I'm not trying to be a prick about that. I mean, I've looked at the wording and I can't distinguish it conceptually from its mode of self-presentation. Hairstyle, dress, etc.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so that means you can't discriminate on the basis of whatever infinite number of categories of gender expression you could generate. And then if you multiply those together, I mean, how many bloody categories do you need before you multiply them together you have so many categories that it's impossible to deal with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So there's a major technical problem at the bottom of this realm of conceptualization that's basically making it, A, impossible for companies to comply and exposing them to legal risk everywhere, but also that provides an infinite market for aggrieved and resentful activism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And it does seem to me that that technological vision, if it's not encapsulated in the proper underlying narrative, threatens us with an intellectualized dystopia that's equiprobable with the abundant outcome that you described.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Especially the competent ones. Especially competent. It's terrible for the competent ones. Yep.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Well, there's another, there's an analog to that, which is very interesting. I mean, I started to see all this happen back in 1992 because I was at Harvard when the bell curve was published. And I watched that blow up the department at Harvard, and it scuttled one of my students' academic careers for reasons I won't go into.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Now, one of the things we're doing at ARC is to try to work out what that underlying narrative should be so that that technological enterprise can be encapsulated with it and remain non-dystopian. I think it's an analog of the alignment problem in AI. You know, you can say, well, how do you get these large language model systems to adopt values that are commensurate with human flourishing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But, well, I was working with that student on developing validated predictors of academic managerial and entrepreneurial performance. So we're interested in that scientifically. What can you measure that predicts performance in these realms? And the evidence for that's starkly clear. The best predictor of performance in a complex job is IQ.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And psychologists tore themselves into shreds, especially after the bell curve, trying to convince themselves that IQ didn't exist. But it is the most well-established phenomena in the social sciences ever. probably by something approximating an order of magnitude. So if you throw out IQ research, you pretty much throw out all social science research. And so that turns out to be a big problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Now, Personality measures also matter. Conscientiousness, for example, for managers, and openness, which you mentioned earlier, for entrepreneurs. But they're much less powerful, about one-fifth as powerful as IQ. Now, the problem is that IQ measures show racial disparities, and that just doesn't go away no matter how you look at it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Now, at the same time, the US justice system set up a system of laws that govern hiring that said that you had to use the most valid and reliable predictors of performance that were available to do your hiring, your placement and your promotion, but none of those could produce disparate impact. Which basically meant, as far as I can tell, whatever procedure you use to hire is de facto illegal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Now, so lots of companies, and one of the, I've never, I don't know why this hasn't become a legal issue. So you could say, well, we use interviews, which most companies do use. Well, interviews are very, they're not valid predictors of performance. They're not much better than chance. Structured interviews are better, but ordinary interviews aren't great at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So they fail the validity and reliability test. And so I don't think there is a way that a company can hire that isn't illegal, technically illegal in the United States. And then I looked into that for years, trying to figure out how the hell did this come about? And the reason it came about is because the legislators basically abandoned their responsibility to the courts
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
and decided that they were just going to let the courts sort this mess out. And that would mean that companies would be subject to legal pressure and that there would be judicial rulings in consequence, which would be very hard on the companies in question. But it meant the legislators didn't have to take the heat.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so there's still an ugly problem at the bottom of all this that no one has enough courage to address. And so, but the upshot is that As you pointed out, companies find themselves in a position where no matter what they do, it's illegal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
That's the same problem you have when you're educating kids, by the way. And how do you ensure that the technological enterprise as such is aligned with the underlying principles that you espouse of, say, free market, free distributed markets, and human freedom in the classic Western sense? And I didn't see that specifically addressed in your manifesto.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Right. So you're optimistic because you believe that the free market system is flexible enough to deal with ordinary stupidity, but like insane malevolent stupidity is just too much. Yeah, I think that's reasonable. Well, I do think that's reasonable, because everything's a mess all the time, and people can still manage their way forward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But when you have a policy that says, well, any identifiable disparate outcome with regard to any conceivable combination of groups is indication of illegal prejudice, there's no way anybody can function in that situation, because... Those are impossible constraints to satisfy, and they lead to paradoxical situations like the one you described Musk's company as being entangled in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
That's just so frustrating for anybody that's actually trying to do something that requires merit, that they'll just throw up their hands. And so, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'm going to stop you there because we're out of time on the YouTube side, but that's a good segue for what will continue on the Daily Wire side because we've got another half an hour there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so for all of you watching and listening, join us, join Mark and I on the Daily Wire side because I would like to talk more about, well, what you see could be done about this moving forward with this new administration and how you're feeling about that. I mean, you made a decision recently
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
I guess, early in 2023, like so many people, to pull away from the Democrats and toward Trump, strange as that might be. And I'd like to discuss that decision and then what you see happening in Washington right now and what you envision as a positive way forward. so that we can all rescue ourselves from this mess before we make it much deeper than it already is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so I'm curious about, with all the technological optimism that you're putting forward, which is something that Well, why else? Why would you have a vision other than that when we could make the world an abundant place? But there is this dystopian side that can't be ignored.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And, you know, there's 700 million closed-circuit television cameras in China, and they monitor every damn thing their citizens do. And we could slide into that as easily as we did when we copied the Chinese in their response to the so-called pandemic. So... So I'd like to hear your thoughts about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And part of the reason for that is that he's part of a swing within the tech community back towards the center and even more particularly under the current conditions toward the novel and emerging technology players in the Trump administration. Now, Mark is a key tech... visionary. He developed Mosaic and Netscape and they really laid the groundwork for the web as we know it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Right, right. Yes, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Okay, so that's very interesting because that's exactly what we concluded at ARC. So one of the streams that we've been developing is the better story stream because it's predicated on the idea, which I think you're alluding to now, that the technological enterprise has to be nested inside a set of propositions that aren't in themselves part and parcel of the technological enterprise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then the question is, what are they? So let me outline for a minute or two some of the thoughts I've had in that matter, because I think there's something crucial here that's also relevant to the problem of alignment. So like you said that the problem with regard to AI might be the problem that human beings have is that we're not aligned, so to speak. And so why would we expect the AIs to be?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And I think that's a perfectly reasonable criticism. I mean, part of the reason that we educate young people so intensely, especially those who'll be in leadership positions, is because we wanna solve the alignment problem. That's part of what you do when you socialize young people. Now, the way we've done that for,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
much of that at all. I eventually worked with one company where it was a real success. But what I did learn was that the product is about 15% of the problem and the communication is the other 85% or 90% or 95% even, which is why you get, what's your typical royalties on a book? Maybe somewhere between five and 12%. Seems kind of ridiculous, right? Because you wrote the book.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
It's like, yeah, but you didn't market the book. So no one's going to buy it unless they know about it. You don't have any marketing infrastructure. And that means you can't communicate with people. And it doesn't matter how good the product is if no one knows what it is. And it's really hard to get people to pay attention and even harder to get them to buy something.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So there's 90% of the problem right there. And then there's all the distribution. So the publishing people, were they able to also help you market or did you do most of that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, yeah. Well, and the moral of this story in part, and for everyone who's watching and listening and who have some business ambitions, let's say, is don't underestimate the utility of a communications network. There's nothing that you can build that's more valuable than that. And then once you have a communications network, you can pretty much, you can develop products indefinitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Because now you can communicate with people. And that's partly why you have three businesses, right? Three plus more, because you can communicate. Okay, so you wrote five books for kids. And did they sell well? And they obviously sold well enough so that you moved towards a movie deal. So tell me about that, because you need a screenwriter and you need a whole crew.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
How do you generate a life of abundance around you conceptually and practically? And Jocko's done that in a multitude of ways. We used his latest foray into a new entrepreneurial domain as a case study, so to speak. He's got a new movie coming out, The Way of the Warrior Kid, and we discussed
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And is this a Hollywood enterprise? Who are you partnering with? Or can you talk about that yet?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Oh, really? Oh, okay. You have major players involved in this. They're the biggest players in the game. Skydance, that was... Top Gun, Maverick, and a whole slew of others.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, it's a tricky issue, eh? Because... Likely you could learn, but the question is, how long would that take? How much failure would be involved? What would be the opportunity cost, right? And then there's the issue of pride that you also already brought up. You learn after a while that a new endeavor has all sort of pitfalls you couldn't possibly imagine, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
why he wrote that book, what problem he thought he was solving, how that morphed into a sequence of publishing opportunities, how that then transformed into the opportunity to make a movie, how he made that work properly. We also talked about leadership a lot and what leadership is and how it is that you configure yourself and the way that you interact with the world so that you can become a
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And those are the things you have to learn the hard way, right? So even though it'd be fun to learn to write a screenplay, obviously.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, basically none of them get turned into movies. And then of the movies that are launched, basically none of them are successful. Yes. Right. So yeah, you're playing a high-risk, high-return game.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So that's a weird presumption too, isn't it? Because one of the advantages, I presume, correct me if I'm wrong, one of the advantages of having additional investors is that you validate the utility of the project. It doesn't look like a...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So did that turn out to be a good decision?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, well, that's the thing too, because you're in a different position perhaps than most people because you have that built-in marketing clout, right? So that makes a huge, hypothetically, that makes a huge difference. Okay, so- Did you evaluate the screenplay and could you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
effective leaders so that you can invite people to share their excitement of your vision how you can develop an exciting vision how you can strategize with people so that they come aboard so that the things that you decide to do together are overwhelmingly more likely to be productive and worthwhile so why is it useful to talk to jocko and why would it be useful to watch this podcast because he knows how to conduct himself effectively in the world in a multitude of different manners
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
What's the essence of those books, do you think?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
It lands on... So to give more consideration to, especially when you're young, to who you could be rather than who you are, and certainly not to despair at who you are. Well, all heroes start out lowly in the story of Moses, so that's a great adventure story. Moses is literally endangered by the Pharaoh, who's put out the word to kill all the firstborns.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
The same thing happens in the case of Christ. And so then he's launched on a river and has to be rescued, and he's the son of slaves. And then in the Gospel story, you have exactly the same motif. Christ is born in the most no-account town in some backwater of the Roman Empire, and his parents, who are also under the thumb of a tyrant at that time, end up giving birth with the animals, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So it's very low beginning. And part of the reason for that is, well, that's life. You start completely helpless. And you start with, in some ways, you start at great risk and with everything against you. And so then the question is, well, what the hell do you do about that? And certainly... In the story of Abraham, for example, so he's the father of nations, let's say, Abraham.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
He listens to the beckoning call of adventure and goes out and voluntarily confronts the difficulties of his life and makes the sacrifices along the way, and he's promised a an eternal future of infinite abundance in consequence, right? The idea being that if you form a, if you forge an alliance with a spirit that calls you to develop, to push yourself beyond your limits,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
if you occupy that space, then God will be with you, so to speak, and no one can stand in front of you, and you'll be successful, and so will your descendants, and your reputation will grow, and abundance will come to everyone, right? So that's a good deal. And I think that is marked by that impetus that children have to, well, like the kids you were talking about who were doing push-ups, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
That impetus to develop is deeply rooted inside of people. And it's definitely what you want to encourage as a father. So you've written these books. And so tell me about the public reception and what people have told you about the kids' books. What do people say in terms of the impact on their kids?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
That have been encouraged and inspired.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And you think the movie will pull that off.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah. Where is it in its production sequence?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Animated?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
It's a live action film. I see. I see. And can you share the names of the actors and...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
physical, psychological, philosophical, practical. And we discussed all the things that he knows, many of the things that he knows, in a way that makes his wisdom accessible to people who are trying to straighten their lives out and to aim upward. Way we go.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Oh, yeah, that's fun. That's fun. That's like a Karate Kid motif, essentially. Yes, yes. There hasn't been a movie like that for a while that really hit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, yeah. So how involved were you, how involved were you in the movie making process?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So you've got quite a lineup, really. You've got great, great allies, Apple and Skydance. That's like... Sundance? Skydance. Skydance. Skydance. And a great director, good actors, and solid screenplay. And, well, that should be well-timed in the market, too, because, well, you know, there's an appetite for that sort of movie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
How are you doing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
What did you do right that enabled you to collaborate together that way? Because creative collaborations are, well, they're great when they work and they can work very well, but people have to, well, that's what I'm curious about your opinion, what you had to do to, well... You can imagine you're encroaching on his territory. That's one way of thinking about it, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And so you have to conduct yourself in a manner that doesn't produce pointless primate dominance competition, right? And you want to be collaborating toward an end. How did you conduct yourself so that that... possibility maximized. Presumed you listened as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
That makes a lot of sense. So you were asking, yeah, so that's an interesting point as well. Like, something to know tactically for everybody who's watching and listening is that if you want to offer your opinion, so to speak, it's generally much more sophisticated to do that with a question. Accusation is the worst question, right? Suggestion is the next worst. Question is the best suggestion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And then you leave it open. It's like, well, what do you think? But it has to be honest. What do you think about doing it this way? And that can't be manipulative. It has to be, you know, you have an idea. Could it happen like this? But if you're working with someone who knows something, you actually want to know what they think of that idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And that's been, it's been like that for quite a while, eh?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So that's an attitude that's characterized by the opposite of pride. That's the humility that opens doors. So one of the things I figured out this year, because I was thinking about what I was doing on stage when I was lecturing and trying to determine explicitly why it was working, and I stumbled across something that in retrospect was pretty obvious, but
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
I pose myself a central question before I go on stage, and it has to be an actual question. I actually have to not know the answer, or not enough, and I have to want to know the answer, because otherwise the whole thing is a lie. But then I also understood, I can't believe it took me this long to figure this out, that the root word of question is quest.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And that what I was doing on stage, because I lecture without notes, and I'm trying to investigate this question, was taking the listeners on an adventure. And the adventure was, the treasure at the end of the adventure was the resolution of that question, or at least maybe it's clarification or further movement towards answering it at minimum, right? And you want a landing, too, where the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
You want to take that self-criticism and narrow it to the point where it turns into a strategy for progress.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
where an answer emerges as a consequence of the dialogue. But it's definitely a quest. And that means that if you're collaborating with someone and you ask them honest questions, which you can do if you continually consult your ignorance, then you're inviting them on an adventurous collaboration. And that is immediately playful rather than tyrannical.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, right. What did I not clarify? Right, well, you also don't know when someone objects. First of all, you don't know if they... if they understood what you said. You also don't know if you said it that clearly. And so definitely in a situation like that, your best initial foray is questions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And then it's always possible, this is a useful thing to know too, I think this is part of the reason why you're supposed to love your enemies. Part of the reason is it'd be better if they were your allies, and so maybe you could figure out how to make that happen, and that would be better for everyone. But part of it also is they might be bringing you some information, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, right, right. Are you still getting up at 4.30 in the morning? I am indeed. You know, that's completely insane.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And even if they're dead set against you for arbitrary reasons, it's possible that in their objections they'll shed light on something that you could have done more effectively. And if you can really listen to them, they might tell you that, and that would be a good deal. So, okay, so you used a question approach, right? And you said it had to be earnest.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
How did you figure out that it had to be earnest?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
You're doing this. It's like, wait a sec, wait a sec. Are you doing this? That's a better, that's better. That's easier. Same information conveyed a little bit less, much less likely to put the person on the defensive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
If the people that you're dealing with are dealing in good faith, you can manage that. But if the people that you're dealing with are not dealing in good faith, that's still often the best approach. I mean, you have to figure out if you can rely on them, if that's a partnership that can even work. That's why you shouldn't really sell either. Because really what you're doing is...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
You're offering people an opportunity that's a partnership. And if they're not interested, you don't want them as a customer because they're not going to be satisfied anyways. And the last thing you need is a dissatisfied customer. And you can think, oh, they gave me money. It's like, yeah, once. And so that's not that helpful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And who knows how much trouble they're going to cause if they're disgruntled. Plenty, right? So don't push.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Use of fear and compulsion, that's all sign of bad policy. Fear, compulsion, mandates, orders, all of that. it's much better to, it's much more effective to, to proffer an invitation. And that could be a rough invitation. That's going to happen in the military for sure. It's not like the stakes aren't high, but...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Exactly. Yeah, right. Yeah, no. No, well, you can see that there are, and maybe this is a boot camp issue, and there's a boot camp, issue with every disciplinary structure. There might be a window of disciplinary necessity where the person involved has to subordinate themselves to somewhat arbitrary demands.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
That would be the case when they don't know what the hell they're doing and they really need to listen. But the goal would be to build them as rapidly as possible into people who would engage in collaborative problem solving.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And certainly in the military, the more that capacity is distributed down the ranks, the more effective the military is going to be because that means that competent people can make local decisions in the environment as it changes without relying on or defaulting to a slow moving chain of command that has shaky allegiance to begin with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Do you do that as soon as you wake up before you eat? Is that the first thing you do is work out? Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
What you want in your business too. You want to hire super competent people and you want to offer them a deal that they're thrilled about so they're maximally motivated. This is something capitalists do a very bad job of communicating to young people. It's like, I'm the boss. That's the stereotypical view of an evil capitalist. And I tell my minions what to do. And they do it or else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
It's like no one will work for you productively under those circumstances.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Well, that means the tyrant is his own obstacle to his growth. Because a good manager makes himself irrelevant as rapidly as possible. And then he's free to go do something else. That's the payoff. Why would I give up that control? It's like, you want control? Really? You want control, do you? Or do you want... How about distributed competence as an alternative to control? That's a good deal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And it also means you have to be very... selective in your choice of employees and partners and in the manner in which you structure your deals. And you don't want to get one up on one of your partners. That's a very foolish attitude because, well, they won't partner with you again. And they're certainly not going to give their best once they figured out that they've been had.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And you can pat yourself on the back for being smarter than them, but you're not likely. They just trusted you and you weren't trustworthy. And now they've discovered it. Okay, so this movie now, so you're working collaboratively with the director. So that must have been fun. You must have learned a lot from doing that. Learned a ton. Yeah, I bet. I bet. And so it's in the editing phase.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And do you have anything to do with the editing? Because that's also unbelievably, you man, skilled editor, that's a valuable person. That's another thing for all you people who are out there watching, listening, you young people. If you can learn to edit, cut.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
cut clips from podcasts and put them on your podcast channel and see if you can learn how to pick the minute two minutes three minutes where something is like a whole story is told in a compelling way see if you can learn to do that because if you can learn to do that and you can do that with a hundred clips and they have some viral some virality about them even on a relatively small scale the probability that you're going to be able to find a job is very very high
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Because good editors are ridiculously hard to find. Because you have to have that eye for quality and that eye for micro-narrative. And you just have an unlimited opportunity to do that on YouTube because you can take all the content there and reshape it. So were you involved in the editing? Are you involved in the editing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Right. So first thing, get up, shower, or do you just go right to the workout? Right to the workout. Right to the workout. Right. Do you think about it or just go do it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And that's crucial too. That's a crucial thing for people to understand is that You want a bad, expansive first draft. So you have way more material than you need, and then you cut and you cut. And you're not throwing away, you're conserving the best, right? And so you do that when you're writing, too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Assume if you're going to write something, you have to write four times more than you're going to keep. And then why? Well, how about so you can keep the best 25%? That's a good deal. And so, and editing, you develop an eye for editing. That's really that ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's crucially important.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And I also think if you develop that in any domain, video editing, for example, that generalizes. It's one of those few complex cognitive skills that actually seems to generalize. You know, because I found that once I had learned to edit writing,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah. And so what's the typical workout length?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
That's a good disciplinary training. And I think when you're editing properly, we tried to teach people that in this essay app that I developed with my son. It's like, well, how do you edit? Well, here's one way to make your writing 50% better immediately. Take your first draft and cut it by 25%. Just shorten the sentences. Keep the content. Shorten the sentences.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Can you get the same place more efficiently? That's a great thing to learn. And then, well, every word. Is that the right word? And length is a consideration. And poetic flow. And you want to edit at the word level and at the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
phrase level and the sentence level and how the sentences are sequenced in the paragraph and how the paragraphs are sequenced together and whether the whole thing has an impact. You want to be thinking about that all at once. That's very careful attention to detail. If you pay attention at all those levels, you'll write something stellar. That's a great thing to learn.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
That essay app, it helps a lot with that because it walks people through that process and teaches them how to do that. Okay, so what's the future of the movie? It's not released. When is it going to be released?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, well, that's fun. So that's a cool thing. So now, you know, one of the things, there's another kind of moral that we could derive from the story that you just told too, which is crucially important because people are often confused about where they might find inspiration or get ideas. Writers are often asked that. Where do you get your ideas? And they usually can't answer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
We're building a module for essay that helps people figure out what to write about because I think I've cracked it. And so... the cracking is something like this, is that there are things that call out for your attention that are like invitations in the world. Those are things you're spontaneously interested in, eh?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
But then there are things that bother you, and that's the activation of your conscience. And one of those is really the voice of positive emotion, things that invite you forward, and the other is the voice of negative emotion. Here's a problem, a pitfall, an obstacle, a way of deviating off the path, a place where things have gone wrong. Now, what happened to you, and you said this,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
straightforwardly is you had a problem which was well what am I going to get my kids to read and your experience was you went to the library the bookstore and you couldn't find anything now you could imagine someone brooding about that you know the culture's gone to hell it's like how the hell can we have nothing but like wimpy pirate novels and it's just another indication that we're going to perdition in a handbag and and you know and to get resentful and bitter about that but your
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
perspective was that absence is an opportunity. And so this is a good thing for people to know. If something bothers you, there's a billion things that could bother you, and not everything does. And so then you might ask, well, why does that thing bother you when some other thing that's equally bad doesn't?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And as far as I can tell, the answer to that is because if it bothers you, that's your problem. And you might think, I don't want to have a problem. It's like, that's because you don't know that problems and opportunities are the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So if a problem's crying out for you, to you, then it could well be that your proper destiny is to address that problem, in which case it's an immense opportunity. And you saw that, exactly that. Oh, look, there's an absence in the marketplace. Well, that's a good discovery, an absence in the marketplace, especially if you're right about
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And so that's what you did, and then you got a movie out of it. So that's a pretty good deal. And that's independent of its eventual success as a movie, because even if it... lands at any of the levels of success it could land at, you got to make a movie. And so that's pretty good. And God only knows what you learn doing that. So there's no loss in that, right? There's just gain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So unless I'm- You don't have to schedule the damn thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Okay, so there's a bunch of things that come off that. So one of the things I realized, so I've done a lot of lecturing again this year. I don't know how many different cities we went to. 60 or 70, you know, over the last eight months, maybe more than that, a lot. And I've, you know, I have a chance to develop my ideas every night.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
One of the things I came to understand more clearly was, this is a very cool thing, it's relevant to what you just said, is that the spirit of your aim is You could say answers your prayers or informs your thoughts. And it has to be that way because thought is a navigation tool, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
You set an aim and then your perceptions line up so you can see your way forward, but your thoughts and your emotions also aid that because otherwise... Because you want to get there, let's say. And then the methods by which you might advance... come to mind because you've set your aim, okay, so we can take this apart in this idea that came to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
It's like, you wanted to serve your children, okay? You wanted to serve them in a manner that was better than what was being served to them. You wanted to serve them in a manner that would help them develop in this adventurous way. So that was your goal, your aim, when you went to the library. And then what happened was there was a mismatch between what you discovered and your aim.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Right. Okay. So you work out, then what? Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And so now that constitutes a problem. But it also constitutes an opportunity, right? Because now you see that if your aim was correct and there's a void, well, then that's a moral problem even. Okay, so now if it's a moral problem because your aim was right and... that the mechanisms for that aim to be manifested aren't available, well, then that's a genuine gap, and it needs to be addressed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And if you figure that out, it's your moral responsibility to do something about it. But it's also your great opportunity. Okay, so there's that. So that's what you're serving. If your aim is correct and true, and you have a revelation in relationship to that aim, and you don't act on it, you've thrown away the pathway to that aim, and you've betrayed it. That's not a good idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
But even more concretely, One of the things my wife has really learned to do in the last two years, she started to write and she started to speak publicly because she introduces me and talks for about 10 minutes. And she's learned during our discussions, our private discussions, let's say, if an idea emerges, she writes it down right away. No matter what we're doing, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
The idea comes, you write that thing down, because it's a gift. And God only knows what it's worth. You know, you could have a good idea now and then. It might be a good idea that changes your whole life. And you could have that idea and be casual enough to forget it, and that was that. And then you'd wonder why you never got anywhere. It's like, well, you had a gift, and you didn't.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And then there's another issue, too, is... The things that meet with reward grow. That's a neurological truth. That's how large language models are trained. They're trained with reinforcement. The closer they get to the target, the more weight is put on that response. So it's literally reward that trains large language models to match the target.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Well, if you have a bit of a creative spark and you're being... and ideas are being revealed to you in concordance with your aim, and then you don't act on those, you punish them. You punish the source of the ideas. Just like demoralizing a kid. Like if a kid comes to you with ideas, and every time they come, you say, oh, that's stupid, or what the hell do you know?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Or you say, I'm going to do something about that, and then you don't. That kid will stop coming to you with ideas. And people do that to themselves all the time. All the time. And so you even have an obligation to your You can watch this, you know, this is what I've been trying to teach people too, is if you want to improve your life, it's like, well, set that as a name.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
I'd like things to be better. And then ask, what could I actually do that would move me somewhat in that direction? You'll get an answer. That's a good way to pray. That's a good way to pray.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So tell me, list out your businesses, if you would. And so let's go through that a little bit, and then we can talk about where you're pursuing all of those.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Well, that's part of that discipline striving. Like I learned when I first started writing, I forced myself to sit and write every day. And some days... I was highly productive, and other days I wasn't so productive. But every day, if I sat long enough, I was a little bit productive. And then I got better at being productive and much better at not delaying sitting down.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
That took a long time, really years, to really get disciplined. I'm still learning that discipline. How long do you write for at a time? I max out about three hours. I find that if I write more than three hours continually, I get exhausted. So three hours is about right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And I've learned tricks like at the end of the writing session, write down what you're thinking so you can use that the next day and do it every day and so on. And I've got to the point now where I can write a newspaper article daily. a good newspaper article, pretty much in one draft. But that's taken 35 years of writing to manage that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
But I learned early that if I sat long enough, I would write something that would be valuable, right? And some days it took like 45 minutes to get warmed up so that, you know, everything I wrote was just... painful to produce and not a very high quality. But if you persist, the thing that persistence, that's the other thing that's kind of interesting neurologically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
You know, I already said, if you punish the source within you that gives rise to ideas, it will stop producing ideas. So that's a bad idea. But It's also the case that you want to make being creative the victor over all the competing pulls and temptations. And partly what you're doing when you're disciplining yourself is that. It's like, no, I'm going to sit here
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Regardless of all the other things I could be doing, all the other things I could be thinking, until that part of me that's able to create wins that internal battle and prevails, and then it gets stronger and stronger over time. And that's building character. That's exactly what that is. Let's segue. Oh, I want to ask you one more question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Why did you move to adolescence instead of people who are in grade five? And then I want to segue to your leadership consulting and talk about exactly what you're doing there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Well, in adolescence too, like there's a lot of coming of age movies and they're also generally attractive to adults more so than a kid's movie. Now and then you get a kid's movie that works, like Stand By Me worked. But those kids were also on the cusp of adolescence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
I think adults are interested in adolescence because that's this time of radical personality reshaping and the construction of destiny. And so people... whether they're happy about the way their life's turned out or not, they, they're interested in looking back to think what if, you know, so, okay. So that's okay. So that's very interesting. And we'll keep an eye on that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And that's tell me the name of the movie again, tell everybody the name of the movie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah. Okay. And so let's talk about your leadership consulting. So, you know, I, worked with executive MBA programs, and I was very interested in the psychology of leadership, but as a psychological field, leadership is a mess, partly because it's very ill-defined. Like, what's a leader exactly? It's a more intractable question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Not as intractable as what is a woman, as it turns out, but... So, let's start with that. Like, when you're... when you're consulting on the leadership front, what is it that you think that you're training? And how did you come to the realization that that was what constituted leadership? So let's, I'd like to know how you define leadership even, and then how you facilitate its development. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, with an or else lurking behind that, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Well, it's actually, well, since time immemorial, the core of religious practice is humility. So what does that mean? It means you practice that. So it's a practice. Why? So you get expert at it. Well, why? Because then you're optimally placed to learn, right? If you're noting what you don't know,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And you're viewing every opportunity as an opportunity to inform you rather than an opportunity to control or exert power. You can become an expert at that. Rogan's an expert. You're an expert at that. Your podcast wouldn't work otherwise. Podcasts are... You're not going to be an expert podcaster.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Well, there's some manipulative ones, let's say, that capitalize on, you know, trouble muckraking and gotcha questions and that sort of thing. But the honest podcasters... They're trying to get smarter, and they're bringing their audience along for the ride.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, so leadership, so you can imagine that if you're making someone an offer for a partnership, let's say, because that's a form of leadership, the first thing you want to do, I think, and you tell me what you think about this, is like, well, this is what I'm envisioning. This is where I see this going, right? Does that strike a chord in you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And the answer might be no, and then maybe we could discuss some more because you don't understand exactly, or it might be, okay, well, then you're not the right player for this game, right? And you don't want to force that at all because if the person doesn't share your vision, well, you're not in a partnership. So that's just an exploration, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And then the next thing would be something like, the next question would be, is there something that we could do together that would work out better than if we each did it separately, right? And that's a question too. Like one of the things that popped up, for example, when you were talking about your clothing company, so we're thinking about merchandise for Peterson Academy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And so I thought the first, one of the things that popped into my mind when we were talking was, And I can just ask you this. Do you do custom clothing? We can. Okay. Because one of the things we were thinking about for our merch is that it should be locally sourced, right? Yeah. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So that's part of the quest there, too, and the vision. Because the vision should be nested inside a broader vision, right, to be really compelling. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Well, then the profit becomes the means to the ends, right? Essentially, because profit has a bad rap because people think about it as exploitation. But what they don't understand is that if your aim is true... Profit is the mechanism by which you accelerate your progress, clearly, because you can't do anything unless you have capital freed up to invest. You can only maintain yourself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
There's no progress in a new direction. And so then that puts profit in its proper place. And almost all the people I know that are businessmen who aren't narcissistic psychopaths, and most businessmen aren't because that fails, they're not interested in money for the sake of money. They might use it as a marker of competence and status, and there's something to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
But the ones that are really great, they just think, well... obviously I need to make some money because I can't make this thing grow unless I have money. And then the money That's a plus, not a negative. And the profit motif there is more a testament to efficiency and the desire to progress than anything else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, that's also why they fail, though.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, well, and it doesn't take that. Well, the typical Fortune 500 company lasts 30 years, right? So the failure cycle is pretty damn rapid. And it does, I think that is what happens, is there's a vision to begin with, and it's very compelling, and the profit serves the vision, but then it gets institutionalized, and the machine starts to run itself, so to speak.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, well, that that's right. That's right. Come inverted. Well, and that that often, I think also happens when the company has become successful. It's like, okay, We did it. Now what? Well, hopefully there's a new vision and a new direction, but otherwise the thing is going to keep, it's going to turn into an algorithm and eventually that won't work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So, but the way the free market deals with that is then those companies become unsuccessful and they're replaced. So, okay, so you establish an aim and you negotiate to see if that's shared and then you start listening to see if you can build, what, a cooperative partnership a cooperative strategy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And so when we talk about... You could ask, here's why I think my idea might be better, but I'd be very interested to hear why you think that might not be true, right? Because maybe it isn't, and I'd like to know, actually.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, I think the last time we talked, you told me about reestablishing some of these factories and reopening them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, that's good. You know, I've done that with, particularly with my kids, because I run a couple of businesses with them. And my default there certainly is, Like if you've got a plan and it's a reasonable plan and you've worked it out and you're motivated by it, how about I leave you the hell alone because you've already done something really good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, well, that's because you've solved the motivational problem, right? Well, and it's also, see, that's also how you optimally train partners and subordinates is... If they have a minimally viable plan and it's clear that they're going to implement it and they implement it, then they learn to implement and they learn to modify their plan on the fly. And then they get good at doing that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So it'll be fun to cover that. So those are the big three. What else? Because that's not enough, you know?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
That meta skill, right? Which is the meta skill of making a plan and modifying it on the fly. You definitely want to encourage people to develop that ability. Definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah, well, right. And if you make an offer to someone like that, the probability that if they're reasonable people, the first thing they want to do is reciprocate is extremely high, right? So you cede as much territory as you can, assuming that you've agreed on the aim. And it's also, you can negotiate the aim too. You know, you can say, I find this vision of possibility compelling.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
It's worth sacrificing for, worth putting some effort in. But, you know, first, are you interested? And if not, well, then we can talk about some other things. But if you are, like... Are there elements of it that you think might be altered that would make it even more compelling to you? That's certainly what you want in a, well, partner or someone who works for you, clearly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
You want them optimally motivated. You know, when I set up my businesses with my kids, I said, when we were figuring out the business end of it, I said, well, I have a lot of marketing clout and you want me bought in and you want me to prioritize what I'm doing with you given all the other things I'm doing. So you have to remember that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
But other than that, I want you to bring me the deal that you're maximally thrilled by, right? So that's the goal. And then, well, if someone brings you that deal and it turns out to be acceptable, there's no enforcement requirement because it's their thing. It's their thing. And then you can have a piece of many things and that's a very good deal and shepherd them and...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
and help people develop along the way and learn a bunch. And so I don't know how it is that we ever got the idea that the boss was the person who barked out orders. I mean, no one who's effective... If you have someone that's working for you that requires that, they're either really immature and still in that disciplinary phase, or you shouldn't be working with them, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
If I have to force you to do something, we aren't suited for each other.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
A prime... Primate dominance hierarchy struggle. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
We don't want to get into the private... No, we don't. No, no, no. Unless your goal is primate dominance, right? Which is not... Well, that's a better goal than abject failure, but it's not the highest goal. No, no. And a problem like that, it like... If there's a meeting and it goes sideways, the most appropriate approach to that, I would say, is certainly not to ignore it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Although if it only happened once, you could probably file it away for further consideration and not act immediately on it unless it happened again, right? Because you don't want to jump the gun. But my approach in this situation would be something like...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
you know, I was watching that meeting, and here's a bunch of things that went well as far as I'm concerned, but I thought this one part, to me, seemed to slip sideways, and the discussion got counterproductive, and I'm wondering if you saw that and what you think happened.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And that's... embedding it in a more positive message, that's also extremely helpful, you know, because lots of times, too, you see when people are negotiating, and... and they're on a trajectory of success, they forget to start the discussion with that. It's like, given that we're on a trajectory of success and these are a bunch of things that you've done right and we've done right,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Here's something we might be able to improve. Well, that's a lot easier on people. And it's certainly not a strategy of avoidance. And then it does have that investigative quality. Because you don't know, right? And sometimes you think things went sideways. And that was actually the person's intent because they felt that someone needed to be corrected and maybe they're right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Well, let's hear the story. Hello, everybody. I had the privilege of sitting down today with someone who's really become a friend, Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL, a serial entrepreneur. And we had a chance to dive into the practices of his successful and adventurous life. And we talked about two broad categories of topic, both of which are a great practical utility.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Maybe it was time to produce a bit of an emotional disruption and there was a strategy behind it. You don't know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So three months, August to October last year. Okay, let's walk through that. Tell me about the books first. I know about the books, but everybody watching and listening should know. And I want to know how that got turned into a movie, because that's not easy by any stretch of the imagination. So tell the whole story. Start with the book.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And you also don't make the person into an enemy immediately. Of course. Because why would you do that? To show you're right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Yeah. Well, I know there are hierarchical levels of right. You can be right locally and pretty wrong contextually. And so that questioning approach seems to be much better in taking the fact of that multi-level embeddedness into account. Right? So, okay, so back to the leadership training per se.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So what size are the groups that you, like, what's the process that you use when you're invited in by a corporation, for example?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
All right, so you're learning a tremendous amount doing that too, eh? Because you get to do an exhaustive audit of all sorts of different complex machines, essentially. Yes. Right. Right, and you should get a little bit better at all of them each time you do a new one.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Right, right, right, right. That's the same basic attitude that behavioral psychologists bring to bear in the clinical world is that if you have a client, for example, who isn't
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
progressing then that's a psych it's not like the client has no responsibility but that's also a failure of leadership you haven't specified the goal with sufficient clarity the person isn't properly motivated or you haven't broken the task down enough so that the steps forward are implementable
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Now, there's some people, perhaps, perhaps, who are aiming down pretty hard, and it's hard to find the part of them that would move forward in good faith. Like, I had very few clients that were court mandated. That's just a non-starter, right? Because they're not interested in, they're not playing the game. Their game is the court told me, forced me to do this, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
You can't, there's nothing, there's no leading in that situation or it's very, very difficult.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Why do you think, given that, and I'm certain that that's correct, like I've watched really good managers. I worked with a guy who ran a big law firm and a couple of people who are very good at this, ran big law firms in Toronto, managing partners. And basically what they did was wander around their office and ask people how things were going, like continually.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And they'd see a problem and they'd just tap something, you know, a tiny bit and fix it. And so everything just went smoothly. But the reason I'm asking this is because the vision of a leader is more drill sergeant, quasi-psychopath who orders people around. But the reality is that in successful companies, the leaders are people on a quest who are looking to make something good better.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And I guess I don't understand why there's such a huge divorce between the stereotypical portrayal of a leader and the reality. I mean, you see movies about great coaches and so forth, or Ted Lasso was a good example of genuine leadership, but that stereotype still That stereotype's still pretty powerful, that parody.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And one of the things that happens in the military is... So that power drive orientation can work, and it can work for some period of time. And I think that's right. That's partly why it's also attractive. It's like if you're a real failure, an ineffectual in all regards, the tyrant looks pretty attractive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And partly because... Maybe it's also partly because if you're that kind of ineffectual failure... that capacity you have for aggression and force is pathetically underdeveloped. And so that makes the tyrant even more attractive because they have that willingness to grab people by the collar and shake them, that it's not like you forego that because you're moral.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
You've never been able to develop the skill. But that doesn't mean that that's the highest level of leadership or the optimal level of leadership.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Right, right, right. So they can find, the power mongers can find these short-term niches. Yeah, yeah, that seems exactly right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
It's too bad. So let's close this. We'll move over to the Daily Wire side. We've got another half an hour there. And I think we'll talk about your other ventures there and continue speaking about the foundations of entrepreneurial ability. But I'm curious...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
obviously you're well into the making of this movie what's what's on your what's in your vision for the for the future for the next three or four years like you continue to expand outward where are you headed and why
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Has Final Spin been published?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
I see. Okay, and you wrote the screenplay for that? I did write the screenplay. Oh, that's exciting. So that's another movie project in development. Okay, well, that'll keep you busy. Oddly enough, yeah. Yeah? I don't know how I get myself into all this stuff. That is the question, and that's what you're trying to teach people, too, how to get yourself into all that stuff.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So tell the truth, take responsibility and make things. Yes. Right. Yes. Yeah. Well, that's that'll work. That'll work. Like it'll be a slow start because zero to one is really hard, but Truth, responsible truth and effort that if you're diligent and persistent, you'll get to one. And once you get to one, things get easier, right? Zero to one's hard. Your first paying customer, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Your first hundred people on YouTube. But like you said, there's, if you want to write, you can. If you want to podcast, you can. If you want to edit, you can. All of this is just laying there in front of you. And your point about Your goal can't be self-aggrandizement. It'll just make you self-conscious and miserable anyways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Your goal should be to do the best possible job you can doing that and to be pulled along by your interest and to do it truthfully and responsibly. And that'll work. Yeah, yeah, that'll work. So that's worthwhile knowing. And I know that too, you know, and I'm sure this has happened to you because thousands of people have told me that that's worked for them. Right? So... All right, sir.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So what are we going to do on the Daily Wire side? Well, I think we're going to continue this conversation. We haven't got to your clothing outfit. I want to hear how that's going and the revitalization of these factories and how you managed to pull that off. So there was the leadership, there was the clothing, and then we talked about the books.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
There was one other... What was the other... We got food supplements. Yes, right, exactly. Okay, so we'll continue our discussion on the business side, and I think we'll turn to those endeavors, and I want to hear...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
We'll do a reprise of how you set that up to begin with, but I also want to know how it's going, especially the revitalization of the manufacturing factories, for example, in the United States. Because the last time we talked, that was a number of years ago. You're just starting that. It had some success. Okay, so everybody on the Daily Wire side, that's what we're going to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So join us there for another half an hour. Thanks very much. It's real good to see you again, Jocko. It's always good to talk to you, man. Yeah, and congratulations on the movie. That's so cool. And on the next screenplay. Those are major league accomplishments and very, very unlikely on top of everything else you're doing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Well, we can also talk about how you... manage so that you can engage in all those projects simultaneously. That's a very, I think we'll zero in on that because that's so cool that as you distribute responsibility, the opportunity space grows rather than shrinking. It's a good reason to give up that prideful control. So join us on The Daily Wire for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And thank you to the film crew here today in Paradise Valley. And thanks again, Jocko. It's always a pleasure talking to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
So, you know, that's also an interesting conceptual error for kids and for adults, for that matter, is that single points of inadequacy do not indicate general incompetence, right? And while it's really hard, it's really easy to fall that way to take a single example, and, well, that's the mountain out of the molehill problem, but that's a classic cognitive error.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
It's like, minimize your self-criticism to the, what would you say? You want to make your self-criticism as small as possible in a manner that would in fact rectify this specific problem. I'm not stupid. I don't know my timetables. Well, that's still too big a problem. I don't know how to go about approaching a new skill. That's still probably too big a problem. I haven't...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
figured out how to set out a schedule that would allow me to incrementally master this thing, right? That's a lot easier on your self-esteem than I'm stupid.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Well, that's what you want to do, right? You want to take that self-criticism and narrow it to the point where it turns into a strategy for progress. That's kind of the essence of behavioral therapy, right? Is to take a well, a vaguely defined and emotionally troublesome, foggy problem, to clarify it until you can advance. And more than that,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
to clarify to the point and to develop a strategy to the point where not only you could advance, but you're highly likely to, to make it that small, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Right. And did that get her going in that direction?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And that that's something you can do and that that's under your control. Yes, yes. Right. Well, that's a very important thing for fathers to teach their children. That's for sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Okay, so you wrote this book, The Way of the Warrior Kid. How many books are in that series now?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Five books. Now, if I remember correctly, did you publish those yourself? Did you set up a company for that? Or was that picked up by someone?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
And so why did you decide to switch from your own publishing house to this company? What was the advantage in that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Well, you make a point. Yeah. Right? You make a point, and you also indicated very clearly that you had your own marketing power, which is a major issue. Like, hopefully what a publisher could offer you is the opportunity to take on all that infrastructure responsibility, but also to market. But if you have your own marketing... clout.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
We should talk a little bit about marketing too, because people, just for clarification, you tell me what you think about this too. One of the things that was most difficult for me to learn as a business person, let's say, I generated a bunch of tests 30 years ago to help companies hire better employees. They were very good tests, but
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
One of them was an analysis of where you find ideas and opportunities. How do you determine where to look for what might change your life? How do you pursue your interests? How do you pay attention to what bothers you? How do you turn the problems that bother you into opportunities? How do you pursue the things that compel you so that they are the gift that keeps giving?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
I really had very little luck selling them, partly because it turned out that most companies didn't want to hire better employees, which was quite a shock to me. And people might not believe that, but it depends on who you're talking to. If you're talking to middle managers in a large company,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
what they're really interested in is not ever taking a risk on anything whatsoever they're not particularly interested in making the company grow either even because there's some risk in that and they won't get any credit for it plus there's some expense and if they were entrepreneurially minded they would be running their own companies and so mostly what they do is attenuate risk and then most companies are set up so that they don't really incentivize their people to take entrepreneurial risks and so anyways we didn't sell
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And we outlined the implications of that dispute for the battle between free speech and government regulation and ideology, as I said, across the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
What about the military in Brazil? Is it right wing, fundamentally? Most of them, I say yes. Yes. So is it reasonable to say that the right in Brazil has the military and the left has the institutions that you, the other institutions that you described?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
I see, I see.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
It's been my experience that getting to know the political landscape on the various countries that I visited and have been able to familiarize myself with to some degree helps me deepen my understanding of what's relevant and important more locally, say in the United States, in Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Yes, and of course, Elon Musk's battle with Brazil has been with the Brazilian political leadership.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Yeah, yeah, well, I think we should get into that. Okay, so, okay, so that... So your father was a city councilor in 1988 and a congressman in 1990, and then he spent 28 years in Congress. And the story that you're telling now is that he shifted the spectrum of political discourse in Brazil from center left, radical left, to radical left, center left, and what would you describe him?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Where would you put him on the political spectrum?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And I think the discussion that I had today with Mr. Bolsonaro with regard to Brazil has exactly the same consequence. There's something deep at work in the world at the moment, and you can see it reflected everywhere. And the more places you analyze it, the more positions you can analyze it from, the more the contours become clear. And so you can walk through this discussion with us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
So it's a limited government vision. Would you regard your view... Now, first of all, I guess I'd like to know, are your father and yourself relatively united in your political views? So, yes, okay. So we can just discuss that, the two of you, as a unit in some ways. Yeah, I do not talk... in his name, but- Right, okay, I got the picture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And so the way that you laid out the Brazilian political landscape since 1985 is basically an argument between two parties on the left. And so I'm still trying to place the Brazilian political spectrum because in Canada, say, and also in the United States, you have the socialist types, let's say, and then you have the classic liberals who are more in the middle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And in Canada, traditionally, that was the liberal parties. Classical liberal Brazil to be on the right. Yeah, yeah, and so, and the right wing that you're talking about in Brazil, would you describe that, could you characterize it as more libertarian, would you call it more classic liberal, or would you call it more classic conservative?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
So Brazil has been on people's minds more in the United States and perhaps in the world as of late, not least because Elon Musk has had a very public dispute with, what would you say, a renowned member of the Brazilian Supreme Court. And that has a multitude of implications for the battle between free speech and government regulation and ideological control across the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
You'll learn more about South America and Central America. You'll learn more about Brazil. You'll learn more about the political landscape in general and about the culture war. Specifically, you'll... Have some new light shed on the battle between Musk and X and the Brazilian Supreme Court, and you'll walk away smarter and more informed. So that's a good deal. So join us for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Okay, so let's build up to that again. So let's go back to when you ran for Congress. So now at that point, your father is still a congressman. Okay, so take us through the story from there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
What's making him popular at that? Why is he popular? Because he's a congressman. He's obviously distinguishing himself from other congressmen. What's he doing differently that's attractive to people? Stepping outside of the politically correct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Did he know when he was starting to speak more broadly across Brazil, early on, do you think he had visions of the presidency at that point? Like, was this a... Yes, yes. I do. So that was an ambition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Well, Mr. Bolsonaro, thank you very much for coming in today. I was recently in South America. I spent a few days in Brazil. That was extremely interesting. And one of the things that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Okay, now explain to us how the president is elected in Brazil. The prime minister in Canada is the leader of the party with the most seats, and the president of the United States is elected directly. What's the situation in Brazil? How is the president elected, and how is that position related to the other major branches of government in Brazil? Just lay out the structure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
dawned on me when i was there although i knew it a bit before was that many of the issues that are relevant on the culture war front in north america and in europe are equally relevant in south america and perhaps particularly in brazil and so i guess we should and so that's why i thought at least in part that a podcast like this would be useful and interesting um also
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
So how did you guys use social media? Like you said, it was a very low cost campaign, which is extraordinarily interesting. I mean, one of the things the internet's going to do is to knock the prices of campaigns down dramatically because... Well, Trump went on Rogan a week ago, 44 million views. And those are voluntary views, obviously. People are doing that on purpose, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Rather than having their TV accidentally on to listen to a soundbite. And the barrier to entry on YouTube and on the social media platforms is basically zero. We've seen this with Pierre Poliev in Canada. So he'll be the next prime minister by all accounts. And the... Media in Canada, the legacy media, is increasingly state-controlled because it's subsidized. And so it's very pro-Trudeau.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Yeah, I'm sure it's the same thing. And Polyev just walked around them. He set up his own... social media channels, his own YouTube site. He built his own ads. He made micro documentaries that were 10 minutes long. And some of his micro documentaries were getting like 400,000 views, which in Canada is a lot of views. You know, that'd be equivalent to about 4 million at least in the United States.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And so he just walked around them completely. And you could see with Rogan interviewing Trump and Vance this week, I think the Vance interview already has like 6 million views. There's just no need for the legacy media. And so you guys were early adopters of that new technology. Like a million dollars for a campaign, that's nothing. And so, Did you use all the main social media platforms?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
There isn't a tremendous amount of attention paid to South American issues in the North American press, or in the European press for that matter. That's probably not how it should be, all things considered. And I thought, well, because of that, it would also be useful to bring people some more information about South America, the political situation there, and again, more specifically Brazil.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Like, were you guys... I don't know what... It's active in Brazil. Like, it would be Facebook and Instagram and X and YouTube, primarily TikTok in the United States.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
So they were, were they, okay, so two things could be happening there. I mean, one, and maybe both are happening, one could be that it's merely an organized harassment campaign. But the other thing is, is that perhaps they're also completely stunned at how successful that tactic was and couldn't believe that it could possibly be managed with no budget whatsoever and merely by communicating.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Well, it's funny though, you know, in the U.S., Recently, I think it was within the last six months, Gavin Newsom, who's the governor of California, made some denigrating comments about Joe Rogan, calling him, his son watches Joe Rogan and me, which I'm quite happy about. And he described Joe Rogan as a fringe figure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And I thought, see, that's really relevant because Gavin Newsom is a fringe figure compared to Joe Rogan. I think Joe's podcast is number one in 192 countries. I'm not sure it's 192, it might be 92, but it doesn't matter. It's a lot of countries. And so he's definitely the most powerful journalist who's ever lived by a large margin. And CNN is a fringe organization compared to Rogan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
But the left in particular, And I would say even the liberals in the more classic sense, they don't understand this at all. They still think that CNN and MSNBC and the Washington Post, for that matter, matter. And they do to some limited degree. But that time is seriously over.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And so I'm wondering, even in Brazil, it could be that you guys were seriously on the cutting edge of the communication revolution. And the people that are watching you just have absolutely no idea how powerful it is because that isn't their territory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
But I think we'll start with a bit of a personal discussion. Let everybody know... well, who you are and what you're doing in Brazil, and talk about your family and recent Brazilian history, and then we'll expand out from there, I think.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
That's another thing that's very interesting about the social media landscape. I mean, I know a lot of the main players, obviously, who are pioneers, particularly in YouTube, particularly in the podcast domain. And all the ones that I know are the same in front of the camera as they are off. Rogan, he's a classic example of that. I mean- You see he's the same or he's not the same?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
He's exactly the same. All right. All of the people that are hyper popular as podcasters, that I know are exactly the same on their podcasts as they are off. There's no persona. And part of that is that lack of professionalism. And it isn't exactly lack of professionalism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
What's happened is that as people have become more and more able to do video editing themselves, for example, they're much more video literate than they were 10 years ago.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Yeah. People on YouTube, for example, nobody trusts edited YouTube videos because they don't trust editing. And so you want to see the conversation unfold as it does unfold. And I've talked with Rogan about this to some decent degree about interviewing people, you know, and his experience too is that You can tell who's an empty suit after about 20 minutes, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Because we're having an unstructured conversation and we both have to be able to track it and it has to go where it's going to go, but it has to stay coherent and it has to stay interesting and we both have to be engaged. And there's really just no way of staging that. And if you try to stage it, it just falls flat.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
The other thing that happens too, we experienced this at the art conference in London, is that... If it's politicized in a way that's ego-driven, it also fails. So at Arc, the discussions that were more political were much less successful on YouTube and at the conference than the ones that were more philosophical and that were more direct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
So the new media landscape, I think it's partly a consequence of bandwidth. There's no bandwidth restriction, right? I mean, 20 years ago, a minute on network television was extremely expensive. And so everything had to be crafted and edited and produced. And now there's no bandwidth limitation whatsoever. So none of that's necessary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And it's also the case that people have a much longer span of attention for listening than the TV types presume. Now, they presume that partly because they were concerned with
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
bandwidth and trying to conserve time but then they kind of thought that well people only had a 30 second attention span it's like no it turns out that people have a three-hour attention span no problem and of course rogan above all demonstrated that and so okay and so your dad and they did the same thing that polyev did essentially and maybe earlier about the same time really because polyev was starting to work directly to social media at that time as well okay now
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
the leader of the Conservative Party in Canada. All right. Because he's the other one I know who's used social media so effectively. And I really think that's what's going to happen. This is a shift in the way politics is going to be conducted. There's absolutely no reason that political leaders can't take their message directly to people with no intermediaries.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And I think that's going to be extremely beneficial. And so while it worked very well for you folks, Okay, so your father was elected president 2018? Yep. And how long was he president?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Right, right. Okay, so let's go to the 2022 election. So that was, it was six, you said, just a number of days before that election that your father was just about killed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
One month. And what was the outcome of the election at the presidential level in 2022?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Oh, that was in 2018. Okay, sorry, it was 2018. Forgive my ignorance. No, no, no, that's okay. Yeah, so, okay, so what happened in 2022? Why did he lose the election?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And so I was warned before the interview started to tread very lightly on the territory that we're investigating now. And it seems to me that... independently of the reliability and validity of the electronic voting process, these are problems that you just don't have with paper ballots, because there they are and you can recount them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And so, to give the devil his due, you can certainly understand that if electronic voting machines had a track record that was as solid as paper, they're more efficient and can be tabulated faster. But the truth of the matter is we don't know anything about this new technology, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And you introduce a radically new technology into the process that determines your political electorate at your peril, right? And so conservatives know such things, unintended consequences. Okay, so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Right, so really split down the middle, really close, tight margins. Yeah, well, any election where there's tight margins like that, it's also, you know, you could imagine that even a well-run political system is, what would you say, corrupt 1%. And if the margin is 1%, that makes things very awkward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
All of them were used. Okay, so let me ask you a question about that too. Well, if you looked at your father's administration over that four-year period, And that was his first foray into the presidency. Certainly, Trump has pronounced, announced recently that, Like your father had a lot more political experience by the time he took the presidency than Trump had.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Trump had business experience, but that's not exactly the same thing. But I presume that your family has reviewed the inadequacies, let's say, of your father's first presidency. What mistakes do you think were made under his leadership that might have also compromised the election?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Well, certainly his reputation outside of, I got low resolution.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Well, I can't say that, like, my knowledge of Brazil is shallow, certainly. And so what that means is that whatever impressions I picked up about the Bolsonaro administration were, like, second-hand representations from the legacy media, right? Not even necessarily direct. And it was certainly the case that the gut sense, I would say, of the typical North American with regards to...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Bolsonaro was, you know, dangerous right winger. So definitely now I'm a lot more skeptical about such terminology, you know, now that I was, let's say, eight years ago or even five years ago. But but those sorts. See, one of the problems is, is that it's very easy to tag people. Right. Because you can think about it psychologically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
in a manner that's appropriate, there's a lot of people that you could listen to. There's 8 billion people you could listen to. And so you need a reason not to listen to most people because there's just too many people. And so if you hear something bad about someone that you don't know, it's easier just to assume, well, you can just write them off.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And it doesn't matter because there's 8 billion other people to choose from, right? So my point is it's very easy to smear someone's reputation. It's very easy, especially, I think you can especially do that, you can do that especially with disgust rather than fear. Disgust is even more effective than fear.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And so, anyways, I mean, my impression of, for what it's worth, my impression of the Bolsonaro administration was definitely colored by the pronouncements of the legacy media that this was another far-right campaign. another far-right movement, right? And, I mean, the same thing basically happened to Maloney in Italy and to Orban in Hungary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And so, well, and I do think it's part and parcel of the operation of the legacy media and the sway that the progressives have over the universities and the legacy media. The same thing in Brazil. It's so interesting to see that exactly the same thing is playing out there, that's playing out in the United States and Canada and all through Europe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Yeah, yeah, so we can delve into that. Now, this gentleman that you talked about, the Supreme Court, now he... Alexandre de Moraes. Now, is he the same one? Again, I'm exposing my ignorance here, so forgive me. Is he the same one who's at odds with Musk?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Okay, so it is this... Okay, that's what I assumed. I just wanted to make sure that that... Okay, so why don't you unravel that story for us? You started... you started going down that road and said that, okay, so what role is the Supreme Court playing in Brazil at the moment?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And why is it that Musk got embroiled in a, well, in this very, very public, international public, internationally public argument with, well, with the Brazilian Supreme Court?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Well, they blocked Trump too when he was president. So that's quite remarkable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Well, there was a top EU official whose name escapes me at the moment, unfortunately, who complained, although apparently not with the full authority of the EU, about the fact that Musk was talking to Trump. Come again? That he complained... using his EU... A Brazilian one. No, no, an EU, an EU representative. Unfortunately, I can't remember his name. We'll put it in the notes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
But he complained that Musk was talking to Trump. Right, so this- What is the crime in that? What is the crime? The House of Representatives in the US actually wrote a response letter. And I think it was Jim Jordan who signed it, telling him to really mind his own bloody business as he should have. And the EU, to their credit, did separate themselves technically from him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Although, and I don't know the entire background of the story, but the reason I'm bringing it up is because it lends credence to your claim that the EU bureaucrats who are not the least bit happy with Elon Musk, and the same thing could be said about the UK, especially the Labour Party there, right? They're definitely Musk's enemies and will do whatever they need to to stop him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Now, I had the opportunity today to speak with Mr. Eduardo Bolsonaro, who's a congressman in Brazil and who's also the son of Jairo Bolsonaro, who was the president of Brazil, who's ran an unorthodox campaign, mostly on social media, and became president for a four-year term. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And that is being played out in Brazil. That's part of the reason why I think this podcast should be of broad interest to the international community.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Right, right, yes, I remember that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Europeans are toying with that too. I've looked at some of their background legislation and The fine structures, Canada is playing with this too, by the way, under the auspices of a bill called C-63, which is the most totalitarian piece of legislation I've ever seen written in the West by a large margin, way worse than nefarious Bill C-16. That was just the warmup.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
In any case, the fines that are being proposed in Bill C-63, which I imagine will be somewhat of a template for the impending war against Musk, involve percentages of company revenue worldwide. Like I think in the Canadian bill, it's 6% of company revenue worldwide per day. Revenue, not profit, revenue. Well, and then the question is, well,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Is it X revenue or is it X revenue and Starlink revenue and Tesla revenue? And well, you can be certain that that'll be interpreted in the most liberal manner possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
So Americans arguably have the most potent protection for free speech rights in the world. I think that's a reasonable thing to say. I mean, countries like Britain, European countries, there's a tradition of free speech, but it's really, our free speech protections in Canada are very weak by comparison, very weak. And that's certainly been demonstrated in recent years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
We have a charter of rights, but it's got so many loopholes in it that, and administratively and technically that, I mean, should I say it's not worth the paper it's written on? I'd probably say that. In any case, that's not the case in the US because the right to free speech is extremely well protected. And so what we're going to see
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
really is like a war in cyberspace between the principles of American law fundamentally and the principles that govern the rest of the world. Because the American social media companies dominate and they run, especially X, on the principle of free speech. And so that's another reason why the situation in Brazil and in the European Union is so... incredibly important.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Now, this Supreme Court official, how does he derive his power? How long is he in office? Like, where does he get his legitimacy and his authority? And how is he regarded by Brazilians?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Right. But who can stop him? And under what administration was he appointed? Before my father.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Right, right. Now, so is that, do you think that that's partly an attack on the social media structures that your family used so effectively in your movement to power? Is it a reaction by the legacy establishment against the emergence of social media dominance?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Well, and of course, all the legacy media want that. Well, it's not surprising that the powers that be on the establishment side, so to speak, even for reasons of mere self-preservation, regard Musk as a threat because he is a threat. I mean, his stated goal for X is to make it the predominant source of information in the world, right? I mean, he'd like to supplant YouTube.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And if YouTube continues to muck about the way they have been, they're so full of snivelly tricks that it's just beyond belief. I mean, they shadow banned the Musk or the Rogan Trump discussion this week because they play around with the search algorithms. They did that to me. Yeah. And they're so sneaky about it. For example, they blocked.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
So there's an autofill that people use to find new videos. And for a long time, they blocked the autofill on the name Peterson. And it took us like six months to figure that out because my viewership was declining. We couldn't figure out why. It's like, oh, they mucked about with the autofill. Isn't that unbelievably devious?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And so anyways, Musk obviously wants to make X into, well, a one-stop media platform. And he's pretty blunt and blatant in his ambitions. And it's working. I mean, X is the number one news center in the world now. And it's just getting going because X doesn't do a great job yet of video sharing and that sort of thing. It's not got everything YouTube has yet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
But I had to bet on a company, and it was Google versus... Musk, I'd bet on Musk, like, no, hands down. Definitely, because Google's tangled themselves up in this corporate idiocracy, and it's been that way for about eight years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Well, we're going to see that play out over the next couple of years, that's for sure. Yeah, and it's a tight struggle. the new, this new Canadian legislation, Bill C-63, it's the most, it's so, it's so devious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Because the beginning of the legislation and the end are all about protecting children from sexual exploitation online, right? And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
as long as well who you're you're opposed to stopping children from being exploited online you oppose bill c63 it's like yeah because i actually read it and i saw exactly what you did it's like all your lovely moralizing at the beginning and all your lovely moralizing at the end and this unbelievable totalitarian proclivity in the middle it's just beyond comprehension and so
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
online harms bill and you can see like it's got to be something because it's happening everywhere it's got to be something like the reaction of the legacy communication systems against the new technologies it's something it's no wonder right because youtube free video universally distributable and permanent is a technological revolution larger than the gutenberg printing press i think because
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
The Gutenberg printing press obviously spread literacy everywhere. That and the Protestants spread literacy everywhere. But even with that, reading was still a minority occupation, right? I think 2% of people buy hardcover books, right? And most hardcover books that are bought, I don't think are read. And so people read, but...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
A minority of people read most of the books, but way more people can listen. Like it's gotta be. I know with my books, at least half of them now are audio, right? And that's the case across the book market in general. But- I prefer to listen than read. Well, many people do. There's a bunch of- It's more practical. Yeah, well- One of the advantages is everyone can listen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
So that's a big advantage, you know, because you have to be a highly skilled and literate person to really enjoy reading. And, you know, maybe that's 30% of the population, but it's not much more than that, I wouldn't say. But listening, man, everybody can do that. And you can do it when you're doing other things. And so it's made, it's absolutely revolutionary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
I knew YouTube was revolutionary back when it first came out, I thought. Permanent, universally accessible video. Oh. oh, this changes, this changes, absolutely everything. And that's what's playing out, right? It is, we have this shifting landscape now where the information intermediaries are now obsolete. Well, it's no wonder they're annoyed by that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
All the legacy journalists, like, we don't need you. In fact, you're in the way. All the legacy broadcasters, it's like broadcasting technology is 20 years out of date. You know, and Musk recently called for the Americans to...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
take broadcast so the like cbs and nbc own have rights to the electromagnetic spectrum that they use to broadcast their channels well musk proposed two weeks ago that that just be taken from them because they have they're not they have an obligation a legal obligation to tell both sides of the story which they certainly aren't doing and they don't own that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
portion of the electromagnetic spectrum and so he thinks it should just be turned over to the tech companies who would make much more efficient use of it and the legacy media companies can be cable like everyone else and that's going to happen because there's no reason for them to have that monopoly anymore so it's not surprising that there's this immense reaction like it's broader than the mere antipathy of the left wing to your family and that's partly why it's happening everywhere right because it's
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Brazil, it's the same story in Canada, it's the same story in the US, the same thing is playing out in Europe and in Australia. So you know that there's something really fundamental going on, and part of it is definitely this technological shift.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And then the other thing that's strange about that too, and this is where your family's more integrally involved, is that you guys were early adopters of the new media, and that was revolutionary, right? And so there's two reasons to be terrified of it, right? Not only...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
is the legacy media or the legacy media purveyors dead and that whole system of influence archaic, but it's also empowering a whole new crop of political types who are speaking directly to the people. Yeah, well, God only knows what that's going to do. I mean, Trump's team figured that out in this election.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Trump has been on, I think this is because of the influence of his son, Barron, who from my understanding knows, because he's young enough, he knows the new media landscape.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
I have reason to believe that he's been recommending the podcast hosts that Trump has appeared on, you know, people like Theo Vaughn, for example, and who wouldn't be an obvious... Vaughn's a great interviewer, and I like him, and he's super smart, but it's quite surprising that Trump went on Theo Vaughn's show, and he did, and Rogan as well, and that was another demonstration that legacy media... I think Rogan was almost 50 million people
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Yeah, despite the shadow ban, right? I saw today Kamala Harris used, Kamala, there's some way you're supposed to say that if you're like an acceptable person, but I'm in Northern Albertan and we can't talk. So her, she did a fairly popular podcast and it's got 745,000 views compared to 50 million. And I think it's also because the people who are following Trump
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
don't follow the legacy media, whereas the people who are supporting Harris do follow the legacy media. So of course, Trump's views are gonna stack up because all of those people, all the Republicans in the United States, virtually, all of them distrust the legacy media. And so they're on the cutting edge in that regard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And you know things are bad when that happens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Yeah, yeah. Well, and the same thing is happening in Europe. The legacy media is still... comparatively dominant in the UK, less in the UK than in Europe, still very dominant in Europe, but that's going to change because it has to. You can't compete with free, right? There's just no way that the broadcast networks can survive because their economic model has been demolished.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And they don't know how to do it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
No, I know. It's so funny. So CBC is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. They have a YouTube channel. Well, you can't post comments. So it's like, that's a no-no, guys. The YouTube ecosystem demands that people post comments. So you've already made a colossal error in your arrogance. I looked recently. CBC posts the programming that it broadcasts also on YouTube.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
The last 20 posts that they made, each got less than 100 views. 100 views. $1.4 billion in government subsidy a year and another $600 million in advertising. $2 billion a year. for posts on YouTube that are getting less than 100 views. That means that even all the actors didn't watch it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Yeah, well, that's Polyev's plan. He said he's going to stop the government subsidy of media in Canada. God, I hope he does it because it's really quite preposterous. Okay, we should talk about the future. So tell me about your future and about your father's future, and where the political landscape is headed in Brazil, and also what's going to happen with the Supreme Court.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And are the Supreme Court decisions popular in Brazil?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And so he was still a congressman at that time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Well, as you can tell, because the political issues are the same regardless of the country. The same thing is happening everywhere, and it is certainly in no small part because we're so hyper-connected. And that also means that warfare is going to change dramatically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
So let me get the timeline right before we go on. I just want to make sure. So... You mentioned a regime in Brazil that was similar to the regime in Cuba. Tell me the dates for that. All right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And what's happening in Brazil, this dispute between the Supreme Court official and Musk, that is a reflection of a new kind of information warfare. And it's definitely the First Amendment versus everything else in a very deep way. Right. Okay, so you've fostered relationships in the U.S.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And so that's so interesting because the case that you're making is that you can understand why the Senate in Brazil would be loath to begin impeachment proceedings against a Supreme Court justice. Because when one branch of the government starts to go to war against another branch, there's real trouble there. So I can imagine why they're stepping carefully. I'm not justifying it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
I just would say that that is something that you want to do very, very carefully. But it's very interesting that the pressure is actually being mounted more effectively through the US and internationally than within Brazil itself. What about the typical Brazilian I mean, all the people that were supporting your father, for example, what's happening with them now?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And that'll be our segue, I guess, into discussion of what you think is going to happen in the future in Brazil.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Oh, that's a big deal to have control, to have influence at the local level.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Here, do you think there is, I believe you're implying that there is some possibility that your father will be in a position to run again. You're not certain of that, but do you think it's a possibility?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
In the past- What about more intense threats? Because he was already, as you pointed out, just about assassinated. So what, like, what- He don't care to be assassinated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
To see which side the bread is buttered on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Okay, well, look, I think we should wrap it up there. That's a good place to end. I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side, for everybody who's watching and listening, we haven't talked about the broader context of South America. I want to talk to you about what's going on in El Salvador.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
I know that's Central America, but we'll consider that close enough for the purposes of this argument, and also about Argentina. And so I'd like you to enlighten us more specifically more profoundly about, yeah, the war, the culture war in Central and South America in general. And well, I'd like to talk about Malaya I read his name all the time. Bukele.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Good, good, got it, got it. Yeah, so that's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side. If all of you who are watching or some of you who are watching and listening want to join us there, we'll continue this discussion and that'll, what, update your knowledge with regards to your neighbors, likely neighbors to the south. I know there's people in Europe watching as well, so, but.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Let's do that on the Daily Wire side. All right. We'll continue with that. Yeah, so that's a good teaser. So thank you very much.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
My pleasure. Much appreciated. It's very good to bring these issues regarding Brazil to broader public knowledge, especially.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
especially given the there's all sorts of reasons but i guess the most compelling at the moment is the connection with elon musk and with free speech in general and so yeah so thank you very much for that and thank you to everybody who's watching and listening and supporting this podcast and to the film crew here in scottsdale for making this possible so
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
We had a chance today to talk about the culture war in Brazil, which is very similar to the culture war that's running rampant in the United States and in Canada and in Europe and in New Zealand and Australia, all across the Western world and all across the world. as a whole to a lesser degree, although that will mount.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
So this was after the gentleman that you described had resigned because of this interference from external forces. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Okay, and that was the time during when the president was nominated by the Congress and the court and not the people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And how did Brazilians generally react to that form of government from 64 to 85? It's half and a half, I can tell you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And we delved into, well, the political structure of Brazil, the political landscape there and how it's shifting as a consequence of the social media revolution. We spoke a fair bit about the background to the dispute that Musk is having with the Brazilian Supreme Court.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
And so it seems reasonable to presume that The political spectrum in Brazil for many, many decades has been much more polarized, right and left, than is typical in the United States and Canada, in Europe, that there's more activity on the radical left and more activity on the right. Is that a reasonable way of looking at it as far as you're concerned?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So there's a geographic monopoly and there's a state mandated monopoly because you have to send your kids to school.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
With, you know, a smattering of incompetence thrown in there just for good measure. I've been following Dr. D'Angelo, Corey, on X for a good long time. He's one of these one-man wrecking balls, one-person wrecking balls, like Layla Micklewaite, who's fighting the good fight against Pornhub, and Robbie Starbuck, who's a complete bloody army guy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Yeah, but everything is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny. They threw every buzzword at the wall.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Okay, so let's take apart this issue of choice because it would be easy to assume that you're an advocate of something approximating parental freedom, right? That parents have the right to choose, let's say, the value set that defines the education of their children. But it sounds to me more that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
your primary concern wasn't so much the freedom of parents to choose as it was your observation of the fact that in the absence of competition, so in the presence of a monopoly, particularly a government-run monopoly, the probability of low quality is 100%.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
All right. So back to the issue of – let's see. We've covered – school choice on an economic grounds. We've covered school choice on a parent's right ground. The next issue might be, let's talk a little bit about the Marxist element. Okay, so I'd like to focus for a moment on the faculties of education.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
As I intimated earlier, I don't think there is a more corrupt and intellectually bankrupt faculty than the faculties of education. My experience with faculties of education as a psychologist is that the worst of all psychological theories are always picked up and amplified, magnified, publicized by educational psychologists. Okay, so let's take that apart a little bit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Whole word learning is a good example, right? So whole word learning was predicated on the idea that expert readers read words at a glance. They don't sound them out or phrases even. And so, since the experts do it that way, it would be reasonable to teach children to do it that way right from the beginning. Now, that presumes that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
in relationship to calling corporations out for their foolishness of their DEI policies. And Corey's been distributing the word in relationship to school choice. And school choice is a matter that's bigger than you might think, even though it has become quite a hot political issue. Because the school system, the public school system, is a failure in many ways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
experts read when they learn to read the same way they learn they read as experts which is a completely preposterous idea neurologically but that didn't seem to occur to any of the people who are pushing it and the introduction of whole word reading if i remember correctly into the california school system knocked california from number one in childhood literacy to number 50.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
The findings were less pregnancy, less crime and higher probability of graduating.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
if I remember that correctly. Okay, so whole-word learning's been a complete bloody disaster, but it's still often utilized. And then there's the self-esteem training. There's another terrible idea from psychology. First of all, the idea that there is such a thing as self-esteem. So you can model self-esteem with extroversion and neuroticism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So people with high self-esteem are low in neuroticism. That's the primary issue. So they are less likely to feel negative emotion and that's temperamental trait. Maybe there's some environmental contribution, but not a lot. And then they're more likely to be extroverted because that's positive emotion. And so... If you're low in self-esteem, you tend to feel a lot of negative emotion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Particularly in women, negative emotion is self-directed. So women with high negative emotion have a lot of bodily concerns, for example. They're self-conscious, right? And that's not... It's not an attitude. It's not a cognitive set. It's a temperamental feature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And the evidence that you can do something about that with something like self-esteem training, well, not only is it thin, to say the least, there's reasonable evidence to presume that teaching children to concentrate on their emotional experience actually makes them worse. So the psychologists who laid out the Big Five personality template using statistics to begin with
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
The most common measure is the neo-PIR, and its measure of neuroticism, negative emotion, has facets. One facet is literally self-consciousness. So thinking about yourself and being miserable are so tightly associated that you can't distinguish them statistically. So if you get children to dwell on their negative emotional experiences, then... then you tend to exacerbate the problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Yeah, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Yeah, well, conceptualizing it as a problem in some sense is misleading because a problem implies that there's a normal course of events and some aberrations. That's just not the case. The entire education system, and this is a consequence of the operation of the faculties of education, is radically different resentfully left us at its core.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
The aberration is any learning that happens outside of that philosophy. And so I want to tell you about a study we did because this is relevant to the faculties of education. So I did this study with a student of mine, Christine Brophy. master's student. We were going to follow up on it, but my academic career exploded shortly thereafter. But it was a good study.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
It's extraordinarily expensive, it's expansive, and it does an absolutely dismal job of what it should be doing, which is educating children, at least teaching them to read, let's say, a bare minimal standard of literacy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
The first thing we wanted to do was to assess how political beliefs clump together. You can do that statistically by looking at the path. You can say, imagine you ask a large number of people a large number of questions. You can see cross people whether answering one question in a given direction predicts answering another question in a given direction. So then you can clump the questions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And so you can analyze how belief statements aggregate. So the first question we wanted to answer was, was there a coherent set of politically correct political beliefs?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Because back in 2015, the idea of political correctness, that there was a coherent body of beliefs, was parodied or pilloried as a right-wing conspiracy theory, which was on the face of it absurd, but it still needed to be demonstrated. We actually found that there was two forms of politically correct belief systems. One was more like classic left-wing liberalism, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
But there was a smaller group of left-wing totalitarians, authoritarians, and so those were people who adopted progressive policies, so-called progressive policies, but were also willing to implement them with force, essentially, so there's a tyrannical aspect to it. Okay, so once you establish that these groups of beliefs exist, you can look at the correlates or the predictors, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So there's a standard set of features that you would look for in a psychological study. You know this, undoubtedly. If you're trying to predict behavior, one of them would be general cognitive ability, which is essentially IQ, which is essentially something like rate of learning, and temperament, big five temperament, and then sex, and then... environmental history.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And although it turns out to be quite effective as a propaganda machine, there's a variety of reasons that it's rotten to the core, but the fact that it's a monopoly is definitely one of them. And we delved into that topic in great detail.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And so we used those variables and we found that the best predictor of being a politically correct authoritarian, that's radical left-wing authoritarian attitude, was low verbal IQ. Right, so you can imagine that people will default to a particular kind of simple-minded worldview if they can't think critically very well. It was a very powerful predictor. It was the major predictor by a lot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
It was a better predictor than the relationship between general cognitive ability and grades.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
No, it's not tolerance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
I think what it is is preference for a maximally simple explanation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, you also can't—like, America is a racist society. All inequalities are a consequence of systemic oppression. Well, that's one sentence. It's one sentence. And now you have an explanation for the whole world. Well, that's attractive. Like we like belief. People like belief systems that collapse into something simple. Okay. There were other predictors. Okay. Being female. Yep.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
having a feminine temperament. That was an additional predictor, over and above being female. And that was after controlling for... This is controlling for intelligence and being female. The next was having a feminine temperament, agreeableness in particular, trait agreeableness, empathy. essentially. And the next predictor was ever having taken even one politically correct course.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Okay, so now why am I telling you this? Well, partly because it's a useful thing to know, but the other reason is that the students in faculties of education, as you said, have the lowest SAT scores. Okay, now the SAT purveyors don't like to describe the test as an intelligence test, But it's an intelligence test. Yeah, it's correlated at like 0.9. It's an IQ test. It's just not corrected for age.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, I think, first of all, the admission criteria are low to absent, right? So you can get in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
If you're a parent and you're concerned about your children's future, if you're concerned about your rights as a parent, if you want to have the option to find an educational institution of high quality so that you can give your children the start they need in life, and also to protect them against a substantial amount of ideological warping, then the issue of school choice should be something that's paramount in your attention, as it has become for
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And it's very frequently the case that if you don't know what you could do, that's a degree that will more or less guarantee you a job. And then the other potential problem, and I don't know of any research bearing on this specifically, is that the... The security and the holidays, my suspicions are, attracts people who are lower in conscientiousness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And one of the best predictors, by the way, of teaching ability, apart from general cognitive ability, right, because hopefully you'd have smart teachers, is conscientiousness. Now, and conscientiousness also predicts conservative political leaning, not liberal political leaning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Right, so you have kind of a perfect storm in the faculties of education is that their academic standards are very low for admission, which really matters, right? And then... They tilt radically to the left, which is also something that would be attractive to people who have decreased cognitive ability. They select against conscientiousness because of the work hours and the security.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
You said, I believe, I think it was in The Parent Revolution, I read both of your books in the last week, so I don't remember where this stat came from, but you said that the New York State dispensed with a dozen teachers over what, do you remember the period of time? Was that a 10-year period? Was it a one-year period? I don't recall.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Okay, well, the fundamental reality is that... Yeah, it's very low, very low. Right, right, right. There's virtually no assessment of teachers for effectiveness, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So it's exactly the same pattern as in higher education.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
If you're in a complex system, you can always see that more could be done regardless of the direction you happen to be moving in. And what that implies is that there's no limit to the number of potential administrative contributions, right? Then the question is, well, what would limit the growth of the administration?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And in a competitive environment, free market principles essentially limit because you run out of money, right? So you can only hire as many people as you can afford to hire. This isn't a problem with...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
for many people in the United States. In any case, we delved into the rationale for school choice from the free market and libertarian perspective, but also from the perspective of parents' rights. I suppose a cardinal question of our time is, well, just whose children are they? And I think the right answer to that question is,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, it's funny that you even have to make that case. I mean it's so absurd that – That we have to sit here and discuss whether having more provider of a given mandatory service is going to improve quality. Like, well, what else would improve quality? Wishful thinking or more money? Well, you can spend an indefinite amount of money stupidly and counterproductively. So, obviously...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
children should be watched over by those who have their best interests most firmly at heart, and that's inevitably going to be parents. And so it's in this service of children that parents have the right to determine the educational pathway that they can pursue.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Right, but their argument usually is that, obviously, it's got to be something like more administrators make for a more effective school system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Right, right. How did you manage to—you said 40 studies?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
We won't go there, yes. Yeah, but in your case, that's probably not the truth because— the probability that you're going to publish something that challenges the... It's counter to my views. Absolutely, man. So the fact that this is exactly what I'm asking you. It's like, over how many years did you publish 40 studies?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So just for everybody watching and listening, so you can draw a rough equivalent between number of publications and a given degree. So for example, with one publication, you have a master's degree essentially, although most master's students don't even have one publication. With three, you have a PhD and you have 40. Right. And you said you had a dozen of them two and a half years into your PhD.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And even though parents might not be able to do that on their own, because educating children is a difficult job, they're certainly in the best position to make intelligent choices about the direction to take if those choices are available to them. And so Corey's been working very hard on making that possibility a reality for parents. And so that's what we talked about today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So how many publications, sorry, how many publications did you have when you entered the job market? Approximately. Nearly a dozen. A dozen. Okay, so in principle, you should have been a very hot prospect because a dozen publications in most institutions would give you pretty serious... You know, dozens a lot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And that would give you serious consideration for promotion to associate professor at many educational institutions. So they should have been lining up at your door.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Okay, okay. So you're pretty early on in what would be an academic career, let's say. And you've had a lot of impact on public policy, but more on public consciousness. And so not only have you produced a remarkable body of research, but... you're very good at public communication. That's a rare combination of skills. So I guess the first thing I'd like to know is, I mean, I know about you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
I'm probably more prone to follow, find and follow people like you. Tell me about... how you understand your public influence. Like, how broad an influence do you have? How well are your books selling? And what are your other major dimensions of communication?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, yeah, you should never let the side that you're opposing define the terms of engagement. Conservatives are very bad at that. They're always on the... I'll give you an example. So in the last Canadian federal election, I think there were in the debate, the leaders debate, I think there were five topics that were... debated. All five of them were picked by the left, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So one of them, for example, I think- Playing on their turf already. Well, 40% of the debate was about climate change, right? So as soon as you debate that, you lose, right? Because the fact that you're even talking about it means that it's one of your priorities. And so, yeah, you got to get the question right. So you said, tell me your phrase again.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, and they are the consumer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, Dr. DeAngelis, hey, I got to make sure I'm pronouncing that exactly right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
That's a good analogy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So it's the equivalent of money, essentially, although a little more narrowly targeted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
They improve some outcomes. People are more likely to graduate, and they're less likely to be thrown in prison or get pregnant. But they don't improve cognitive outcomes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, the crucial issue is there's no evidence that Head Start improves academic performance. And that's a consequence of multiple reviews. And it's really a catastrophe that it's the case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So they were worse behaviorally as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
I did a very programmatic review of Head Start in the 90s. So that's quite a long time ago, but the programs had been operating for a very long time. And there were, I think, five major reviews. And at that time, the findings were that Head Start accelerated cognitive performance, so test scores.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
for a year or two following the interventions, but that by grade six, there was no effect, but that the longer-term effects seemed to be behavioral. And so reduced crime. No, no, they were positive. Oh, those were positive. They were positive. Less pregnancy, less crime, and higher probability of graduating. So, and the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
The relevant issue with regards to graduation in principle was that because the kids who had gone to Head Start behaved better, they were less likely to be held back.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Yeah, yeah, no, no, I understand. Well, I sidetracked a little bit into Head Start because doing that review for me was actually very disheartening. Because the thing about Head Start... and this can allow us to talk about political issues more broadly or conceptual issues, nobody liked the fact that poverty tended to persist multigenerationally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And there were reasons to assume that if you gave so-called disadvantaged kids a head start, that A, that might work, but B, that it might even have self-reinforcing consequences, right? Because the idea was, well, you take the disadvantaged kids, you give them a bit of an academic boost when they're three or four, and the consequence of that compounds with time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And so they're actually farther ahead of their peers by grade six because they got this head start, you know? And That didn't happen. And that was a catastrophe for the right and the left politically, as far as I was concerned, because it was a reasonably motivated endeavor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Now I did some arithmetic calculations with regards to Head Start to try to figure out how many adult minutes a Head Start program actually bought a given child. And the answer is virtually none. And also, The Head Start programs were also used as employment programs. So the probability that a given Head Start teacher had any qualification was extremely low.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
You know, when you're dealing with three and four-year-olds, let's say, it's very hard to, especially in groups, it's very hard to spend time teaching them anything because just taking care of three and four-year-olds is such... Basically just a daycare program. Well, exactly. And often not a good one. Now, when I was looking at the positive results,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
say, in the 1980s, the hypothesis was Head Start might not have been good for most kids and probably not good at all for kids who had decent families, but for kids in absolutely wretched conditions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Right, but you were convinced that the Tennessee data, I don't know the study.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Yeah, definitely. The rest of them are socialists. Yeah, yeah. Okay, and so how did that institution come to exist, and why does it still exist?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
What did you have to do with what happened in Virginia?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, given that 50% of the bloody state budgets go to K-12 education, it should be like number one or number two all the time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, they're also, for a long time, like when I went to school as a kid, like I hated school. It bored me to death. But I have to say... that my teachers didn't teach me insane things, right? And so we don't just have- I don't know when that flip happened either. Somewhere around mid, somewhere around 2010, things really went sideways. They went sideways in the universities too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Like I saw that blip of political correctness in the 1990s when I was teaching in Boston, but it was mostly outliers. You know, it was the radical fringe, although a lot of them were in the educational psychology departments, but they weren't, They didn't have the upper hand, and somewhere around 2010, that flipped hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And I think that sort of thing flips partly to, you said, you talked about good teachers leaving. Well, one of the things that does happen as an enterprise disintegrates is that it'll hit a point of no return where it becomes so unbearable for anyone competent to be in the system, they all leave. Right. And then, well, then you're just left with the worst of the worst. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And then they hire people who are even worse than they are. And the whole thing's, you know, going off its railings. And so I guess part of the reason that this has become an issue is because the student, the schools moved from merely like traditional incompetence, traditional socialist incompetence, let's say, to absolute bloody insanity. And then people started to notice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And it was likely the gender issue that did that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
a self-fulfilling prophecy. I've spoken to Republican governors about this on multiple occasions. I think I met you at RGA, by the way. Yes, that's right. That's right. You know, and I've been beating the drum on this issue not very successfully, I would say, is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Republicans don't have a hope in hell of ever winning the culture war if they allow faculties of education to maintain their hammerlock on teacher certification, and if they continue to spend half the state's money on K-12 education, essentially that's dominated by progressive Marxists. Like, everything else that is happening is, as far as I'm concerned, it's blowing in the wind.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And so I want to challenge you on a couple of things, because I'd like your opinion. See... I can understand the rationale, the logic for your choice approach. And I can see it from the free market perspective. So let's say the libertarian perspective. I can see it from the parents' right perspective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And I appreciate the data that you've described in terms of demonstrating that when you do open the market up to competition, you get an increment in quality even on the public side and a decrease in administrative spending. Great. All of that makes sense. But I am wondering... if you've hit the nail squarely on the head. Because I'm... And I genuinely want your opinion on this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
It seems to me that the fundamental weakness in the system is still that faculties of education have a hammerlock on teacher certification. So, because, you know, I know people who are sending their kids to private schools, but the private schools are full of woke teachers too, right? The Catholic schools are full of woke teachers. Like, it's a pervasive problem. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
I want to know your thoughts on the teacher certification issue, because I think what the Republicans should do is just, they should just take the monopoly away from the faculty certification.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, you see this in the universities, too. It's like, well, we're going to scrap our DEI programs. It's like, they're not scrapping them. They're just renaming them. They just retitled this person, and they continue to do exactly the same thing. And you can camouflage what you're doing with words, no problem. It'll take people years to figure it out. And so this is another part.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So you think the diversity of school proliferation will eventually solve the ideological problem?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Are many or most of the school choice programs set up so that you could set up a micro school and educate your own children, for example?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
It's an interesting twist on, paying women to have children. Because in some sense, that's what you're setting up, right? Well, yeah, yeah. Because a lot of- Which is what the public school system is already, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
If it's $20,000 a year per child and the typical family has two children, the woman has to make $40,000 a year to justify the subsidy. And so that's after expenses. And so that's a very – it's very unlikely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Yeah, well, you could figure, what, 60 for overhead in terms of physical plant, something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So where does, well, so tell me, where does the, where does the, so you said-
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Republicans don't have a hope in hell of ever winning the culture war if they allow faculties of education to maintain their hammerlock on teacher certification. Everything else, as far as I'm concerned, it's blowing in the wind.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Which you could do if it's $20,000. So what is the amount of the typical voucher if student expenditure—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Is any of that happening locally as well to pull in there?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, and also the reality is, as you pointed out, that there's enough money at the state level to produce economic incentive for the micro-schools, for example. You know, you could imagine five kids together, that's $50,000 a year. That's a pretty good supplement for a given parent's income. So, okay. So, let's talk about... Let's see, where should we go now? Yeah, okay, um... effects.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So I want to talk a little bit more about your means of communication. You've been working for these think tanks, but your work has received broad public attention. Okay, so now you also said that that was in part because you were in the right place at the right time. Yeah, yeah, that makes a difference. And you've done the background research, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So you had a message that was saleable given the state of the zeitgeist, let's say. Okay, well, that's crucially important, right? But it's also important to be able to capitalize on that. Okay, so how would you characterize the consequences of your work so far? What have you seen shifting that you would attribute, at least in part, to the message that you've been disseminating?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Independent of graduation rates?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Is X your most effective?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So let me ask you about that. I've discussed school choice with some of my more intelligent liberal friends, and one of their objections has been that I think you'll be able to address this given what you already said, but I'm going to lay it out anyways. Parents who are involved in their children's future, in their children's educational options,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
given the vouchers, are going to do the research, and they're going to find the best school to suit their children. But then there'll be the children whose parents can't or won't involve themselves, and they're going to default to the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
public school system, and if it collapses as a consequence or degenerates as a consequence of funding being distributed widely, then don't we risk setting up a group of kids who are already suffering because their parents aren't involved to fail even worse because they're going to exist within the confines of a degenerating public school system?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
2024. Wow. So essentially this year.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, it's a reasonable hypothesis, but the fact that the studies have already been done indicating that the- There's one other study on this topic that I think is really important.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Yeah. And then there is another one that you co-authored.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, it's definitely the case too. Like I remember reviewing studies probably about the same time I was looking at head start on attitudes of the underclass towards their children's education. And look, if people are going to be motivated by anything, they're going to be motivated by the thoughts that their children might have a better future, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And so most parents, for example, regardless of their own literacy levels, would like to have children who are literate and well-educated. And they might not know how to do it, but They know their kids better than anybody else. Yeah, well, they actually care. That's right. They care as much as they care about anything, and they care far more about their kids than anyone else is likely to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Right, okay. But the critical issue is, as you already pointed out, if these studies, and you think the studies that show a salutary effect on public school quality because of increased competition, you think those are reliable, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Okay, okay, okay. So let's end with this. Let's end this portion of the discussion. I think what we'll do— I wanted to hit one more thing. Yeah, well, this is what I want to give you the opportunity to do that. So if there's anything else you'd like to bring up, do it now, and then we'll turn to the Daily Wire side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, that's better, at least for the people who are getting the money.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, it isn't an obviously partisan issue. It shouldn't be. Well, it's like cost-cutting in government. It isn't obvious at all why that... default left winger would be against getting rid of fraud in the political system and political spending, right? Because then, at least in principle, more money could be spent on things that actually work. Yeah, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And this seems to be, I mean, you can make a perfectly cogent case, as you have, I would say, for how broadening choice It might even preferentially benefit people who are poor and dispossessed. That seems to be highly likely to me because, as you pointed out, the worst schools are the ones that are serving the people who are trapped in the – admired in poverty, often multigenerationally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And I don't see any way out of that then. the multiplication of supply. And it's also the case that the money of a poor person is just as good as the money of a rich person. And so if they have that money at hand, their children are more likely to be valued by people who would like to get paid for their efforts. Right, right, right. All right, so I think,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
We'll turn to the Daily Wire side now, and I think I'll talk to you about a couple of things. I'd like to know about your future plans, strategic and conceptual. Where do you go next? I'd like to know what it's been like for you to deal with the new administration federally and particularly on the federal level. And...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
I'd like to talk to you more about any pitfalls you see emerging on the school choice side. So we'll talk about the future. We'll talk about strategy. We'll talk about the new administration. We'll talk about potential risks that you might see, maybe in the hyper-partisan approach, but also in the school choice space. conceptual domain per se. So we'll turn to that on the Daily Wire side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Everybody watching and listening, you're more than welcome to join us for an additional half an hour behind the Daily Wire paywall. Thank you very much for coming.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Yeah, yeah. It's really good to have you here and appreciate it. And, you know, you're spending your time educating people too and letting them know, well, exactly how they should be thinking about the fact that their children are sent to a pathologically unproductive monopoly, right? That eats up half the resources at the state level, right? It's really something. It's really something to see.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So, all right, everybody, you can join us there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So that means essentially that the teachers unions have a hammerlock on 50% of the state budgets. And it's worse than that. It means that the faculties of education, we can talk about them in some detail, because they have a monopoly on teacher certification, basically have their What would you say? Their status is subsidized by half the money that Americans spend at the state level.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
It's the only way they can survive because I don't know if there's a more dismal faculty than the faculties of education.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
There's a number of different monopolies operating that you just described. There's geographic monopoly, right? And that's a good analogy. So there's no competition. The problem with no competition is that when there's no choice, there's no real incentive to do the hard work that produces improvement. And there's actually no possibility even for comparison between different systems, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Thank you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So without competition, you don't have any possibility of really head-to-head evaluation, and no necessary incentive for innovation. So there's a geographic monopoly, which you just described. You send your kids to the school that's in your location, and that's that. And then there's a state-mandated monopoly because you have to send your kids to school.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Right, right. Okay. And now, so you fundamentally concentrated, and does this include your doctoral research, you fundamentally concentrated on the issue of choice per se? Yes. And were you interested in choice as an economist might be interested in choice? Or why were you interested in choice?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Hello, everybody. I'm speaking today to Dr. Corey DeAngelis. He has a PhD in education policy, which under normal circumstances wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. But he graduated from the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas, and that's one of the rare schools, maybe the singular schools, that isn't terribly bloody Marxist in its fundamental orientation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
There's also kickbacks. What's the percentage of Democrat financial support from teachers' unions across the U.S.? It's in the high 90s, if I remember correctly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
They're not doing the same thing because they keep ramping up the mounted costs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
So it's worse than the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Smaller classes, more money.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Well, in principle, you'd assume that much of the heavy lifting could have been done by computational technology. I think that's particularly true if it was applied properly for, you know, when you're teaching children basic skills, likely reading is the best example of this. So when children learn to read...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
contrary to the whole word theorists who are also a product of the faculties of education and devastated literacy in their theoretical stupidity. So, English obviously is a phonetic language, and the way you learn to read is that you learn to associate sounds with letters, and that's actually a rather dull process.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
There's nothing intrinsically, not, there's little that's intrinsically interesting about that. Some kids will treat it like a puzzle. Some children can associate letters with sounds very rapidly, and some take much more practice, that's IQ dependent fundamentally, although there are other contributing factors. You can have high IQ kids with dyslexia, but it's basically an IQ phenomenon.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
But what you wanna do with little kids is, continual exposure and practice because they need to produce little neural circuits that recognize each letter and that use the conjunction between the visual system and the auditory system in the brain to tag each letter with a sound. Letters first, two letter combinations, three letters, small words.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
Then as you develop expertise, phrases, you get in a single glance and maybe even sentences if you start to become stunningly proficient. Right. Computers are unbelievably good at the first part of that. Right. Because they're incredibly patient and they can give you immediate feedback.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis
And so, at least in principle, it would be possible to augment teachers with appropriate technology and increase their efficiency. And we've seen none of that. Right. None of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
So we started our conversation with a discussion of the pathologies of modern academia and tried to analyze exactly why the institutions had become so hidebound and ideologically rigid and punitive, and also investigated whether there was anything that might be done about that apart from, say, making new institutions. I can't say we came to a particularly optimistic conclusion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
But do you see... Like, I can't imagine that you're happy to see the demise of these great institutions. I mean, if we lose Oxford and Cambridge, for example, that's a complete, bloody catastrophe. But...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Yeah, well, you know, we also didn't add to the panoply of problems the fact that the research journals themselves have been captured and corrupted. Academics have to pay to publish in them. They have libraries over the barrel. They charge them an arm and a leg, completely inappropriately, and they put everything that researchers write behind a paywall. And then it takes two years to publish.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Like, this is... That's insane. In a world where you can write something and publish it to an international audience in one day, the fact that it takes two years to publish a peer-reviewed article means that you're stuck in like 1830. If that. It's terrible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And then we turned our attention to the unit party in the UK, the strange co-option, let's say, of both the Conservative and the Labour Party into this woke, utopian, green idealism that characterizes so much of modern politicking. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, so, yeah, well, we have a new leader who will likely be the next prime minister in Canada if he takes over the Liberal Party, which is the kind of classic ruling party of Canada, Mark Carney, who is the governor of the Bank of England. And I just read his book, Values, which is a very bad book from the perspective of literary quality, let's say, for a variety of reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
But worse than that, it's like... Trudeau, our current prime minister, has been a WEF follower for, I don't know, the last 15 years, let's say. But he didn't have the originality or the ability to come up with the ideas or really to implement them all that effectively, although he's pretty much crippled Canada's economy. But Mark Carney, he's like a WEF leader.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And there's every probability that he'll be prime minister at least for an interim period and maybe longer than that. And then I've been to the UK many times and have great admiration for that country, for your country. It's a terrible thing to see it decay and slip away. And it's terrible to watch, for example,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
you people contend with energy prices that are literally five times more than they need to be. At least five times. Mark Carney said, for example, that 85% of fossil fuel stores across the world have to be kept in the ground. And at the same time, he promises...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
the denizens of my home province, Alberta, which is oil rich, that somehow magically they'll all be supplied with green economy jobs, whatever the hell they are, to replace the fossil fuel jobs that, you know, actually exist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And so, I don't know, I mean, my country, Canada, has gone down the insane woke rabbit hole like the universities, but I think your country, at least at the moment, under the Labour government, is even... Ah, maybe you guys are worse, which is a hell of a contest to win. So let's expand on that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
talked through as well the rise of the Reform Party in the UK as an antidote to the top-down elitism, let's say, the destructive top-down deindustrialization elitism that characterizes the attitudes of the political class in the UK. We also discussed the relationship between the policies and philosophies of this new emergent Reform Party
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
So let's talk about net zero in the UK for a moment. I just interviewed Kemi Badnok, who's the new leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, for everybody who's watching and listening. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
She noted her resistance to net zero when it was initially formulated, but she also pointed out, and I don't even know how to conceptualize this and remain out of the domain of radical conspiracy theory, you know, she pointed out,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Kind of like Keir Starmer when he talked about the fact that this experiment in mass migration was something that was perpetrated from the top down consciously, and that everyone who opposed it was gaslit, and that was also conscious, and oops, we're sorry about that. But Bednox said that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
that something approximating a trillion dollar cost net zero plan was passed through Westminster with 20 minutes of debate. It's like, so I just don't know how to conceptualize this. It's like, first of all, what were the conservatives thinking? What was their motivation?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Was it merely that they were trying to look like planetary saviors and to virtue signal despite the fact that they were conservatives? Or was it the fact that, like Keir Starmer, they were completely enamored of the Davos WF crowd, which they regarded as somehow more stylish than the mere plodding pedestrians in the parliament?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
We compared and contrasted them with the political attitude that's emerged in the United States under Trump, collaborating, let's say, with Elon Musk and the rest of the Trump Avengers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
as well the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which is a group that I helped found in the UK that was designed to produce a philosophical alternative to the machinations, let's say, of the WEF, Davos, and UN crowd. So join us for that. Matt, maybe you could start by letting the viewers and listeners, especially those who aren't in the UK, know who you are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, so let's see if we can get to the bottom of things here a little bit. You're outlining a scenario where both the right-wing party, the conservative centrist right party, and all the other parties were taken over by the same progressive mob, let's say, that took over the universities. It's something like that. And so the distinctions between the parties start to become irrelevant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
But then we have to ask ourselves, what are the motivations of the people who... orchestrated and participated and or at least didn't oppose the takeover. So let me lay out a couple of theories and I'm going to go a little astray here, but I really do want to get to the bottom of this, you know, because I'm trying to figure out what the fundamental error is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
We see it, let's say it's the same error manifests itself in virtue signaling on the environmental side with regards to net zero. and virtue signaling on the multicultural liberal tolerance side with regards to mass immigration. And so underneath that, there's this claim of tolerant moral virtue that requires no effort personally, and that it requires other people to make the sacrifices.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, so let me lay a... structure underneath that, and I'd like to know what you think about this. So I've been investigating classic religious stories in the Old Testament and the New, and I found an interesting parallel about a class of sin, you might say, in both of those sources, Old Testament, New Testament sources. So one of the 10 commandments is to not use God's name in vain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And you see, people think that means don't curse. That's the popularized idea, but that isn't what it means. It means don't claim to be motivated by divine purpose so to use God's name, when you're actually pursuing your own selfish agenda, right? So don't subvert the divine to your own ego, your own motivation, your own status, because status is very important to people, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
It's a fundamental psychological motivator. And status determines longevity, for example, and status determines mating attractiveness among men. Socioeconomic status, it's a, okay. So you can subvert that process by falsely claiming moral virtue. Now, the same thing happens in the New Testament because the Pharisees, who are Christ's primary enemies, are the virtue signalers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
I mean, Christ tells the Pharisees, who are the leaders of a popular religious movement tradition at that time, that the only reason they proclaim their allegiance to God and the prophets they purport to worship is so that they can have the best seats in the synagogues and accrue social status. And he compares them to tombs that are whitewashed on the outside and full of rot on the inside.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And it's actually that accusation, that's one of the primary reasons that he ends up crucified. So the reason I'm telling you this, it might seem a bit obscure, but the reason that I'm bringing this up is because I don't think that we've come to grips with how powerful the temptation to accrue moral status falsely, so that's reputational status, how deeply...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
conceited and absolutely destructive that is. And like, absent a better explanation, and Rob Henderson, of course, who you pointed out, has touched on this with his idea of, what's the name of his... A luxury belief class. Luxury, sure, luxury belief class. Look how good I am. Right. And so, first of all, I'm kind of curious about what you think of those ideas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Then I'm curious about whether you have any alternative ideas. explanation for this, because it's a systemic rot, right? We talked about the universities. We already decided, for what that's worth between us, that they don't look salvageable. But you really extended that argument to the political parties themselves, with the possible exception of reform, which we can talk about in a moment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
So, like, where do you... Two things. How would have you characterized your political orientation prior to your departure from the universities, let's say? And then what do you think of, what's your explanation for the pervasiveness of this rot?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, okay. So it's about protecting the pretentious claims to unearned moral status of the elite. But then we might ask ourselves, do you have any sense of why it was the progressive ideas, so to speak, that... emerged to dominate the universities. Like, I can't quite, I can't put those two things together.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Is it that progressive, is it that what progressive ideas actually do, as Rob Henderson, say, might indicate, is the progressive ideology nothing but the proclivity of the privileged elite to cover themselves in unearned moral glory? And is the temptation so profound that that's the natural course of things? Because you might say, well, why wasn't the progressive movement working class?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
You want to just describe what you see as the reality of the rape gang situation in the UK?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Or why was the elite movement towards moral status, virtue signaling, why did that take this leftist twist? And I can't quite put those things together. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, well, let's start with your university background then. What university were you at last?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, so let's imagine. Okay, that's a good hypothesis. So let's imagine this. Let's say, look, when I was at Harvard in the 90s, I taught there in the 90s, that place was firing in all cylinders. And that was the same at McGill when I trained there as a clinical psychologist. I really liked being at McGill. I had excellent compatriots there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And the education I received, by and large, was extremely high quality, especially on the research side. And then when I went to Boston and taught at Harvard, I thought the undergraduates were great. I had excellent graduate students. The administrators served the faculty, particularly the senior faculty. The senior faculty were the smartest and most well-informed people I'd ever met by a lot. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Everyone was devoted to their work to the point where we had very short faculty meetings because everyone wanted to get back to their lab. It was really good. Okay, so now imagine that we had a period of time after World War II where the elite universities, the high-quality universities, really were high-quality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
They were merit-based and high-quality, and they set up a reputation system that was valid. Okay, now imagine that the cluster B psychopaths and the narcissists and the histrionic anti-merit types invaded those institutions that had developed this new currency of status that you referred to, which would be educational literacy. But it was valid. Well, now you can game it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Now you can game it because it's been established. And I really see that this happened at Harvard, for example, with the promotion, for example, of gay to the position of president. It's like, what the hell was going on with that? She didn't have the academic credentials to be hired at a second rate institution. as a professor in the second-rate department.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
So, okay, so imagine that the university's built up a reputation, a real reputation, They were really markers of credibility, and then the system got gamed. Maybe that's the right explanation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, and so what was it that apart from the dismal state of your country, let's say, which I think you share with my home country, Canada, what was it about academia and maybe even more specifically about your sojourn as a professor in political science that disenchanted you with academia?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, let me add another ugly dimension to that line of argumentation. And this is something I haven't talked much about this publicly, but at least not in this context, but I think it's probably worth broaching it. So I did a research project in 2016, just before my academic career blew up. where we were looking at predictors of politically correct authoritarianism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
First of all, we established that such a thing existed, all protestations of the progressive social psychologists to the contrary. There was a coherent set of left-wing authoritarian beliefs, and you could identify them statistically. Then the question was, what predicted them? Okay, we found three major predictors, and we had no a priori perception about this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
The first predictor was low verbal intelligence. And so when you ask yourself, well, how could people be daft enough to believe such things? Well, one of the answers to that our research showed was that, well, people who swallowed those ideologies weren't that smart. And so they were very much likely to dominate those academic sub-disciplines that attracted the least cognitively able people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, so it was a big predictor. The correlation between IQ and politically correct authoritarianism was higher than the correlation between cognitive ability, IQ and grades. It was a whopping predictor. The next, here's, now here's the, so that's bad enough. Here's the kicker though. There were two other major predictors, three actually. The first was being female.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Yeah, yeah. The second was having a female temperament. That was an additional predictor over and above being female. The third was having ever taken a politically correct course. Okay, so now that, you know, you pointed out that this ethos of harm avoidance, let's say, something like that, this protective ethos started to dominate. Well, no one has been courageous enough
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
or foolhardy enough to broach the possibility that the reason for that is that the universities became dominated by not only women, this is even worse, I might as well go in all the way, childless women.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, okay. So they were definitely at least lying by omission. Like I got into the study of left-wing authoritarianism sort of sideways because I'm a personality and clinical psychologist, not a social psychologist. the people who studied right-wing authoritarianism or authoritarianism, let's say, were social psychologists. And so then I had to master the social psychological literature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And I found to my absolute bloody shock what you just described, which was that for 60 years, the... social psychologists essentially had insisted that there was no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism. And I thought, well, what do you mean there's no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism for Christ's sake? Who the hell do you think was, who do you think Stalin was and Mao?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
That's not left-wing murderous authoritarianism. And that's why we did this research. But here's another thing that's horrible, and I don't know if Conway has dealt with this, and I didn't know about the book, and I will read it. See, the pattern of cancel culture is the same pattern as female antisocial behavior. So there is a literature on antisocial behavior that's sex-typed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
So antisocial males are violent. They're physically violent. And they're criminal for that regard, and they tend to get thrown in prison because of it, because we don't tolerate violent crime. White-collar crime's not so bad. You can defund a million people out of their pension, but you don't want to mug someone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And, you know, I can understand that, because people are afraid of being physically assaulted. But we definitely have a differential scale of justice when it comes to economic damage. Anyways, female antisocial types, they don't use physical aggression. They use gossip.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
reputation savaging and and like like camouflaged aggression right and so you could imagine i mean this is a very ugly hypothesis but there's no reason to assume that women are going to be any less pathological in their social behavior than men it'll just take a different form so i was just going to say i would say the evidence on cancel culture you know comprehensive rigorous surveys across
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Well, it's a good thing that neither of us have academic jobs anymore, because if we had had them, this conversation would have done them in for like seven different reasons. OK, let's turn back to the rape gang issue, because, you know, in for a penny, in for a pound.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And so if you don't mind, what I would like you to do is, you know, I've looked at the rape gang issue as much as I possibly could as an outsider to the U.K., Right. And was shocked by it. Absolutely shocked beyond comprehension that such a thing could even be vaguely possible. I couldn't even believe it when I first started to investigate it, which was probably about 15 years ago, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And so the first thing I'd like you to do for people who are watching and listening and for me is just to you want to just describe why. What you see as the reality of the rape gang situation in the UK, just lay it out. You mentioned 50 cities and up to something approximating a million victims. So tell us what you believe to be the case in the UK with regards to these rape gangs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Define them and then tell us what the case is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, so let's delve into the details, both practical and personal, with regards to the universities. Because, you know, now it's been a while since I've been actively involved with the university. It's really been since 2017. And, you know, I now and then have this sense that maybe I'm exaggerating the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, let's see if we can sort out why that is. Because you might assume that if the elites that we were describing have a harm ethic, like a harm reduction ethic that you might associate with a maternal instinct gone astray, that a logical target for an empathic impulse like that might be underprivileged, working class girls.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Like, it doesn't seem to stretch the bounds of credibility unless, and you know, I think I've maybe detected this as a strain in British society because I'm a bit of an outsider looking in, unless part of the motivation for the virtue signaling on the part of the people who are ignoring this, including upper class women, is to separate themselves as much as they possibly can from any hint whatsoever
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
the catastrophe that the universities have become because I was involved in it so deeply personally. So let me review for a minute what I see as the major problems. And maybe you could expand on that. I'd like to know as well what you experienced personally. Okay, so the first thing that happened to me, I would say around 2013 or so,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
of contamination with that lower class status. Is that... I know that's a harsh judgment, but... No, I think there's a lot to do with that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, so let me add another layer to that. And again, I'm speaking as an ignorant man. You know, I'm not a citizen of the UK and I'm trying to sort out what the hell's going on there as an outsider. You know, I really became aware of the grooming gangs as a consequence of my knowledge of Tommy Robinson. And I started watching him about 15 years ago and I interviewed him last year.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
My wife first and then, or my wife and I, It was actually on her instigation. And then we did two interviews. And my sense with Tommy was, you know, I kind of understand him because I was raised in a working class environment, by the way. And so I understand what sort of character he is. And he's also super bright. He's remarkably intelligent. And, you know, he's got a checkered past.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
But my sense of Tommy Robinson, and I'm more than happy to hear your take on this, is that He's a representative of the working class. He saw what was happening to the girls in his community, including his own cousin, who fell prey to these gangs, and he started to make quite the damn fuss about it. And he wasn't afraid to point fingers, particularly in the direction of the Pakistani rape gangs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And we have to talk about the fact that they're, well, you know, because we're already in serious trouble in seven different ways, they're Pakistani Muslim rape gangs. That's the ones we're concentrating on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
at the moment in the UK, from what I understand, and this has been the case for quite a while, to specify it that carefully and precisely, let's say, opens you up to accusations of being like a far-right neo-Nazi, like Tommy Robinson, let's say. So tell me what you think about Robinson and the reaction to him. I mean, I know people like Piers Morgan. I get along fine with Piers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
He's treated me great. We've had lots of good discussions. He's certainly no fan of Tommy Robinson, and he's pilloried in the British press as a general rule. I know there was a huge demonstration, what, last week? 100,000 people, I heard. The legacy media never bloody well reported it. Anyways, see, tell me what you think about that mess.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
was that I noticed that my graduate students, particularly the females, were starting to get nervous about lecturing about gender differences in personality. And that actually turned out to be a big problem for my lab, because I'm a personality psychologist, and one of the things we do is look at sex differences in personality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, so if I'm reading this correctly, your criticism of Robinson would be that he... took the protest route, let's say, rather than working within a system that you still regard, an electoral system that you regard as viable. And you have your reasons to regard it as viable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And then I noticed I was starting to get nervous about that, and that really set me back on my heels. Because I was never nervous about anything that I lectured about, particularly because I tried to base what I lectured about on what I knew, what I'd learned, what I had investigated. It was pursuit of the truth, as far as I was concerned, and I was apprenticed in a lab where truth mattered.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Look, there's two ways we can take this conversation now, and we have to kind of decide between them because we're going to run out of time, although we have an additional half an hour on the Daily Wire side. So,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
What we could do, we could take apart the Pakistani Muslim immigrant issue and see if we could discuss the separate contributions of each of those three attributes to the rape gang phenomena, right? That's a hard thing to do, but it would be worth doing. The other thing we could do, because I don't think we can do both, is we could further discuss
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
the plan that you just described or the vision that you just described in relationship, let's say, to the Reform Party and Nigel Farage. And we could talk about how it is that you might reinvigorate UK civil society and move it away from this virtue signaling net zero and multiculturalism idiocy. And so do you have a preference for one of those directions?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, so let's do that. Okay, so let's start with this. So could you detail out both your association with and your understanding of the, I guess we're going to concentrate on the Reform Party in the UK, and differentiate that from, well, the current Conservatives, maybe even the classic Conservatives in the UK. So how are you associated with reform?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
What do you think of Nigel Farage and what he's doing? And how would you distinguish reform from the... whatever the conservatives are now, the net zero conservatives, let's say,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And then, well, and then things got worse. The DEI people moved in, and the administration ballooned out of control, and... university tuition prices continued to expand in expense, and the research boards, which I always had trouble with all the way back to the 1980s, they became impossible to deal with, so that while I had ramped up my ability to do research
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay, so let me compare and contrast your Reform Party agenda, let's say, with the agenda that we've put forward, perhaps more on the philosophical side, with this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. We have a conference coming up in London, February 17th to 19th. We'll have about 4,000 people there. I think that what we're aiming at has...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
to some degree, they are overlapping Venn diagrams with what reform has been proposing. So we have five major policy initiatives, six because we added an additional one. So let me just lay those out. And I want to do that not to advertise art precisely, although that's handy, but to give us structure that we can use to take apart the reform platform.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
So, cheap, reliable, plentiful energy in all of its forms to drive energy costs down so we don't starve the poor people to death, let's say. Allied with something approximating responsible environmental stewardship, but that doesn't mean nature worship, and it certainly doesn't mean there's too goddamn many people on the planet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
a rekindling of the narrative that the West is founded on and a restoration of appreciation for the fundamental principles that the free West is predicated on. I'll give you an example. 100% of Protestant and Catholic majority countries outside of Africa are highly functional Western democracies. There's a reason for that, and no one will talk about it. And so that needs to be discussed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
We're not a fan of government, media, corporation collusion. So it's anti-fascist in the genuine sense. We're very pro-family. We don't think there are too many people on the planet. We think that monogamous...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
child-centered married couples are the appropriate environment for children and the foundation of a civil society and that's well that's basically insofar as they're those aren't policies they're Axioms, that's a good way of thinking about it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And so I'm wondering perhaps what you think of those, but also more specifically, how you see that in relationship to what the Reform Party is doing, maybe even what the Trump administration is doing in the United States.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
I would say I probably improved my speed at doing research by a factor of 50 given computational technology. I was doing research more and more slowly because it took forever to get through the research ethics boards, which had nothing to do with research ethics as far as I was concerned. And then there was the overwhelming tilt to the radical left. Okay, so that's my spiel.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
I should have pointed out too, given what you just said, that one of the primary focuses of ARC as well, and this overlaps with the principles that you just laid out, is the principle of responsible citizenship, hence the name Alliance of Responsible Citizens. And it is predicated on the idea that sovereignty properly inherits in the people and that society
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
not only can't be but shouldn't be governed by top-down elitist rule by let's say forced compulsion and fear that ordinary people aren't so ordinary and that they have to that it would be best all things considered for them to adopt responsibility for their own sovereignty and to govern their own affairs
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
it became unmotivating to continue. So tell me what your experience was as a professor, as a lecturer and a researcher.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
That's partly an emergent consequence of the principle of subsidiarity, which is an ancient doctrine of social order that has been classically viewed as the alternative to tyranny and slavery. And so, okay, and so that's in keeping with your point. Well, let's say something like a return to the people, which is a deep, obviously, a deep British tradition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Maybe the deepest of British traditions and something that you Brits have given to the world. Most fundamentally, it'd be a catastrophe to see that disappear.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Israel has done it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
All right. Well, okay. First, I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation at ARC in mid-February. And it is a conversation because we're trying to figure out how to move toward the implementation of these, let's say, broad-scale philosophical visions that we're putting forward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And there's obviously a conversation to be had, well, I think, with the conservatives as well as with reform, but certainly with reform. And You know, I'm certainly attending very carefully to your concerns about the capture of the Conservatives because the fact that they're still promoting net zero seems to me to indicate quite likely that that capture is pretty complete.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
But in any case, we've got many things to talk about and there is some reason for optimism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
I think maybe what we'll do on the Daily Wire side, for those of you who are watching and listening, is I think maybe we'll return to the issue of the rape gangs, because there's some more delving into that I'd like to do, both on the pessimistic and the optimistic side, because I'd like to take apart the contributing factors on the side of the perpetrators, like just exactly who are they and why are they doing what they're doing, apart from, you know,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
issues of pure, unadulterated lust with some, you know, with some genuine sadism mixed in there. So I think we'll do that on the Daily Wire side. Apart from that, I'd like to thank you for talking to me today and for being so forthright. That's a hell of a conversation to have to have. There's so many terrible things to delve into. And I'm looking forward to seeing you at ARC.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Yeah, much appreciated. And to all of you watching and listening on the YouTube side, thank you very much for your time and attention. Thanks to The Daily Wire for making this possible. The film crew here in D.C. I'm in D.C. today at the prayer breakfast. And, well, we'll continue our conversation for another 30 minutes behind The Daily Wire paywall.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Thank you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
A trillion dollar cost net zero plan was passed through Westminster with 20 minutes of debate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Hello, everybody. I was pleased to sit down today with Dr. Matthew Goodwin. Dr. Goodwin was a professor of political science in the UK, but he's turned his attention in recent years to developing a more public presence on the political front.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
Okay. Well, two observations about what you just said. The first is, um, I think it was Ernest Hemingway who famously, one of his characters, when asked how he went bankrupt, famously said, gradually, then suddenly. And I've watched institutions, large institutions, including corporations, devolve and die. And it happens gradually, then suddenly. And I think it...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
I think this is how psychopathology develops in people, too. You hit a point where a positive feedback loop of some sort develops, and you kind of pointed to that, I think. So you imagine that as the number of radical left-wing professors increases, the cost of not being one of them increases. And then it increases to the point where anyone who isn't someone like that, who has options
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
leaves because they can. And then the people who are left are either incompetent and can't leave, or are the radicals themselves. Well, this happens in companies all the time. If a company has a bad quarter or two, often the 10% of people who are hyperproductive leave because they can.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
He didn't really believe that it was appropriate for him to be engaging in political action as a professor, but he also got, let's say, sick and tired of working for the increasingly woke university. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And then the company's in desperate straits almost immediately, even though it may still have most of its employees. Okay, so there's that. And then The other comment I would make that's horrible, really, it's a horrible observation is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
I mean, are we really at the place where the institutions of higher education that we're supposed to function not only to educate young people, but also to act to some degree as intellectual stewards of the political, economic, social, and psychological environments, let's say, they've abdicated their responsibility.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
They've become so irresponsible and so corrupt that they actually can't do that anymore. Like, one of the things I've been wondering... I've been contemplating the reality of the rot at universities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And one of the things you have to ask yourself when many large institutions of the same type rot all at the same time, you have to ask yourself whether or not the reason that they're rotting, the simplest reason that they're rotting is because they're dead. They're actually dead and they're not savable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And I kind of think that might be the case because I've tried to think through how you could save them. But you can imagine, here's the situation. They're way too expensive. They're way too centralized. They're way too dependent on government money. They're way too radical in their thinking. There's far too many administrators. And, well, and that's enough. That's like $6.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
That's like six terrible problems. And my experience watching large organizations fail is that if they have two major problems, they're done. And I think academia has six. And I can't even hypothesize how... And then he adds this. One final observation would be... The younger the professor, given everything we've said, the more likely they are to be radical in their orientation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin
And that means the longer their tenure as tenured professors before the scales might be rebalanced. And so I can't even... Okay, so you left, and you started acting in a more political way, and you said you had some personal reasons for that, including the fact that you didn't think you should be a political actor as a professor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
It's Titania McGrath.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Less active than she used to be. But, you know, I was very active as her for a long time. I wrote two books as her. We did a live show where I had an actress play her. We got to do a West End show in London. We only got to do one because we were booked for a week, but the person who runs the theatre found out
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
and scotch that um so we ended up with a deal so we only that's funny it's very funny that titania mcgrath got cancelled yeah well there's that exactly yes she would she probably wanted to cancel herself yeah um but i'm in a different position from graham because i was never fetid or successful in the way that he was so i wasn't cancelled in a sense all it means is that you know i was satirizing this movement and that kind of meant that i i was put in the uh the bad pen
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Well, I suppose, I mean, like a lot of people within the comedy industry, because my background is stand-up comedy and playwriting and writing musicals and that kind of thing, a lot of people in the creative arts got dragged into this culture war because by virtue of what we do, we're on the front line of it, insofar as creative people are often either teasing the boundaries of tolerance or addressing issues, certainly with satire, when you're holding up to ridicule
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
and scrutiny the most powerful elements of society. But then all of a sudden this movement came along, which we might call wokeness or critical social justice or whatever you want to call it, which was effectively a new powerful force in society, which no one was ridiculing. It was as though
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
For all of us, this one closed system of thought had somehow successfully portrayed itself as the underdog and therefore became ring-fenced from satirical attention, which is an interesting unprecedented thing. You know, normally we know the church, the state, the government, whatever. We know who the powerful people are and we know where the satirist's target will be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But this was a group that said, if you mock us, you're actually punching down. You're bullying us. You're a bully, even though, of course, their whole movement was legitimizing bullying. And because of the whole thing was plagued.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Yes, exactly. So it's this power-obsessed, identity-obsessed movement that plays with language, plays elaborate word games. Very effectively, too. Hugely effectively. So they can be the bullies and say that any criticism is bullying. They can be regressive and call themselves progressive. They can be illiberal and call themselves liberal. They can twist everything linguistically around.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
They can be men, call themselves men. So everything is up for grabs in that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
And in a sense, that would be fine if it was confided to the sort of the flesh pots of academia. If it were just the old postmodern theorists... Or a gay club. Oh, well, fine, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Well, that's not quite my point. My point is that if it was just at the level of theorizing, which it was at some point until the late 80s, And then all of a sudden it became applied into society. What I mean is the government now pursues policies based on this inversion of what man and woman means, what truth and fiction is. It wouldn't matter if it was just theorists and activists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Well, actually, to Graham's point, there was a recent, a couple of weeks ago, the government spokesperson for equalities in the House of Lords, Baroness Jackie Smith, was asked explicitly, what is gender identity? What is the government's working definition of gender identity, given that so many public health policies are being implemented on the basis of this concept? What is your definition?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
And she's turned it around and said, that's a gotcha. She said, you know, you should take this seriously. You know, in other words, not answering the question, fudging the answer, and turning it around and blaming the person for asking in the first place. And, you know, we have this similarly just today in the House of Commons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
We have a member of the House standing up calling for blasphemy law, calling for the desecration of the Quran to be illegal. We've had cross-party discussions in the UK on the definition of Islamophobia, and it was agreed by both parties that Islamophobia is a type of racism based on Muslimness or perceived Muslimness, whatever that means. But it's not racism because Islam is not a race.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
It is a very ethnically diverse belief system. So when you have governments, and I know it's very bad in Canada, but when you have governments actually proceeding on this slippery linguistic terrain where even they don't understand the terms that they are deploying, then that means that those activists that I'm talking about have won. They've won out. And they are the most powerful, which is why...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
We've been satirizing them. That's why we've been mocking them, because they're in charge.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
And didn't J.K. Rowling sort of, or other people supported that point of view, and they got called Holocaust deniers?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But maybe part of the problem is that we no longer tolerate the eccentric. I mean, John Stuart Mill writes about the importance of the eccentric within society.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Right, exactly. But if you don't, and if you problematize eccentricity and demand conformity, in other words, you empower those further marginal states that you're talking about, those realms of the monstrous.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Well, I'm saying that those aren't eccentric. I'm saying the ones that they're empowering.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I suppose what I mean, though, is that if we don't cherish the eccentricity, we don't have the arts. We don't have creativity. Absolutely. And so we've been demanding conformity from artists. from the most free-thinking types. And I don't think it's a coincidence that at the same time in our history, we've empowered these extremists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Because they've become the powerful. Yes, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Well, Graham said to me once, you said to me once about the jester now sitting in the king's throne. Right, right. And I think that's sort of what's happening. It's a complete inversion, you know? So we don't have, I mean, this is why Graham and I are now in America, because we're going to work in America rather than, we don't think the creative arts in the UK,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Well, exactly. Hopefully not exactly. We've ended up in this situation, I suppose I should clarify, because Rob Schneider is setting up a new company with myself and another producer I've worked with a lot called Martin Gourlay. And we've brought Graham in as well because Graham's in a similar situation. We're all over in Arizona. We never expected to be... here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
We're working on various projects now. I genuinely don't think it's an exaggeration. It sounds histrionic, but I don't think we could have the kind of artistic freedom in the UK now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Have you noticed, though, Graham, the shift within the comedians? Well, you've noticed more than most, but within comedians themselves. I mean, I remember years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, there was one club in London that had a document, a contract you had to sign, which sent out a list of the topics you couldn't discuss. And that was widely ridiculed within the comedic community.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
No one thought this was a good thing. Yeah. And now there's a club in London. Now it's kind of standard. I mean, I wouldn't say it's standard insofar as most clubs don't do that. But the clubs that do, the few clubs that do, are not ridiculed. They're given awards and they said, this is the ideal now. And you also have more than a signed contract anyway.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
You have comedians kind of policing each other in a more surreptitious way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But what's great about all of this is none of this really ever caught on with the audiences. Insofar as I think generally, even though when you go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival now, most of the shows you go and see will be lectures dressed up as comedy shows, sermons in disguise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
That's what I'm hoping.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Even the intervention of puberty blockers, I mean, even that isn't justifiable. If you're saying that we all have a gender identity, something we cannot define, some esoteric essence within ourselves, and you're blocking puberty. the puberty of a child on the basis of that pseudo-religious belief. I mean, that's already unjustifiable on any metric, I would have thought.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I mean, that's the stuff of body horror.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Then why don't they... No, I think there's other factors in your case, though. No, because there are two other factors, I think, and one of which is that psychopaths are scary. And I think that to stand up for Graham in that situation would have made yourself a target. I think that can't be underestimated. I think that's very, very important. Oh, definitely. But I think also...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Right, well, they've got a digital militia. They've got that, but there's also the... I mean, when you're talking about some of the things you're describing, about the body horror stuff, about the beliefs that we're expected to swallow... I think if you would have played this conversation to someone 15, 20 years ago, it would have been incomprehensible to them what they're hearing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I think a lot of people just simply did not understand what was happening. I think it's incomprehensible to most people now. Exactly. So how can you stand up for... How can you expend that energy to understand the incomprehensible in order to defend you? I think a lot of it is simply that... No smoke without fire. So many people are saying Graham Linehan is a bigot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
That's readily comprehensible in one sentence. I can understand that. But I cannot understand this whole other thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
So, I mean, it happened recently where a well-known author, Boyne, John Boyne, came out and defended, who was someone who had attacked. He wrote The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, very famous novel. He had attacked Graham back in the day. And I saw this, it was an incredible post. He wrote an apology online and said he now understands it. He's now looked into it. He says, I was wrong. You were right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I'm sorry. He said that to you. It's quite a brave thing for him to do. By doing that, he's also put himself in the fire online to a degree. But of course, every time someone does that, and every time they are piled on and destroyed and demonized and monstered, it sends a message out to everyone else that you don't want to be that person. It takes a certain kind of strength.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Is it worth exploring? I mean, the weaponization of the law in the UK. You've mentioned non-crime hate incidents. Would it be worth me explaining what that is? Because that's the key weapon that activists have.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I think people here find it incredible because obviously you have the First Amendment in the US. We don't have a codified constitution. It's not quite as central in the UK, freedom of speech. Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
That's an understatement, which is why a lot of us were so disturbed when, in that vice presidential debate with Tim Waltz and J.D. Vance, Tim Waltz effectively said that hate speech wasn't covered by the First Amendment. A comment, by the way, which didn't make it to the official transcripts, I noticed. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It didn't, no.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I think it was because he was speaking at the same time as Vance. That might be the excuse. Chilling thing to say, though. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Absolutely, yeah. But I think I suppose to explain what happened in the, because I don't think people in the US will understand how the police. Well, so what happened, there was a horrific murder of a black teenager called Stephen Lawrence in the early 90s. And that was racially motivated. And there was a failure among the police to take it seriously in the way that they should have done.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Right, exactly. So there was a report commission called the Macpherson Report, which came out in 1999, which did find that there was institutional racism within the police, or there was certainly a problem within racism. That was the first time that we had a document which outlined the difference between crime, racist incidents as being defined as criminal and non-criminal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
It didn't use the phrase non-crime hate incidents, but it made this distinction and it said that both ought to be reported. This was the recommendation of Macpherson in that report. But then you have to fast forward a long time. You go forward to 2014.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
2014 is the time when the College of Policing, this is the body in England and Wales which is responsible for training all police forces across England and Wales. And they're a kind of quango. They are an administrative body that effectively the government has outsourced the responsibility to train police in the law in this country.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
They invented this idea of non-crime hate incidents with one eye on the Macpherson Report. So that's the origin of it. And they decided that if anyone perceived that a non-crime had been committed, something offensive, something that hurt them, if they perceived that it had been motivated by a prejudice or hatred against one of the protected characteristics, race, gender, sex...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
In UK law, it includes gender reassignment. But it's interesting that the College of Policing changed that to trans identity. So they actually, they made it up as they went along. So you had now a system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
implemented in UK law, not in law, sorry, implemented among the UK police, where the police were told, if anyone contacts you and says, I've been offended and I perceive it was to do with this, you report it, record it as a non-crime hate incident against someone's name. It's on file. You don't notify the person who's being recorded as such.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
There's a thing called a disclosure and borrowing service check, where if you apply for a job which is sensitive in some way, say you want to be a teacher or a carer, you have a DBS check. It will come up there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
There's no headmaster or headmistress in the world who's going to see something flag and then employ it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
You're done. So you have a situation now where members of the public with a grudge can weaponize this against anyone they like for whatever reason. Or systems of activists with grudges. And the CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the College of Policing have explicitly said that no evidence is required for hate to be recorded. There doesn't need to be evidence of hate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
It's just solely about the perception of this. Now, this all came to a head recently because... How could that go wrong? Well, sure. By the way, I should note that this isn't just about McPherson. The chief executive of the College of Policing at the time that non-crime hate incidents were implemented in 2014 was a man called Alex Marshall, I think.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
He'd won the previous year Stonewall's top award in the country. He became an LGBT envoy. So in other words, he's an activist. you have high-ranking activists within the police, within the College of Policing, who are effectively dragging the police force along in their wake, often reluctantly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But the reason why this is, I think, so chilling now, and it's become, a lot of people are talking about it now, because it's effectively a form of pre-crime. It's effectively Philip K. Dick's idea of pre-crime. Their justification is, Sorry, what do they say? They say that unless we record non-crime hate incidents, we won't be able to monitor them in case they escalate into actual crime.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But of course, all crime is preceded by non-crime. It cannot be any other way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I know about this, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But you might, not even that you have. You might.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Let's have a competition then. I think you're winning at the moment. A competition of stupidity. Canada is really in the forefront of this. A competition of authoritarianism and stupidity. I think we've got a few more cards to play in the UK. Insofar as, for instance, there have been estimates around a quarter of a million non-crime victims. Hate incidents recorded against UK citizens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
They happen at the dinner table all the time. I think it's like 62 a day or something is the average.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I mean, it's like a national sport. Exactly. But worse than that is that the College of Policing has been instructed twice by the Home Office to stop doing this. Two Home Secretaries in succession, Priti Patel and Suwala Bravaman, said to them, you can't do this anymore, issued new guidelines.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Not only did they ignore the guidelines, but incidents of non-crime recording has gone up since the government has said you can't do this. In addition to that, the High Court ruled that it was effectively, they said it was a chilling, it had a chilling effect on freedom of speech. The judge compared it to the Stasi, said we've never had a Gestapo in this country.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
They effectively said, you know, this is not lawful. And so in other words, the College of Policing, an individual activist group that trains the police in our country, has ignored the government twice and the high court once and has fudged the language. And now we have a Labour government that has said it wants to ramp up non-crime hate incidents.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
We've had Yvette Cooper saying, these are really important. We need to record non-crime. Now, you might still be winning on the candidate front because we haven't got to the point where if I think you might commit a crime.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But to give a very specific example, which is why it's been written about a lot over the last few weeks, is because a journalist in the UK, Alison Pearson, telegraph journalist, was visited on Remembrance Sunday morning by two police officers and And they said, we are investigating you for a crime of stirring up racial hatred. And she said, what is the complaint against me? What is the crime?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
We can't tell you what the crime is or what the tweet is. It was a tweet from a year ago. So you don't need to know the crime or the accusers, right? She asked about the accuser and they said, it's not the accuser, it's the victim. So in other words, we don't have due process either. Now, you'll know the novel, The Trial.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Right. Because who needs that? Exactly, exactly. But in The Trial by Kafka, the first scene is two police officers turning up at his house and he says, what have I done wrong? We cannot tell you that. You do not need to know that. This was a replay of that. So when she describes it as Kafkaesque, she's not being hyperbolic. It's straight out of the first chapter of The Trial.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
And he never finds out what he's done wrong in that novel, right up until the grisly end of that novel. So go on, sorry, Graeme.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
The real fear I have is that you can't vote it out because all of this came about during the Tories. Yeah. And now we've got Labour. And so, you know, whatever you get, because the College of Policing and because the police are, they do their own thing. They decide their own thing. They don't care about what they're told to do by the government. It's not a right or left issue. Both are bad.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But I do think, and we've had conversations about this, I do think that with a Labour government in the UK, things are getting a lot worse a lot quicker.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Well, it's not just now about non-crime. We've had a lot of cases since the riots in the summer after the murder of those three children in Southport.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
The ethnically Welshman. Yes, I know what you're doing there. He, you know, we've had people who wrote... He had an Al-Qaeda training manual.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Standard Welsh practice to have that. But he... there were riots, there was anger, there was a lot of obvious justified anger. There were also some horrendous people opportunistically turning up from the far right to attack and destroy and defame. All of that is true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But the problem is we've had people who've, in anger, have tweeted things out that I do find objectionable, you know, things that are racist, things that are unpleasant. And there's, let me give you an example. There's one woman, Lucy Connolly, and she wrote out, I don't care anymore. We should burn down the hotels that they're in. We should just, you know, I don't care. Yeah. Not pleasant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
31 months in prison. Said in anger, by the way. Deleted very quickly. Said in anger. Deleted quickly. 31 months in prison. There have been a number of cases like that. And one of the common factors is that all of the judges have said, we are setting an example. We're giving you the harshest jail term to set an example to others.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
They were. And previous to that, Keir Starmer had said that he wanted judges to do this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
My problem with this is... They were victims. My problem with this is manifold. I mean, firstly... The draconianism of the jail terms is a problem in and of itself for language, for speech. I don't approve of the speech, but there is no evidence whatsoever that that tweet by that woman caused any violence in the real world. None whatsoever. And no one can tell you different.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
We've had decades of research into this. We know that that's not how it works. People don't tweet and then violence happens as a direct result. Otherwise we'd be knee-deep in violence. It's why in the U.S.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
you have the Brandenburg test for incitement to violence, which would mean that, firstly, there has to be an intention to cause violence, that it is likely to cause violence, and that there is imminent risk of violence. So none of these people currently languishing in prison cells in the UK for tweets meet anywhere near the threshold of the Brandenburg test. We don't have that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
So the chilling effect that this has, not just on people who are saying nasty things, the chilling effect on people expressing themselves in any way. We've got a guy who's just been found guilty of stirring up hatred because of a Halloween costume that he wore. He dressed up as the Manchester Bomber. which is sick and unpleasant, that's the point. But it's Halloween too. It's Halloween.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Which is like when you do... It's about horror.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
There's a kind of joke in that. It's that you're trying to outgross everyone else. He's awaiting the prison sentence. We don't know how long he's going to be in prison. But why is someone...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Count Dankula. Graeme should tell this because you made it worse.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I don't want to drop you in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Even better, by the way, for this conversation, I, at the time, wrote a satirical piece. I was writing this character called Jonathan Pye. I was the co-writer of this character. And we wrote this satirical piece mocking the court's decision where the character... Oh, no. And Graham attacked me for that online. Oh, yes, he did. Yeah, I think you called me alt-right or fascist or something.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Oh, I'm so sorry. No, no, no. I'm not saying it to embarrass you. I think it's quite funny. It's a nice little connection we have. Back in the day before we were friends, I was a fascist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Yeah, right, there's that too. All of this is suggestive of this idea that there is a real problem we have at the moment where there's an expectation of moral purity from all sides. I've seen a similar thing there, like where people either didn't understand what was going on during the pandemic and maybe supported lockdowns or et cetera.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
And they get piled on and attacked by these very sort of, almost like an equivalent of the woke, on the sort of lockdown skeptic side as well. I don't think any particular group is immune to this idea, this kind of expectation. Everyone must think the same way as me on every single point.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
No, but something's changed. Because I remember being at university, debating friends late into the night, drinking, rowing, but in a good-natured way. We didn't not be friends the next day because we fundamentally disagreed. We actually relished the fundamental disagreements, and they were part of the friendship. Yeah, yeah. That's not possible now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Is it as mobilized as that, though? I don't think it's mobilized. I think it's more something has changed in the air.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Yeah, sure. No, no, I think that is happening. But I think for a lot of people, they are being caught in a wave of societal change where this is just now the norm. Go on, sorry, Graham.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
It might be that period of time when we have this revolutionary new technology that we don't know how to handle. We don't know what it will produce. I did read somewhere that at the invention of the printing press, there were similar moments of hysteria.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
In other words, it took a kind of calming down, a readjustment process before we understood how to deal with books.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Something very freeing about that. All of a sudden you can read God's word in the vernacular, which was the church was protecting its power by preventing that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Like it was a major league transformation. So maybe, to be positive, maybe this Tower of Babel at the moment that we're building, maybe this period we're in will have a settling down period in its wake.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Yeah, that's right, if you can think of anything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But there's something about tilting the world in that direction. I do love that aspect. It's not new. I mean, what you're identifying really is the enduring appeal of authoritarianism throughout human history. Forever. Forever, which will manifest itself in one way or another. And it just so happens that at the moment it's manifesting itself in this way. Yeah. And it seems to me that... And fast.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
And quicker than ever before. Yeah, that's right. So it's been catalyzed in this strange way. But it feels to me as though the struggle in of itself between liberty and authority is one thing, but the struggle to recognize the threat of authority, of authoritarianism, seems to be another battle you have to have.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Well, the Labour government don't think that they're authoritarians. They think that they're doing good. When Keir Starmer said in Parliament today that he felt that desecrating a holy book was unacceptable and divisive and awful, he wasn't thinking of the bigger picture in terms of this is a gateway to authoritarianism, blasphemy laws, you know, once you start down that line.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
In other words, it's the well-intentioned authoritarian… Which is particularly what we have to challenge at the moment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
It's the psychopaths who are proceeding along that line. What concerns me more is the fellow travelers who are benevolent. and to subscribe to this tyranny out of a sense of this is better for the world. Those are the ones that I find harder to deal with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Well, I saw recently a clip of one of the, I won't name names, but one of the very woke comics in the UK in a BBC audience. You could tell the audience were forcing themselves to laugh because they wanted to show approval for the message that was being... And I felt like, I think it was maybe Leo Curse at GB News, he was saying that that's the punishment for the woke.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
They have to sit through these things and force themselves to laugh. It's that distinction between what they call claptor, you know, when people are applauding out of approval for what is being said.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
What's much better is that involuntary laugh when you think, I really shouldn't have laughed at that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Yes, exactly. Yes, of course. It's a very weird... But don't you find it depressing, though, that so many comedians, you call them regime comedians, but comedians in the UK don't recognize that this is a problem. They don't think it is a problem because their opinions are the orthodox opinions. But also, I mean, we did a stand-up gig in Dublin, what, four months ago or something?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Which was cancelled on us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Activists phoned up the... Graham and I were both performing that night, a couple of other comics. It was part of my Comedy Unleashed thing. Right, right. And the activists phoned up the venue and they said, okay, we won't put it on then. They're too scared. Yeah. And then we found another venue at the last minute and it was fine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But how can you talk to... How can any comic today say that that is a situation that's... Well, you answered that question earlier.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
And that's a big, that's a huge accomplishment. Or do they genuinely think that we are spreading hate through the medium of humour? Do they believe that Count Dankula was trying to recruit people to neo-Nazism through the medium of pugs? Well,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
He did think that, you see?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But worse still, they're not necessarily their opinions. They're the opinions they feel they have to transmit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
How many lives have been ruined? But I would say that I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a celebrity expressing an opinion. No. And I think there's a distinction to be drawn. I mean, I've spoken with John Cleese about his, he has sincerely held convictions that he's entitled to express.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But I think that is very different from, for instance, to give an example, an actor friend of mine during the Black Lives Matter riots was contacted by her agent saying, you haven't put up a black square in support of Black Lives Matter. If you don't do that, I won't be able to find work for you. That's not going to happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
So therefore, you have someone in the arts industry now feeling they have to convey an opinion that they don't sincerely hold, otherwise their livelihood will be taken away from them. Now, I think that's the risk.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I'm often catching myself in that. If I get into a Twitter spat, an argument which I do more than I should, sometimes I catch myself and I think, am I trying to be seen to win? Right. More than getting to the truth of the point. Right. And that's the point.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
And that's when I tend to withdraw from it. If I think it's, I'm messing up now. I'm trying to humiliate this person.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Right. And I don't like that about myself. I'm sure everyone has it. Oh, definitely. But I think being aware of the performative element of social media, it's just not.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
It's not the forum for discussion. It just isn't. Something about it, it rewards extremism. Well, it rewards impulsive behavior. It does.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
We live in a time when many of us think that human progress is inevitable. When it comes to the arts, this is a kind of wishful thinking. It's the psychological complexity of his characters and his insights into human nature, not the plots. He wasn't interested in plots. Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
This is a girl on a balcony, her lover below. Could you change a single syllable and improve it? It's not possible. You can read Shakespeare. I don't care who you are. These are plays about human beings. This is why they've never stopped being relevant. He broadens our sense of what it means to be human. People found it very uncomfortable. because it doesn't have poetic justice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
His characters, Iago, Cleopatra, Titus, Cordelia, Brutus, they all think differently. I do think that Shakespeare has the capacity to illuminate our modern world. As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. I like the fact that Shakespeare absolutely doesn't attempt to preach at you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
It's incumbent on us to have a familiarity with, well, the greatest writer who ever lived. Tell us about the course. So the course is on Shakespeare's tragedies. And we filmed it in London. Was it last year? I think, yes. My sense of time has completely gone. And it was excellent. And I'm not saying that just to be a sycophant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But the whole premise, I'm so 100% behind, which is that I was told you can teach this course in whatever way you want. You can focus on the things you want, which I think is the way to get the best out of people who want to teach Shakespeare.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Well, what's great about it as well, because that's my background. My doctoral degree was in Shakespeare. I used to teach Shakespeare at Oxford University part-time while I was completing the doctorate. It's everything. And obviously, I've retained the love of Shakespeare, and I continually read him all the time. So I tell you what it is. I've been dragged into this culture war stuff forever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
by virtue of my creative work, comedy, playwriting, et cetera, because you have to address this as a creative. If there's such an obstacle, such an impediment, you have a kind of duty to address it. Right, political is an obstacle to your creativity. You can't ignore it. But it then becomes an obstacle to other enthusiasms in your life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
And actually, I think the study of the likes of Shakespeare, who the activists are trying to problematize, you know, the Globe Theatre in London, which is supposed to be the custodian of his work, has an annual anti-racist Shakespeare webinar where sort of anti-racist experts gather to berate Shakespeare for his problematic elements.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I'm better than Shakespeare. I'm better than Shakespeare. And I think one of the great things, so in the course that I did for you, for the Peterson Academy, I started the first lecture with a question, which is why has Shakespeare as a playwright never been bettered? How can that be the case? You know, this is, he began in the late 1580s.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
The public theatres had only been around for about a decade. This is a new generation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
thing this is a new medium how is it that a man right at the start of this new thing isn't ever bettered for four centuries how does that happen and i hope by going through it we sort of get to some kind of answer but i think it's that prioritization of genius which has now become suspect within the academy you know the idea that he's his work can be reduced to the idea of just a white male um uh it
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
effectively trying to empower other white men through his work. That's how they see art. That's how they see creativity as just a kind of conduit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
There was an exhibition of Hogarth in London where there was a self-portrait and because he was sitting on a chair which made of wood, the panel explained that the wood had probably come from a plantation and it's connected to slavery and therefore we need to judge Hogarth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
So I think these little lectures that you get, it's so of this, it says so much about our time but nothing about the art and nothing about the transcendent capacity of art. And that's why I'm very careful now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
It is, absolutely. And whenever I see, I research it very carefully now, if I go and see a production of Shakespeare, because nine times out of ten it will be a mangling of Shakespeare to promote the ideology. And by the way, I don't think that's a problem if you want to, people do all sorts of things with Shakespeare. Yes. And that's fine. They're free to do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
And I don't care if you want to turn it into a pro-Marxist thing or a pro... Whatever you want to do with it. Queer Shakespeare. But everyone's doing the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But why is it that all, in our current culture, I think all art at the moment is, as you say, mandatory in terms of it must be conveying the message. It feels like state-sanctioned art, propaganda rather than art. And that's the only way you're going to get commissioned. That's the only way you're going to get a play on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Well, Graham, if you were working, if they were letting you work today, all of your scripts would be passed by a sensitivity reader in advance. You would be told which bits you have to take out. You know, even the poet Kate Clancy, who's, you know, on the left and, you know, et cetera, she wrote this piece about sensitivity readers, her experience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
She'd written a, and I will not do it justice, but she, as a poet, had used the word disfigurement relating to the landscape, relating to the, she was doing something poetic, obviously. And the sensitivity reader said that's an ableist slur. So all they can see when they read these texts is how does this either promote or oppress people on the basis of identity groups? Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I'd say, I mean, definitely top five.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
It was the actors. So John has done a stage version of Life of Brian. He's written a stage version. And in the reading, I think it was in New York, the actors then said, you have to take out the bit where the man says he wants to be a woman, where he wants to be called Loretta, and he wants to have babies. And John's character says, but you can't have babies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
And they say, no, but we want to fight for his right to be able to have babies. And it's so prescient. It's so perfect. But he said he won't take the scene. No, that's right. He said he wouldn't do that. Which is fantastic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
I think Eric Heidel bet the needle. Oh, did he? I think so, yeah. It's so sad. But I wonder about this, and it's a broader question. Is it possible for artistic genius to even emerge within the conditions that we are currently creating?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Well, that's the point, isn't it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
So there's a great book by Victor Hugo about artistic genius, and he estimates that about three or four major artistic geniuses emerge in every generation. That's his view about this. He says that this is, how does he describe it? He says this is God distributing himself on earth. He says every masterpiece is a kind of miracle. It's a really beautiful idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
But what I think Hugh, and he's probably right, he's talking about the big one, like Aeschylus and Homer and Dante and Shakespeare. I think he's right about- Not me. I'm sorry about that, Graham. But you will reach Homer's heights at some point. But I think he's talking about these He's saying that this will inevitably happen within humankind.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Three or four a generation, you'll get a Mozart, you'll get a whatever. But that won't, I think Hugo takes for granted that we live in a culture that values the arts and doesn't value this. It doesn't punish it. Quite. So I don't think within the grip of this movement, with the arts so captured by this movement, those people cannot emerge Because the conditions are simply not there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
They're probably there. There probably are those Jesuses.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Right. You know? So, yeah, that's the question. So how is it that under the oppression of medieval Christendom, great artists still emerge through it. What does Michelangelo do with the Sistine Chapel? He's given narrow parameters in terms of what he can represent, but he finds a way to... Well, as a manifestation of God on earth, so to speak, it's very hard to stop.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
That's so interesting, the way that true creative genius finds a way through the impediments.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Yeah, right. But I love that. So, for instance, with Shakespeare... You know, he can't write, produce his narrative poems, Venus and Adonis or Rapier de Crise, without patronage. So each poem is preceded by this effusive praise of Henry Ruthly, his patron, which you could say, well, that's dispensable. But the beauty then comes through in the poem in of itself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Isn't it quite an exciting, it's quite an exciting time. All of this oppressive woke stuff actually could produce something amazing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
to become an advocate for diversity, equity and inclusivity, and to assume that human beings should be divided on the basis of their race and their sexual identity and their gender, et cetera, and that our culture is essentially oppressive at its core. And so I believe that idea to be discreditable
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
across multiple dimensions of analysis, and it's certainly the case that it was roundly rejected by the American electorate in the last election cycle. And you can also see that the Democrats themselves in the United States are backpedaling rapidly on the DEI front because they realize that it's It's a losing game in the short, medium and long run.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so the first thing we might note is that when Carney is trying to formulate policy, one of the sets of policies that he put forward include this discreditable and divisive DEI formulation that's being part and parcel of the maneuvers by intellectuals to tilt the entire political world in a radically revolutionary and leftist direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Okay, now, Carney also points out that he's a free market advocate, but you see, this is a rather serpentine proposition because in his book, Values, Carney also points out that All things considered, although the free market is necessary, it doesn't really do a good job of valuing the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So he points out, for example, that it's preposterous that Amazon, the company, is valued financially, economically, higher than the Amazon rainforest. And while that sounds good in principle, it's a very vague and foolish claim. What Carney is pointing out is that the free market system can't attribute a financial value to all, to everything. And that's true, and it's a problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
pro-Canadian sentiment, in consequence, even among liberals who haven't been noted for their patriotism over the last 10 years. This is a common occurrence in Canada, historically. It's very frequently the case that in Canada, we learn to pull together because of a threat, real or supposed, emanating from the American elephant that occupies the place of primacy south of us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
But his solution is a technocratic solution, and understanding that helps us understand the implications of his educational pathway and his career. See, Carney, who has been in,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
stellar advocate for the World Economic Forum policies, for example, believes that because the free market cannot adequately value everything, that it's up to a handful of highly educated elitist technocrats to step in and substitute central planning so that the inadequacies of the free market system are properly rectified.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Now, the question that begs is, well, which experts, why those experts, what legitimacy do they have as, let's say, unelected bureaucrats at the UN or the WF, or with regards to the European Economic Union, what legitimacy do they possess to make those central planning decisions? And by what principles are they willing to value those things that can't be valued from within the free market system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Well, we already started to delve into that when we talked about the diversity, equity and inclusivity provisions in Carney's thinking. But the answer to that, you see, the answer to that points us in the direction of the most fundamental appropriate critique of Carney's thought.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So Mark Carney and his globalist compatriots genuinely believe that carbon overproduction constitutes an existential threat to humanity. Now, the IPCC, which is the UN body that delves into such things, has not recognized that there's any such thing as a climate emergency. There are climate concerns, but that's not the same as an emergency. And Carney recently claimed to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
to eliminate the carbon tax from Canadian consumers, but that's a temporary pause, and he's transferred the carbon tax into the industrial domain so that it's hidden from Canadians, and he's going to continue to pursue it. Now, how do I know that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Because the primary idea in Carney's book, Values, is that the climate crisis, which translates into carbon dioxide overproduction, is so dire an existential threat every single financial decision that every individual and every institution across the world makes should be focused on the necessity to ameliorate carbon production above all else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so make no mistake about it, even though Carney has taken steps to back off the carbon tax in Canada because of its radical and justified unpopularity,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
The fundamental axiom of his entire worldview is that human beings are locked in an existential battle with nature itself, and that we're a destructive force and that we're overproducing carbon dioxide, and that's going to decimate the planet, and that we have to do everything we possibly can to ameliorate that threat, no matter what it takes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so what that means for someone like Carney, who already believes that it's people like him that should be in control because of their superior intelligence and their better grasp of the realities of the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
It also means that he's facing the kind of existential emergency, carbon dioxide overproduction, that justifies any maneuver possible on the basis that, of course, he has to do that because, after all, he's saving the planet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so he can do things like tell Canadians that he's dispensing with the carbon tax, which he hasn't done because it's still on the books and it's only a temporary pause, but he's still an avid advocate of net-zero policies and believes, for example, and Canadians should very much listen to this, that three-quarters of the fossil fuel reserves in the world have to be left in the ground.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So Carney and the Liberals have got a boost because of Trump's rampaging around, but also because Carney is a new face, a new fresh face, hypothetically. And so the people who are a little leery, let's say, of the Conservatives under Poliev have every reason to hope that Carney is the right
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Okay, and so he believes that we should approach net zero by the year 2050 and that it'll require a $2 trillion investment on the part of Canadians in order to make that happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And just to put that in perspective, that's about $300,000 out of your family's pockets. So that's what Carney's planning. He's planning to charge you $300,000 to move Canada towards net zero by 2050.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Now, let's take that part a little bit, because you might say, well, if the planet's in serious trouble, then everything is up for grabs, and we're going to have to spend that money because there's going to be a catastrophe. And the first question would be, well, is that catastrophe impending? And the second question would be, even if it is, is that the right plan?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So let's answer the first question first. And I would say that there isn't a catastrophe impending. Far more people die from cold weather than from warm weather. And there's no evidence whatsoever that an emergency is at hand. And the other thing I would say about that is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
The biggest piece of data pertaining to the carbon issue that's emerged reliably over the last 20 years is the global greening phenomenon. So what's actually happened as carbon dioxide levels have risen, for whatever reasons, and some of that might be human cost, what's actually happened is that semi-arid areas around the world have become more green, and by a lot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So the planet is actually 20% greener than it was 30 years ago, despite the prognostications of people like Al Gore. And there's a very specific reason for that, and the reason is that plants love carbon dioxide, so it can hardly be regarded as a pollutant. And it turns out that if carbon dioxide levels are elevated, even slightly, as they have been in the last
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
hundred years, let's say, plants can breathe more easily. Okay, well, so what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Well, so you get more plant growth and more plants, and if you're a fan of green, like the greens hypothetically are, and the environmentalists, you'd kind of think more plants would be better, and we see about a 13% increase in crop production in consequence of that, by the way, and so there's 20% more vegetation worldwide, but it's also
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
mostly green, in the most noticeable way, in semi-arid areas. Now, you heard the prognostications that as the climate warmed, that the deserts would expand, but actually, exactly the opposite is happening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Semi-arid areas around the Sahara Desert, for example, are shrinking, and the reason for that is that as carbon dioxide levels go up, because plants can breathe more easily, the breathing pores that they use can shrink in size because they don't have to be as open to pull in enough carbon dioxide, and that means that they lose less water, and that means that they can grow in drier areas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so now the reason I'm telling you all that is because there are effects of carbon dioxide increase, and some of them might be troublesome and some of them might be beneficial, but there's no evidence whatsoever that there's an emergency.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And I think a very strong case can be made, for example, that we were at historic lows in terms of carbon dioxide proportion in the atmosphere across a 500 million year period, right? So now and 50 years ago, our atmosphere had the lowest concentration of carbon dioxide that's been recorded in half a billion years, so that's a long timeframe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
We're getting close to the point where plants were actually going to struggle, going to have to struggle to breathe because the carbon dioxide levels were so low. And so now they've increased somewhat, and plants are having an easier time, and our crops are about 13% more efficient in consequence, and the planet is actually getting greener.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Now, he's capitalized on that to some degree by positioning himself as an outsider who will bring fresh new ideas and a novel and innovative approach to the Canadian political situation, and we'll take that claim apart a little bit later. Suffice it to say that the combination of his novelty
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So I don't think there's any reason at all for us to assume that we have an ecological emergency on our hand. I think, in fact, you can make somewhat of the opposite case. But be that as it may, Let's say there's room for reasonable difference with regard to that interpretation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
If you're more interested in that, I would highly recommend the work of Bjorn Lomberg, who's a Danish economist, whose organized teams of economic analysts are very good ones, Nobel Prize-winning economists. to assess the costs and benefits of carbon dioxide increase over about a 100-year period.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And I don't know anyone more informed than Lomberg to have such a discussion, and he certainly has concluded, A, that there's no emergency, B, that there will be some costs to CO2 increase over the next 100 years, and that'll mean that we'll be somewhat less richer in 100 years than we would have been, given our trends for economic improvement, and that, most importantly,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
that spending untold trillions of dollars, like Carney wants to do, $2 trillion for Canada, for example, by 2050, to ameliorate the minor effects of climate change is catastrophic economically. So I don't really believe there is a carbon dioxide emergency, but even if there is a concern,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Spending vast amounts of money carelessly in a rush and panic is not going to do the planet any good and is going to be particularly hard on poor people who are particularly dependent on money. who are particularly affected by energy cost changes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So what that means is if you increase energy costs, for example, by making fossil fuel more expensive before there's anything approximating a reasonable explanation, mostly what you do is devastate the poor. And you devastate the poor in the Western world, and you absolutely devastate the poor in places like Africa.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Now, the globalist utopians like Carney are perfectly willing to say, well, we're going to have to pay a price in the moment because the situation is so dire. And even if the poor have to suffer right now, it's much less than the poor in 100 years would suffer if we didn't take action.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And my response to that is you're willing to sacrifice the actual poor now for your hypothetical poor in 100 years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
You're modeling those hypothetical poor with your economic and climate models, which are radically unstable, and you also believe, and this is absolutely delusional, that you have the economic and scientific wherewithal to do anything like a reasonable estimation of what the Earth's economy is going to be like in 100 years. Yeah, well, good luck on that front.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
It's definitely the case that poor people are going to pay a terrible price for the carbon dioxide emergency fear-mongering in the moment. And it's completely debatable whether these steps that have been taken to ameliorate the problem, which don't work, by the way, are going to have any beneficial effect whatsoever on anyone at all 100 years out. We just can't model 100 years out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
That's just no one who's credible thinks we can develop economic models that predict over a 100-year period. So, alright, so let's pull back from that now a little bit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So why don't we also take a look at, let's give the devil his due in a more comprehensive way, and let's assume that Carney's right about the carbon dioxide emergency, and he's not, and that radical steps have to be taken to ameliorate the problem. and that those radical steps will have the desired effect, right?
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and the knock-off consequences of Trump's comments with regard to Canada have moved the Liberals over the last month from a place where they were essentially facing electoral extinction of a historically unprecedented sort to neck and neck or arguably in the lead of Pierre Poliev's Conservatives. And so, why have Canadians turned to Carney apart from Trump? Well,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Because Carney's promise is that if we dump $2 trillion into renewables and net zero, that that's going to have a measurable impact on the climate and carbon dioxide amelioration, and that's going to be beneficial for people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
But we don't have to guess at this anymore because there's been a number of countries, including Canada, that have taken steps to ameliorate fossil fuel utilization and to move towards net zero. And so let's start with Canada. So one of the things you guys might have noticed is that in the last month, Trump signed a trillion-dollar international deal for the sale of natural gas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Now, the prime minister of Germany The head of Germany, sorry, not the prime minister, and the prime minister of Japan came to Canada a year ago, two years ago, cap in hand, asking the Liberal Party if Canada could make long-term arrangements with their countries to provide them with natural gas. And Trudeau said he couldn't make a business case for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
and Trump just signed a trillion-dollar deal, and I guess that was the business case, and that's $150,000 for every Canadian family that went down the drain just with that one deal. And there's estimates that the Trudeau Liberals, the Liberal Party, put the kibosh on $650 million worth of natural resource projects over the last 10 years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so that's how we've been solving the carbon dioxide crisis from the Canadian perspective. And what's been the consequence of that from the environmental side? Well, first of all, Canada produces such a tiny proportion of carbon dioxide output on the international stage that we don't even count. Plus, our country is so forested that we're radically...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
negative in the carbon dioxide production direction anyways. And even if we have rectified our carbon dioxide output by calamitously destroying our fossil fuel economy, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever, because all that's happened is that China, that has, you know, like,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
25 times as many people as Canada and India, which has even more people, economies and populations that are so large that they make Canada fundamentally irrelevant on the industrial and the population side. All they've been doing is picking up the slack. And so China's carbon dioxide output has increased radically over the last 20 years, as has India's, swamping any possible effects of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Hello, everybody. As some of you may know, and some of you don't, Canada suddenly has a new prime minister. His name is Mark J. Carney, and he's the replacement for Justin Trudeau, running the Liberal Party in Canada. That means that we Canadians need to know who Mark Carney is and why. to the degree that Canada has a role to play internationally that everybody needs to know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
climate amelioration by tiny populations like Canada. And the Chinese and the Indians think, well, why can't we benefit from industrialization just like the West has? A question Africa is asking as well, and they're absolutely right. And so all it's meant
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
You can see this with Australia, for example, because Australia has forgone all coal-fired electrical production in their country, but they ship coal to China, and China builds coal plants like mad, as does India.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And since we all breathe the same air, all that's actually happened is the industrial power that could have been Australia's and Canada's has been shifted to China, which is a terrible, authoritarian, communist state, and to India, which at least has the advantage of being somewhat like a Western democracy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So now, so the Canadian contribution to environmental improvement has been negligible, absolutely negligible, no practical effect whatsoever, but the economic consequences have been absolutely dire. So Canada now, the richest Canadian province, has a lower gross domestic product per person. So that's a indication of our total economic productivity, we're lower than Mississippi.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Canadians produce 60 cents of value for every dollar the Americans produce, despite the fact that 10 years ago, and that's before the Liberals were in power for a decade, Canada and the US were equal. We were at parity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And the forecast for Canada's economic development, and this assumes something like the continuation of the policies that were put in place by the Trudeau Liberals, is that we will have the worst economic performance of the 40 most developed countries in the world for the next four decades.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So if you want more of that, much more expensive fossil fuel, much more expensive air conditioning and heat for your house in frigid Canada, and you want your children to live in a society that's radically poor so the globalist utopians can fail to do anything for the planet, then Carney's your man. And these corporations that he worked for and these positions he held
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Tarni has a remarkable resume, and If the choice is Carney or Pierre Polyev, it would be easy for Canadians to assume that Carney has everything that Polyev does and more. Polyev's a career politician, and that means he's faced the electorate. It means he's done a lot of door-to-door knocking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
were all positions that enabled him not only to follow the doctrines of those who believe that net zero is an existential necessity, not only to follow them like Trudeau did, but to lead them. Because you see, Carney is not only an acolyte of the net zero globalist vision, he's a true leader, and it was Carney who was a climate envoy to the UN, for example, and he also organized
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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a very large number of the world's biggest financial institutions to pursue net zero policies in preference even to their financial obligations to their shareholders. And so to understand Carney, you see, you have to understand that he prioritizes the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
the hypothetical health of the planet, narrowly defined as the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so a very narrow environmentalist view. He prioritizes that above all else. All of the values that he describes in his book, everything that Carney holds dear,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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is predicated on his view that we're facing an apocalyptic future on the environmental side that's all due only to carbon dioxide overproduction. And that means we don't even pay any attention to any of the other environmental problems that are confronting us, like oceanic overfishing, for example, which also constitute issues that should be of some concern.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so Carney's entire vision of the world and vision of Canada hinges on his faith, and I would call it a quasi-religious faith, that the planet's atmosphere is to be prioritized above absolutely everything, and that that's such an emergency that everything is permitted. Everything is permitted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so that means Carney can do things, for example, like present himself as the kind of outsider of the Liberal Party, for example, who will come in with radically new views and develop Canada into an industrial powerhouse. It's like, first of all, That's a lie. It's actually two lies. First of all, he is not an outsider. Carney is a consummate, bureaucratic, liberal insider.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
He's the godfather of Chrystia Freeland's child, and his new cabinet is composed of all the people who played the roles that we've described already in the Trudeau years. And it's certainly the case that he hasn't budged from his presumption that we have to hit net zero by 2050, because that's still up on his website.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And he could say that he wants to lead Canada into an industrial future that's successful, but if you read his book, Values, you'll see that he means that we're going to produce a new, renewable economy, which in Canada is insane, apart from perhaps hydroelectric production. and nuclear if the Greens were willing to go in that direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
But what Carney means by industrial progress on the Canadian front is a new and unproven economy that relies primarily on a net zero shift and renewables. So now we might say, how has that worked out in the rest of the world?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Canada's attempts on the environmental front have had absolutely no effect whatsoever on the health of the atmosphere globally, despite the fact that it's cost Canadians their primacy of position economically and put us on a downward trend that is likely to continue for at least 40 years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
It means he's listened to Canadians at the ground level and been appraised of their concerns, and Carney doesn't have that. But Polyev is also a career politician. Now, Carney is a career bureaucrat, and he has a resume that, on the face of it, you might be regarded as preferable in its depth to Polyev's.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
If you want a future for your children and your grandchildren that is characterized by more and more wealth disparity and increasing emphasis on a net zero future and massive disparity between Canada and the US in terms of economic growth, then Carney's definitely your man.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So with regards to this promised utopia of a new future, one of the things Carney says, for example, after he talks about the fact that 75% of our fossil fuel resources will have to be left in the ground, is this promised new magical utopia of renewable jobs, especially for places like Alberta.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Now, he says that if we unleash innovation in the private sector, that all the problems that are associated with the transition to net zero will somehow be solved. So let's see what's happened in countries where that's actually being attempted. So I think we should talk about Germany and the UK. So Germany has been more green, arguably, than Canada, let's say, for the last 10 years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And they've shut off their nuclear plants, and they've made a transition to renewables. And so what's the consequence of that? Well, one consequence is that German energy prices are now five times as expensive as they are in the US. And then you might say, well, that's a small price to pay for saving the planet. But then we could take that apart.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So Germany is rapidly deindustrializing and their economy is tanking and all the industrial production that they no longer produce. manage is only shifting to other places in the world, like China and India, so it's not like it's going away, it's just not happening in Germany. And they're dependent on, increasingly dependent on renewables, solar and wind.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And Germany is one of the world's sunniest countries, and it's also susceptible to what they call wind droughts, so there are long periods of time where the solar arrays and the windmills aren't producing any electricity. And like zero electricity is not very much electricity. Now, why is that a catastrophe? It's like, well, do you want your refrigerator on or off?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Or even more to the point, do you want to be able to go to the hospital and make sure that there's electricity when you're having emergency surgery, etc. ? And there are signs, for example, that places like Australia that have been moving down the renewable pathway are facing the imminent threat of rolling blackouts, and that could easily happen in places like Germany.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
OK, so now, the problem with renewables is that we can't store the energy. We don't have the battery technology and the battery infrastructure. Not even close, and it's going to be a long time before we do, at least 20 years, maybe longer than that. And so the question is, now, what do you have to do because renewable energy is so unreliable?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Sometimes, like at night, the sun doesn't shine, in case you hadn't noticed, and the wind stops blowing, and so then renewable production falls to zero. Now, you have to have something to back that up. And worse, you have to have something of the same size as the entire renewable grid, because otherwise it can't handle the power demands.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so that means that as you switch to a renewable grid, you have to have another grid in place that has exactly the same capacities, and it has to be not renewable. So what that means is that when you build a renewable grid, you build it in addition to the preexisting grid. And then you might say,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
If the renewable sources aren't producing energy, you could just turn to nuclear, but there's a couple of problems with that. First of all, you can't turn a nuclear power plant on and off quickly, as you might well imagine. And the Germans, for example, scuttled their nuclear plants. And so what have they done? They've turned to coal-burning plants.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And the Germans don't burn anthracite, which is high-quality coal that doesn't produce much particulate matter, which is like the dust pollution that would be associated with smog. And they burn lignite, which is low-quality coal, and it produces a lot of particulate, plus it produces a lot of carbon dioxide. And so what's happened in Germany after...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So I want to familiarize you with his resume, and then I want to walk you through what it signifies, because we should assess not only what he's done and what he looks like on paper, but what that actually means practically and conceptually speaking, and with regards to its impact on Canada and the broader world. So we're going to start by walking through his resume.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
10 years of green idiocy is that their power prices are five times as expensive. They're hyper-reliant on places like Russia and the Middle East for their fossil fuel production, not least because Canada was too daft to enter into an agreement with them. and they pollute more per unit of energy produced than they did 10 years ago.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So even if you accept the environmentalist argument that carbon dioxide overproduction is an existential crisis, which it isn't, and you say, well, something
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
substantial needs to be done to ameliorate the threat you have to observe that when something substantial has been done so that's the creation let's say of a renewable power grid the consequence is not only that the atmosphere doesn't improve with regards to carbon dioxide proportion but that the pollution problem actually gets much worse as well as energy becoming more expensive and unreliable
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so what, that's what you want Carney to do for Canada and for Canada. There's not a country in the world that's more dependent fundamentally for its existence on reliable energy, because Canada is uninhabitable without an unbelievably well-developed industrial and energy infrastructure just to keep us alive when it's 40 bloody below.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And then our economy is radically dependent on our natural resource production. Now, it shouldn't be that dependent on natural resource. production, because we should be doing value-added investment. For example, refining our fossil fuel resources to a higher degree than we currently do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Most of that's done in the United States, and we should do things to ensure that we make the proper transition into a technologically driven future. But Carney says absolutely nothing about any of that in his book, Values. And so he just magically hand waves and says, oh, well,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
if you unleash the private sector, there'll be this magical net zero transformation, and everyone will have much more productive jobs, and the planet will be much greener, and we won't need to rely on fossil fuels. Well, We don't just rely on fossil fuels for energy, folks. We rely on fossil fuels to make damn near everything that we make, including our agricultural products.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so you also hear the net zero people claiming that agricultural production has to be slashed radically, and so you can imagine what that's going to do to food costs if you haven't noticed. And part of the reason for that is that the fertilizers that we use, ammonia, for example, are created out of fossil fuels.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so you have no idea how much the entire economy, and so that's your bread and butter and your house and your heating and your air conditioning and your travel and your vacations and your kid's future, that's all dependent on the fossil fuel economy. And so Carney, There's two tacks you can take to Carney.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So, if you want to know who Canada's new Prime Minister is, and you want to know who Mark J. Carney is, and whether or not you should support him or vote for him if you're Canadian, or what you should think of him if you're part of the international audience, then this is the podcast for you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
One is either he's learned that his net zero preoccupation was wrong, which means every single thing he thought while he was being educated and while he had his highfalutin career, every single thing he thought was radically not only wrong, but the opposite of the truth. That's one conclusion. Or he still thinks what he's always thought, which is certainly what it seems to be in his book, Values.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
certainly seems to be the case with his continuing insistence that we have to hit net zero by 2050 and spend two trillion dollars doing it the alternative conclusion to he was just radically wrong and has learned is that he hasn't learned a damn thing and it's still his fundamental axiomatic presupposition that human being industrial production leading to carbon dioxide overproduction is an existential threat that that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
should be everyone's top priority for every financial decision that they make, and that everything should be secondary to that. And that implies that his claim to eliminate the carbon tax, for example, and to move Canada onto a more solid industrial footing in the future is just a lie. So those are your options.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Either he was completely wrong about everything for the last 20 years in the worst direction possible and has learned, or that he hasn't learned a damn thing and is still sticking to exactly what he wrote in his book, Values in 2021, and exactly what he's indicated in all of his public pronouncements, and he's going to,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So currently, as we already pointed out, he's Prime Minister of Canada, and that's been the case since March 14th. Now, here's a couple of things to understand about that. The first is that he's Prime Minister and he holds no seat in the House of Commons, which means he hasn't faced any electorate. He's not elected. He does not have a mandate from the Canadian people.
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act as if he's in favor of Canadian economic development, but he's going to keep pursuing a net-zero agenda because that's priority number one, and you peasants are too stupid to understand the reality of the situation that's in front of you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so that's going to mean no flights for you and no clothes for you, maybe three changes of clothing per year, only a short-haul flight every three years, for example, a radical reduction in the amount of meat that you eat, a radical reduction in private car ownership,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And you might think, well, that's paranoid conspiracy theory, but you can go look at the documents of the C40 coalition of the top cities in the world and look at their aims for the next 20 years, and you can decide if they're on the same side as Carney or whether they're on your side, and you can draw your own conclusion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Because if your presumption is that the planet is facing an environmental catastrophe because of carbon dioxide production, and that that's such an emergency that we have to do every possible thing we can with every financial decision, no matter how much it costs to ameliorate it, then there's no limit whatsoever to the amount of power that you're willing to expend to make that happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And we know it'll happen because it's already happened to Germany and the UK, and it's happened to a large degree to Canada. And there's no reason to assume at all that Mark Carney is a leopard who's changed his spots. Quite the contrary. And so what's the conclusion with regards to his pedigree? It's like, Mark Carney's an educated person, and he's no fool.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
but he's completely untested in the electoral domain, and he obviously has contempt for it because he's willing to be prime minister and to act like a governing prime minister, despite the fact that he's never put his policies to test in front of the Canadian electorate, despite the fact that only 130,000 people have positioned him as prime minister, and despite the fact that he's apparently willing to deceive Canadians about being an outsider, which he most certainly is not, and with regards to his actual aims, which is net zero by 2050,
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537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
and he's willing to claim the contrary because he's going to turn Canada into an industrial powerhouse. So that means he's either wrong about everything he's believed in the last 20 years, and radically so, or he's lying because he thinks the emergency justifies it, and maybe because he's after power. Now let's investigate that a little bit. Is Carney primarily after power?
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537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Perhaps for the reasons that we just described, perhaps because he's using the reasons we just described, his concern for the future, to justify his grip on power. That's another alternative. Well, let's see how he's conducted himself. He hasn't complained to Canadians with regards to his true aim. It's like, is he a net zero advocate by 2050 or not?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Well, we want to build Canada into an industrial powerhouse. It's like, which is it, buddy? Because you're not going to do both. You're not going to crisscross Canada with fossil fuel pipelines while aiming at net zero by 2050. You're not going to do that. And so you were either wrong and so wrong that it's a miracle, or you're deceiving Canadians because you think the emergency justifies it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
That's the stark reality of the situation. Now, what is the evidence that the more stark reality, for example, that Carney is deceiving Canadians, what's the evidence that that's the case? Okay, well, let's say that it wasn't the case, And that he's playing a straight game. Well, so then you're going to ask yourself, why did he parachute himself into power the way he did?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And why has he claimed publicly that he's an outsider?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And about 130,000 liberals voted for him. So he's basically become prime minister with no test of the validity of his personality or his political stance being presented to Canada by a tiny proportion of the Canadian population. It's about half of 1% of the Canadian electorate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
He proclaimed that on American television on the Jon Stewart show in front of like millions of people. Right. So that's an international plan. We'll give the devil his due a little bit more. Carney's actually learned, he saw what happened under Trudeau.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
He can see that the net zero pursuit is untenable, although he has not formally repudiated it one bit, and it's still written down in black and white in his values. But then what would he do? Here, he'd call an election because he's duty bound, morally bound to call an election, and he would make the election long.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
as long as he possibly could, because that way he could go door to door, and he could meet the Canadian public, and he could let them get to know who he is, and he could take intrusive questions from the press without getting peevish and annoyed, and he would outline his new industrial vision, and he would say why he was wrong about net zero and about ESG.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
That's that presumption that there should be central planning to... fill the gaps of the free market, and that he was wrong about DEI, and that's about everything that he believed, and that he didn't understand Canada's core values, and despite the fact that he was absolutely wrong about everything he believed, he's now the guy to lead the country into an industrial revolution.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And he could take a couple of months to convince Canadians of that, or he could call a snap election, hoping that all of the noise around Donald Trump and his relatively foolish proclamations re-Canada has given Carney an undeserved and he could shorten the election cycle so that Canadians can't figure out who the hell he is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
and rely on the apparent validity of his resume to propel him into the seat of the prime ministership. And so what's he doing? Well, you can ask yourself that. It's like, did you know any of these things about Carney that I just described? And if you didn't know them, well, why didn't you know them?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And well, part of the reason for that is, well, Carney hasn't told anyone, although he did write the book Values, but who's read that, right? But I read it and I understood it and I'm doing my best to explain to you what it meant. He's got the wrong idea about Canadian values because we're not a fundamentally utopian, socialist, elitist, top-down, central planning society.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
We're a Western democracy. And the principles that Carney outlined as cardinal values of Canadians are not the cardinal values of Canadians. And it's an interesting thing for the bloody liberals to do anyways, because under Trudeau, we heard nothing but the proclamation that Canada had no core set of values and that we were really a post-national state.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so that means it's actually incumbent on him to do exactly what he's doing, which is to call an election, but also not to be parading around the world, let's say, especially in places like Europe, acting as if he is prime minister with a mandate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And that insofar as we had any national identity at all, it was mostly that of genocidal, capitalist, patriarchal oppressors. And so I don't understand at all how the Liberals under Carney, who's certainly not an outsider, can be waving the flag of Canadian virtue at this point while also proclaiming that they've got their finger on what the Canadian core values are, translated into DEI.
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537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
and ESG and net zero, which are radical leftist, globalist, utopian, top-down, central planning dogmas that are incredibly expensive and truly ill-advised. Now, Carney, as far as I can tell, would rather that you didn't figure that out. And the reason for that is that he's riding high in the polls because Canadians look at his resume and they think he's qualified.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And I can understand that because at the surface, his resume is impressive. But the The question is, what has all that experience taught him? Well, it's taught him to be elitist to the extreme. It's taught him that him and his cabal of compatriots at the globalist level know better than you dimwitted peasants who are going to have to pay the price for his utopian vision.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And it's taught him that while the environmental crisis is so terrible, that's the carbon dioxide problem, that it's up to a handful of globalist elites to take the steps necessary to put things right. And if that means that the typical Canadian has to be made poor, well, that's going to happen anyways as the planet boils.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And besides that, you peasants are too dim-witted to understand the nature of the, what would you say, existential threat that confronts you. And it's too bad for you that your children are going to be poor. Because you need that, we need that to save the planet anyways, as we jet off to Davos in our private aircraft and conspire to save the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so let's talk about Davos, because that's the WF people, the World Economic Forum, and so I'll tell you a little story about them, and how much they care about what you bloody peasants think. So... A couple of years ago, I formulated this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship with a handful of people in the UK and a stellar group of advisors.
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Now, he's done a fair bit of that in the last couple of weeks, and we want to keep that in mind, and we also want to keep in mind the fact that the election is very likely to be of incredibly short duration, because there's a reason for that, too. Okay, so currently as prime minister, that's obviously somewhat impressive.
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537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And it's spread itself out now internationally with some real effect. And we had about 4,500 people come to the UK today. and that went very nicely. And you might say, well, how do we know that you people aren't just another bunch of globalist utopians and it's another conspiratorial cabal to help with the little guy? And here's what I would say to that.
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You know, we made every single thing our speaker said public. It's all on the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship website. And so you can see exactly what we're up to because we've been radically transparent. And then you might say, well, what's the consequence of that? And here's the consequence.
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In our first conference, we had an arena event that attracted 12,000 people where some of the primary people from the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship spoke directly to the public. But the fact that we've released all these videos enables us now to contrast ourself and our communication ability with the WEF for example.
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So at the moment our videos are outperforming the WEF videos by really by an order of magnitude. And so why is this relevant? Well the WEF is been around for decades as the Davos globalist types conspire in their elitist bubble to manipulate the planet to their own benefit and to hell with you peasants. And the proof of that is the fact that no one watches any of their content. Well, why?
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It's because they haven't put any effort into publicizing their content because they don't really give a damn what you think or what you know. And so the ARC, for example, we're kind of a bare-bones organization. We've only been around for two years, and we're still struggling to find economic purchase. And we've managed to produce a communication network that has radically improved
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has been radically more successful at communicating with the public than the WF, despite the fact that they've been around for decades. And Carney is part of that Davos crowd. And if you think that they care what you think, then you should give some thought to the fact that this is gonna be a very short election.
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And that the reason for that is that Carney would rather not that you didn't know what he's like or what he's up to, because he has a planet to save and you dim-witted populists are just gonna get in the way with your idiot concern for your heating and your air conditioning and the odd vacation and for the like economic future of your children. And so we'll unwind right to the beginning.
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Look, Carney looks impressive on paper, and I can understand why Canadians think he's the man for the moment, because he was vetted, for example, by the Brits who put him in charge of the Bank of England. But I can also tell you what happened when he was in charge of the Bank of England. And I know this because I know people who were affected, and I mean rich people, who were affected by...
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He got a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1988 and developed an interest in economics at that point. Then he went to the University of Oxford. So these are major league educational institutions. And back in the late 80s and the early 90s, they were still highly credible institutions, I would say. So he was at Harvard in 1988. I was teaching there from 92 to 96.
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his decisions as head of the Bank of England. So the policies that Carney put forward as the head of the Bank of England produced an asset boom, and what that means is that stock prices went upward radically. And what that meant was that the people who have a tremendous amount of money got a lot more money as a consequence of Carney's maneuvering. And that, I would say, shows you
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That's a good case example of exactly who he prioritizes, despite his protestations, when push comes to shove. And so the people that I've been talking to, and these are very wealthy people and they're very well connected, although they have a conscience, as it turns out, we're not very happy that the quantitative easing
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principles that Carney put into place in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis made the rich much richer and the rest of everyone else, and that meant everyone but the extremely rich, substantially poorer. And so that's just, so that's an example of what happened when Carney was running the Bank of England. And so there's no evidence that he's like a friend of yours.
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Now, then we might address another issue. It's like, the issue of Trump and his saber rattling. Well, the accusations that have gone out with regards to Pierre Polyev is that Polyev is just mega light. You know, he's a make America great advocate, which he's not by the way. And that a vote for Polyev is really a vote for the Trump types. Well, let's see what Trump himself thinks. Well,
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A few days ago when this was recorded, Trump came out and said he didn't give a damn who ran Canada. And so, you know, we can conclude from that what we might as Canadians. One thing we can conclude, and, you know, you want to put this in perspective, is that
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The new American administration has a lot of countries to keep track of, and Canada is the US's major training partner, and we should get some due consideration. But that doesn't mean that the new administration has had Canada in its sights, so to speak, or even understands the Canadian political landscape particularly well. And it's my impression, and I've done some digging, that
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Trump didn't understand that his comments about Canada and the tariffs and his promise threat to turn Canada into the 51st state would be utilized by the liberals to resurrect them from the well-deserved death they had already managed and to raise them up above the conservatives. He didn't know that. Now you could say, well, he should have.
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It's like, yeah, fair enough, but it doesn't matter because he didn't. And so I don't know if he would have cared if he didn't know, but he didn't know. But the upshot is the liberals have leapt ahead. Now, then you might say, that's no problem because Mark Carney, man, he's got the international cachet to put that orange-haired son of a bitch in his place.
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And then you might think, well, what does Trump think about that? And what Trump said was he'd rather negotiate with a liberal. Now, you could say, well, that's because he thinks Carney is much more confident and competent than Poliev, who he described as no friend to him and no friend to the MAGA movement, by the way.
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Or you could read it, and I would read it this way, knowing something about Trump, that because Trump is radically pro-American and because the free trade era has radically come to an end, that Trump is looking at Canada thinking if...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Canadians are foolish enough to elect that Piker Carney, who's a retread of the worst of Trudeau, although much more effective on the managerial front, let's say, then we'll be able to crush him extremely effectively at the negotiating table. We have contempt for everything he stands for, and that would be a real good thing for us Americans as we pursue our own self-interest.
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My experience at Harvard was phenomenal. I thought it was an absolutely remarkable institution. So again, I said I would give the devil his due. And to get a bachelor's from Harvard is a genuine accomplishment. It certainly indicates that you have a fair bit of raw cognitive power and some real conscientious discipline.
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And so if you think that Trump is intimidated by Carney and his international expertise, you don't understand the Americans and you certainly don't understand Trump. Because not only is that not the case, and I know it's not the case because I have extensive contacts in D.C., which I have carefully developed over the last five years, precisely for moments like this.
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And they tell me what's going on. It's not like Trump and the MAGA Republicans think that Carney is a credible, canny negotiator that's going to bring them to heel. Quite the bloody contrary. Now, you know, can Polyev step up and do a better job than
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Carney, well, you know, Canadians tend to get overshadowed at the bargaining table with regards to the Americans because they're very canny negotiators, and we have a lot to learn in that regard. But what we could do and perhaps would do with a Conservative government if they got their act together is
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foster Canadian independence from the United States in a very real way, remove borders to inter-provincial trade, crisscross the country with pipelines, radically improve our fossil fuel-based economy, move our refining capacity back into Canada, develop something approximating a real industrial policy,
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and maybe on something approximating a wartime footing, given the magnitude of the threat from the Americans, deal more effectively with the Germans and the Japanese, for example, who've already indicated their inexhaustible thirst for Canadian resources, make ourselves into the industrial powerhouse that Canada could most clearly be,
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indicate our willingness to contribute to military defense in the manner that we should, given the necessity for that in an increasingly unstable world, signal to the Americans thereby that we're willing to pursue our weight, but that we don't bloody well need them if push comes to shove, and then sit down with them at the negotiating table like a real...
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competitor and contender and potential ally. And if you think it's going to happen under Carney, well, you can take Trump at his word. He already indicated his contempt for the liberal types, and he said that, you know, he's no friend of Polyev.
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Well, you know, you want to read behind the lines a little bit, and as far as I can tell, what that means is that Trump would rather deal with a contemptible, weak-kneed liberal than with a conservative who actually puts Canada first.
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And so don't be thinking that Carney's the guy with the cache to put Trump back on his heels because Trump has faced people who are a lot more intimidating than Carney. And it's not only that, like Carney stands for everything that the more radical fringe of the Democratic Party stands for in the United States.
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And it's not like Trump has any sympathy for the Democrats as a whole, and certainly not for the more leftist eco fringe of the Democrats. And it's clearly the case that if Carney was an American politician, he'd be Gavin Newsom, like he'd be exactly the sort of person that's pushed exactly the policies that Trump can't tolerate that have emanated from the Democrats. And so it's a delusion.
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And then he went to Oxford, which is another one of the world's premier universities. He got a master's degree in economics in 93 and a doctorate in 95. And then he has an honorary degree from the University of Manitoba, Doctorate of Laws. So educationally, that's very stellar. Now, with regards to his professional experience, he was governor of the Bank of Canada, and that's a major deal as well.
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So Carney has a very impressive, Resume, read shallowly. And I can understand why Canadians are relying on that as an indicator of his competence. And they're also hopeful that he's a new guy, which he most certainly isn't.
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But if you look into what he's actually done and what the consequences have been, and if you actually assess what he said in his book, Values, for example, where it's written down in black and white, you find that if we elect Carney in Canada, which at the moment looks like a reasonable likelihood,
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We're facing the same situation that we faced under Trudeau, except Carney will be more effective at implementing it. And so we're going to do worse faster and with a lot more virtue signaling. And that's hard to believe because, you know, Trudeau virtue signaled to a degree that was virtually impossible as he impoverished Canada to no positive end whatsoever on the environmental front.
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And all that's going to happen is that that's going to be much worse under Carney. So we already see that Carney's set at serious odds, for example, with Daniel Smith in Alberta. And that's a continuation of the scrap that Smith and the West has been having with Trudeau and the Liberals and the East as a whole. That's not going to rectify itself. It isn't even obvious to me that the country itself
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which the liberals, for the last 10 years, have regarded as an entity with no real central identity. Anyways, it isn't obvious to me at all that the country's going to be able to survive another four-year round of liberal, utopian, globalist, environmentalist, net-zero catastrophe. And so don't be thinking that Carney's a new guy.
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And don't be thinking that his stellar resume indicates that he's gonna produce some kind of economic revival in Canada, because all the evidence points to the fact that he's gonna continue to pursue the net zero delusions that he's already established as the center of his entire edifice of thought.
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And if you don't believe me, and maybe you don't want to or can't, or you doubt me, read values yourself. And then you'll see. Read the first three chapters and the last three chapters, because the middle of it's just boilerplate. It's only there to make the book thick instead of pamphlet-length. And so... an hour of reading and you'll figure out who Carney is.
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Now, if you believe that carbon dioxide output on the part of Canada constitutes an existential threat of the sort that requires us to become poverty-stricken over the next 40 years, while we virtue signal about how the planet could be saved, while doing absolutely nothing about actually addressing any true environmental problems, then Carney's your guy.
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537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And if you think that core Canadian values are the values of the radical utopian environmentalist left, then Carney's your guy. Now, he purports to be a free market believer, which takes him out of the left-wing camp, but the way he
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maneuvers around that problem is by saying well the free market doesn't address the really important problems and it's the central planners the highly educated technocratic central planners that have to pick up the slack and so he says free market but what he means is central planning free market and what he means by central planning is his vision and what his vision is that's the other thing about Carney you know I read his book values and
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One of the things I really hope for in a book is A, that I learned something and all I learned from reading values was something about Carney. I didn't learn anything of any substantial import in consequence of reading the book. And I learned that he didn't have a single original idea. There wasn't a single original idea in that entire book.
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537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And then, even more impressively, he was governor of the Bank of England from July 1, 2013, to March 15, 2020. Now, that's pretty impressive, eh? Because it's not typical for the Brits to hire someone who isn't one of their own, so to speak, although he does hold British and Irish passports, to lead an institution as august as the Bank of England. And so, again, on first glance,
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Like the first three chapters and the last three chapters outline his ideas, but they're not his ideas. Diversity, inclusivity, equity, That's not Carney's idea.
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Environmental social governance, these new policies that are hypothetically going to govern the biggest financial institutions in the world and every financial decision everybody makes with stakeholder capitalism and central top-down planning, none of that's his idea. Net zero, that's not his idea.
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And Carney had the opportunity and values to put forward a platform of ideas because he could have said, well, here's the problem with the fossil fuel economy, and it's leading us into this carbon dioxide catastrophe. And here's an absolutely detailed industrial plan for how Canada could move itself forward, own its own technology, Develop a new industrial base that was renewable.
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Here's the detailed proposals, and here's the vision. Here's the proof of concept. There's none of that in this book. There's hand-waving about how the magical new renewable economy, and he has the gall to talk about hydrogen, which is like the most appalling proposition possible. No one takes the idea of a hydrogen economy seriously, certainly not in the next few decades.
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537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
There's no ideas and values except hydrogen. DEI, ESG, and net zero, and those aren't his ideas. And worse than that, they're like the worst ideas of the last 20 years, and they're already outdated. So let's talk about that for a minute.
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So it was true that Carney took a leadership role as the UN climate envoy, and it was true that he organized like 400 of the world's biggest financial institutions to pursue what's essentially a net zero agenda. And that happened, let's say, roughly five years ago. Okay, so let's ask ourselves, what's happened in the interim?
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And the answer is, despite his success in doing so, all the big players have bailed out. BlackRock, Vanguard. All of these big players have decided that pursuing the net zero agenda, DEI and ESG, that's not going to fly. And so even...
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If you believe that Carney had been properly successful in organizing these big financial institutions to hit the net zero targets, you're faced with the problem that they don't think so anymore and that that whole coalition is falling apart. So my interpretation of part of the reason that Carney is motivated to become prime minister is because his international career has collapsed in failure.
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And so now where is he? Well, you might as well go to Canada. It's kind of a ratty little backwoods country anyways. You don't really want to bother with niceties like actually having a seat and meeting Canadians and being elected. You can just hop in because you have this stellar resume and you're the Bank of England former governor and you can tell people what's what.
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And you can tell Canadians that you're an outsider and that there's going to be some sort of economic revolution. And you can do that while lying about your actual goals, which are net zero.
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or failing to explain how you made such a cataclysmic mistake, and you're going to do that because you're a complete bloody failure on the international front, and that's embarrassing, and it's going to become stark, bloody obvious in the next five years. And then I would say, as I already said, that if that wasn't the case, then Carney would let Canadians get to know who the hell he is,
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and he wouldn't have called a snap election that will unfold in virtually no time. And I might also say he would have agreed to come on this damn podcast as well, because I offered him that opportunity, because I could be sitting here talking to him, and his staff was reasonably polite in their insistence that they couldn't find the time. But I'd also like to point out that I interviewed Polyev,
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relatively recently, and that was, by any standard of evaluation, the most successful political interaction in terms of distribution and impact of any Canadian political move in the last 100 years. We got something like 50 million views. And so if Carney actually wanted to communicate to Canadians, even Canadians like me, well, he had the opportunity.
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You know, and I might say, well, if I was Carney, I wouldn't have come on my show. And that might be true, because I'm not a fan. And I would have done my best to be like a reasonable interviewer. And I'm kind of an agreeable guy. So I probably would have been. And I can see why he didn't want to do it. But he didn't do it. And so you can make of that what you will. And then you can also...
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read between the lines, if you're willing. You watch how he responds to press inquiries and who he talks to. Talking to CBC doesn't count, right? Or CTV, because the Canadian legacy media is heavily government subsidized. And so he doesn't like talking to reporters anyways, but those he talks to are government-funded reporters.
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it would be reasonable for Canadians to propose, to surmise that Mr. Carney has had his credentials vetted not only within Canada and with regards to these educational institutions, but by the relatively skeptical Brits who decided he was the man to run an operation as significant as the Bank of England. Goldman Sachs, he worked for Goldman Sachs, a huge financial
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Well, he won't talk to me, and he won't sit down with me for three hours and hash this stuff out. And I would have done it politely, skeptically. You know, I've done interviews with 500 people, and many of them had political views that I didn't agree with.
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Many of them were, well, the Democrats, for example, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK, Dean Phillips, who had held positions that ideologically would have aligned with Carney at least at one point in their political careers. And so that opportunity was open to him and he didn't take it. And so instead, I'm talking to you directly about who Mark Carney is and trying to walk you through what I've concluded.
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You know, I've done as much studying as I could in the last couple of months, including reading his book twice and talking to formidable people in Canada about what they think and my connections in the UK, trying to get a handle on this guy and evaluating his policies in light of what I know about the UK and about Germany and about the net zero catastrophe.
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And in light of what I know from talking extensively to people like Bjorn Lomberg and other people who are, Richard Lindsberg, for example, who are stellar scientific critics of the entire net zero apocalypse game. So in conclusion, Canada has a new prime minister. Who is Mark J. Carney? Well, he's someone who on paper looks stellar.
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He's someone who, because of that pedigree and educational history, Canadians regard as a potential contender with Trump. What do we conclude if we look more deeply into what those claims truly mean? Well,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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If we do an analysis of Carney's career and his writings, what we find is that he believes that there is no more important existential issue facing mankind and Canadians than the apocalypse that's impending because of carbon dioxide overproduction. And as far as I can tell, All that he does stems from that initial presupposition.
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Now, if you accept that presupposition, well then, perhaps Carney's your man. If you think there are
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credible reasons for concluding that there are other important things that might be taken into consideration, like the fact that Canada's economy is collapsing and that the prognostications for its continued collapse, especially given the industrial policies that someone like Carney is likely to pursue, the prognostications is that unraveling will continue and accelerate. And so you have a choice.
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Now, Carney, is riding high in the polls at the moment, and there are two reasons for that. One is Trump's carelessness with regards to his comments about the unviable status of Canada as a country, and the other is the fervent hopes of Canadians that Carney is someone new, as he purports to be, which is an outright lie, by the way, and that his resume makes him a credible contender with Trump.
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Now, I took apart his resume and I described what Trump really thinks of Carney. And we don't have to analyze that much because Trump said he would rather deal with a liberal than with a strong conservative.
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So given Trump's radical pro-America stance and his skepticism about the kind of free trade agreements that have characterized the Canada-US relationship for the last 50 years, you can conclude from that what you might. Carney, in my estimation, doesn't want Canadians to dig too deeply into exactly who he is and what he stands for. He's more of the same and worse.
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Carney is a mystery to Canadians in large part, not least because he's been a political figure for a very short period of time. And the election that's being called is a snap election. So Canadians aren't going to have, and the rest of the world, aren't going to have a lot of time to get to know him before the determination of his status as prime minister is going to be finalized.
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And he's more of the same because he believes the things that Trudeau so shallowly believed insofar as Trudeau believed anything. And the most important of those things is that there's nothing more crucial than the impending apocalypse consequential to carbon dioxide overproduction. And so anything goes given that set of presuppositions.
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organization from 1990 to 2003, where he was managing director of investment banking. He worked in London, Tokyo, New York, and Toronto offices. He worked in the Department of Finance in Canada from 2004 to 2008. He was chair and head of transition investing. Now, that's getting a little more relevant to the point we're going to make later.
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And so he's going to call a snap election as rapidly as possible so that he can continue to maneuver towards his net zero goals, regardless of what Canadians want or say, because he's a leader of the elites and their presumption is that the hyper-educated technocrats know better.
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And so if you want a future of increasing economic constraint and lack of opportunity for your children and a further degeneration of Canada into a third-rate, while we do absolutely nothing to improve the environment whatsoever, just like Germany and the UK have failed to do, then Carney's your man.
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And if you have some questions about that, then perhaps you should give some serious consideration to the results of the upcoming election and decide what sort of country you want your children to inherit. Thank you.
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He was chair and head of transition investing for Brookfield Asset Management from 2020 to 2025. He just resigned upon entering the political sphere. He oversaw investments in renewable energy. So, and then he was United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance from 2020 to 2025 as well.
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He was appointed by Antonio Guterres, who's the Secretary General of the UN, to mobilize private finance for climate goals. He co-founded the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. Okay, so now, We need to take that apart. Now, he's also written a book, Building a Better World for All, which was published in 2021, and we're going to talk about that as well.
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So what do we say about Carney's experience and his résumé? Well, the real question is, what is he aiming at? Right, so he's got a stellar educational background and this vast experience on the international side. But the question is, what has he concluded from that? And what has he done in consequence? And what is he planning to do in the future?
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Now, I read Carney's book, Values, very, very carefully. And so the reason I wanna walk you through that carefully thought through statement of principles and aims. And so it's useful to take a person at his word on the written side.
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And so I think we can derive from values what Carney's values are, what values he thinks Canadians do and should hold, what we can conclude about what he's already done for Canada and on the international stage, and where things are headed in the future. And so now the first I'm going to take Carney's Values book apart in two ways.
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The first thing I want to tell you is what he thinks Canadians' values are. Okay, so he's setting himself up as an arbiter of the Canadian ethos, and to do that in his book, in the first couple of chapters and then at the end of the book, he tells us all what makes Canada the country that it is. And so we want to delve into that.
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All right, so Carney's conclusion with regards to Canada's core values are a leftist, utopian, globalist view of the Western tradition. So he believes, for example, that the core Canadian values are fairness and equity, resilience and adaptability, sustainability and responsibility, and community and cooperation.
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OK, so the first thing I'd like to do, those are all terms that sound positive and that could in principle bring people together on the basis of a vision. Fairness and equity, resilience and adaptability, sustainability and responsibility, community and cooperation.
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But the first thing I'd like to point out to all of you who are listening is that although Carney claims that those are core Canadian values, that claim is not correct. Those are core globalist, socialist, utopian, net zero promoting environmentalist values. But the core Canadian values are actually derived from the Judeo-Christian Western, broadly Western and English common law tradition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Now, I want to make a case for Carney first, as powerfully as I can, so that we give the devil his due, so to speak, and I think the right way to do that is with a review of his resume. It's quite clear to me that Canadians are entranced with Carney, whose Liberal Party has risen dramatically in the polls in the last month, They're entranced with him for two reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so I'm going to outline what those are, just so you can see the contrast between those values, which are the true Canadian values, and Carney's values, which have this patina or aura of high-flown positive emotion, but bear little relationship to the genuine historical reality and do not describe the values that made Canada the wealthy, free, productive, Western democracy that it is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So Canada's actually founded on the principles of individual liberty and rights, the rule of law, equality and justice, and equality there doesn't mean equality of outcome and it doesn't mean economic equality. It means equality of value before the law and equality of opportunity. and responsibility and order.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And so those are values that are very different than the value set that Carney is putting forward. And so then you might ask, if Carney didn't derive what he believes Canadian values to be from the historical reality of Canada, From what source did he derive his values? Now, you also might wonder why it's important to even delve into this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
Well, the first conclusion we could draw is that Carney wouldn't have written a whole book about values if he didn't think that it was important to delve into values. And he certainly wouldn't have written a book revealing his own values if he didn't think it was important to communicate to Canadians and people around the world what he thinks Canadian values and his values are and should be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
So my focus on values, although I certainly believe, as he does, that values are fundamentally important, I'm focusing on values because that's the focus that Carney himself chose. All right, so this is where we can link the facts of his resume to an analysis of his genuine motivations. So let's first look in more detail at how Carney translates his core values into the beginnings of policy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
All right. Carney, in his book Values, outlines his support for three of what I regard as the least credible ideas that have emerged on the international landscape and the intellectual landscape in the last 20 years. So first of all, he's an explicit advocate of the diversity, equity and inclusivity principles that have destroyed the modern universities, that have corrupted our
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
judiciary and our political institutions and that have allowed the liberals to smuggle, the modern federal liberals, to smuggle in what's essentially a relatively radical leftist agenda under the guise of classical liberalism. Diversity, inclusivity and equity, the DEI holy trinity, is a political policy movement predicated on the idea that Western society, and that would include Canada,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
is a corrupt patriarchy in its essence that marginalizes a variety of groups, and purposefully so, delegitimizing them, and that the appropriate response to that is to segregate and identify people on the basis of their group identity, and that would include race and sex and gender and all the other isms, all the other ism identities that you may have heard in the last 10 years, to divide people on the basis of those identities and to privilege
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
And one is because Trump has been careening around like a bull in the China shop with regards to his comments about Canada, placing tariffs on Canada, describing us as not worthy of having our own country and fated, if we're lucky, to become the 51st state. This has produced a groundswell of...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
the marginalized, to bring them to the center. Now, some of that presumption derives from postmodern philosophy, and some of it is essentially Marxist in its orientation. And so Carney's derivation of Canadian values, when the pedal hits the metal,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
537. Reaction to Imminent Liberal Victory in Canada
let's say, or the rubber hits the road, the manner in which Carney translates his interpretation of Canadian values is the same manner that the radical leftists in the Democratic Party, for example, in the United States translated the same value propositions. And that's...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
If you gave America the knowledge that they could use to improve themselves, to feel confident that they had jurisdiction over their own body, to actually play an active role in ensuring that they don't develop those chronic illnesses, that they'll do it. If people don't think they matter, then they don't show up in their own lives.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
We did a show and I just saw a tsunami of negativity. Much of it led by media who had clearly been played. And I say that because when we finally got the data from the government, which was released the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which anyone who knows press and PR knows, you release data the day before Thanksgiving to bury it because you don't want anyone to see it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But people who had been attacking me came out and shared openly that they had been incorrect and there was actually concern about this. And today in America, we have limits on the amount of arsenic that can be imported with the apple juice. It shouldn't have been that hard. But I began to see the inner workings of how this game is played. I had a similar problem with GMO food labeling.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And I wasn't taking a stance on the show against GMOs per se. It's a separate discussion. I was just saying transparency. you know, allow consumers to know if the products are GMO. So just write on the label, you know, GMO corn or whatever. And companies didn't want that. And yet every other Western country did that already.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It wasn't like I was asking for this ridiculously crazy outlandish concept. It was already the standard in most other countries. We were the exception, clearly the outlier. And then I began to get attacked, not for that exactly, but for other things around that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And you think that was really starting to come to a head around 2012, or that's when you saw that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
No, this is going over five years of battles. I mean, every year I'm fighting for another reason, for something that doesn't seem that it should be that much of an argument. These are things that I thought were better for America. Don't you want to label your foods with GMOs? If you disagree with me, come tell me why. They don't tell you why. This is what I'm pointing out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
exceptional level of energy and doing his best to aim upward as far as I can tell and quite effectively so and so it was a pleasure to have him today in Scottsdale where he is with his wife and what did we talk about? Well
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
These battles happen behind the scenes. If they were to attack me directly on labeling GMOs, they're going to lose. Everybody wants transparency in that reality. Again, I'm not accusing manufacturers that the GMOs are bad for you. I'm not even making a medical commentary. I'm actually making a argument for transparency in the process. You're not going to win that argument.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So you don't attack the persons telling the story for the story. You attack them for who they are. And now all of a sudden, and I get clues here and there, they were there. This is hilarious. They got 10 doctors, so-called peers of mine, even though the lead writer was the head of the cigarette disinformation program, cigarette smoke disinformation program for big tobacco in Europe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
The second author went to jail for Medicaid fraud. I haven't done any of those things, by the way, so they're not really my peers. But they read an article to the dean of Columbia asking for my ouster. I'm tenure faculty. You can't just fire me because you don't like me. So far. So far. That could change. We'll get to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
That's the whole point of giving someone tenure, so they can speak their mind and have some job security. But the press published it before the dean got the letter. And you tell me how that happens. And then in the letter, they were complaining that I did a lot of bad things, including this GMO crazy idea that I had. And then I began to realize this is actually a very well-oiled machine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's a takedown. Because I bought Ink by the Barrel and published it, I'm on network television. I had a production team go out to the headquarters of these guys, which was a shell organization. There was no one there. And you begin to realize that you can get past these guys. But I had a lot of resources. A massive show with a lot of people, smart people working hard for me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
What about the people who don't have that? Which is everyone. Which is everybody else. And I began thinking, my goodness, these folks are, you know, if they're the only one putting their hands up, they're going to get shot. And then, boom, COVID came.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
When COVID hit, we saw firsthand what happens when in a time of tension, when the answers aren't that obvious and people start offering ideas that you don't want to hear, it's a problem. So I began talking to doctors around the world. Didier Raoult was the main virologist, parasitologist in Marseille in France, and he'd had a lot of experience with hydroxychloroquine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So I was curious, could that work? Maybe we should study if that works. Then I find out we're banning the prescription of that medication in New York State. The governor of the state is banning the right of a licensed doctor to prescribe a medication. It's never before happened in America. And there's not a real good reason for this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
In fact, we weren't even willing as a country to study whether this worked. I'm not making the argument that it would have saved anybody. Even to this day, there's still debate over this because it was never actually studied in a way that was acceptable. And we saw a general move away from looking for treatments of COVID infection to only believing that the vaccine was the answer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
We talked about the changing media environment and why that's occurred, the shift from legacy media to online media, and also the corruption of the legacy media enterprise over about a 10-year period, something that he got wind of as early, let's say, as 2012. And we tried to puzzle out why that was occurring, and that brought us into a broader discussion of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And it's not that the vaccine is a problem. I was strongly supportive of the vaccine. We'll come back to what ended up happening with this creation. Why wouldn't you entertain another thought process that might be perfectly valid? Hey, historically, doctors treated the, you know, prevent the gunshot wound. But if it happens, treat the patient.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Don't lament the fact that the bullet went through the heart. Fix the problem. Put your finger in the hole. Deal with the hemorrhage. And that mindset just wasn't acceptable. And I remember very vividly, several months into it, I was really upset because there was so much published data that the school should not be closed. Right. And so I said it. Now, in retrospect, obviously I was right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But at the time, whether I was right or wrong, we should have had a debate about whether the open school was for America. The kids in Europe went to school. The kids in Asia went to school. Are those kids different biologically than Americans? So why would we only take our orders, we think, from special interests, teachers unions around these school openings and closings.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Why wouldn't we at least in our own country acknowledge that some states were doing better than others and they were having their schools open? This became a major battle. But I mean, the kind of vitriol that I felt personally just by raising the issue solidified, steeled me to the reality of where we had come, where we no longer could have open discourse. We had Nobel laureates getting canceled.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
We have people who have domain expertise in the area of COVID offering thoughtful suggestions about how to manage the crisis better. We ought to be careful in dismissing those ideas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
In the operating room, as a heart surgeon, if I'm having an issue and someone else comes in who happens to have expertise in the area and offers me an idea about how to put a stitch or what kind of valve to use or a different technique for opening the chest wall to get in there, I'm at least going to hear them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I'm not going to have them escorted from the premises never to return because I didn't want their intrusive thoughts in my mind. There was a fragility around our policy that compelled me to want to eventually run for the Senate. But it also, in many ways, highlighted many of the things we've been fighting for.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
In the Maha movement, the Make America Healthy Again movement, the ideas that are being raised are ones that came up on the show over and over again. And not just my show, they were coming up in many other places, but they never could get any air cover. They get smothered, suffocated before they can sort of get airborne.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
What's happened that I think is very promising is that we're at least now seeing some pushback on ideas about whether or not fluoride is actually a beneficial thing to have in our drinking water. Should there be mandates around vaccines? Can we talk through the revolving door of our federal agencies and the agency capture that is perceived by some?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Why is the NIH not actively studying prevention with any kind of aggressiveness? It's just a trivial part of their budget. They're not doing it. Because they think other things are, you know, curing this other illness is more important, which I do that too, if you want. But you have to study prevention because no one else will do it because there's no money in it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Companies aren't going to profit by studying how to not use their products.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Well, cure without prevention often indicates relapse as well, right? I mean, if the conditions are there to make the disease possible to begin with and you don't change that, then... Why is there any reason to presume that it won't recur? I know there are situations where it doesn't recur, but even that dichotomy between prevention and care seems to be odd from a conceptual perspective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
George, I think metaphorically, if it may help, the issue of prevention is about the soil. We have to till the soil, fertilize the soil, protect the soil, use regenerative techniques on your biology to make sure that you're resilient enough to deal with illness and other insults to your well-being. That's what longevity is fundamentally about. It's not about being made perfectly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
while corruption on the scientific and academic front, which is a manifestation of the same set of symptoms in a different area.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's about being resilient enough that when bad stuff happens, you can cope with it. And we have actively in America, without intending so, I don't believe, but it nevertheless actively made it difficult for people to do the right thing. We've chummed the waters with products that make bad behavior simple. Federal policies have over and over again subsidized products that aren't as healthy for us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And we, you and me, and our brethren have let the country down because the intellectual elite, the knowledge worker groups haven't been honest, at least haven't been willing to challenge some of the fundamental assumptions we've made about our well-being. So we now have bad science or bad conclusions from science being infused with
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
but in the products made by industry, which aren't in our best interest, wrap that in bad policy and then dish it to people, serve people with that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And that's also had an effect on the legacy media. Like we've got three things sort of in the air now that we're discussing simultaneously, and it'd be useful to see if we can untangle them to some degree. We have the transformation that you described on the legacy media landscape that started to take place around 2012. We have the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And we talked about the radical changes on the political side with regards particularly to the Make America Healthy Again movement, which is a twist in the Trump approach that certainly meets with Dr. Oz's approval because he's been working for years on the public health side and is...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
There's no uniting narrative, there's no union. It's a completely pathological claim because we live in a hierarchy of narratives that stretch in principle up to the ultimate pinnacle. There's that, then there's the fact too that now we're all connected. so things can spread much faster.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
complicitness and the malfeasance and the silence of the scientific and medical community, let's say around COVID, but even more broadly on the scientific front, right? And then we have this emergent Make America Healthy Again movement that interestingly enough, is being captained now by the very person who has been pushing it in the most extreme manner in the public sphere for the last 20 years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So these things are related in some way, right? There's been some massive shift in the last 10 years all these fronts and it's driven by something that's it's it's driven by Factors that are similar across all the areas and it's very difficult to put Finger on exactly what that is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I think some of its we talked a little bit about the fact that technological transformation Let's say on the YouTube side has put a tremendous amount of pressure on the legacy media because YouTube basically bought brought the price of production television production and and dissemination to a much broader audience than was ever conceived of as possible, plus made it permanent for zero cost.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And so that's, I thought back in 2003, I think I started putting my YouTube videos up, maybe it was somewhere between 2010 and 2013 when YouTube was still mostly for like cute cat videos. But I looked at it and I thought, you know, there's something, this is very weird because we have video on demand It's free and it's permanent. Like that's, I thought, is that like the Gutenberg printing press?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Like, is this something completely different in a revolutionary way? Not only on the price side, but video is now permanent and indexable. Well, that's like, what the hell does that mean? Well, we're kind of seeing what it means. a radical shift in the way people communicate. There's that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Then there's the fact, too, that basically during that same period, we became hyper-connected, right, with these. And that's a very interesting thing to think about that psychologically and even neurologically. Now we're all connected. So things can spread much faster. Okay, so what spreads quickly? Well, do good ideas spread quickly? I think there have been good ideas that have spread rapidly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And I think YouTube's probably been the best for that of all the social media networks because it facilitates long-form communication. But it's certainly possible that once you're all connected, pathological ideas, oversimplified, easily understandable pathological ideas like viruses spread the most rapidly. And so that's driving this as well because we're hyper-connected.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
pleased, I would say, or more than pleased, to see this become a central issue of public concern, as it should be, given the unbelievable cost and consequences of the chronic disease epidemic that does immediately confront us. We discussed all of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And then maybe there's the The effect of policy, I mean, there was a legal change and I don't remember how many years ago in the United States that made it possible for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to the consumer, right? And this was something, this is a policy that characterizes the United States relatively uniquely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And from what I understand, that means that 50% of the advertising budget for the legacy media networks in general is now pharmaceutical company driven and 75% of the advertising for the legacy news associations. So the legacy news shows. And so that means the pharmaceutical, giant pharmaceutical companies have a hammer lock on public communication.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
apart from the you know emergent new media so that's a lot like that's a lot of technological transformation in 10 years right i mean that's stirring the pot in a major way the question is that would it have happened anyway and i i think bad ideas they can be viral but i think of them more like bacteria they'll burrow under your skin and if you don't expose them to light and oxygen
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
then they'll become abscesses and fester. The sores are painful and they can kill you. And what I think technology did to a large extent is expose a lot of mediocre ideas to the reality of what happens when you try them. Because ideological movements sound great conceptually, but when you actually put them into use, they don't pan out so much.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And the motivation for the movement might be positive, but the results are not. I'll give you a concrete example, because I think it plays into what you're saying. Long before we had iPhones and YouTube or anything else, Ancel Keys went to Europe and did a seven-country study to look at what happens to people when they eat certain foods and what kinds of problems it causes with their heart.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
He happened to collect the data during Lent, which, of course, skewed the data a bit, and the local scientists didn't like it. But he brought it back And because our nation was desperately looking for solutions for heart attacks, President Eisenhower had just had one. We had data that a lot of young men were dying.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
They jumped at the possibility that a low-fat diet might be better for you, because that's what seemed to come out of this early data. Now, again, this is long before we had any technologies. That became the ruling dogma. Keyes came back. He had allies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Because of his allies politically supporting him and no one being able to challenge him, but successfully, because anyone who tried to raise their hands and say something got taken out, we now develop a formal national policy to advocate for low-fat diets. So low-fat diets. usually means high carb too. Somebody's got to make up the calorie difference.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So companies started making high carb solutions, simple carbohydrates, high fructose corn syrup, unhealthy foods, which directly correlated to weight gain. Again, this wasn't a conspiracy. It was- And diabetes. And diabetes and heart disease and Alzheimer's and all the things that come out of metabolic syndrome, this array.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But as you look back on the history of all this, which is only possible now because you have so many ways of telling the truth and lying, by the way, but you have ways of telling the truth. You look at things like the Minnesota Heart Study, which was commissioned to prove that this theory was right, and they never published the data.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And years later, 15 years later, they finally are forced to publish it because it showed, proved that low-fat diets do all the things we now know they do. and they do not in any way help with heart attacks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
We also discussed as well his foray into the political realm, the price he paid for that personally, the advantages of that, and his plans for the future, which involve continuing to develop what is already a sizable social media, new media presence, which is expanding and that he's hitting with all his customary diligence. So stay tuned for that. Well, Dr. Oz, it's good to see you again.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So all that data was very easy to cover up, and you'd never know it was hurting you, and you'd think it was bad luck, you'd think you're gaining weight because you're lazy, or other people are gaining weight because they're sloths. You start making all these these excuses about why we have gone the wrong direction without addressing the fundamental flaw, which was we're giving people bad ideas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And bad ideas lead to bad outcomes. You talk about sin, right? As the idea of an arrow heading towards a target. And you know, if you hit the target, fantastic. If you don't, that's a sin. Or if you have the wrong target you're aiming at, you're definitely not going to hit the right target. That's what we did. We aimed people in the wrong direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And then we allowed industry to co-opt that process because it was easier for them to make those foods, less expensive. And they very much had a vested interest in making sure that ideology stuck. So how do you turn that over? A lot of physicians sacrificed their careers trying to do so and didn't succeed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
What's allowed us to finally take these on in a very aggressive way, and they're wonderful scientists now who are getting big enough that what they say has gravitas, and people hear them, listen to them, and act on them, is because they can get their word out through podcasts like this in ways that were never before possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
If I was trying to challenge someone about the American Heart Association guidelines for cholesterol intake, the diet intake of fat, I couldn't do that. I mean, literally, who am I going to talk to? You walk into the learned organization where all the heart doctors are supposed to say what they think is important, no one's going to listen to you. They'll dismiss you and put you to the corner.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So the democratization... of information has allowed us to challenge dogma that was incorrect. That, I believe more than anything else, coupled with obvious errors during COVID, has allowed a lot of Americans now to believe that our country is not sick by accident. And by making America healthy again, it's both an achievable goal, but also one that will deal with our crisis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I'll give you a little bit of math here because when I was in medical school, I went to business school at Wharton because I was interested in health care policy, just these issues. Like, how do you fix the game so that you actually get some benefits? And one thing you always track is what drives the big budget items.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
If we deal with chronic disease- And the most common chronic diseases are- Metabolic syndrome is the root cause of all- Describe that. Metabolic syndrome means your pancreas, it makes insulin, but it's unable to make it in a way that allows your body to deal with the calories coming into your body. So the body reacts- by doing things that are maladaptive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It'll deposit the fat in your belly, for example, in your mentum. Sounds like the momentum, but not the M. That fat tissue there was designed for our ancestors to store fat in times of feast, but you use it in times of famine. Right, at the harvest. The harvest is a good example. So you didn't die in the winter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Good habit to have, which is why our ancestors had a uniquely effective ability to store fat. It's not a bad thing, except if you have to go hunting, you open the fridge, it doesn't work because you're not consuming calories to hunt your food anymore. And so metabolic syndrome is a series of problems that occur because the fundamental process by which you consume and use energy is off.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
People who happen to have a healthy metabolism live a lot longer. They don't develop heart disease and Alzheimer's and cancers and a slew of other problems nearly as commonly. And people have those issues with the metabolism of their blood sugar and inability of insulin to keep up. And as a consequence, lots of inflammation in the body, including in the liver.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
All of those complications drive most of the healthcare expense, at least half of the healthcare expense of the country.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So that's very tightly linked to diet. And not exactly to caloric intake, but rather to type of diet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Yes. And people who are overweight have trouble exercising. They don't sleep well. That's another building block of your health. And oftentimes, people who are overweight feel shame.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
As always. We haven't done anything publicly since 2021?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Yes, well, we've made it a moral issue. My attitude towards that has shifted a lot in the last 10 years. When I see someone overweight now on the street, I would say probably 15 years ago, I was slightly more judgmental. I'm not a particularly judgmental person when it comes to people's health. because it's generally very complicated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But it was easy enough to think, well, if they just exercised more and ate right, they'd do fine. And then I learned that, well, I learned many of the things that you just described, broadened my knowledge in that area and started to understand that these high carbohydrate diets were making people obese. And that was as simple as that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Well, I read a study at one point that suggested that one soda a day is sufficient to cause the obesity epidemic. It's true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And let me explain. That's really important.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You brought that up. Yeah. Well, that's nothing, right? That's not even much of a bad habit by all appearances. 160 calories. 160 calories.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Right. That's not the problem. Your body is looking for nutrients. Your brain very wisely is disregarding caloric intake, only focusing on the nutrient density of what it's getting. That's what it uses to build muscle and hormones and brain and everything else. So when you take in a soft drink, your brain doesn't count that as food. because it's not getting what it's looking for.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Before I decided to run for office. That was the last time we taped, and you were the last big interview I did. Oh, is that right? It was very helpful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And yet the calories still add on. And the high fructose corn syrup actually sort of stimulates a bunch of processes that are also maladaptive, but getting full, feeling satiated is not one of them. And so we see this happening over and over again, where small little errors reproduced every single day. But the converse is also true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Small things, small steps done right every day, all of a sudden life's beautiful. And that's why it's so painful for me to see so many of my brethren, other Americans, feeling ill, thinking it's their fault and thinking there's no way out. The nihilism around health is stunning. And these are focused on longevity, wellness issues, because there's so much opportunity there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You know, not just because we've got AI now that can customize recommendations for you just exactly what you need, including when you hear the recommendation because you're not always receptive equally. But we also have much better technologies that are available that can help you get on the right path. There's medications that in some instances make sense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But these are all crutches that fundamentally to get you to realize that you can do it. to empower you, the person whose ultimate destiny is so tied to your own will, which is, Jordan, why the messaging that you're delivering is so critical. Because if people don't think they matter, then they don't show up in their own lives.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
That'll teach you to interview me. Career-ending move. You got me psyched up to go. You said, tell the truth and go out there and do battle. Well, it was actually a weird situation at that time because three years ago, There still was very, very few people, let's say, on the classic legacy media side who would do an interview with me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
We have a kids foundation, which you've been incredibly helpful on, called Health Corps. It's based on the principle of the Peace Corps. So we go around the country with young college grads who, like the Peace Corps, would train them to do great things. Instead of sending them off to Botswana to build dams, you put them in schools in America.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
In fact, here where we're taping in Arizona, the Department of Education has given Health Corps a $5 million grant to go into 100 schools and build digital platforms to deal with this issue that I just discussed. Fundamentally, here's the problem. We can't get young people to practice anymore for sports. We can't get them to do their math homework anymore.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You can't get them to be respectful in class. Why? because they don't think they matter. Think about your life. If you're listening, think about your childhood. Someone told you that showing up would change the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
That if you actually studied math or became a doctor, a nurse, a construction worker, a union person, if you did something with your life, that the world would be a better place for it. If you don't think that's true, Jordan, you're not going to do your homework in school. And you aren't going to go to practice because why would you bother? Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And so what we try to do more than anything else is get young people to first off very narcissistically focus on themselves, their own bodies. You can be healthy. You can be cool. You can be a better mate for someone in the future, a better employee in the future. But no matter what, you are important. You can do great good things. You can do terrible bad things. But what you do matters.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So start focusing on what's in front of you. Show up in life by showing up in your school. So we're broadening to tell young people things through the lens of health. that historically was told to them by their teachers and by their parents, or just by society at large, by messaging. Because culture eats strategy all day long.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You got a strong culture, then you can make up for flaws in your strategy. But if you don't have a culture, who cares what you're being told to do?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You're not going to do it. Well, they're told the opposite now. I mean, they're really told, they're categorized by group, and that group can be, you know, race, gender, sex, whatever. They're categorized by group. They're told that they're pawns of a tyrannical society and that they have absolutely no agency.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And in the boys' case, they're also told that if they have any agency, that's nothing but a manifestation of a detrimental power drive and that their play preferences are all wrong in school. And so I can't see how we could demoralize children more effectively if we'd set out to actually manage that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I read a study again not so long ago that showed I think it was 43% of American youth feel that they had no agency in their life. Well, that's a hell of a thing to think when you're 18.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Jordan, you go into the schools and you've been kind enough to be supportive of HealthCourse, you may have witnessed this as well. You talk to a 17 year old and the light's gone out of their eyes. It's just blank darkness. They don't know what to think anymore. They have 15 different conflicting ideologies being thrown at them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
None of them are going to help them deal with the challenge of their life. Imagine all of us had those issues when we were in high school. Somebody put their hand out and said, Jordan, you can do this, man. It could have been the priest in your church. It could have been a coach. But someone helped a little bit. That's what we try to do with Health Corps.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But there are other ways of getting that message out that aren't being used. And most importantly, we don't have the luxury of sitting back on our butts and wondering what happens next and complaining about this process. You need to pick up an oar and start rowing. And ideally, you get someone across the hall from you, so you're rolling in straight, not in circles.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But it's a reality that has, like an epidemic, taken over like a brain worm our young people. But they don't want it. They know it's wrong. It doesn't take a lot when you sit in a room to get a young person to believe in themselves. So what's Health Corps doing? Well, as an example, we will teach you about the fundamentals of health. So what I just mentioned as an example about soft drinks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And you were certainly one of the, because we had done something earlier than that, too. Two years before that, maybe? It was earlier, I think 2017 or so.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But how do you message that to a kid? If I lecture them like I just discussed these topics with you, I mean, they're not going to listen to me. I'm not cool to them. I don't culturally identify with some of the subtle music tastes that they have. I don't get the jokes all the time. So ideally, someone who's close in age to them goes in there and say, hey, listen, the man –
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
The man wants to take advantage of you by selling you junk food, food that's not good for you. They know it's not good for you, but they're silent to you because they make a lot of money. So don't be conned by the man. Now you've got a little bit of a thing going on. You know, it's me versus them. A counterculture. Counterculture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Now it's sort of cool for me to reject junk food and vaping and cigarettes. You know, I'm actually better than that. Now, we actually have studied this in randomized trials. We've actually gotten data to show that it works. Young people know it's not good to drink soft drinks. They don't drink as much soft drink, especially when women.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It was 18, that early time period. I say that because when we first decided to invite you, I had an intense battle within the show with people threatening to quit. Did they quit? I'll tell you the story very briefly, but it's a wonderful reflection of what I think is the ultimate hypocrisy that happens often, certainly within media. Folks wanted to quit. It was performative in general.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And then you've got to translate that to they perform better in life, which we're still studying. But someone's got to deliver the message to them. But that's the foundation. I use health as a crowbar to open them up, to get into their bodies, the thoughts that I think they need to hear about how valuable they are. Because if you're – the most precious thing you're ever given by your family is –
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
is seen by you as being worthwhile, all of a sudden you're worthwhile. Oh my goodness, I got this incredible body and I've got all these opportunities. Now I'm going to start paying attention and maybe get past all these thoughts that were racing in my head that were taking me in the wrong direction. And then we can use that as a excuse, a trampoline to develop mental resilience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Because what I really want to do is workforce development. I want to get these young people to believe they can enter American culture and help. And if they have the mental resilience to recognize that, that if they can change what's happening in their body, Jordan, they can change the world outside of it. If they can actually get that idea in their heads, you can't stop them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
What's been your experience introducing Health Corps into the schools? What kind of response are you getting from kids?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Jordan, I've raised with my wife, Lisa, $90 million for the foundation. We've touched the lives of 3 million plus kids. We're getting large multi-million dollar grants from states and foundations. Of course, we raised a lot of the money privately as well. It costs about a dollar per year of life lived by the kids. It's incredibly inexpensive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
We can get nursing schools to give us their volunteer hours because nurses have to volunteer time in the community. Social workers do the same thing. People want to help. The thing that I found most uplifting when I was campaigning and I saw it on the show as well is the average American thinks they can live their life. They're worried about their neighbor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
They don't think they're doing so well next door. But they're okay right now, generally. They could be better. They've got this problem. They're being held back by that. And the government, they definitely don't want to round because the government's really going to be useful to them in a positive way. So, you know, but they, you know, they want to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's an interesting approach to ask people about their neighbors. I read of a pollster recently who was doing that when trying to predict the outcome of the election, which he apparently called correctly. People are more likely to, what would you say, maybe they're less guarded?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
when they're asked about how their neighbor thinks or how their neighbor is going to vote or how their neighbor is doing, for example. So you get some sense of their picture of the generic other, and that might be an extremely effective way of gathering information. Let's go back to the legacy media issue and the Maha nexus, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So in principle, now RFK is going to be running the show on the health front. I don't know what that's going to look like or how he's going to manage it. One of the fundamental problems I think that he's going to have to address, and this is an incentive problem. I mean, if you want to make a system work properly, you have to get the incentives aligned with the aim. And that's very difficult.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's something that behavioral psychologists specialize in. And one of the problems on the prevention side is that it's very difficult to give people credit for prevention. If you go for a drive and you don't have an accident, nobody pats you on the back. But you've prevented innumerable catastrophes if you drive 100 miles safely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You're not going to get credit for things that you do intelligently that stave off a catastrophe that doesn't exist. And so it's very difficult to associate scientists, let's say, or physicians with effective preventative strategies because the evidence that they've done something good is subtle and it takes a long time to make itself manifest.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
That's way different than, well, was it Barnard who did the first heart transplant?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Neil Barnard. Right. I used to play basketball with him. Right, right. He was friends with my father. Right, right, I remember that. But he learned how to do the transplant at Stanford and Texas Heart. But because of our regulatory issues in the United States, he took the technology, flew back to South Africa and did it there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And did it there, yes, yes. Well, he became world famous, of course, for doing that. And that's not prevention, that's cure. And you can tag him immediately with the prevention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I lived this. I was exactly what you're describing, taking incredible pride in what I could do with a scalpel and a stitch. Yeah, yeah. I could change hearts. I could put mechanical hearts in. I could now begin to change the valves. It's very dramatic and immediate. We had New York Med, which is a new show that was filmed in the hospital that did very, very well airing on primetime television.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
They wanted to show that they were going to be taking a strong stance against you. And the reasons were obvious. I know all the accolades they could throw at you. And So I challenged the team. I said, well, show me those evidence because if he's truly those things, I don't want to have him on. I'd never met you before. I had listened to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
On the show, the Dr. Oz show, we'd go into hospitals and show these dramatic moments. It's fantastic. There's so many TV shows that have been successful, Marcus Well Beyond, the ER, and House. There's a reason for it because it's exciting. I don't think the issue with prevention is that you don't get credit for it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
The issue with prevention is more about how do you create a system where it's easy to do the right thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Yes, well, that's the incentive issue, of course.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And that's where I believe our government has been of very minimum value. Because if the NIH was able to put some support behind looking at the actual tactics that might work, getting rid of the ones that are ineffective, reinforcing the ones that do help Americans, then we'll start to develop mechanisms to make our lives a little better.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Ironically, there are differences even between different parts of the country in the health of our people. Just learning from that would be effective for us. But no private sector business is going to do that because they're not going to be able to pay their shareholders back for that invested money. That's something we as a people should do for ourselves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And that's an example of one of the topics for the Maha movement. You know, regulatory bodies should be responsive to us and should at least be able to explain why they're not spending money in a way that might make sense for the betterment of the average American. We also should not be directly misleading them. I mean, you chum the water by telling people, you a low-fat diet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I mean, you eat only meat. You've lost weight. You're sharper. Your rheumatoid issues are better looking. Your boyish looks never better. All those things happen, but it's not an accident. And the fact that we're not- It's also impossible to believe. Well, I think that's part of it. Why is it impossible to believe?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Someone long ago, because these ideas are not new, these bad ideas have been battled for decades. Someone long ago should have been honored by at least hearing their ideas. And we suffocated them, killed these ideas in their infancy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And so now- Do you think that, okay, so let's talk about something more radical. When you were talking about the NIH and these granting agencies, I thought about a conversation I had with Larry Arnn, who's the president of Hillsdale College. And Larry is quite the force of nature. And Hillsdale is a remarkable institution, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's one of the few universities, legacy universities, let's say, which has maintained its appropriate function. They have a 1% first year dropout rate, right? The average is 40%. 1% is stunning. And it's a lovely campus. And the students are very much on board. And The typical student there told me that 90% of their professors were excellent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I was intrigued by the battle that you'd waged around compelled speech in Canada. And I thought big thinkers ought to be heard. And my job as a television host, I was trained was to, you know, expose the public to ideas that are worth hearing so they can judge for themselves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And I asked like 15, 20 students, you know, and privately so they could actually talk to me. In any case, one of the things Hillsdale did was not take government money right from the beginning. And it's very interesting. Like, I don't exactly know what to make of this because
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
In the beginning stages of my career as a researcher, which was quite extensive, because I published about 100 papers, and the reason I'm saying that is because I want people to know that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to discussing the research environment. And so I did research at McGill and Harvard and the University of Toronto, and that all went really, really well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
The only fly in the ointment that entire time was the emerging power of the research ethics boards, which became, in my opinion, corrupt beyond belief and absolutely 100% counterproductive and woke. They were awful. And they started out bad and they got rapidly worse. But something, again, seemed to happen somewhere around 2014.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And the research enterprise, which was in the main, in my field, in psychology, free of... relatively free of careerism and relatively free of corruption. Not everybody who was doing research was a great scientist, but you can't expect that. And most research wasn't true, but you're not gonna have a lot of misses.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But everyone, virtually everyone I ever met who was seriously involved in the research enterprise was doing it above board and ethically and they weren't careerists. And also the scientific journals were trustworthy and the granting agencies were too. And then something twisted in the last 10 years, and I think none of that's the case now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I mean, science, the greatest magazine in the world, greatest scientific journal in the world, and nature have both become ideologically corrupt. Scientific American is pretty much gone. I mean, that's more on the public side, but it's emblematic of the same thing. I mean, there's...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
The replication crisis, so to speak, never shocked me because I never thought that most things that were published were true. That would be too much to hope for, but some things at least were true. Now I wonder, I don't see a pathway forward, an easy, a straightforward pathway forward to rectify the granting agencies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's the most clear with your health where you really should be taking charge because you're going on a wrong path otherwise. But it's true for almost any other important thing you do is to make sure you have an opinion on what's best for you. So when I invited you on, I heard different things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I mean, even 20 years ago, the typical scientist in the United States was spending one third of their time writing grant applications that failed. One third of their time. That's insane. You've basically sidelined 30, 35 percent of your researchers in producing paper that has no utility whatsoever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And things have got much worse since then because you have to be ideologically pure now to get a grant. You have to have your DEI statement in order. And that's the first order of business. And so do you think. Is that a rectifiable situation, or was the trajectory inevitable? If you have government finance research, does it become corrupted by government corporate collusion? I don't know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I'm not really sure what to think about that. Much of what the young people do is mirroring what their professors and teachers are doing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Well, which is what they should be doing. They should be mirroring it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
That's the whole point of the education system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
They're rejecting it en masse because it's a failed ideology. And they're also realizing, to quote, paraphrase George Orwell, who, as you know, was a journalist, was sent up to the coal mines in northern England, and he quit after a few articles. And he argued that he thought the socialists cared about poor people. It turns out The socialists didn't care about poor people. They hate rich people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And so when the professors don't actually care about— Worse, they hate successful people. That's even worse. But that's what you start to see. All of a sudden, the faculty who are leading these onslaughts to revise the institutions, they're pretending, performative again, pretending that they care about the poor patients who are being left behind. They actually just hate the system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And if you're going to blow the system up, you better know what you're going to do next. Metaphorically, to one of your 12 rules, you know, make your bed first. Just get the basics right. Telling a young student that he has to use pronouns to a person who's not going to appreciate that is the opposite.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Which is like 95% of people, right? Because that is not the highest concern of 95% of people, especially if they're going to a hospital because they're sick. I can't really imagine as a clinical psychologist a worse way of demonstrating my
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's certainly possible that oversimplified, easily understandable pathological ideas like viruses spread the most rapidly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
a better way of demonstrating my cowardice in the face of an ideological onslaught and the capture of my imagination than by stating my pronouns and asking for them the first thing I do when I met a client. I would never do that under any conditions whatsoever. It's absolutely preposterous.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And I heard back from no one except one individual, a senior producer, very capable, well-respected, said you're homophobic. He happened to be gay. And so I said, bring me the evidence. He brought me evidence. And it was fascinating because it was you talking on a social site about
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's precisely announcing to someone, first of all, my ideological position, which you should not do, certainly as a therapist, and I would also say as a physician. You're not to burden your patient, your client with that sort of information. You're not there to make a personal statement to them. You're there to listen to them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And so you shouldn't be starting out with an announcement of your ideological position. And you're also telling anyone who can think that you're too weak to stand up to the woke mob, which is not exactly something that's going to strike confidence in the heart of someone who's on their deathbed and hoping that you can help, or in some sort of terrible crisis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Yeah, so this is, well, so we continue to outline the problem. And the solution that you've put forward so far, at least in part, is based on some faith in the students themselves to see through this and put pressure on the institutions. But man, what I saw as a professor, and the same thing I believe happened in the research enterprise overall,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
the faculty retreated as the administration advanced. And I don't think that's my opinion because all you have to do is track spending on administration against spending on faculty or spending on students. And you can see who won that battle. And it was 100% the administrators. And they pretty much had that in the bag by 2014. And then the woke mob took over the administration.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And that seems to me that's also what happened What did it happen on the, what, the boards, the editorial boards of the scientific journals? Is that exactly the same thing? But this is cowardice, Jordan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
This is our Hippocratic Oath. The pesky thing. The pesky thing that you read at graduation and that you're supposed to, you know, people have in their offices, right? You take care of your client, your patients. It's number one, always, you never compromise them. You police your specialty or field because you have domain expertise others, lay people don't have.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So I've got to call you out if you do something that I think is wrong. I have to advance the field by standing on your shoulders. So the people who taught me that I've got to do more than they did to make the field better. But the fourth thing you have to do The civic responsibility of being a professional is to speak out on issues that are wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And we have been cowards in organized medicine and in the learned arts. It's our job to take the bullet for the team, because if all of us put our hands up, they can't take us all out. They can definitely take you out one at a time, though. But that's what we're doing. And we did that for months.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
What I think has changed, and I don't want to overplay it, but I'm sensing it, over the last year, and that's what the Maha movement I think represented, enough people put their hands up That if you mention the possibility that we're going to revisit some of these mandates, you don't get taken out summarily.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
to two gay men, advising them to be thoughtful about their adopted child, because that adopted child might face hardship because it's an untraditional, nontraditional family they're having. You didn't judge them. I thought you were very caring and loving, as a psychologist would be in that setting. And I confronted my producer with that, and he refused to back down, but he didn't quit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
People may still hate you, but they don't feel emboldened to shoot you because they're bullies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
The government of Alberta made vaccine mandates illegal two weeks ago. They revamped the Alberta Human Rights Act. I think it's the Alberta Human Rights Act or the Alberta Charter of Human Rights. I don't exactly have that at my fingertips, but that's no longer going to happen. And I think, too, one of the things that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
public policy people should have known now i have some sympathy for them because when covet emerged the politicians completely abandoned their responsibility and made the public health policy people who were willing the experts on everything and they ran the show and that just was completely inappropriate it was a devolution of responsibility from the political but the public health
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Public health policy people who also, by the way, were very complicit in the Nazi organizations in the 1930s. So there are parallels to this, historical parallels that are not fun. Public health policy officials should have realized that any medical doctrine that relied on compulsion, force, and fear was pathological in its essence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And we've seen, I think, the biggest consequence of the COVID tyranny is going to be the demolition of faith in the public health field. And maybe there's also an indeterminate spillover effect of that on the medical profession in general, and then all the other associated professions that are under the broader rubric of helping professions in general.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But it's also the case, it's not that surprising that individuals won't speak out. In 2016, when I annoyed the government by making some YouTube videos. I didn't really think they were going to have that much of an effect. It was more of an experiment on my part. I had three sources of income, three independent sources of income. I lost two of them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I lost my clinical practice and basically it became impossible for me to be a university professor or to continue with my research. And then I've been fighting an ongoing battle for 10 years with my regulatory agency and that's cost me more than half a million dollars. And it's been unbelievably annoying, like way too annoying, very, very stressful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And so that's a lot to ask for people to speak out. You know, I mean, it was hard to take me out because I had more than one means of supporting myself and that turned out to work out very well. But, you know, there are very few voices on the medical side or the psychological side in particular in Canada
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
People contact me behind the scenes and there is the odd person, there's the odd nurse, there's the odd teacher who has said something. But it's also very easy for people just to write them off because they're such extreme outliers, you know, and to tar them with some right wing epithet, for example. So I can understand why people don't speak out. And I guess part of what all this has done.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
for me is to highlight even more particularly the absolute miracle that any country anywhere ever managed to establish anything like a right to free a speech free speech right there's so many factors that work against it which is why free speech of course doesn't reign in almost all the countries in the world so what the hell did we do right so that it actually worked for some period of time in the west what were the preconditions well let's get into that that is
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
As a good psychologist, you're asking the most important question. As you know, I'm Turkish of origin. And when you go to Göbekli Tepe, Potbelly Hill, which is in southeastern Turkey, it's the oldest known human civilization. And you see these big tea temples that they built there 12,000 years ago. And they're clearly religious in origin.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And at that point, I realized that it really wasn't about whether you truly were those ad hominem attack words, but the fact that they just didn't like you to be able to say what you wanted to say because they didn't agree with what they thought you should be saying. And that is the biggest risk, I think, to free speech in America. And I'm reminded of a very close friend who grew up in Hungary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
These people, primitive as they may have been, had some belief that, in something bigger than them. There was something out there. They had the audacity, actually, to sense that they were connected, that it wasn't just the material world around them. And I would argue that it's because they had that audacity of belief that they thought, hey, I can domesticate animals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
If I trap those gazelles, I can actually do animal husbandry. If I put these seeds in the ground in an organized fashion and put water on them, I can grow crops. And so it actually gave rise to human civilization. Abraham met Sarah there, by the way. It's not a coincidence. There's something special happened there that allowed this to all take place.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And as it began, for humans, began to take over the world, who knows when that happened. We left Africa 60, 70,000 years ago. But again, something allowed us to go beyond the typical tribe size. A typical tribe is under 50 people. Something connected us. A belief that we're all in it together so that we can get 500, 5,000, 50,000 people together. And Homo sapiens took over the planet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
We killed off the other six species that for some reason didn't get that deeper.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Yeah, it is an orientation to some kind of abstract higher order uniting good. There's no doubt about that. And that's, I think... where democracy comes out of.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's fundamentally based on humanism. So let me quiz you. I may have shared this with you in one of our late night discussions. But this is something I think everyone who's listening could do. Quiz themselves, but also for people around them. You're standing on the side of the river. And you see a stranger floating by. And they're heading towards a waterfall. And they're obviously having trouble.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And let's assume they perish if they hit the waterfall. And you've got a ring you can throw out there, a rope, and save them. And then out of the corner of your eye, you see your pet, your favorite dog. Cute thing as it is. Woof, woof, woof. Coasting by this stranger. Who do you save? You only get to save one. Oh, I'd take the person without a second thought.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Most people in the Western world who are older pick the person. Most younger people pick the pet. This is about humanism. You saved the stranger. Why? You don't even know the person. Young people say, we have too many people. There are billions and billions of people. That dog is my dog. I love that dog. We don't need more people. That dog, if he dies, will hurt me personally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So they saved the dog. I'm not even trying to make a value judgment here. I'm just describing the numbers that seem to come back when this question is asked. Please, everyone, do it yourself. Ask that question of young people, old people. Let them struggle with the answer. But if we don't think that stranger is more important, then it's hard to have a democracy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Because without believing in humanism, the sacredness of that individual, that there is something bigger that unites us all, a non-local consciousness, a God, you can call it whatever you want, that sees us all of having value and therefore worth listening to, then what's the point of having democracy?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And that begins to challenge some of the assumptions we've taken for granted because America was, yes, it was created by modernists, but they were all interested in God, if not overtly religious. Well, this is a good time to give you this book that I think. As you know, and you're very kind, you shared a draft with me early on. Probably it was January, February, very early.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And he left Hungary when he was about 20 years of age. He's older now. He just had his 80th birthday. And he said when he grew up, everyone that he talked to He knew they were lying to him. But that wasn't the problem, Jordan. The problem is that those people knew that he knew that they were lying. And they knew that he knew that they knew that he was lying. Everyone's in on the game. Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And I remember going through it. And I'll tell you right now in a non-patronizing way, this may be your most important work ever. And I was flabbergasted at the depth that you brought into some of these discussions. And I must say, it's nothing else. Most people read the beginning of a book anyway. When you get to the part about Cain and Abel, which I thought I knew that story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Most people think they know that story. And when you begin to explain what it was that Cain did that was truly murderous, that really was the problem. All of a sudden, they began to see parallels in modern society.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And that's why the ability, and you've done this so brilliantly, to dive deeply into these archetypal stories, stories that people used to discard because, oh, there's old people who wrote down dumb concepts. They weren't dumb and they weren't unrelated. They're desperately important for our time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Well, that's what it looks like to me. And I think I'm hoping that book is better by a substantial margin than the draft I sent you in January because I did a lot of work after that. And so I walked through, I think, basically 10 biblical stories trying to describe why they're sequenced the way they are and what they actually mean.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And I am hoping that your comment is correct, that it's the most significant work that I've done. I think that might be true because... Maps of Meaning was very dense and academic, and then the following two books were quite popular and more descriptive and helpful rather than conceptual. Practical. Yeah, they were more practical.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
This book is also practical, but I hope I got the balance between idea and practicality right, exactly right. It's a harder read than 12 Rules for Life, for example, though easier than Maps of Meaning. But the other advantage that it has is that most people still know these stories at least to some degree, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So there's some essential familiarity that I can draw on, which is, of course, a culture that doesn't share stories isn't a culture. It's fragmented into... subpopulations that share stories. There's no uniting narrative. There's no union, you know, in the postmodernists claim.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
The fundamental postmodernist claim, actually, it's actually the defining claim of postmodernism is that there's no uniting narrative. And it's a completely pathological claim because technically, We live in a hierarchy of narratives that stretch in principle up to the ultimate pinnacle, let's say. And there are uniting narratives at every single level.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You can't just put an arbitrary cap somewhere and say, well, beyond this level, there's no uniting narrative. It's preposterous. There's no way of doing that. And so I think the fundamental postmodern claim is intractable. And I think part of the reason that postmodernists have turned to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
the doctrine of power is because when you lose your uniting narrative, and that's something roughly equivalent to the death of God, let's say, then other competing narratives immediately emerge. And the three most likely candidates are sex. And of course, that's what Freud concentrated on in such a revolutionary manner in the early 20th century. Well, if it's not God, then maybe it's sex.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Fair enough, like reproduction, like that's a fair proposition. Well, if it's not sex, maybe it's power. Well, then you get the Marxists and you get the postmodernists, most of whom were Marxists, and you get the totalitarians. Nothing unites us except power, and all friendships are power relationships, and marriage is a power relationship, and all economic relationships are power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So, you know, as is often said, democracy is based on common truths and totalitarian governments are based on common lies. And he just did not want that. This older gentleman was such a patriotic American after having immigrated here, fled from Eastern Europe. He didn't want that for this country. And yet... He saw it. I'm witnessing it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's like, well, you can make a case for that, or you can say,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Well, there's no essential union and we basically live in a nihilistic morass And those seem to me to be the three competitors to the idea of what's highest and every single one of those competitors is self-devouring and pathological so The question is what's what rules that is the question what rules and nothing is an answer But man, you pay a price for that answer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I remember calling you, uh about two years ago. And I've always been impressed at your ability, your resilience. And I was struggling with some stuff. And I asked you if you thought there was a God. And you paused, pregnant pause, longer than usual. And you said, there better be. And it was interesting to me to hear you say that because we're better off living like there's a God.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I happen to believe there is a God, but you're better off living like there's a God. And sometimes in life, if you go along and try to understand why there's such power there, it begins to bloom. So you begin to see it in different ways. I think there's been a shift in America quite dramatically in that people aren't willing to give it a chance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
They're not willing to truly allow it to grow in their heart and to see if there's wisdom there. They almost feel like it's, It's a sign that you're a fool. You can't believe in a God. The big shift I would argue is, and I've seen some data on this, 30 years ago, a third of people believed strongly in God.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
A third of people weren't sure, but they definitely respected the people who believed in God and they wanted to be like them. They were struggling to actually be like them and they were having difficulty. And then a third of people were not religious, but they weren't disdainful either. They just weren't religious. That's shifted now. And the middle group shifted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You still have a third that go to church all the time and a third that don't go to church ever. But the people in the middle no longer want to be like the ones who have found a faith. They actually are disdaining them. That's the shift that's happened in America. And that's a powerful group of people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Those are the people who, through the culture, should feel more comfortable at least allowing the concepts that have governed human culture for at least 12,000 years, but probably all 60,000, 70,000 since we left Africa, to rise up. It's audacious, it's arrogant, and it's dangerous to ignore thousands of years of wisdom compiled by your ancestors.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
My parents were immigrants to this country, came here loving America for everything it represented. The shining city on the hill, as Reagan called it. It was there for all the world to admire and emulate. And we can't afford to slip on that. I was in Singapore. My show, as you know, aired... in 120 countries, so a lot of the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Well, you degenerate into a kind of... One of the dangers is the degeneration into a self-serving populism. And there's utility in populism insofar as democratic leaders consult their constituents to find out what they need and want. But the problem with the populist approach in general is that it's too short-term. It's too focused on...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
only the things that you can understand during the span of your life, however long that has been. There's an insistence in the biblical text that there's two axes of orientation. One is interpersonal, to treat other people as if they're of divine value and to love other people as if they're yourself, let's say. But the other one is upward. It was to orient yourself to the highest possible good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Now, the sum total of all highest goods, that's a reasonable definition of God. But you know, even in the biblical corpus, the reality of God is, what would you say? Especially in the Old Testament, the reality of God is indeterminate, not least because God is in a category that transcends the real. And this is something that's very important to understand because the atheist claim is,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Well, do you believe in God? But there's a, what would you say? There's a metaphysics in that question because the atheist materialist definition of belief is an atheist materialist definition. And so what they're trying to do is to take the concept of God and reduce it to the reality of an everyday person. object, a table, atoms, something material and structured.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And the God that's presented in the biblical corpus is ineffable. And that means that the reality of God isn't the same order of reality as the reality of things. And that's not my inference from
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
struggling through the biblical texts, texts that's absolutely crystal clear, not only in the texts but in the tradition that whatever the divine, the highest divine principle might be, it transcends the categories of time and space and it's not bound by what's materially real.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And so if your initial starting point is there's nothing but what's material, then there's no sense having a discussion about value at all. But if you understand that you have to have a discussion of value because you have to value things to act, and you do, this is one of the points I tried to make in the book. The idea that we see the world through a story is an incontrovertible fact.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It is being demonstrated in at least six different independent disciplines. And it's not only true for our beliefs, let's say, that we live in a story, but it actually structures the very perceptions that hypothetically inform us about the facts. And I think this is a revolutionary realization that a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story. We live in a story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
The postmodernists were right about that. And that's partly why we have this culture war. It's because the postmodernists were right about that. Now, their solution to that, their analysis of that problem was lacking, sorely lacking, to say the least, and unbelievably self-serving and worshiping at the feet of power and hedonism as well, which is a very bad idea. You might say, why? It's like,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And I didn't have a lot of competition because in many parts of the world, there aren't health shows. So we were the dominant health show for those 13 years we aired. And I would go around, do interviews. And one of the places I went was Singapore. I'll never forget, right before I went on the air, I was on, my show aired right before the national news.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Worship of power is self-defeating. You know, I outlined the data from the chimp studies. Chimp tyrants, like human tyrants, tend to meet a very unpleasant end and early in life. It's like, well, what happens if you play a power game? Well, then you're in the power game.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And the problem with being in the power game, as soon as you're not the biggest kid on the block, you're not just dead, you're ripped apart and dead. And so... There are things that you can raise to the highest place, power and sex, for that matter, hedonism in general. The problem with doing that is it doesn't iterate. It doesn't work. You can't do that with other people because they object.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And not only that, even if you do that with yourself, you'll defeat yourself in the future. So what I've tried to outline in this book is the idea that There are a radically limited number of self-sustaining and improving principles. And that's something like a natural law. It's something like there's a universe of games. Some of them are playable and some of them aren't.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Non-playable games are much more common. Games that will defeat themselves that no one wants to play. Then there's a fraction of games that are playable. So people will do them voluntarily and they'll iterate. Then there's a smaller fraction that iterate and improve. There's even a smaller fraction that iterate and improve multi-generationally. Well, the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Biblical stories capture the spirit of the iterated game that improves over centuries. And I think accurately. I think one of the cases I try to make in this book, you might say, well, what's the alternative to power? And that's fairly clear. Voluntary sacrifice is the alternative to power. And that's why the biblical texts concentrate on sacrifice. So what do you mean? What does sacrifice mean?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
What do you give up to be married? What do you give up to have a friend? What do you give up to have a community? If it's all about you, you give up nothing. But if it's all about you, you don't have a community. So obviously the community is predicated on sacrifice. Once you know that, you think, okay, what's the sacrifice? Well, that's the question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So I went on the national news to promote the show. And the anchor, you know, turned over to me and said, please help America, please save America. And I said, well, I mean, I love my country and of course I'm going to do my best for it. But why are you warning me about that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
That's the same question as what's the nature of life? What's the nature of work? What's the principle of community? Like the example you gave with the stranger in the stream. And the dog, what do you sacrifice? The dog, right? Your attachment to the dog, your juvenile sentimentality, right? Maybe even your hatred. What if it's an enemy in the street?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
What if it's the bully who made your life miserable or your dog? It's like, what do you do? You rescue the bully. Why? That's a hard question. The answer to that is something like, if you don't rescue the bully, the world turns into hell. It's something like that. And you think, well, that's not obvious. It's like, well, yeah, that's for sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's not obvious, but your conscience will tell you that. And so, yeah. So how did we get into this? Well, we were trying to figure out what had gone wrong, you know, at a fundamental level. And then we switched into this discussion of deeper things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Yes. Add something to it. to what I'm hearing is that we all have a filter because we can't process everything. Yes, that's the thing. I'm watching you. I see the pink shirt that matches mine, but a tie that I'm not wearing. A great choice of shirts. Thank you. But there's a lot that I'm... Even when you speak... I'm hearing some things that you're saying clear to me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Others feel like, you know, Charlie Brown, Lucy. And so that's all of us do that. It's not a bit disrespectful. Just some ideas will resonate with us. The story that I shared that I was told about the pet versus your pet, beloved pet versus some stranger, might not even be a good person, is a story some people will hear and remember for the rest of their life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Others are going to not even understand it the first time. And there's a spectrum in between there. So I think a lot of our political differences are caused by that. We tend, not only are we served with different news feeds, I get all that. That's been said many times. But even if you were here, the same news feed, your interpretation of it,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
is very different depending on the stories that you believe and the story that you think you're in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And the stories that are at the foundation of the structure through which you look at the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So in therapy, as you try to work with people like me and everybody else on the planet, I've been told that you challenge us with this concept of complementarity, which was originally a physics idea, Niels Bohr. Mm-hmm. The idea that you could have particle theory and wave theory, and they could both be true. They're on the surface opposites. Matter is a particle, matter is a wave.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And he said, in our country, we have several warring groups, people who don't naturally get along, different ethnic groups, religious groups, and we're on a tiny island. And every time we're about to blow ourselves up, and crush that thin veneer of civilization that protects us. Someone looks up and says, guys, guys, America pulled this off based on a piece of parchment 250 years old.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But in reality, it's waves and particles. The particles act like waves. And so Niels Bohr could hold both of these concepts in his mind at once without breaking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You know, when Carl Jung was working out his principle of complementarity with regards to unconscious function, he was also having a dialogue with one of the world's most famous physicists. So, in fact, one of Jung's books, which I think is, it's either alchemical studies or psychology and alchemy, is actually a library of dreams that this physicist dreamed up at the moment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And he was one of the physicists who worked on the principle of complementarity. And at the moment, unfortunately, his name has escaped me. Pauli. Paulie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Wolfgang Paulie. Yes. Let me just share with folks at home. So this is so typical. We're in a conversation. Jordan is tolerating me. He wants to talk to my wife. He was just yelling out the answers to the questions that he has in his mind that he can't articulate. Yes. So usually when we're together, I go to bed around midnight, which is late for me because I'm a surgeon.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You stay up at least until dawn debating Jung and other realities that aren't so obvious to others. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Yeah, so the complementarity idea too is part of that does lay out the landscape of the dream because Jung's idea, for example, was that you'll have an ideological framework, let's say, but it keeps things out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
That's relevant to your discussion of this filtering mechanism, but there's part of you that keeps track of what you're not paying attention to because you pay attention to very little and you don't pay attention to a lot. And if what you're paying attention to is misaligned, you need, what would you say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You need a repository of alternative potential conceptualizations and that's fleshed out in the landscape of dream and fantasy, yeah. It's a brilliant idea. I'm certain it's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It maps very nicely onto the hemispheric theories. Part of the question becomes, how do we realign Western society to at least begin to focus on things all of us believe are worthy of our attention? Yes. And the stories that we're telling are ones of nihilism, of power, of hedonism, of a patriarchy that has failed us. Nature worship. replacing a humanistic God with nature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Well, even the dog rescue is an example of that, right? Because that's putting the animal above the human in the hierarchy of values. You might say, well, I love the dog. It's like, you're missing the point. You're missing the point. It's not about what you love. That's not the point. That's too focused on you. Why shouldn't it be focused on me?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Well, the simple reason is if everything's focused on you, subjective identity, if your identity is radically subjective, no one is going to want to be around you, right? The degree to which any of us is tolerable to other people, let alone welcome, is directly dependent on how much of our own individual whim and power drive, let's say, that we sacrifice to the relationship. Obviously.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
We know that with children. Two-year-olds can't do that. So they don't have friends. They're still too egocentric. Three-year-olds start to learn to do that. And the three-year-olds that are expert at that by four are...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
desirable play partners and they're socialized by their peers properly for the rest of their lives and now we're reverting you know we're telling all our young kids it's like act like a two-year-old define yourself subjectively right it's about who you think you are well it even begs a question it's like what part of you do you think is you right like is it it's your immediate hedonistic whim that's you what i want what i feel right well no one's going to be able to tolerate you
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Obviously, they'll just walk around you. They'll find someone else. Why wouldn't they? You know, I used to tell my socially anxious clients, suggest to them that when they went to a party, whenever they started worrying about how they were fitting in, that they flipped that to trying to make other people comfortable. Right, because they couldn't stop.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
If they can do it, again, based on something that was written, we can do it too. So America is a role model for the rest of the world. So when we blow it, they copy us. When we sneeze, they get pneumonia.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You can't tell someone to stop thinking about themselves, right? Because that just makes them think about themselves more. But you can tell people to make other people welcome. And that takes them out of that realm of self-consciousness. And then they could draw on their own social skills. Many of them had social skills. Not all of them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Some people were socially anxious because they just didn't know how to behave. And that was a more complicated problem. But... Well, that all tangles back into the idea that the community is founded on sacrifice. This realization, it just flattened me. Because one of the things I understood, I think, was that we have, in the West,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
in the Christian West most particularly, have been looking at an image of sacrifice for 2,000 years without understanding why. Like our towns, European towns were literally founded around a sacrificial center, right? The cross, the altar, the cathedral, the town, the country. Why is the sacrifice at the center of that? Well, the answer is, well, sacrifice is at the center of the community.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's like, oh, okay, obviously. It has to be. Community is defined by sacrifice. Like a bear, it just does what it wants. There's no community of bears. It's only a community when you sacrifice. Well, so then that begs the question, what's the highest form of sacrifice? Well, we're going to wrestle our way through that. question a lot sooner than anybody thinks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And that's partly what this book is concentrating on. It's like, what's the nature of the sacrifice that redeems? Even though you don't know it, that's the central question of your life. And there's actually an answer to that. Like you see that in the story of Abraham, right? Because Abraham sacrifices Isaac or is asked to, he doesn't. And there's a lesson in that. And what's the lesson?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And that's why the crisis that we have felt over the last several years, exacerbated by COVID, which really just sort of bolded and underlined what was going wrong, is such an opportunity for us, as well as potential risk. An opportunity to put things right again. To wake people up to what has happened. And I do think it slipped up on us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
If you offer your children to what's highest without reservation, you get them back. And that's 100% true because if you're the sort of grasping parent who protects them or who devotes your child to you, they're gonna run away and rightly so. But if you encourage them out into the world and ask them to pursue nothing except what's best,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
then they'll know you're on their side and you'll get them back. And of course, you know, the atheist types, Dawkins is guilty of this, point to God's demand to Abraham that he sacrifice Isaac as proof of the superstitious quality of the Old Testament narratives and the fundamental malevolence of the God of, let's say, Jacob and Abraham. And that's completely wrong. It's like,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Parents offer their children up to what's highest if they're good parents. And then they get them back and then they establish a dynasty. And that's actually what happens to Abraham if you tell the whole story. And so it was quite a shock to understand what that meant. And then to understand that that is what you do with your children if you love them. Who would have guessed that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But of course that's what you do because raising children is about something. And it could be about your child. Or it could be about what you want. That's not good. The latter one, that's really not good. Is it about your child? No, it's not. It's about encouraging your child to be good. That's what it's about. Well, what do you mean by good? It's in relationship to something. Well, what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
the highest possible aim. And it is the aim that our respect for free speech is predicated on. It is the aim that all of the freedoms that make the West what it is and a desirable place to immigrate for everyone in the world who votes with their feet. There's a foundation underneath that. And we've been wrestling with that today when we've been talking it through.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
When that foundation shakes, what? Everything shakes. Science, this is so interesting, hey? It was one of the things I found fascinating about talking with Dawkins. Dawkins knows that the scientific enterprise is in trouble. He was hoping that if we switched to a kind of materialist atheism, that science would flourish.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's like, no, I think when you knock out the religious substrate, one of the first things that goes is science. It's fragile and unlikely to, you know, to have a whole cadre of people who do nothing but pursue the truth and that they're protected. That was what tenure was for. That's very unlikely. What's the precondition for that? Belief in truth? Belief that the truth will set you free?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Belief that you have to tell the truth. That's right. Even when it's at the risk of your career.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Which is why science came out of religion. Yeah, well, that's... faith-based traditions, because they put something above each and every one of us, implored us to tell the truth because we weren't reporting to you. Because smart people are really good at lying to themselves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Yes. In fact, the smarter you are. Yes, definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
That's why the intellect is Lucifer. Absolutely. And so we see that playing its role. I mean, the learned people who destroyed Russia and Cambodia and China, these were smart people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I don't think most people appreciated how hard it was to say what you believed needed to be said and heard. You were a very early example of this. I mean, just blaringly obvious that you should have been allowed to say what you were saying about compelled speech. And yet you were, again, the ad hominem attacks, they can't attack what you're saying, so they have to attack you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Yeah, yeah. Paul Potts, he got his PhD at the Sorbonne. Exactly. And where he outlined his plan, much to the delight of the leftist postmodernists that taught him. And then he went back and killed, what, six million people?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
At least. And, you know, the skulls piled up. You know, he didn't illustrate that part with his thesis. But, you know, these are smart people who come up with these ideas. fantastical ideologies that are so destructive. But if the purpose of science is to find truth, someone has to hold you accountable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And we've all witnessed this because you get into a debate and people will cherry pick the facts that they like, which is the opposite of telling the truth because you're entitled to your own opinion. There's more to hand off than simple, not to your own facts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And when we are dishonest, intellectually dishonest about the data, the facts that we're using, which is rampant now, we're seeing more and more. If you go back and just look at all the manuscripts that are published, half of them are suspect.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Not minority, only half of them are suspect because people get rewarded not just monetarily, but with tenure, with pride and ego and all those things that trump the truth. And we're left without a deeper belief that the truth matters. The whole system begins to implode, right? The gyre begins to spin faster and faster.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And as we crash land, the public is watching this and saying, I thought those guys knew what they were doing. And now I'm seeing them actually censor each other in a way that I wouldn't censor the guy who works at a local deli. I let that guy say his piece, so I can say my piece. And these guys aren't doing the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Again, Nobel laureates being censored because you don't like what they're saying. reinforces a pathology that the public begins to appreciate. And I think that was directly correlate with what happened in this election. And that's why the Make America Healthy Again movement got traction. Because some of the things that are being said, there is no way
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
that you'd be able to accept this even two, three, four years ago. I know because we were saying it. And I'll give you a story. This just happened to me. So the debates around vaccines have gotten a bit louder. And please do not start off everyone by saying, oh, it's anti-vax, pro-vax. It's not about that. I had Bobby Kennedy on my show. 10 years ago to talk about this issue.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And I got, as usual, a ton of grief, but that was my job, I thought, to give people who deserve to have, you know, I say, their minutes on network television. And the first, I asked, are you anti-vax? Because everyone's telling me you're anti-vax. What does that even mean? And I opened this book and, you know, the first line of the book, the first line was, I'm not against vaccinations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Right, right. And then he said, if you're actually one of the few people who reads the whole book, Go to the last line. I'm not against vaccination. So I thought, my goodness, you know, what I've been told about this guy might not be right. So then I started getting into it a bit more. And one of the issues is hepatitis B vaccine. Now, do you know much about the hepatitis B vaccine? No.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I love your psychological interpretation of what's going on here. So this is a vaccine that's effective reducing the incidence of a very bad illness called hepatitis B that destroys your liver, leads to liver cirrhosis and transplantation, kills you. You don't want to get it. You can pass it to others.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's generally passed through sex, prostitutes, high-risk activities, and intravenous drug abuse. Those are the main ways that it gets passed. We vaccinate, we mandate vaccination of every newborn as soon as they come out of their mother's womb. I mean, like that day. It's the first thing that happens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And anytime anybody's listening now, if you read a newspaper article or anything that's in a commentary, and the first thing they do is attack the person rather than the idea, you know that they're on weak ground. Because if I got you on the idea, why would I bother wasting my time attacking you personally? I only attack you personally because you're not worth listening to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So doctors look at that and say, well, geez, you know, I just described how you get hepatitis B. I mean, this child's not going to engage in any of those activities. It's true the mother might have hepatitis B, but you could test for that. And that'd be a very tiny fraction of people. Small, but it's there. And I understand that theory. But there's a lot of women who might say, well, test me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
If I don't have hepatitis B and my child's not going to start taking drugs, maybe I don't want to inject them the first day of their life. Right, right, right. You can't ask that question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So this weekend, I'm at an event, and a woman who's, I'm speaking, so I deliver a little bit of this message, and a woman comes up to me afterwards, and she says, I'm a doctor, and I'm a little alarmed by what you said. And I said, well, what part about you? She said, well, you know, I just had a baby, and I vaccinated the baby.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So, you know, I think it's helpful for them to have the hepatitis B vaccine. So I said, I know you vaccinated the child or you allowed the vaccination, but do you still think that it really was helpful to have it the first day of life? Could they've had it when they were 10 or 12 or 15 or 18? Because I vaccinated my kids, but they were about to enter into college.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
There was actually a possibility they might get exposed to it. And I saw the wheels turning and the panic in her eyes. And then she said, well, at least it's safe. which is a unfortunate comment to make because I'm not going to argue that it's safe or not safe, but if there's no value, then I don't want to even ask the second question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
She was going through something that I think many Americans are suffering from. Because she realized that she didn't really understand this and had taken the advice of the experts, she couldn't acknowledge the expert advice might have been wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Yeah, of course. Well, there's also another psychological fact that you're running up against there, which is that we rapidly bring our beliefs in line with our actions. Like people think you believe and then you act.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's like, well, some of the time, much of the time you act, you watch yourself act, you draw the conclusions about your belief that your actions indicate and you bloody well stick to those beliefs. Well, why? Well, you've already committed yourselves to them behaviorally. So this physician that you're describing, she had a real conundrum at hand because it wasn't a mere abstract issue for her.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
She'd already vaccinated her baby. So if she's wrong, then she did a bad thing. To her own baby. Yes, exactly. Right. On its first day. Right. Well, you know, you could imagine the evidence would have to stack up pretty high before she's going to be willing to swallow that bitter pill.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
That's why I think when it happens, it'll be a tsunami. Until now. Maybe it's already happened. I think it's starting, which is why I believe it impacted the election so powerfully. And I know in Pennsylvania that it did. It made a very big difference because we were actively involved there. The Maha movement per se. The Maha movement was not questioned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It took a lot of people who started to feel the kind of anger that motivates you to vote. when they began hearing these stories. Because you eventually, maybe that position now several days later is having this epiphany, you at some point have to deal with the fact that you may have hurt your child. And that makes you really unhappy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I think the arguments around R.K. Jr. are a good example of this. I mean, if you can argue against his ideas, and gosh, there are lots of ways you could do that, then argue them. But stop wasting your time attacking him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
That's the basic biology of- Well, it's worse too, because you may have hurt your child, And you did it because you believed the experts. Right. So now there's lots of rats that crawl out of that nest, isn't there? It's like, well, why did I listen to them? And are they in fact experts? Right. And so we've certainly hit that period of questioning in our society in a very large way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And when you mandate it in a way that shames the new mother who just went through a lot of stuff and is in a vulnerable position. That's for sure. And when she is shamed,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
by the nurse or physician taking care of the baby about the fact that she must not love her child if she's not willing to follow the state law which mandates vaccination and isn't able to ask in that confused moment a couple extra questions. They take that personally. That's for sure. And they will not forget it. And we're starting to see that in lots of other areas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
If fluorinating the water is not really, really important to do for the betterment of society, then you start to feel that you may have been, you know, tacitly allow something to happen that puts your family at risk. So there better be a good explanation and good reason. And there might be. I'm not even saying that these issues are settled.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
The science is being debated and it should be, but you couldn't ask the questions. And now more and more GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, glyphosate, is it really a problem? what are the toxins that we're allowing in our environment that don't seem to be allowed in other countries? Is it true that we have that much plastic in it? Does it really matter?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You know, are you feeding me a lot of junk food and subsidizing it? So it's, you know, you're making, you're chumming the water basically. So I'm going to go, you know, looking for it. And now I'm putting weight on it. It turns out it wasn't all my fault. That kind of stuff gets people, because it's very personal, to start to think differently about who's on their team. And I believe
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Well, it's also the sign of someone who's juvenile and relatively simple-minded, because it's a juvenile approach to go for the person. It's simple-minded to avoid the nuances of the situation. And I can understand to some degree why people do that, I think, with me, but also with RFK Jr., because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
The reason this issue is so critical is because you have an opportunity on the Republican side to take a generation of people who didn't have strong sentiments. Remember, half the people don't vote. Half do not vote. If some of those people all of a sudden begin to think, you know what? believing that this Republican Party cares about issues that I care about, they start to become Republicans.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And that's an existential threat to the Democratic Party because this should be an issue that Democrats embrace. So if they both embrace it, you actually start to get change.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Let's turn our attention to the political scene again on the Daily Wire side of this. We've got another half an hour. I think that would be a good conversation. I'd like to lay out, I'd like to hear more about your thoughts today
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Regarding the Maha movement in general how you think that could go right and how you could how you think it could go wrong underneath that there's obviously this broader discussion of this massive shift in the political landscape that has taken place that we don't understand because at one level of analysis, it's the Republicans defeating the Democrats but Trump Kennedy Gabbard Ramaswamy and
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Vance, those are very strange Republicans, right? First of all, most of them were Democrats. So I'd like to delve into that a little bit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So all of you who are watching and listening, you can follow us on the Daily Wire side for another half an hour and we'll dig more deeply into the possibilities that are going to be laid out in the coming months and years as this radical shift propagates itself through the political system. Thank you very much for talking to me today. And also I should say too,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Thank you for interviewing me back in 2018. You know, I've had very few American, in particular, mainstream media interviews. Like, I can certainly count them on the fingers of one finger, really. So, you know, that was quite seriously, like, you know, it's fine. And it's fine. But...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
The reason I'm bringing that up isn't to bemoan the fact because it hasn't mattered that much, but it does also highlight the degree to which you took a risk and very early on. And so I definitely appreciate that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Well, if I can add one thing to that, part of the reason I'm launching my podcast is because of what happened after the interview. And the interview went two hours and 42 minutes. I'll never forget it because it was so ridiculous that I would have talked to you that long. I loved it that much.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Lisa and I spent weeks preparing for it because you were explaining things that were so fundamentally important for folks to hear all over the world. And so I do the interview and I think that's too bad it's so long because people aren't going to listen to it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
more than 5 million people that listened to a 2-hour, 42-minute interview, which means, in my mind, there is an appetite, a voracious appetite, if the information truly is life-changing. And so it highlighted to me that although there are many benefits of network television, reach, obviously, you know, Uniformity, for that matter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
You can begin to get people to think similarly around important issues, particularly valuable when we have crises like COVID. But if you want to go deep into the kind of topics that change your life, it's nice to take those little sparkly ideas and go deep with them. So first, thanks for coming on and trusting me to host you because I know it was a difficult time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
It's hard to believe that the things that I pointed to, let's say in Canada, were actually a danger. And it's hard to believe that the things that he's got his finger on can possibly be true. You have to do a lot of thinking and a lot of reorganization of your beliefs in order to give RFK Jr., for example, credence. And when I objected to Bill C-16 in Canada in 2016,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
But also for awakening me to the possibility that we could talk about stuff with a lot more depth than ever thought possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Yes, well, we can also discuss that on the Daily Wire side, too, because I'd also I'd like to discuss the what what would you say? Well, expand on exactly the distinction between what's happening in the new media world, let's say, and the legacy media. We can take that apart in some detail. So.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
infinite bandwidth right and permanence those are radical changes low cost and they do change the dynamics of the social landscape in ways that we're barely beginning to understand and thank you very much sir god bless you you bet man good to hear have you here
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I had some thoughts about where legislation like that might go if things didn't work out well. And of course, at that point, I still thought they were most likely to because Canada had been such a remarkably stable country. Since then, by the way, we've gone from GDP parity with the US to 60% of GDP per capita in Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
We are on average poorer than people in Mississippi, which is the poorest American state. Right, and we have real estate costs that have spiraled out of control, and incredible internal divisiveness in Canada on a scale that is completely historically unprecedented. It doesn't take much of an assault on free speech like Bill C-16.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
They extended the provisions of protection, let's say, to gender identity and gender expression, which I thought was insane beyond comprehension. The outcome of that has actually been worse than I had originally thought.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Suggested I did tell the Senate in 2016 that they would produce an epidemic a psychological epidemic Among young women by confusing them about their gender and I got that exactly right and so I'm fairly happy about that Of course, they just told me that I was you know Transphobic or whatever the hell they're like epithet of the day was so so so tell me let's talk about
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
free speech and the media in a broader context. Now, you've watched this transition, right? At least that's what it looks like to me. And I think it's driven by the fact that YouTube made digital bandwidth essentially free. I think that's the fundamental issue at stake here. And I can't see, the legacy media doesn't seem to be able to compete with that. They drop production costs to zero.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
There's more going on than that, but that's the technological aspect of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I think the rot was happening much earlier. And just to rewind this a little bit, I mean, I trained in a fairly traditional way. My father was educated actually in World War II in Istanbul, Turkey, which may have been the best medical school in the world because all the Jews from Europe had fled to Turkey. And for that reason, he got a superb education.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And when he finished first in his class, he was recruited to America because we wanted people like that. I'm talking to your students from high quality universities coming to America. He wanted the brain drain. But I was completely indoctrinated by his way of thinking about hard science approach to taking care of patients.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And at the time, 50s, 60s, 70s, there was remarkable advances being made in the treatment of diseases. You know, the skate saves, metaphorically. You know, the people are about to die and you get in there and you fix the heart and you take out the problem and they're better again. And there was no wrong in traditional medicine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
When I started my career at Columbia University, where I'm on the faculty, you know, I was for many years, tenured, because I published and I worked hard. And Made sure that I was on the cutting edge of a lot of different fuels. I wrote patents around the repair and replacement of heart valves from the groin. I was involved in mechanical heart transplant programs. I ran the Heart Institute.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Dr. Oz was an early advocate for me, a fair early advocate for me back as early as 2018, which made him unique in that regard on the legacy media side. And since then, we've had a number of public discussions and a much broader, a much larger number of private discussions. And that's been very good as far as I'm concerned. He's a very remarkable person, full of ideas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
I mean, these are like hard science ideas. So there was nothing wishy-washy about my career. But I began to realize that the patients had not read the same books that I had read. that they were getting it wrong at a very fundamental level and taking care of themselves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
So I can throw as much high tech out there as possible, but without some of the lower tech preventive ideas, we weren't going to get the desired responses. And, you know, my wife, Lisa, she won't be silenced. She kept saying, you know, they're getting it wrong because you're not giving it to them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
If you gave America the knowledge that they could use to improve themselves, to feel confident that they had jurisdiction over their own body, to actually play an active role in ensuring that they don't develop those chronic illnesses, that they'll do it. That's why I even started doing media. Otherwise, I was perfectly happy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
In the operating room, in the ivory tower of Columbia University, having the time of my life, you know, studying scientific things and, you know, making sure that those advances in religion. My dad intensely disliked that I stepped out of that traditional approach to medicine to start talking on the airwaves about health.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
In the beginning, I didn't think what I was doing was all that controversial. I was literally telling you everything that we knew within medicine. And then things started to change. Okay, what period of time was that? So I started doing the Oprah show around 2003, 2004, and I started my show in 2009, and all that was pretty smooth going. Around 2012, I began to notice a big shift.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And I remember one event in particular, there was evidence from several articles that there was arsenic in our apple juice. Now, why would anyone put arsenic in apple juice? There's no reason to do that. It's a derivative of using arsenic as a pesticide or herbicide around the apple. This is cheap spray.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And so America banned the use of arsenic in that setting so that the apples, when you harvest them, when the apple juice is squeezed out of the apples, there's no arsenic in them. Does that make sense? It seems reasonable. Okay. What if the Chinese don't do that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
What if the Chinese farmers continued to spray with an inexpensive product like arsenic, and then multinational companies buy those apples, squeeze the juice out of it, put it in cartons and ship it to America? What happens then? Do you think that's a legitimate question? Could there be arsenic in that apple juice? I think so. People have studied it. They said it was the case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
We decided to go to the government and say, hey, we want to see your data. Is there actually arsenic in the imported apple juice? And if so, what can we do to make sure that's not a problem? Because arsenic is not good for kids. Primarily, children drink small apple juice cartons. You and I aren't drinking apple juice cartons, generally. That stuff's coming for young people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
And the arsenic levels in America and our water are capped. You're not supposed to have above a certain amount of arsenic for a reason, because it's not good for you. The government wouldn't share their data. They wouldn't talk to me. And then I started realizing that no one was talking about this. And I wanted to make waves because I didn't think it was right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
So I thought I'd take a crack at assessing the psychological significance of Joe Biden's pardon of his son, Hunter. He said, I abide by the jury decision, and I will do that, and I will not pardon him. And have you ruled out a pardon for your son? Yes. Is there any possibility that the president would end up pardoning his son?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
He passed the line from victim to perpetrator long ago. Now, was he selectively and unfairly prosecuted? Yeah, I don't think so. The penalties such as they were that were levied against Hunter were not particularly egregious. And he was found guilty in the course of a perfectly credible legal investigation as the people involved in the investigation have insisted in the aftermath of the pardon.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
I don't think that he was selectively and unfairly prosecuted at all. I think that Hunter and Joe maybe the whole Biden family were unfairly and selectively shielded from prosecution despite the remarkable magnitude of their continued multi-decade transgressions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And I would say the fact of this pardon, which is blanket, which covers crimes that may have been committed and for an 11 year period is very strong evidence in favor of that hypothesis. So then there's some boilerplate excuses without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
People are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Yeah, that's minimization of the magnitude of offense of exactly the sort that you would expect from precisely the sort of people who enable their children's pathological criminal behavior while claiming to be moral while doing so.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, the thing about that is that as far as I have been able to determine, Hunter was not in the throes of addiction when he was late paying his taxes. And late only means that he decided to pay them after he got caught for not paying them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, let's note under duress, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently. Yeah, it's not so clear. And it's...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
It is the case that President Biden did say he wouldn't interfere with the Justice Department's decision-making, but he said much more than that. He said he would not pardon his son. And he said that repeatedly, and so did his press secretary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Easy to make an argument as credible that Hunter was let off very lightly with nothing more than a rap on the knuckles as it was that he was prosecuted meanly by people who didn't understand the depth of Hunter's victimization and his heroic attempts to straighten himself out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
The charges in his cases came about only after several of my, that's Joe Biden's, political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Yeah, no, I don't think so. I think that the charges in his case arose after the Biden laptop scandal emerged
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
after it was attributed falsely by the FBI and 50 major members of the intelligence community falsely attributed and consciously so, knowing it wasn't false in a long-term campaign as Russian disinformation, even though that was a complete lie. This was after the New York Post was kicked off Twitter for reporting what was strictly the truth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
and after evidence had mounted substantively that Hunter was a distasteful character, to say the least, and that there were all sorts of shady things going on on the Biden family front with regards to the business dealings that Joe should have never allowed Hunter to be involved in given Joe's knowledge of his addictive propensity and his tilt towards at least quasi-criminal behavior.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
So no, that doesn't fly either, and I would say that letting Hunter off the hook by saying that my poor son who isn't poor and who's not really even a son anymore in that he's not a child, he's an adult and should be treated as an equal to attribute that prosecution to the malign intent of Joe Biden's political opponents while refusing to take any responsibility as a father
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
for the behavior and the enabling of that behavior by his son points to precisely the pathology in the Biden family that generated and abetted the misbehavior of Hunter in the first place. Then a carefully negotiated plea deal agreed to by the Department of Justice unraveled in the courtroom. Yeah, well, that's lie. That's lie by omission of detail, I would say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And so, although it may be technically true that he's not interfering with the Justice Department's decision-making, it's completely inappropriate of him to extract out moral stance from the fact that he's keeping his word in the most minor way and breaking it in the most major way because he is pardoning his son and he said repeatedly that he wouldn't do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
With a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process, had the plea deal held, which it didn't, by the way, and there's no evidence that there was any impropriety in that, Apart from the fact that it didn't turn out the way the Bidens would have wished it to, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter's cases.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Well, that isn't what the people who were involved concluded. No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter's cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was signaled out only because he is my son. Um, yeah. No. I mean... I don't see how any reasonable person could review the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop and conclude anything other than
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
than that there was something seriously rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak. I mean, that bloody laptop reads like a mafia crime movie. It's really ugly, and it's ugly in a low-rent, pathetic, cringing, victim-claiming, despicable, hooker-toying-with, cocaine-snorting sort of manner that has nothing whatsoever heroic about it and nothing that speaks of anything approximating
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
victimization, quite the contrary. So I would say any reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter's cases would reach the conclusion that there were plenty of reasons to single Hunter out. And the fact that he was Biden's son mitigated strongly against the detrimental consequences that he should have reasonably faced, not least on the reputational front.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
The fact that the bloody story was suppressed and the New York Post seriously punished for daring to put the facts forward and then that it was blamed on the Russians means that it isn't reasonable people who look at the facts of Hunter's cases and conclude that poor Hunter Biden, poor Hunter, poor Hunter Biden was signaled out because he was Joe Biden's son. Yeah, no.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And then here we get to the real meat of the matter, as far as I'm concerned, from a psychological perspective. There has been an effort to break Hunter. Well, first of all, I don't think anybody's particularly interested in breaking Hunter. And if anybody has broken Hunter, it was Hunter and it was his parents.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. Well, what's the subtext there? Well, any person radically less heroic and admirable than Hunter certainly would have succumbed to addiction and criminality of the most second rate and low rent type because they were unrelentingly attacked and selectively prosecuted. I don't know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Hunter was doing pretty well living the high life with millions of dollars in high-flying apartments and hotel rooms for a very long period of time. And as I said, he's not... 16 or 18 or even 25 or even 30. He's actually a relatively old man, you know, and he should be able to tolerate a little bit of unrelenting attack and selective prosecution because that's part of life and so
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
The idea that there has been some kind of conspiracy to break poor Hunter, who's been doing nothing but striving mightily to put his life together in the face of insuperable obstacle, is the kind of sob story that the Democrats love to, what would you say, love to worship, let's say, and that the Bidens have been making political capital of for decades.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
The pardon is bad enough and we'll get to that but the pardon in the face of the repeated denials that that pardon would be forthcoming
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And the thing that appalls me as a clinical psychologist is this is what they've done. They have sacrificed their son to their own moral pretensions. And now they've done it on a national scale and as publicly as possible. I think that Joe Biden and Jill hurt their son more desperately with this latest knife in the heart than they have with anything else they've done in their entire life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And that's really saying something. If Joe loved his son, he would have shut the hell up about what happened to him on the legal front, and he would have let him take his medicine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
He would have stood by him and Encouraged him when he was attempting to do the right thing in the midst of his despair And he would have let him take his bloody medicine because that's actually what you do with someone you love you don't make pathetic excuses for them and the reason you don't is because you care for them and you care for who they should be and So this whole idea that any father would have done that nope wrong
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
No good father would have done what Joe did with Hunter. And certainly not this final travesty. I'm telling you, everything I know as a clinic psychologist tells me deeply, this is why I'm making this video, that Joe did something last week to make his son hate him even more than he already does. And all that's going on underneath the surface. And it breaks out in
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
in combination with the fact that the Biden administration, including the press secretary and the Democrats in general, made a case for the outstanding moral quality of Joe Biden, who insisted even under substantive familial distress that he wouldn't give in to these emotionally challenging, admittedly emotionally challenging family circumstances and use his privilege as the nation's top executive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Hunter's affair with his brother's widow, and it breaks out in Hunter's release of the laptops just before his father's presidency, and in all the misbehavior that Hunter has made manifest and documented and recorded and stored on his computer, which is not what a wise person would do if they weren't trying to cause a lot of trouble for everyone around them while they're engaging in their low-rent quasi-criminal behavior.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
In trying to break Hunter, more whining, more victim claiming. And if you can't see the pattern of Democrat policy in that, you're not looking. In trying to break Hunter, they've tried to break me. God, what a way to end the pardon. That's so pathetic. It's so self-serving and self-congratulatory and victim proclaiming.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
all with this insistence that underneath that I'm bravely, what would you say? I'm bravely striving forward along with my son, arm in arm in the face of these pathological attacks on the integrity of our admittedly imperfect family. Yeah, no, no, absolutely not.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
You know, I think pity is the wrong emotion to feel with regard to Hunter because at some point you cross the line from victim to perpetrator. He crossed that long ago, but I got to tell you, man, I thank God that I wasn't cursed with the kind of father that Hunter Biden was cursed with. How does he conclude? And there's no reason to believe it will stop here. That's true, Joe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
There is no reason to believe it'll stop here because what you've done with your latest act is to continue the patterning of enabling that has encouraged your son to make his most pathological side manifest for the last 30 years of his adult life. And that won't stop because you didn't allow it to stop. And not only that, you accrued moral capital as a father
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
loving his son and therefore pardoning him. You accrued moral capital to yourself, as you indicate in that last sentence, by the way, in a manner that's extraordinarily destructive to your son. You know, you think that pity is the right emotion for your intelligent and privileged 50-year-old son. It would have been better if you would have punched him. It would have been better, you know?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
That would have been a much more compelling demonstration of love. Enough is enough. Yeah, well, that's what you should have bloody well said. Instead of saying that to your son, you said it to the people who were holding him accountable for his actions because you wouldn't.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
It should demolish whatever little reputation you have left as the leader of the United States because it's a hell of a note to go out on. For my entire career, I have followed a simple principle. Just tell the American people the truth. Yeah, right. Like you said repeatedly, as did your press secretary, that you wouldn't pardon your son. And so that was a lie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And you did pardon your son, and that's going to hurt your son. And that's the unforgivable part of that. And then, you know, the example that you're giving to the American people that, well, if you're a loving father, what you do is you violate the principles that should govern your conduct as the holder of the highest office in the land.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And you do that to pretend that you love your son while enabling his participation in an ever-ending sequence of self-destructive behaviors. So... You haven't followed a simple principle for your entire career, the simple principle of telling people the truth, and you certainly haven't followed that principle with your son.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
In fact, everything you've done with your son has encouraged the development of the worst in him. And it's no wonder he released those laptops, because you probably deserved it. They'll be fair-minded. I think that's true in all things considered. The American people as a whole will be fair-minded.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
That's just, all of that's just too much to take. The pardon's bad enough, but the pardon in the aftermath of the lies about the fact that the pardon would not be forthcoming and the moral grandstanding that was accrued to the Democrats and to Biden in consequence of that grandstanding, that just makes this, as far as I'm concerned, unforgivable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
But I don't think the conclusion they're going to draw, Mr. Biden, with all due respect, is that what you did was appropriate or loving. It was neither appropriate nor loving. It was unbelievably self-serving. You sacrificed your son to your own delusions of morality and you've done that your whole life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And you've done that in part to have a compelling story about the depth of your love that you could tell the American people and yourself. It's quite sickening to be blunt. Here's the truth. I believe in the justice system. Yeah, do you? But as I have wrestled with this, yeah, have you? I also believe raw politics has infected this process.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Yeah, that's certainly the case, but not in the way that you're leading the American people to believe. And it led to a miscarriage of justice. Yeah, many, but not the ones you're pointing to. And once I had made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. Yeah, I know, you're just as decisive as hell, aren't you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
When you decide to go back against your word and to stab another knife into the heart of your son. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a president would come to this decision. Yeah, well, I think I understand it, but I don't think my understanding is the same as yours. So, Shame on you, Mr. Biden, seriously. And as I said, man, I thank God I didn't have a father like you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And we haven't even got to the psychological element yet. And I kept my word, yeah, no you didn't, even as I have watched my son being selectively and unfairly prosecuted. Okay, now this gets a little closer to the psychological issue at hand. You see, the Biden narrative has been that, the Biden narrative is poor hunter, poor, unfairly treated,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
misunderstood, desperately trying, failing heroically, Hunter. Now, I took a good look at the laptop and I read Miranda Devine's work on Hunter and Joe, and here's what I have to say as a psychologist. Joe and Jill have enabled their son's pathology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And they've capitalized on that enabling politically by presenting their son as a heroic victim, which is something the Democrats are very apt to do to everyone, including the criminal types who are akin in many ways to Hunter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And so they're replicating in their family what the Democrats do politically, and the consequences for their family are akin to the social consequence of the Democrats' insistence that criminals are victims. Now, some criminals sometimes are victims in a way that might
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
motivate someone who was attempting to be both just and merciful to moderate, let's say, their attitude with regards to a given crime. But even if that is true in some cases, as it is, there are a variety of criminal types. The repeat offenders, the psychopaths in whose existence the hyper-empathic Democrats refuse to even admit to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
They're not victims, they're perpetrators, and they use claims of victims, they use claims of victimhood to victimize. That is what psychopaths do. That is what narcissists do. Every clinical psychologist worth his or her salt knows that. Every criminologist knows that. And when you turn a perpetrator, especially a repeat,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
perpetrator or a repeat, sadistic, Machiavellian, manipulative perpetrator into a victim, you're nothing but an ally or pawn of the perpetrators. And if that's your social policy, as it is in the case of the Democrats, who have no imagination whatsoever for evil, then all you do is amplify the consequences of criminality. Now, what happens if you do that within your own family?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Part of the reason I'm doing this, you see, is because there's been a variety of claims justifying the pardon emerge in the aftermath of its manifestation, including the claims that Joe only did what any loving father would do. And the I think less egregious claim that, well, other presidents have done things that were equally bad or worse.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
if you constantly make excuses for the criminal misbehavior of your children. Well, you might say, well, everyone would make excuses for their son if he was engaging in criminal conduct. And the proper response to that is that's a complete bloody lie. And it's a deceptive and destructive lie. Look, There are a subset of children who at the age of two are tilted in a criminal direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Now, everyone's temperament predisposes them to their own particular temptations. So if you're high in neuroticism, that's negative emotion, and you're dependent, you're unlikely to be criminal, but you're quite likely to develop depression or depression. pathological anxiety or dependent personality disorder.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
If you're a more aggressive person, so lower in agreeableness, for example, you might be very competitive and you might be very, what would you say? You might be useful if your aggression is socialized so that you strive forward with your anger in a positive direction, like you might if you were a very good team player, for example, in a sports situation, but
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
that innate aggressiveness, if unsocialized, can lead in a criminal direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Now, I'm not saying that this necessarily happened in the case of Hunter, because I don't know what Hunter was like when he was a little kid, but I do know that there are little kids who have the precursors to criminal tendencies, and the parents that bring them under control and socialize them properly don't make excuses for their aggression or enable it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
What they do instead is encourage their children to interact in a pro-social direction and limit them selectively and stringently in the manifestation of their aggression.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
So if you have a two-year-old boy, because it's almost always boys, it's about 5% of boys, by the way, who in the presence of other two-year-olds would kick, bite, hit, and steal, it's a pretty good definition of childhood criminality, then you remove the rewarding consequences of that behavior. And you often do that by careful punishment of various sorts. Certainly not by reward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
You don't reward it. You don't feel sorry for it. You don't enable it. You don't justify it. And you certainly don't proclaim that your bratty two-year-old who's aggressive and pushy is a victim who should be
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
pitied because of his pathological behavior and that you are a kind of hero for feeling sorry for being empathic toward the behavior on the part of your child that will do nothing but make his life a misery over the long run and do the same to others. Now, I read the Biden laptop book, Miranda Devine's book, Laptop from Hell, and the Bidens have been making excuses for Hunter
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
of the sort that a relatively unsophisticated dependency enabling parent could make with some justification the first time their 14 year old son committed a juvenile offense. But the manner in which they discuss Hunter's transgressions or Hunter as a person is reminiscent of exactly the language that you might use for a 14 year old juvenile delinquent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And the problem with that is, I don't know if you've noticed, but he's not 14. He's 50 and whatever excuses might have been made for his behavior when he was a juvenile delinquent, they're completely off the table at 25, let alone 50. The Bidens portray Hunter as a victim of addiction and his criminal actions as a consequence of that victim producing addiction. He's not a victim.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
It's the former one that particularly, I find particularly appalling and telling. And so I think I can explain why. So we're gonna walk through the pardon and then I'll make comments where I think that would be helpful and appropriate. Today I signed a pardon, for my son, Hunter. Okay, well, there's obviously a problem there because that's a conflict of interest that could hardly be clearer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And addiction is no excuse for criminality. And making excuses for your son. I have watched my son being selectively and unfairly prosecuted. Making excuses for your son when he's acting at 50 like a very badly behaved juvenile. isn't an indication of your admirable empathy as a parent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
It's an indication of your codependency, to use a relatively cliched term, and your pattern of pathological enabling of your son. Now, here's a hypothesis, and I'm not saying this is right. One of the things that really struck me about the Biden laptop story was that In the Biden family, Beau had always been put forward as the golden boy who was destined for glorious things such as the presidency.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Whereas Hunter was always mopping up the lavatory, so to speak. He was the black sheep of the family from which little was expected, let's say. And you know, if you end up playing that role, it's like you're the criminal shadow of your father. If you end up playing that role, I'll tell you what that's gonna do. That's gonna make you unbelievably angry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
It's gonna produce a kind of hatred of your parents, however unconscious, that's deep beyond belief. And maybe that accounts for why Hunter dropped off three water damaged laptops. How do you water damage three laptops? A week before his father announced that he would run for the presidency,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
while knowing comprehensively just exactly what kind of horror show, multi-dimensional horror show, was available for view on those laptops. Now, You know, as a psychoanalytically minded psychologist, I can't help but see motivation there. There's a psychoanalytic dictum, which is, if you don't understand the motivation, look at the outcome.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Okay, so why would Hunter drop off three laptops full of compromising information to a repair clinic a week before his father ran for presidency. Okay, what was the consequence? The emergence of a massive scandal surrounding Joe Biden. What was the motivation? How about that? Okay, and you think, well, you know, Dr. Peterson, you're reading too much into it. No one would possibly act like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And first of all, if you think no one would possibly act like that, you know nothing. That's for sure. And you certainly don't know anything about malevolence or psychopathology. And then we could add another interesting detail to that that I think lends credence to my hypothesis, which is that it was very shortly after Beau Biden died
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
So the golden boy disappeared from the scene and there was no one left but the bag man that Hunter had an affair with his brother's widow, despite the fact that they both had children, then enticed her into a addiction then filmed them having sex, and then uploaded the video to GitHub with the title, Lonely Widow.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Now, you see, both of those patterns of action are, you might regard as circumstantial evidence, but they're strong circumstantial evidence pointing in the same direction, which was revenge, revenge, revenge. And my reading is it's Hunter was taking his revenge, maybe with his entire style of life on the enabling idiocy of his parents, something which they have yet again engaged in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And now so all the many Democrats have come out and said, well, any father would have done what Joe did. And that's not true. It's simply not true. At some point, if you're dealing with
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
not only someone who's addicted, in a manner that's tilting them very hard in at least quasi-criminal directions, so consorting with strippers and hookers and so forth, and spending way too much money in every possible mafia-like manner, as well as tangling himself up, becoming tangled up in all sorts of nefarious and quasi-nefarious business affairs. Your obligation as a parent
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
is to stop making excuses and put up some bloody boundaries. And yet again, Joe failed in that. And the Democrats who've come to his support, have come to his side, proclaiming his virtues as a loving parent, have enabling and love seriously confused, which is actually a pathological thing. element of the Democrat political platform.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And so the moral improprieties and therefore the psychological improprieties make themselves known in the opening of the written statement itself. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department's decision-making. That's... half-truth at best.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
They do exactly the same thing with so-called trans children, confusing their empathy for those children and the moral capital they can generate by proclaiming that empathy with care for those children, which if actual care was being manifested, the care would be don't let 12 and 13 year olds make decisions about their
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
bodies, their sexual function, their reproductive capacity, and their long-term marriage and partnership when they're too young to be legally allowed to make any important decisions whatsoever. That's not love. It's not empathy. It's not admirable. It's enabling. And it's precisely the kind of enabling that people do when they have no imagination whatsoever for evil.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
And that means that they're naive cowards. And it's certainly the case that What Joe and Jill Biden manifested in the case of this pardon was the continuance of a pattern of unforgivable enabling of their quite seriously gone astray son. And they do treat him like a kid. He's not a kid. He's a 50 year old man. And what he does is not excusable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
One of the things I figured out recently, the significance of the fact that the root word of question is quest. You have a question, which is your plea to the gods, let's say. You await a revelation, and then the critical process is something like internalized dialogue.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
You tell me what you think about this, because this is a terrifying thought, I think. The spirit of your aim answers your prayers. So if you have a question... the answer to the question will make itself manifest in your consciousness. People usually say, I thought up the answer, which I think is a terrible answer. That isn't what happens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
What happens is that when you set the aim, which is the question, I would like to know this, this is the direction I'm seeking, then the thoughts that make themselves manifest to you will be in keeping with that aim. And then you search for the words and are you a vehicle for them? Likely. You're a vehicle for the spirit of your aim. Well, and that's what's happening when I'm talking on stage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
It's like I have a question. It's a real question. I'm thinking, okay. And there's a little more to it because I use stories that I know as investigative tools, right? So they're like, they're tools of inquiry, but the fundamental thing is the inquiry, the question. And it's very interesting to me that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
So one of the things I've thought about too is that, well, thought essentially, it's got a question element. You set the aim. Then it has a revelation element. The ideas come to you. Then it has a...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
critical thought element which is like a dialogue essentially it's like okay well here's the question here's an answer but here's another answer okay so how do we or and maybe here's another answer so how do we sort that out well we have an internal dialogue right which is an analogy analog of an actual dialogue you'd have socially and the consequence of the dialogue is the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
That's the separation of the wheat from the chaff, you might say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Yeah, yeah. So I've often, now I've started to think about thought itself as secularized prayer. And that makes sense historically, if you think about how thought might have developed. You have a question, which is your plea to the gods, let's say. You await a revelation. Well, then you have to determine...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
whence comes the revelation and is it reliable, especially if there's many of them or if you're unclear about your aim. And then the critical process is something like internalized dialogue. And so it seems to me that I've thought, and I'd like your opinion on this. Well, is it Socrates who taught the Greeks to think, at least to think critically?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
He's also interested in the interface between modern technology, AI, for example, and philosophy, partly in an attempt to solve what's started to become known as the alignment problem. How do we ensure that these autonomous systems
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Like literally, is he the first man who determined how to internalize dialogue? So, okay, so that's a bunch of questions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, that's right, because we don't know when thought itself emerged, especially critical thought. Critical thought's hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
So is he looking, is Burgers looking for the advantages to finitude, let's say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
intelligences, because that's what they're developing into, will have the well-being of human beings, for example, as one of their priorities, or maybe their top priority, you might hope. But what we really ended up talking about was the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem, philosophically,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And at a deeper level, less geographically centered, the relationship between rationality as such, the Enlightenment project in science, and the underlying metaphysical substrate. And it turned out that the conclusions that Dr. Howland had drawn
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, it's a fundamental problem, right? Because obviously we have some relationship with the infinite.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Right. It might be a relationship of negation. But there's no escape from the conundrum that we're finite and faced with the infinite. Indeed. Indeed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Limitations. You see that in the creativity literature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
So there's a great, extremely comical example of that online. So haiku is a poetic form that has ridiculous limitations. Yes, right. And you might say, well, why bother with it? And the answer is, well... You can't play a game without rules. That's the answer. Yes. Okay. Now, but there's a spam haiku archive online. So it's only haiku that's only devoted to the luncheon meat.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Like the last time I looked at it, it's very funny. They're very funny. That's pretty good. And it's ridiculous. MIT engineers made the archive, of course. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
There's 50,000 haikus there about spam, and it's ridiculous, and it's supposed to be, and it's comical, but the point is that without that absolutely preposterous set of limitations, that whole universe of poetic beauty, you might say,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And comic endeavor wouldn't have come into being. And so, it's a very strange thing that there is a genuine relationship between finitude and abundance. Yes. Like, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
So, there's a right balance between constraint and possibility that produces abundance. Too much possibility, there's nothing. That's Borges' point. And then… Too much limitation, there's nothing, but there's some optimal balance. And maybe, I mean, you could, it seems reasonable to propose that the issue, fundamental issue in human life is how to get that balance exactly right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
That's really what the Jews, the ancient Jews were wrestling with when they were trying to figure out how you have a relationship with God. You know, modern people say, well, there's no such thing as God as well. Do you have a relationship with the infinite or not? You have some relationship. Maybe it could be a productive one if you could formulate it properly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
seem to be very similar to the conclusions that I've been drawing along with people like John Vervaeke and Jonathan Paggio, for example, a variety of the lectures that we have on Peterson Academy. It does appear that something really quite revolutionary on the intellectual side is beginning to emerge because the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Problem of misaligned aim. Adam and Eve turn away from the proper aim, like the builders of the Tower of Babel. And so, because they no longer, this is exactly what happens with the Israelites when they demand a king. God basically says to them, well, if you conducted yourselves properly and maintained the covenant with the divine, you wouldn't need a king. It's like, we want a king.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, and it's even stranger than that in some sense, because you have, first of all, you have the idea in the Garden of Eden that if your aim is proper, then you don't need, well, to set your own course, right? Which Eve decides she's going to do regardless. Once you set your own course and you're steeped in sin because your aim is misaligned, you need rules. Now, remember in the Exodus story,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
God provides the rules, first of all, directly from God, and then the Israelites go astray instantly, and then they get kind of a second rate, and you could argue, in a way, inferior and more tyrannical set of rules. And that's because you could imagine tears of proper aim, and God's hoping that the Israelites will aim at the at the highest conceivable. And they fail at that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
He says, well, here's something that's still high. And they fail at that. He says, well, it looks like you guys are going to have to settle for this with me hanging around the fringes around. And because that's all you seem to be able to manage. So- And I'm very interested in this idea of misaligned aim.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, because I think the spirit of your aim answers your prayers. And so, okay, so now you talked about Borges, and you talked about the question, and that was part of a conversation we were having about questions in general.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, it's probably the question, it's at least one variant of the question of identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
We're in an identity crisis, obviously. We've cascaded into identity politics.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And given your frame here, you could say, well, the reason for that is because we don't know where we've been.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And certainly there's no unified sense of that, which is a big problem. And we don't know where we're going. You could add maybe one other foundation stone to that, which would be, where have you been? Where are you now? And where you're going? That's a full narrative, really, right? So, okay, so let's focus on these. Why did that capture your interest specifically?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
flaws in the Enlightenment have become so structural that it's clear that a new pathway forward not only has to be found, but is likely already upon us. And the appearance of new institutions like the University of Austin, like Peterson Academy, like Ralston, are an indication of that. And so we delve deep into the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Spoken like a true conservative. Well, I mean, listen... That's the sort of thing that makes you think in a conservative direction once you realize that kind of... And that's a whole other interesting thing because the fact is that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, the other issue, tell me what you think about this. I also think that if you think about the Maoists, for example, and the fact that, for example, the Red Guards destroyed all the Chinese statues as far up as you could reach with a hammer. We're going to obliterate the past and we're going to build the new man in keeping with our, well, there's the question, right? In keeping with our what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Revolutionary presuppositions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Okay, but then you have to say, well, where did those revolutionary presuppositions come from? Did they just spring like Athena out of the head of Zeus? No, they have a history too. Or worse, they have a spirit, they have a personality. And this resistance to studying the Western canon, let's say, which is not even exactly Western, get right down to it, right? It's much broader than that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
I think it's a... It's not only terror, let's say, that you'll become more conservative, but also it's a rebuke to your intellectual hubris because you can no longer presume that you're selfish, power-mad whims say are of sufficient significance to be the determinants of the future. You have to subordinate yourself to the tradition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And I think Luciferian intellects dislike that. And you could be even more cynical than that. You could say that people who are underpaid in relationship to their IQ, that would be professors, are angry enough with their lack of status to elevate their Luciferian presumption to the highest point.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And that means they're very interested in dissociating themselves from the canon and making themselves... Well, they do the same thing Adam and Eve do. It's like, we're going to make our own values...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
philosophical relationship between enlightenment rationality and the underlying narrative substructure. That's a good way of thinking about it. And we discussed that in terms of the relationship between Athens and Plato and the ancient religious texts of the Western world. So join us for that. So Dr. Holland, I wanted to talk to you today primarily, there's a bunch of reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
No, you can also be lost in the desert.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
That's an alternative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
But that's an important, those are the three.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
So that means that those societies apprehended a principle of sovereignty abstracted beyond the... the most powerful man.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
The buck stops there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And to be a slave- Yeah, you get this dynamic between potentate and slave.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, that's what Moses tells the Pharaoh, right? He says, let my people go, so they may worship me in the wilderness. It's not anarchy. It's not hedonistic freedom of the sort that the golden calf worshipers turn to. It's what we call it, ordered freedom, I think is the general phrase.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
It's a retelling of the pharaonic tyranny, essentially.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, I think that's part of the spirit of Luciferian usurpation. It's like the radical types who were trying to produce the new man, they assumed that if they had been Stalin or Mao, the promised utopia would have come. And that is an elevation of the intellect. So I interviewed a guy recently, unfortunately, I can't remember his name, who wrote a book about Marx and Satanism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And he looked at Marx's early writings before he became political. And Marx was a seriously warped individual in virtually every way you could possibly imagine. And he was definitely a Luciferian intellect. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
See, one of the things I think we've done wrong in our analysis of, let's say, communism, and perhaps also Nazism, but we'll stick with communism, is that we assume that the best way to understand it, to understand what happened, is to do an analysis of communism. But we don't think what you're proposing, which is, well, communism, that emerged in like 1850, let's say, something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
I think the main reason was that we have overlapping interests in new approaches to higher education and maybe education in general. And you're involved with the University of Austin and I've been involved in Peterson Academy and also Ralston College. And so I thought we could talk about that more narrowly, but we share philosophical interests and
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Was it actually something new? Well, your point is, no, it's not something new at all. It's really old. It's the tyrant-slave dichotomy. And I do believe that communism is the most recent garb that something very ancient cloaks itself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Especially if they're young.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Yeah, and it's true in South Korea, it's true in Japan, it's true in Australia.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, I'm curious because you said, you know, you said some... you made some statements that elicit questions. So, for example, you studied Plato and then you said, sort of casually, you joined the synagogue and you got interested in the Talmud. It's like, oh, well, that's not necessarily expected.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And then you showed your deepening understanding of the relationship between today's political scene and these very, very old stories and are making a case that the political situation is bad better understood in terms of those old stories, what, arguably than any other way? I mean, that's kind of what it looks like to me. There is nothing new under the sun.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And if we lose touch with those ancient stories, we lose our ability to actually understand what's going on. Elijah, you mentioned Elijah. Elijah's foes are the nature worshipers. Right, well, that's kind of relevant in today's society, given the rise of nature worship, is something will attain the pinnacle point. We talked about the man-god.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, that doesn't look like it works out very well, unless you want to be a slave, and maybe you do. And we're also facing the consequences of the rise of Gaia worship, let's say, the rise of nature to the highest place. And that's Elijah's fundamental... realization, which makes him a star of the Old Testament.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
He's one of the two prophets that appear when Christ is transfigured on the mount, right? It's Moses and Elijah. Well, why? Because Elijah realizes that God is not to be found in nature. But we have no idea how cataclysmic a discovery that was. Huge. Right? So God isn't a man God, and God isn't in nature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Okay, well, Now, one response to that is there's no God, but we kind of end up with nature or man-gods when we take that route, or some nihilistic catastrophe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And so then the question, now you talked about Greece and the ancient Israelites as... constructing up a principle of divinity or sovereignty that was separate from a specific embodiment like a pharaoh or an emperor, but also not to be found in nature, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Yeah, okay, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And everyone's needs are met, whatever the hell that means.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
If we lose touch with those ancient stories, we lose our ability to actually understand what's going on. Elijah, you mentioned Elijah. Elijah's foes are the nature worshipers. That's kind of relevant in today's society, given the rise of nature worship. Something will attain the pinnacle point.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
I'm also curious about your take on new developments in AI, especially with regards to the large language models. That'll be an interesting discussion because I've used them quite a bit now. And I have a colleague who's helped me program a number of them, custom LLMs. And they're uncanny machines. And I have no idea where they're headed. Well, that doesn't make me special.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
By a particular man.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, and as you said, we can produce a centralized authority, which falls out of the presumptions described, that's going to have the computational power necessary to pull off the task.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Which is, well, just that claim is preposterous, right? But I like the way you formulate that, because what you're pointing out is that For the system that's proposed to make itself manifest, it has to meet a series of increasingly likely constraints.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Increasingly, sorry, increasingly unlikely constraints. Right. It has to do this. That's already hard. Well, you add four more impossibilities to that, it's like, well... Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, whatever a human being is is something completely different than whatever it is now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
How did you figure that out?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Yeah, Luciferian hubris.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
No one knows where they're headed. And so that's the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
broad landscape that i hope to traverse with you today but i think we should start with let's start with a little background about you so that people can situate you you're a philosophy professor you're an acclaimed educator so fill us in on who you are first let me say i appreciate your having me on your podcast uh this is a great opportunity um so i uh
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Look for new forms of our ignorance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Okay, I believe, I think we know enough about both psychology and neuroscience now. to move that from the domain of philosophical theory to the domain of established fact.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Because one of the things that people who've studied perception and emotion have come to conclude is that, well, I asked Carl Friston, who's the world's most cited neuroscientist, by the way, I asked him, is every object perception a micro-narrative?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
He said, yes, for sure. He said, necessarily. Right, necessarily. That's quite the claim. Because what we've come to understand is that there's no object perception independent of motivational frame. And the description of a motivational frame is a narrative. Okay, now you made a comment earlier that, well, you need to know where you've come from and where you're going.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Okay, so let's, what is a narrative? Well... There's an aim, there's a starting place, there's a voyage. And then you might say, well, the world's made out of objects, and you overlay a value-laden narrative on top of it. But then you might say, well, where's the interface? And so you might say, well, let's look at how perception works. What do we see as objects? Well, we do not see...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
We do not see what the enlightenment mind conceptualized as the object when we see an object. That's not right. What we see, so what it seems to be the case, it's very cool. So once you establish an aim, And this is in the most trivial of circumstances. The world reveals itself to your perception as a pathway to the aim, okay? As a set of obstacles, that produces negative emotion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
A set of facilitators or tools, that produces positive emotion. And that's with every glance you take, because every glance specifies an aim for action, right? Because otherwise, why look? Okay, so... Aim pathway, right? So that might be the straight and narrow pathway. Uphill, for example. Tools and obstacles. Positive emotion, negative emotion. On the social front, friends and foes, same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Almost everything is positive. defaults to the realm of the irrelevant, right? Because if I specify an aim, most things are now irrelevant. So your aim makes most of the world irrelevant. Some things stand out as phenomena. The phenomena that stand out are tools and obstacles or friends and foes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
There's also, and I just figured this out this year, there's also agents of magical transformation in narratives. They change your aim. So imagine that. Every aim brings a set of constraints and rules. So that's like the metaphysics of the aim, the rules. But if you switch the aim, the metaphysics change, and that's a magical shift. And if someone comes along whose aim is for...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
stages higher than yours, we'll say, then they appear truly magical. But the reason I'm making this case is like, and there is, I think we're at the end of the enlightenment. And I think it died like Nietzsche claimed Christianity died at its own hand. Because it turns out that There is no level at which what we see are dead objects. Not at any level of perception whatsoever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Every object is actually... You cannot dissociate value from object in perception. It's not possible. In fact, if anything, it's tilted towards value and not object. And there's another...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Back away. We can start with undergraduate if you want.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
terrible plague for the enlightenment types as well who think the world is a place of objects is that well there's an infinite number of objects because yes well so then which objects right right which objects that's a terrible question because as soon as you say that you have to prioritize well there's no difference between priority and value so another way of thinking about a narrative when you go to a movie you watch the protagonist what you are
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
embodying is your observation of the protagonist's structure of value. You're incorporating that. You match his emotions because you match his aims. And so when we're storytelling, what we're doing is we're exchanging information about the substrata within which rationality has no choice but to operate. So the metaphysics of the Enlightenment were wrong. Rationality
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
is at the base because the world's made out of objects and you can calculate your way forward with value-free objective knowledge. Like none of that's right. So the story's the thing. Now you said, well, we need a story. We need to know where we've been. Now, that has to have something to do with why you got interested in the Talmud, I would presume.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
You said you saw a similarity with the dialogues. So what else caught your attention? You've obviously developed extreme familiarity, for example, with the story of Exodus. Why do you think, as a philosopher, you started to presume or understand that these ancient stories shed light on the world in a way that Philosophical theories abstracted away from narrative don't.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
This is why Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, which is a guidebook for revelation, says, okay, how do you pray? How do you orient yourself in the world? Same question. Aim at the highest thing you can conceptualize. That's number one. Presume that other people are made in the image of that highest thing. So now you've set the frame. Now, pay attention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Having done that, pay attention to the moment. Because what will happen is if you specify your aim properly, the proper pathway will appear. The proper tools will make themselves manifest to you. The proper revelations will come to you. Well, that is how perception and thought work. So in the Tower of Babel is a story of misaligned aim, you know, and it's the engineers who build the tower.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, you know, people end up unable to communicate because the aim gets so misaligned. Words themselves lose their meaning. And that's a reference to exactly what we're describing, is that if you mess up the underlying narrative substrate enough... Rationality becomes impossible partly because words don't mean the same thing to different people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, we can see that now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Right. Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
It's Jacob's ladder image.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Now, so if you have that... So would it be fair to say that Plato, would Plato consider the highest good as whatever the commonality is between the true, the good, and the beautiful, let's say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Yeah, right. That's a definition of worship, actually. Because you pay attention. Worship, the act of worship is attention. it's indistinguishable from paying attention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Because what you're doing when you attend is you're prioritizing the objects of attention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, to worship is to prioritize.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And so this is what's so stunning about these sequence, let's say, of discoveries in neuroscience. It's like, oh, I see, every glance... whether you know it or not, is an act of worship. Now the question comes up.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
It's like, oh, what are you worshiping?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
It's like, well, then your eyes are closed and you're asleep. It's like, no, there's no escape from this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, you could be a pagan and a polytheist, and you could be a worshiper of your own whims. This is another thing I've been trying to take apart, particularly in the last couple of years. It's like, especially because I started to understand more deeply the golden calf story. It's like, well... I don't worship anything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Okay, well, let's take that apart. Okay, because it's about me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, or it could be about nothing, because you could be nihilistic, but then you're like suicidal and dead if you take that, or worse, if you take that pathway. Okay, so let's say there's nothing superordinate to you. Okay, but then when an ugly question comes up, it's like... Well, what do you mean by you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Do you mean the higher you that's in service to your wife and your family for the long run? Or do you mean the you that's at the strip club with like a Jack Daniels giraffe in your hand?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Right, exactly that. And if the you that you are prioritizing is what you want, what you're actually saying is that The momentary whims that seize you are your God. Exactly. Well, and then you could easily ask, and should, it's like, what makes you think that those whims, why is it self-evident to you that you're identical with your whims? That just means you're possessed by something low. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
so completely that you don't even know that you're possessed. Like, once you start to open up the question of what is the you that you're serving if you're selfish, let's say, because it's not self-evident that you are your selfish aims. Especially because they change. So there's no escape from the problem of prioritization. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
It's whatever's at the top of Jacob's ladder.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
It's a lovely way of putting it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Because you climb up and it keeps receding.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Why does it become... That's a very trenchant observation. Because I mentioned earlier that people think that the purpose of their life is happiness. But it's not. That's shallow.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
So then I think, well, maybe the purpose of your life is adventure. And that's different than happiness by a lot. Well, and where's that to be found? Well, an adventure is a quest, and the quest is to be found in the questions. Now, you just said you get the questions right, and that's very exciting. Yes. Okay. Well, the first question would be, why is it exciting to get the questions right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And what does the fact that it's exciting signify, even neurologically, let's say? Because that excitement signifies the discovery of something of import. Okay, so why is the right question exciting?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Moses is on a quest when he encounters the burning bush. And depths of meaning are revealed to him as a consequence of his pursuit. That's what transforms him into a leader. Right? It's a question that takes them off the beaten path. It might be, what is beyond well-adapted shepherd, let's say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Yeah, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, and Solzhenitsyn points out that happiness disappears with the first blow of the jailer's truncheon on your apartment door at two in the morning. Indeed. It's like if happiness is the purpose, as soon as you're not happy, which is going to happen? You're lost.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
That's a definition again. Yeah, I think... That's right. You can find what's inexhaustible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
That's why Christ is the miraculous provider of fish and water, right? Because there's an orientation that provides limitless abundance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
You get the fans you deserve.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
I mean, just like all of these. So God offers Abraham an adventure as the covenant. And he says that one of the consequences, he says, if you accept this mission, this mission impossible, you'll be a blessing to yourself. Well, that's a good deal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
You'll be esteemed for valid reasons. Right. So the esteem, there's almost nothing that people will chase more than attention from others. And there's a very positive aspect of that. Yes, yes. So that's not going anywhere. But then you might say, well, are you esteemed because you're an actor? Because you're a phony? Yes. Or are you esteemed because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
The pattern of your life brings abundance to everyone, which is also another offering to Abraham, right? Yes. Four, you'll be a blessing to yourself if you have an adventurous life. You'll be esteemed for valid reasons. You'll establish something of incalculable permanence. And you'll do this in a way that will bring abundance to everyone. That's a hell of an offer, man.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Now, the humility... That's an easy thing to have faith in, if you're honest, because your ignorance is boundless.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And that's truly something self-evident. I don't know enough. It's like, yeah, you can go to the bank on that. And that drives the question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Because they already know. They know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
They're also afraid of wonder. They're afraid that wonder will be that sword that bars the path to paradise that cuts every which way and burns.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Because you have to substitute wonder for certainty. And if you've staked your soul on your certainty, then wonder is your enemy. Yes, exactly. And you will pursue it. Yeah, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
That's Job's conclusion, I think. Because Job ends up adrift and barren in the most dismal way possible. And he proclaims two axioms that he won't abandon. One is that despite the evidence, he's fundamentally valuable. So he's not going to lose faith in the essential goodness of being a man, especially if you're one that's trying to aim up. So he's not going to abandon that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And he's going to make the presumption that the spirit that gave rise to all things is good, even if he can't see how.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And that their quest is worthwhile.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Yeah, well, you know, I talked to Richard Dawkins about that. I said, because he's an enlightenment mind, let's say. I said, well, you bring to the scientific endeavor a set of axiomatic presumptions. One is the world could be understood. The second is that trying to understand it is good and will bring good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Those aren't scientific theories. Those are starting points for being a scientist. And so then the question is, well, what's the validity? Like, how do you ground that metaphysics that gets science itself off to a start?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
So, but anyway... And that also, that humility, you know, because there's another metaphysical aspect to this too, which is extraordinarily... I learned this from Carl Jung mostly, I think, at least initially, which was... Well, what spirit seizes the scientist's curiosity? It's like, so let's say the world's intelligible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
The pursuit of that intelligibility is possible and good and could bring benefit. But then that begs the question. The question is, well... Does that depend on the orientation of the scientist?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
So, like, I read a book at one point that was written by an ex-KGB officer, and he made the claim that there were labs in the Soviet Union in the 80s, I think, in the 80s, where they were trying to hybridize Ebola and smallpox and aerosolize it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, that's a perfectly reasonable scientific question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Right? Can that be done? If you live in a world of valueless objects, that's just as good a question as any other. And you can even imagine spin-off benefits from it. But you might say, well, isn't there a better question you could ask? So then you might say that this is a weird thing, too, that... the goodness of the world is predicated on the aim of the investigator.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
I see. So you really are split between the aesthetic and the more scientific engineering.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
The alchemists kind of knew that. I got very interested in Jung's analysis of alchemy because the alchemists the pre-chemists, insisted that the aim of the investigator had to be pure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Right, and so they were beginning to understand that the secrets that matter revealed were dependent on the investigative tools that were put to play in the investigation, and that was actually a moral endeavor. So are you actually trying to aim up? Right, right. So we're looking at the substrate of science, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Saying, well, there are values that have to be held for the scientific enterprise itself to emerge, to proceed, and to be beneficial.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Okay, because that's useful to know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And blood soaks everything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Right. So if you look enough, you'll find a problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And you may also find it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Yeah, it'd be pretty weird if it turned out that the world was constituted so that you find what you're looking for. Seriously. And I kind of think there's some truth in that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
It was from Goethe, and it's a very specific quote. I knew this quote before I found this out, because I read Faust 1 and 2, and there's a line in there, Mephistopheles. Goethe is trying to characterize Mephistopheles, who's the spirit of rationality, or the spirit, the Luciferian spirit of the usurper. Mephistopheles' credo was repeated twice, once in Faust 1 and once in the second part.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Everything that lives should be eradicated because of its insufficiency. Now, I'm paraphrasing, and I'm paraphrasing badly, but the basic idea is that the suffering that's attendant on consciousness is indicative of a flaw in the world so profound that the best possible solution is the eradication of everything. Right? That's Marx's favorite quote. Wow.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
It's extremely interesting because that's only one sentence in each of those plays. But it's Mephistopheles' revelation of his motivation. It's like all that suffers should die so that suffering itself will cease. And the antinatalist types, for example, they believe exactly that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And so this is something, it's very interesting here because we're also verging on a definition of faith. So in Job, like Job makes a decision and the decision is the act of faith. It's not belief in some idiot superstition. Job says, okay, I got two pathways here. I can act as if The world in its essence is good. I am, and so is the spirit of being.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Or I can forego that and do what my wife suggests, which is curse God and die. And all the evidence at hand suggests that cursing God and dying is the right thing. It's a rational conclusion. And Job says, I refuse to forswear my faith. Right. And I see that partly as a prodroma to the passion story, which is an extension of what Job suffers and concludes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
But the axiomatic presumption, well, maybe there's three, right? The spirit that underlies being is to be regarded as good. The essence of man, despite his flaws, if he's aiming up, is to be regarded as good. And The answer that you seek is dependent on the aim, right? Because that brings the morality of the investigator into the picture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And so this is part of the reason, for example, why scientists need a class and engineers, maybe even more, to solve the problem of alignment, let's say. They need a classical education that's grounded in a deep... Okay, so you've already come to that conclusion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And that was at Cornell?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
So is that part of, I guess, probably what we're going to talk about on the Daily Wire site because we're unfortunately approaching the end of this. Yes. is more practical consequences of this. I want to talk to you more about the University of Austin and what you're aiming at, but now I've kind of fleshed out the metaphysical territory. And so, yeah, we're grounding people in their aim, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And Scientists and engineers might think, well, that's unnecessary given the importance of our pursuit. But you can also see how absolutely susceptible they have been to the ideological mob in the universities, right? The scientists, they're just like babes in the woods when it comes to the political activists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And it shows that their metaphysics is so underdeveloped that they have no understanding or defense against the... deconstructionist mob.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Well, we know what happens. We see it. We see, what was it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And everyone loses the ability to communicate because the name is wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And they devolve in their ignorance to their science fiction metaphysics that they adopted when they were 13 without even understanding that that constitutes a religion and are unwilling completely to look beyond that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Oh, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
It's like the all-seeing eye of Sauron. Yeah. Right? Well, you get the all-seeing eye of Sauron as a substitute for the divine if the state has to intervene in every decision.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Right, right. Well, that's a really good place to end. And so we'll continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side. Right. Well, I think we can do two things. We can flesh out what it might mean to aim up, because part of what you see in the biblical corpus is an attempt to characterize up. And, of course, Socrates, Plato are doing exactly the same thing, right? They're doing it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
It's like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, in a sense, right? The ancient Hebrews used narrative as an investigative tool. Yes. And the philosophers use philosophy. You can see that dynamic with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky too, which is quite interesting. But both of them have their role. But the narrative role is more fundamental. It's more fundamental. And I think that's been established.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
All right, so we'll talk about that. And I think we'll talk about attempts. that are being made now to reorient the academy. God, that problem. And so if you want to continue with the discussion, join us on the Daily Wire side. And so, well, there were many more things that we could have talked about today, but I liked that vein. That was good. And it's interesting to see.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
it's interesting to see how you were drawn to the conclusion that there was something in these ancient narrative texts that was, well, of incalculable and necessary value, right? And that it's particularly relevant given the technological transformations of the age. That's a very strange thing, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Because you'd expect that as technology advances, the more ancient the text, the less relevant it would be. It turns out to be exactly the opposite.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Exactly. Yes, definitely. That's right. There's nothing new under the sun. That's for sure. Even... in this time when so strangely there is so much new. The old patterns are even more obvious and people can see that at the bottom of the identity crisis, there is a spiritual crisis and a spiritual war and the contours are becoming obvious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
So as the technology mounts and the rate of transformation increases, the archetypal contours actually become more clear. Very weird. All right, everybody. So join us on the Daily Wire side. And thank you for your attention today. And thank you very much for coming to talk to me. Thank you. And we appreciate you people who are watching.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And if you are inclined to toss and support the Daily Wire way, come and see the rest of the conversation there. Good to talk to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
This is a terrifying thought, I think. You said you saw a similarity with the dialogues.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
So what else caught your attention?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
except it's not obvious that the American Academy privileges questions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
The belief is... Elijah, specifically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Dreams, eh?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Dreams don't utter falsehoods. They're incomprehensible often, but they never lie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
But what I want to say is... It's their voice of nature, you could say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
But in any case, Socrates says... Depends on what you mean by the divine, as it turns out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Mm-hmm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Yeah, and isn't that not because he knows what he doesn't know?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Okay, so the reason I asked that, very specific. Well, because you said that the Talmud, like Plato's, or the Talmud specifically, which are like Plato's dialogues, privilege questions. Now, the thing about questions is that questions require... They require the recognition of ignorance, and that's a form of humility. Of course, humility is the opposite of pride.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
So I had the opportunity today to speak with Dr. Jacob Howland and I wanted to speak with him for a variety of reasons. He's a philosopher, longtime academic, integrally involved with the new University of Austin, which is one of a handful of institutions that are attempting to reorient traditionally reorient modern higher education.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And one of the things I figured out recently, we could talk about, maybe this is what we'll talk about, in fact, mostly. It had never struck me before this year, weirdly enough, that the... the significance of the fact that the root word of question is quest. Because quest is adventure. And so I've been trying to figure out what I do in my lectures, because they are popular.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And it's strange, because I discuss the sorts of things we're discussing right now, and yet many people come and watch. And so I've been very curious about why that happens. And so I've taken the process that I use apart, and... What I do essentially is figure out what the question is. And it's an actual question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Like before I go on stage to talk for 90 minutes, I have a question, which is part of a set of questions that I'm pursuing. So it's a real question. I actually want the answer. I use the time on stage to, well, to further the quest. And the quest is the answer. And that's the treasure at the end of the pathway.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
And then the lecture itself, which isn't exactly a lecture because it's a quest, is an attempt to answer. Now, The reason I think it's so relevant to privilege the question is because your thoughts are structured the same way your perceptual systems are structured. And what that means is that when you set the quest, you set the question, you set the aim. And here's the thought.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
The first in that series, 10-part series, released on December 1st, so you could go check that out as well. We're pretty excited about it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
embeddedness in the story. But my experience has been that with enough concentration on both, then you can unite them and you can have the embeddedness in the experience and the deeper understanding at the same time. And that's actually better. That's the goal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It seems to be performing a little better than the Exodus seminar did, which is saying quite something, because I think that was the most popular offering that The Daily Wire produced, apart from Matt Walsh's movies, which is pretty good, given that it's so, you know, they're actually...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Or worse, you know, they subordinate their search for- beauty and truth to victory in one of the finite games, right? And that's like the equivalent of propaganda in the arts. You're putting the cart before the horse, and that's a very big mistake. You know, one of the things I learned In graduate school, I wouldn't say that I'm particularly mathematically minded.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You know, it's not something that comes with great ease to me. I had some students who had that proclivity, and I could certainly see how different they were from me in that regard, although I could learn it if I put my mind to it. I probably had more trouble with statistics in my career as a psychological researcher learning it as a graduate student than anything else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
until I started doing my own studies and then statistics became it became as much fun as gambling like slot machine gambling because If you were doing a study you were interested in, there was a moment in the statistical analysis where you pulled the lever, so to speak, and you could see if you discovered something or not, or if all your work was for naught, if it was going to move you forward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
intellectually complex and somewhat arcane and the fact they have this public appeal is really something terrific. So that's the announcements for the time being. I had the privilege today of speaking with Dr. Brian Keating, one of the world's leading cosmologists. Dr. Keating has been a guest on my podcast before and that was plenty of fun and
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And so the thing that's interesting about the infinite game element of that is that It's like a bricklayer who's laying one of 50,000 bricks when he's building a cathedral. If you just think of the next brick, that's a pretty damn dismal occupation. But if you understand that each of the incremental steps you're taking forward is in relationship to this infinite whole, then...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
the significance of the whole imbues the part. And if you're pursuing science properly, you have to do it that way. So it's interesting, you know, the conception of the divine that's laid forth in the story of Jacob's ladder is an infinite game in the same regard, because Jacob has a vision of a ladder ascending upward with no pinnacle, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And God is at the top of the spiraling ladder with no pinnacle. Sure, but... But it is a vision of finite and infinite games, I think, but in relationship to the moral domain rather than the scientific. Those probably overlap, though, and that overlap, I think, is what we're talking about, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's the call of beauty and truth as the fundamental motivation, not only the fundamental motivation of the scientific inquiry, in that it's the pursuit that saturates all the sub-elements with meaning, but it's also the ethical pursuit that makes science possible, because unless you're very strongly aligned in your belief
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
With your belief in the truth, you can't be a scientist because you'll put your career first. And then the whole bloody thing collapses. Because, you know, another thing you win as a scientist is evidence that you're an idiot and you were wrong. Right? Because every time you discover anything that's actually a discovery. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, that's right. Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Hey, everybody, some announcements today before my description of the podcast with Dr. Brian Keating. So the first is I just published this book, We Who Wrestle With God, and it hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. So I'm kind of happy for five different reasons about that. There's a tour associated with it, some of it in December.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But it's also a relationship.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And so you'll find people— what you might describe as ethical orientation as psychometrically measured into IQ. There's no correlation between IQ and work ethic, for example. That just shocked me when I first discovered it. It's like, what do you mean there's no correlation? You mean zero? Really? Like zero? You'd ex...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
We had an opportunity to continue our ongoing conversations. We talked a fair bit about his lecturing for Peterson Academy. He has a couple of courses on astronomy and cosmology there. We discussed the utility of the opportunity to bring high-quality mass education everywhere at very low cost, very well produced and at low cost.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You'd expect just maybe on the basis of something like neurological integrity that people with higher RQs might be able to dedicate themselves to tasks over the long run more assiduously. Nope. Nope. No correlation whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah, so that's... And it's also the case, you know, and this has been laid forward in the mythological representations forever, mythological characterizations that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
There's nothing—there's no sin greater than the prideful sin of the intellect, right? Because it's extremely powerful and very, very inclined to worship itself and its own creations, right? Very bad idea. That is the serpent, right? Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's completely correct. I agree with that. You know, one of the things I've been trying to work out conceptually, and I tried to talk to Richard Dawkins about this, I wouldn't say with a tremendous amount of success. Science can't be at the bottom of human endeavor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It can't constitute the foundation of human endeavor because science itself has to be embedded in an a priori moral framework that is not itself science.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I don't think you can do it, because the problem is—and you're pointing to this—is it a defining characteristic of science that it serves the benefit, at least in intent, let's say— It serves the benefit of life more abundant. That would be a good way of thinking about it. It's human-centered, life more abundant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
See, I read a book at one point that was written by an ex-KGB officer who claimed that before the Berlin Wall collapsed, the Soviets had put together a biolab in Siberia that was working on a hybrid between Ebola and smallpox that could be aerosolized. Right, now that's science. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Right, because if you accept the proposition that science is value-free and that all facts are equal because that's what value-free means, both of those are like very untenable philosophical propositions, but people do accept them, then... Well, were the scientific experiments that were done by Unit 731 in Japan, in China, by the Japanese, was that science? Fritz Haber. The data's being used. Yep.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
and so you know that was gratifying as far as i was concerned because that project has been quite a stellar success we have about 40 000 students and uh dr keating's offerings are very popular and deservedly so so you can follow us on the scientific side more intensely there we talked about
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And so if the exploratory endeavor is not motivated by the proper ethical striving, you're not a scientist. And then I think that actually works out practically, too. Like, I was fortunate... In my graduate advisor, who's still alive, I still work with him, Robert Peel, who is a very, he was a scientist. And most scientists aren't, right? Most scientists are journeymen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And I'm actually not even criticizing that because for there to be any exceptional people or any exceptional things, there has to be a lot of run-of-the-mill things, like even scientific research. A lot of the publications are going to be the first publication of someone who doesn't know what they're doing. They're incremental. Yeah, and they're not likely to be correct or useful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Right, right, right. But that doesn't mean you have to dispense with them. No, no, no. Okay, so... Bob's insistence in the lab was, don't publish things that you know to be wrong. Even if you're tempted, because you will be tempted, because maybe you work on an experiment for a year, and that's your master's thesis, and it doesn't work out. It's like, well, then what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, that's a year, and it's supposed to take you a year. So that's a big problem. And you have to mentor someone in your lab to put the search for truth before... their short-term career orientation. And you can do that practically, because you can say, look, if you allow yourself to take liberties with your statistical analysis, and you discover and publish something that isn't true,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You're going to believe it, and maybe you'll pursue it for the next 15 years, and you're chasing a chimera. And not only that, so that will happen to your students and everyone that your research influences. Is that what you want? Maybe you'll get your postdoc because of the publication, but... You've destroyed your credibility and your career and your soul. And your integrity. Absolutely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
The relationship between science and ethics is a very tricky thing to tease out because the empirical presumption is that we build our representations of the world as a consequence of our experience of the facts of the world. That doesn't appear to be correct, precisely. That doesn't mean there are no facts. It means that the issue of what the relevant facts are is an important issue.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
The public. Well, it's worse than that, isn't it? Because... If the public wants to do their own research online, they'll find that most of it, despite the fact that it's publicly funded, is behind not only a paywall, but an appallingly expensive and inaccessible paywall. $50 for 24-hour access to a single article.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But I think— Like you're pointing to, though, a lot of that's a consequence of practice. It's practice. That's what I'm getting at. Like, I stopped lecturing with notes. Right. 30 years ago. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And when I first started, especially when I was lecturing about things that I hadn't thoroughly mastered, which is the case when you first start lecturing, I used PowerPoint and I used fairly detailed notes, but my intent was to dispense with that, and that was incremental improvement over a substantial amount of time. Yeah. And you can see it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Maybe they should spend 20% of their time because the thing is, well, it also forces you to put your thoughts in order. Yes. You know, I develop a lot of my ideas in consequence of lecturing. I agree. I would say the majority of them, right? But that's also because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You see, people also lecture very oddly because people generally conceive of a lecture as the reading of a text or something like that. And it's not. A lecture is a performance. And I've thought about this for a long time. It's a lecture theater after all. So what are you doing in a lecture? Well, you're eliciting enthusiasm by demonstrating your love of the topic. That's partly what you're doing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And you're embodying that. So you're a model. You're telling a story. You're telling a story. I've really thought through explicitly what I do in my public lectures, and now I really know what I do. I mean, I have a question in mind that's related to a long-term pursuit, so it's an issue I've been interested in forever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Before I do a public lecture, I formulate the question that seems, from a set of potential questions that seems to be relevant and at hand for that day, And then I try to get farther in the answer than I have before. And so what I'm modeling is the process. I'm engaging in the process of intellectual exploration. And so that's thought. Question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
hypothesis which is something akin to revelation by the way it's like question potential answer critical analysis iteration yep exactly exactly and so i think that has the same structure by the way as the mythological quest yeah right you specify a treasure of unknown magnitude okay yeah exactly and then you think well how do we make our way there and you know there's a
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Juggling element to that, keeping the plates in the air, or a high wire act, that's another way of thinking about it. Because if it's a real quest, you don't know if it's going to be successful. That's right. So if I go on stage with a question in mind and I'm trying to push myself farther than I've got before, I don't know if that's going to happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Now, everyone in the audience and me are extremely happy if, as a consequence of this event, quest-like exploration, there's a punchline at the end, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And I think I've got better at ensuring that that will happen as I practice this, but it's also a blast, you know? And there's no reason you can't practice that, you know? And you're right that it's a travesty that people who will be university lecturers aren't trained to do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And the determination of what facts are relevant and why is actually part of the enterprise that we describe as ethical. That's the definition of the ethical enterprise. And so we tried to...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, so let's investigate that a little bit. So, I mean, part of the reason that we established Peterson Academy. There was a bunch of reasons. One was I have access to an endless supply of great thinkers. So that's convenient, like super convenient and fun. And then we could see no reason why the best lectures in the world couldn't be identified
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
given a public platform and offered the opportunity to lecture about what they love in a manner that's extremely professionally produced. And I'm extremely, very, very happy about the way the lectures have turned out. I mean, my daughter, Michaela, and her husband, Jordan Fuller, have taken the lead in the production side of Peterson Academy. And I think they've just knocked it out of the park.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
bandy back and forth various concepts of the relationship between the ethical and the scientific, or maybe even more particularly, the fact that for science to exist, it has to not only be embedded in an a priori ethical framework, but that the scientists who are practicing science have to be oriented by that ethic to be scientists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, the surprise, the thing is, is that... If you lay out a prediction in keeping with your understanding of the world and something else occurs, you have no idea what you've discovered. Now, what you might have discovered is that your reputation is now shot and your future is looking gloomy, right? But you also have no idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
That's a reservoir of unrevealed truth of indeterminate magnitude, right? And so the proper response, and I did learn this in the lab that I trained in, the proper response to... your error as an experimental scientist is, I probably just stumbled across something that was even more important than what I was investigating. That's right. If I can just figure out what the hell it is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You have to put your pursuit of the truth and beauty, which is another topic we touched on. You have to put your pursuit of truth and beauty in the service of humanity ahead of all other considerations. That's an ethical decision, not a scientific decision.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
So far less than a rounding error.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I just was on his podcast yesterday. Oh, you were? Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's a hot topic these days. It is. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And it's the ethical decision upon which all science that's genuine in its most abstract and glorious formulations and in its most practical elements is predicated. And so that constituted the bulk of our conversation. And there were many more things that we could have and would have liked to discuss, but that was plenty of grist for the mill. So join us for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, that's what I've often found that often what would you say, have come to the conclusion, I don't like arguments from design as proofs for the existence of God. And there's a variety of reasons for that. I'd like your opinion about one of them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I mean, the fine-tuning argument I find specious, and maybe I'm wrong about this, because I think that you can obliviate its unlikelihood with an evolutionary argument. It's like, well...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
if life evolved under these conditions, it's not surprising that there's a tight tuning between what's necessary for life and the conditions of the universe, no matter how improbable they are, because this form of life wouldn't exist without that form of material reality constituting the substrate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And so, if something has adapted to something unlikely, the unlikeliness of what it's adapted to doesn't presume a designer. I think there are more powerful arguments. I'm going to give you this book right now. So, this is the new book I wrote, We Who Wrestle With God. It's a good time to give this to you because I've made other arguments
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
about the relationship between science and the divine, let's say, in this book. I tried in this book not to put forward any propositions that I couldn't justify scientifically, but I'm not making a scientific case for God. I think the case, I think the rapprochement between science and religion is not going to be found in use of materialist reductionism to prove the existence of a designer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I think it's going to be more a consequence of us coming to understand what it means that science itself is not science without maintaining its embeddedness in an underlying upward striving ethos. So, for example, Cardinal Newman, a famous Catholic theologian, His existence proof for God wasn't an argument from design, which is an argument that's been around for a long time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It was much more akin to something that's laid out in a sequence of Old Testament stories. There's an identity proclaimed in the story of Elijah and the story of Jonah, Job as well, to some degree. One of the manifestations of God is the voice of conscience. And I really like that argument. But more it's a definition, you see, not so much an argument.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Because before you talk about the existence of God, you have to say what the hell it is that you're... That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
So it's got to be more than a year since we talked, eh?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
If we're dark adaptive, one photon, yeah, it's amazing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's a relational system, and that is— Well, I think the great comparative investigators of religion, Mircea Eliade, probably foremost among them, he was part of Jung's broad school and maybe played a role equivalent to that of Jung. They're—I— They certainly identified the same kind of patterns in profound religious thinking that you can see characterizing literature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
remote podcast together right a couple months after right right right yeah well it's always it's always uh good to have a chance to talk to somebody from the scientific community i can plague you with my uh preposterous questions about cosmology i have a preposterous question for you today i can't wait that's what i'm here we'll get to that i want to ask you first about the course you did for peterson academy yeah
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I mean, literature, stories are identifiable because they are manifestations of an underlying pattern. And I think you can make that case in the religious domain. I would make that case biologically in part by... This is the way I conceptualize it, is that... There's a virtually infinite number of ways that you can interact with someone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But there's a finite number of ways, extremely restricted and finite number of ways that you can interact with someone in a manner they and you approve of simultaneously. Like a father, right? Like a parent, right? Or two kids playing a game. Now, see, Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, he thought of that as the origin of morality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And Piaget's goal was actually a rapprochement between science and religion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
play as the origin of that in part that was very very smart okay so now there's many ways that we can interact yeah some of them will will jointly appreciate okay in consequence of that appreciation we'll want to continue them that's the establishment of a relationship okay so now imagine there's a smaller subset of those games that will maintain their value across time
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
and stay voluntarily desirable or improve. Now that's an even smaller number of potential games. Well, those games are gonna have a pattern and it's the pattern of human interaction, sustainable human interaction. My suspicion is that conscience as an instinct indicates a violation of the rules of that game. And I suspect further that that's universal. Now out of that,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
a realm of story is going to emerge. There's going to be representations of games that deteriorate and games that have a tragic end and games that are sustainable where everyone lives happily ever after. Or incomprehensible games. Those are going to have a universality across cultures. Cultures are going to vary in the sophistication with which they represent those games.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But there's a, it's sort of like, it's almost like making the same claim that obviously all languages are the same because they're identifiable as languages and they're structured well and they're characteristic of human beings.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But within the family of languages, there's commonality still, grammatical structure, there's nouns and verbs, like there's tremendous commonality, but there's also tremendous variability. So I think that religious domain is analogous to that. My sense, I've done a fair bit of study of comparative religion, is my sense that the Judeo-Christian endeavor
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
proceeded farther along the line of explicit representation than any other religious system. Now, we could debate that, but you know, that's not much different than saying that Western cultures are the most literate, which is, that's the case. So, yeah, definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I'm going to be in Texas with my wife, our accompanying musician. And then from January through April, running through the United States. If you want more information about that, go to jordanbpeterson.com. The content of the tour...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, the thing that's odd about Sam, too, in that regard, is that he's drifted into a kind of a visionary Buddhism. Yeah. And I think I understand why. Yeah. One of the characteristics of the meditative tradition that Sam is partaking in is that the God of that meditative tradition is extraordinarily ineffable, not defined and also not concretized into ritual or story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Now, the advantage to that is that you can't criticize it intellectually. You can't falsify it, right. Well, that's exactly right. You know, and I see that in the Christian tradition, the Orthodox Church has been the most resistant to woke, partly because it's so embedded in non-propositional tradition, right, liturgy and ritual, that, well, how are you going to criticize?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's like criticizing dance, or music.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
idea about this it's also the case that like first of all the entire story of exodus is about the movement from slavery and tyranny to freedom so and that's like that that's a major part of the biblical library um and then even more importantly the metaphysical insistence is that If you're not a slave to God, let's say, so to speak, there's something that you're a slave to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You might be a slave to yourself. And that's not appropriate. Or a slave to your whims. Your work. And that's what hedonistic self-gratification is. It's like, I'm free. It's like, no, you're not. You're a slave to your whips.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's great gratitude is also the opposite of resentment. Exactly. And resentment is the most bitter and destructive of emotions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's the revelation of a child. It's terror.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Do you know one of the things I discovered that— Every audience I've discussed this with goes silent. There's no difference between obligation and adventure. You know, because you think of an obligation as something that you're involuntarily shouldering, right? That's an obligation. It's like, well, if you get rid of the involuntary part of that,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
and you make it voluntary, now you're voluntarily shouldering a great weight. It's like, well, that's an adventure. When you go see a movie about a great adventurer, a secret agent, say, the thing that characterizes his journey that you find so compelling is that he's doing something impossibly difficult voluntarily. It's like, so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
People don't want an obligation, but that's because they have the wrong attitude towards obligation. It's like, no, you actually want a stellar obligation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
One of the things I've learned about the atheist community, so to speak, though, that's a mitigating factor, I would say, there's a subset of them that are just Luciferian rationalists, and they're not fun. They're not fun. They know everything. They're bitter, they're resentful, and they're seriously underappreciated for their genius. Okay, but then there's a very large subset of atheists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Atheists who are relieved at their atheism because they were brutalized by Pharisaic religious pretenders, right? That's Richard, right? Well, it might even be Richard Dawkins because he's made the odd illusion. Yeah, he's made the odd illusion. And I've met lots of people who were very badly hurt by fundamentalist types.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, we're also surrounded by Pharisees and scribes and lawyers. That's awesome.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, that's exactly the problem. Because that's also a very weird definition of self. It's like they have the self— That's without tradition. Okay, so that means, fundamentally, it means without discipline. It means without rich moral knowledge. It means without community. It means without the necessity of foregoing immediate gratification for a higher purpose. That's a major loss.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Like, you'd only think... that the child-stripped of tradition has himself in the untrammeled sense, if you believe that the self that was the true self had no relationship whatsoever with the surrounding community. Well, that's a... That's a lonely person. It is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, and also maybe narcissistic and self-serving. Because if it's all about you, independent of anyone else, then, well, it's all about you. That's right. So one of the things I discovered in this book, and I outlined this in painful detail, you might say, is that the postmodern types were correct and the scientists wrong, or the empiricists at least incorrect.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
The postmodernists were correct in their proclamation that we see the world through a story. A description of the structure through which we perceive the value of the world is a story. When you go see a movie, you're looking at the consequences of the value structure of the protagonist. And you want to know that because it orients you in their direction so you can try that out. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Once you understand that, the question that necessarily arises is, what story? And it could be non-nihilism. It could be hedonism, which is whim possession, essentially. It could be power. And the problem with the postmodernists is that they were all Marxists, virtually, and they turned to power as an explanation immediately.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Now, the problem with that hypothesis is it's actually wrong, because power is not an effective unifying motivation. That's why the ring of power in the Lord of the Rings is... It's the ring of Satan himself. It's very attractive power. I can force unity. But it doesn't iterate well. It doesn't unite well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
The biblical library is predicated on the idea that the foundation of community is voluntary self-sacrifice. And that's right. And it's actually self-evident because... when you engage in a social relationship, what you're doing is you're giving up the primacy of your immediate desire for the benefit of the relationship. It's definitional.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
So we can think about Piaget, that developmental psychologist. His proposition was that if we wanted to understand ethics scientifically, we'd look at their precursors. And he thought we'd find that in the behavior of children as they became socialized. Very smart hypothesis. That's why he got so interested in games. Well, when a child makes the transition from two-year-old egotist...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
to three-year-old social creature, because that's when that occurs, one of the hallmarks of that development is taking turns. Well, taking turns is a sacrifice. It's like, it's not my turn now. I sacrifice my turn to you. Okay, if I do that, then we play. If you want to keep playing with me, then we're friends. Well, that's the... Contract that's that's that's the social contract, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's not imposed tyrannically from above something else PSA pointed out is that the stable social contract is Voluntarily created and accepted. That's way different than Freud's superego or Foucault's power games It's way different way different and I think I think there's all the evidence in the world that it's true and so the idea that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
See, we're acting out, this is something else I realized, is the typical European town, Christian town, let's say, has a cathedral or church at its center. And then there's a periphery, which is the town and then the countryside. Center, periphery, or center, surround, periphery. center is the sacred place, and the reason for that is the center is the sacred place. That's definitional.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Then in the center of the center, there's an altar where sacrifices are being made, right? And the drama that's enacted is the community is founded on the principle of sacrifice. It's like, well, yeah, obviously. Right. Well, obviously. Because that's the definition of community in some sense, is that the individual is brought into relationship with others. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, that's obviously a sacrifice of individual primacy. Exactly. Well, what's the gain? Well... It's the gain of maturity. That's a major gain. Now you're taking care of the future and not just the present. So that's a major gain. Because maturity is the sacrifice of the present for the future, right? And a relationship is sacrifice of your whims for the benefit of the relationship.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
So it's all sacrifice. And perception is sacrificial because you could be attending to a lot of other things. Instead, you're attending to the one thing you're attending to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It wasn't yes, right? That's the magic word, man.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Two years old. At two years old, you're playing the battle of no. Yes. And that is exactly how much is for me, which is what no means, and how much has to be sacrificed to the collective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
There's also none of that in the biblical focus. None of that. No, it's not. There is in the artistic representations. That's right. But they're images, and everyone understands that. And there's also constant warnings in the biblical texts about confusing the image with the image. Ineffable, right? That's right. And there's been huge battles in the Christian church.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
The iconoclasts were people who believed that icons had the danger of concreteness, which is exactly the danger that, say, Dawkins has fallen prey to when he concretizes a metaphor. Infantile, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
or the approach of the tour will be similar to my previous tours in that I'm taking abstract concepts, in this case, concepts associated with the realm of story, particularly the stories of the Old Testament. I'm explaining their conceptual significance, but I'm also extracting out the practical implications of that understanding for attention and for behavior. And so it's always my goal to make
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, and even in that analysis, you're pointing to an a priori distinction between the things that made them truly great scientists and in that necessarily ethical sense, and all the flaws that are part and parcel of being a human, but aren't in the same category. That's right. And you can't— Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Rule for monetary exchange. By means of these same arithmetic lines, we can change every kind of currency into any other in a very easy and speedy way. This is done by first setting the instrument, taking lengthwise the price in the money we want to exchange, and fitting this crosswise to the price in the money into which the exchange is to be made.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
We shall illustrate this by an example so that everything is clearly understood.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Florentine gold scudi into Venetian ducats.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, it's very seductive for scientists to want to prioritize the intellectual. Because how else do we get more immortality? Well, they're also smart. Yeah. Well, of course you're going to do that because it's in your obvious self-interest to prioritize in importance your most outstanding trait. That's also the deadliness of worship of the intellect per se. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, I'll be interested in your response to this book.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, it's a weird fact really, isn't it? I mean, you wonder about it biologically because that exposure to the night sky, day sky too for that matter, is also an at-hand experience of awe. And I've wondered often from the psychological perspective what it has meant for people and their existential positioning to have less access to the night sky than they once did.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, and people then, of course, they started to intuit the fact that there was a... This is when astrology and astronomy were still rightly intermediated, because the ancient people discovered that there was a relationship between the events of the heaven and the transformations on Earth, right? The movement of the seasons. And that was obviously of critical importance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
This is going to predict the movement of animals, for example, or when your crops should be planted. But just that concordance of the cosmic with the practical. Right. That's an... Well, it's an unbelievable fact of nature to begin with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I mean, these are both now supplanting the need for— Well, and atheists get all their religion from science fiction. Right. Right, right. I'm dead serious about that. Really? Oh, sure, because the mythological pattern of science fiction stories is crystal clear. I mean, Star Wars was predicated on Joseph Campbell's analysis of hero culture. Hero's journey, right. Sure, of course.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
That is true, yeah. I haven't thought about it. Definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Oh, I never thought about that particular. I don't have that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. So you get all the advantages of the assumption of advanced intelligence with none of the moral requirements. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Because there's a lot of people who never see the full cosmic landscape because of light pollution. It's not a good way of conceptualizing it, but because the light interferes with the night sky, right? And it is something I remember growing up in northern Alberta. I mean, we were a long way from any major urban center. And the night sky there was very impressive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You wrote about UFOs. Really? Yes, yes. Wow. And he noted – because – The belief in UFOs historically cycles, and it tends to make itself manifest more frequently in times of crisis. And he probably describes in his book on UFOs the answer to the question that you're posing. Really? Because what you're really asking about is the metaphysics of materialist atheism, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
The mythological metaphysics of materialist atheism. The whole impulse, the urge, yes. Well, the materialist atheists might say we have no religion. It's like, yeah, you're wrong. Right, right. You have an unrecognized religion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, then you're laying out some of the trappings that tend to come along with that. It's because you can't. Organize your existence in life without imposing a story on the world. There's no way of doing it Your life is a story in the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
technically is a response to ambiguity, right? That's technically anxiety signals the emergence of entropy, right? And positive emotion, I learned this from Carl Friston, because I didn't know this, positive emotion signifies a reduction in entropy in relationship to a goal. A structure, yes. And anxiety itself signals the sudden emergence of entropy, right? So there's a way actually of aligning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
This is so cool, something we could talk about for a long time. There's actually a place where the thermodynamics and emotion can be what would you say, brought into concordance? Yeah, I've thought about that. We have to stop on this part of the podcast. And that's too bad for all you people watching on YouTube, because we're actually going to continue this on the Daily Wire side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And obviously, we could talk for an endless number of hours and would love to. One of the things that means is that the burning question is, that I wanted to ask Dr. Keating has to wait for the Daily Wire side and what that means for you poor people on YouTube is that in order to hear that part of the podcast, you actually have to have a subscription to the Daily Wire.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And that sleight of hand, you might say, wasn't done by design. It's just how it worked out. But you might want to think about throwing the Daily Wire some support. There we go. Thank you for talking about Peterson Academy today. We have 40,000 students now, eh? Wonderful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You could see the Milky Way fully. And very frequently, we had aurora borealis and pretty spectacular displays. And when it's 40 below and the air is dry, there's very little humidity. And so the night sky is very stark. And it was dark by 6 o'clock at night. So even when I used to do my paper route,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
We are pretty damn happy with the way things are going. The social media interactions on the site are extremely positive. They're all idea-focused. They're upward-aiming. Community. There's no trolls. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll work out the details of that as we progress, too. So for everybody watching on the YouTube side, do join us on the Daily Wire side. We're going to continue this conversation, and I'm looking forward to that. Thanks very much for coming into Scottsdale today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Friends, we spent a lot of time looking up at the night sky, watching for falling stars, watching for satellites. But it's interesting, eh, that observing the sky is a primary pleasure that's strange biologically. It's like, what the hell's going on there? That it produces that experience of awe. And awe is a weird emotion too, because it's a very sophisticated emotion, but it's also very primal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
One of the... concomitance of awe is pile of erection right that feeling of your hair standing on end and that's actually the same reflex that manifests itself when a cat for example puffs itself up at the sight of a predator like a dog but it's trying to make itself more impressive so it's it's that sense of awe we have is associated biologically with our response to predation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But it's also, as you pointed out, see, I've thought about it. It's like when the cat's hair stands on end, it's becoming more than it is, right? It's trying to display itself in the most impressive manner possible. And there's a call to higher being that's part and parcel of the experience of awe that seems like like the psychological equivalent of that, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You look up at the night sky and it fills you with a sense of wonder and a sense of your remoteness and finiteness, but at the same time, it also kind of compels you to be more than you are, evokes curiosity. That's right. It's very complex, eh, to see that happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
what I'm discussing applicable immediately in the real world, and that continues in this lecture series. We've released a new seminar series for Daily Wire+, featuring the same players with a few substitutions, as partook in the Exodus seminar, which was very popular, this time devoted to explication of the Gospels, and so that released on
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It calls it, it marks it and makes you notice. That's right. Well, there are... I suspect if your eyes were open, as they should be, possibly, you'd see that all the time. That's right. And you suggested something that's very interesting. We know... neurophysiologically that knowledge and memory inhibit perception.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Because what happens when you learn to perceive something, when you're familiar with it, is you replace your presumption with the perception. You replace the perception with your presumption. That makes you super efficient because you see what you know, but it distances you from the phenomena. That's right. Phenomena means to shine forth, right? It distances you from that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And so then you gain efficiency at the cost of wonder. That's part of the reason it's so nice to be around little kids. Yes. Because they're not efficient.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
That's for sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But everything's new, exactly. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, you know, I've had the same experience in some ways teaching my students about, let's say, analysis of dreams and stories. You know, if you're a naive movie attender, moviegoer, you don't really think about the movie, right? You certainly don't think about it as an artifact. You don't think about the direction. You don't think about the cinematography. You're just in the story. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
In a way, that's where the most enjoyable capture takes place. And then when you become critically minded and you start to see the subtexts and to see the technology and to see the skill or lack thereof, then it distances you from that. And that is a gain in that you're a more sophisticated observer and probably less susceptible to manipulation. But it's a loss in that you lose that ability
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
544. When the Right Goes Too Far | Dr. James Lindsay
They are called pride parades.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
544. When the Right Goes Too Far | Dr. James Lindsay
Yeah, and they are called pride parades.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
544. When the Right Goes Too Far | Dr. James Lindsay
I'm like, oh, well, I was wrong about this guy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
534. How Some Muslim Countries Navigate Extremism | Mark Siljander
I had the privilege today of sitting down with Mark Silgender, a former congressman.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
534. How Some Muslim Countries Navigate Extremism | Mark Siljander
Mark wrote a book in 2008 called A Deadly Misunderstanding.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
534. How Some Muslim Countries Navigate Extremism | Mark Siljander
Mm-hmm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
534. How Some Muslim Countries Navigate Extremism | Mark Siljander
Why did he believe you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
534. How Some Muslim Countries Navigate Extremism | Mark Siljander
Mm-hmm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
534. How Some Muslim Countries Navigate Extremism | Mark Siljander
Right. Oh, no.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
534. How Some Muslim Countries Navigate Extremism | Mark Siljander
Hmm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
534. How Some Muslim Countries Navigate Extremism | Mark Siljander
Thank you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
510. The Greatest Hits
And Birbelsingh students ace the standardized tests, despite the fact that most of them are from, you know, oppressed minority backgrounds, to use the horrible progressive parlance. And You know, we need like a hundred of her. A hundred Catherine Birbelsings and the whole education system would be revolutionized. She is a force of nature and tough as a boot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
510. The Greatest Hits
And the cancel mob has come for her like dozens of times and coming for Catherine Birbelsings. That's a very bad idea. So she'll chew you up and spit you out in no time flat. And it was a privilege to go to her school. And more power to her. And again, she pulled off the same thing this year.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
510. The Greatest Hits
And one, I thought, fairly entertaining tweet suggesting that this is the tweet that people online are saying you were inciting suicide, which honestly, I think you'd have to have the IQ of a beetle in order to think that. But anyway, you responded to someone who thought the world's population was too high and suggested that he should include himself in the depopulation he was already suggesting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
510. The Greatest Hits
And got almost no credit for it from the idiot Labour Party in the UK, despite the fact that she's actually doing... what they promised to do. That's why they're so annoyed with her because she's actually showed that it's possible and she can do it efficiently and inexpensively and in a manner that would scale. And of course,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
510. The Greatest Hits
That's not happening because people would, especially the radical progressive types, they'd far rather moralize about a problem endlessly than actually solve it. So yeah, Catherine Birbelsingh, two thumbs up for her. That's for sure. Check her out. The Michaela School in the UK. Man, if every school was like that, every kid would be a killer.
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These are adult problems that haven't been dealt with because people aren't allowed to speak. And now children are at the brunt of it.
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My wife, Tammy, interviewed Tommy with me. Tommy is the most reviled man in the UK, I would say. That's an honest assessment. He was a whistleblower with regard to the gangs in the UK. And if you want to investigate an ugly story, wander down that rabbit hole for a week or two. There were thousands of young women who were
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in the United Kingdom by organized gangs and the authorities work to, still work to cover it up. And many working class towns, many. And well, Tommy Robinson's cousin was one of the girls who got tangled up in that catastrophic mess. And Tommy has been reviled as a right wing provocateur, you know, next door to a Nazi. And he's paid a major league price for that.
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uh he's in prison right now in the uk for contempt of court he had left the uk after our interviews and went to i believe he was in spain but he came back to face the music and they they put him in prison and in a rough prison too even though it was a civil charge and even people i regard as sensible in the uk are ambivalent with regards to tommy because he really is He's from the streets.
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He's a working class guy. He's tough as a boot. And he's he's not he's got the background you'd expect from someone like that. Like, but he's super smart and he's super dedicated and he's he's amazingly intelligent and he's unstoppable.
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Hopefully this next prison bout isn't gonna do him in or he isn't killed in prison because that's a real possibility in the UK is gonna have to the the leadership of the Conservatives and the Reform Party are gonna have to reconcile themselves with the people that Tommy represents the genuine working class in Britain because they deserve a voice and need one and certainly Tommy is one of the few people who've provided that and
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The gist of it is it looks like your license is getting taken away.
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And Tommy isn't of the right class, you know, and that's a problem in the UK. But he's extremely brave. And the gang story in the UK is the only thing, the only story I know that's indicative of the state of disrepair of the West, let's say, that's approximately as horrific as the gang story is the surgery and mutilation story.
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I think probably the most comical element of this absolute charade is that the College of Psychologists and Behavior Analysts, because that's what they call themselves now in Ontario, convenient name change, they received perhaps, I don't know for sure, 15 complaints about me.
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And, you know, we should be ashamed of ourselves deeply for like five decades for both of those things. And yet Tommy has been persecuted intensely and continually and now for being brave enough to point to the fact of these, of the existence of these gangs and for his role in identifying the true, not only the true perpetrators, but also the cowards and liars
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and enablers who've covered this all up for literally for decades it's an ugly business now you know this was the most contentious podcast riskiest podcast maybe that i ever did and i did it in part at the insistence of my wife who'd been following tommy as i have been for many many years And he conducted himself extremely well. We got very little blowback for the podcast.
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We did two of them, which is really remarkable because Tommy Robinson is a red hot, he's a red hot piece of iron that you grasp at your peril. But he comported himself extremely well. He was really, really nervous in the studio. Because he knew what was at stake. And I certainly believe that the consequence of this was that he came out with his reputation much enhanced. He's someone I admire.
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can't stop him and he's paid a major price for it him and his family like a price higher than i would say anyone else i know even maybe including ayan hirsi ali who's another person the left detests who's so brave and so upright it's so honorable that it's like it's a it's a it's painful to meet them you know they're the sort of people you kind of feel shame in their presence because
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They have the kind of courage you could have if you weren't such a bloody coward. So I hope Tommy manages to keep his head together, given what's facing him at the moment. I think they put him in prison for nine months for showing a movie about another scandal in the UK, for showing a movie after the court had told him that he wasn't allowed to show it.
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He regarded that as an extension of his activity as a journalist. And I believe Elon Musk shared the movie, even if Elon didn't, because I might be wrong about that, although I know Elon has shared some of Tommy's material.
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from people who, as Michaela pointed out, weren't my clients or even knew my clients or had anything to do with them, complaining about things that I said that were true and that needed to be said. So, for example, with the Joe Rogan transcript, which was submitted in its totality as a complaint, I pointed out that stacking extremely unwieldy economic models
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Well, you understood it well enough to have an existential crisis when you were 11 or 12.
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Yeah, so there was a couple of cardinal moments in that Elon Musk interview. I mean, the whole thing was... A real privilege. We went out to his Cybertruck factory, which is just an absolutely amazing building. It's immense. It's like five airports big. And he built it in no time flat. And then he's making these preposterous, powerful...
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Electric vehicles that actually function despite government opposition, despite the fact that the government is pushing electric vehicles. So, you know, that's a small part of Elon Musk's story. And two things really happened in this interview that were worthy of note, I would say, especially given what's transpired in relationship to Elon Musk. and the and the new Trump administration.
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The first one was this clip here, because see, Elon pointed to something very important in that discussion. He said that he had a profound existential crisis questioning the meaning of life, you know, when he was well, when he was very young teenager. And it's not that rare for a really hyper intelligent
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teenagers and he said that the way he resolved that essentially was to start to envision his life as a quest right that he found deep meaning in pushing the limits well and you can see that for example in his his ambitions to go to Mars in the ambitions that drive all of his companies and
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to push the limits and to explore and to ask questions and to investigate and that in that process of investigation and exploration and production, meaning itself is to be found. And that's...
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Well, that was a sufficiently profound realization for Elon that it did solve his, it did quell the storms of his existential crisis and put him on the pathway that he's been walking ever since in this radically successful manner. And so that was very interesting to hear and to work through from a psychological perspective.
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But the other thing that happened in that interview was that Musk talked a little bit about His experiences as a father whose child fell prey to the ideological machinations of the butchers and their lying enablers, which at the moment includes virtually all psychologists and a large proportion of the medical establishment. Absolutely unforgivable in my estimation.
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And in his, you know, it's clear to me that part of Elon's determination to be the most formidable of enemies possible in relationship to the woke mob was in no little consequence of the fact that he had been brutally lied to when he was in serious trouble with one of his children, who did in fact transition, and who is alienated from him.
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projecting out 100 years into the future on top of climate models that are in themselves unwieldy was not anything approximating settled and genuine science, which is absolutely 100% the truth. And you may have noticed, if you were paying attention, that the Democrats under Kamala Harris said nothing about climate in the last election. And so that narrative has turned.
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You know, the typical physician, the typical psychologist, I say this to my own great shame, being a member of the profession of psychologist, is
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to tell parents whose children are manifesting the kind of gender dysphoria, bodily dysmorphia, let's say, that's actually quite common in early adolescence, especially among women, to tell them that that has to be rectified with puberty blockers and the most barbaric of experimental surgery. It's so awful, that surgery, that you can't read it without... It's like it's silence of the lambs bad.
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It's inexcusable what's being done. And part of the way that parents are talked into that is that the lying therapists tell them that if they don't participate in this stunningly brutal thing, medical process that their children will commit suicide. That is the biggest lie that I've ever heard members of my profession utter. There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that that's true.
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There never has been any evidence of that sort. And anyone reasonably well trained as a psychologist knows it. And silence on this front is
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inexcusable and well musk you might say what could you say about elon he's decided not to be silent right and so he's not i would he's not the person that you would choose to go to war against if you had a choice but that choice has already been made and he's not the least bit happy that he lost one of his kids and he revealed that in some real detail on the podcast really uh It's awful.
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And I know other families who've been affected in the same way. All of us should be deeply ashamed of the fact that we're complicit by our silence in this insane, devastating, deceitful, ideologically ridden, fetishistic, sexually hedonistic, catastrophe. Thankfully, many places are waking up.
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Even the Labour Party in the UK, a party of whom virtually nothing good can or should be said, had enough sense to extend the ban on puberty blockers to minors throughout the UK. So the Europeans are waking up. Americans not yet, although many states, many states at the state level, there has been
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increasing pushback thank god for that canada of course is still completely captured by the butchering woke ideologues and their you know pied piper leader trudeau so yeah the musk interview was really something i probably talked too much during it and that's too bad but uh it was a real privilege to talk to him and uh you know to see his mind in action he's a remarkable person
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You're going to go back to the UK, you said, if I got this right, near the end of October to face the music. That's the plan.
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And in the meantime, I presume your strategy so far has been certainly not to involve yourself in the demonstrations and so forth that have been occurring in the UK over the last few weeks, except you also said that you were correcting certain misapprehensions about what's been said about you and also the information that's been spread around. So you're going to, your plan is to
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stay out of the, to let the events unfold as they will, but that you're going to go back to the UK and face the music. That's the plan?
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Anyways, they're still pursuing me. Hypothetically, they found someone who doesn't know what planet they live on to serve as my re-education agent, even though we're squabbling over the details of that. They don't want any of it made public, and that's not going to happen. They've received 25,000 complaints about their own behavior. And they admitted that.
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The film that Tommy Robinson is talking about is called Silenced, in case you want to watch it. And Tommy did do exactly what he said he was going to do. He went back to face the judiciary in the UK, and he didn't have to. And he thought they'd put him in prison for two years. And the last time he was in prison, he was in solitary for a fair bit of that. Now, you have to understand that
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He was imprisoned after this interview for a civil matter. And they put him in a prison for very, very, very serious offenders, despite the fact that that isn't how they treat civil offenders. And he was imprisoned for showing this film when the court told him that he couldn't. And so I hope he emerges well alive and also... intact. We'll see what happens.
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You might want to keep your eye on that story, especially because the UK right now is a very unstable place. You know, Keir Starmer, the UK labor leader, he came out like three weeks ago and said, I couldn't believe this. I thought it was like an AI fake. He basically said that the
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immigration policy that has characterized the uk let's say for the last 10 years something like that was planned it was an open border plan experiment to see what would happen if the uk opened its borders just like the right-wing conspiracy theorists had suggested and that when people pointed that out they were gaslighted
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They were told they were conspiracy theorists and liars, and that that was all a dreadful mistake for which Starmer is now apologizing. And I couldn't believe that when he said it. I mean, that was a Prime Minister of Britain said, the Prime Minister of Great Britain said that.
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And then the new leader of the Conservative Party, a lot of these policies came into play under the Conservatives, not the Labour Party. And so the conservatives, so to speak, and the new leader of the conservative party, Kemi Badnok, basically said the same thing the next day. And so I don't know even what to say about the situation in the UK. It's dreadful. You know.
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They have electricity prices now, by the way, like Germany, that are five times higher than the, this is prices for the electricity that runs all of the industrial infrastructure of, say, the UK and Germany. It's five times as expensive in the UK as it is in Germany. as it is in the United States. How's that going to work? It's obvious what the consequences that will be.
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There's no difference between cheap energy and a prospering economy. Those are the same thing because energy is work. And when you make work expensive, well, you don't have to be a genius to figure out what that means. So the UK has a massive immigration problem and no one has any idea what to do about it. Stop the immigration process would be the first thing.
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And they're actually bound by their own rules, which they never pay any attention to anyways, to investigate all those complaints and to find out if they're justified. And so it's just a complete bloody nightmare. And in principle, I am still scheduled to be reeducated by some social media expert, whatever the hell that is, so that I conduct myself more appropriately on social media.
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and their industrial infrastructure is collapsing and the country is extremely divided, we'll see. We'll keep our eye on that very carefully. You know, and Tommy Robinson, when he emerges from prison, assuming that he does, which is not a foregone conclusion, it'd be very convenient for the authorities if something happened to happen to Tommy in prison.
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And he got beat up really badly the last time he was in prison, because they put him in prison with people who were in prison, in the same prison, for conspiring to kill him. That's the prison they put him in. So, and then he got beat up really, really badly when he was in prison, lost a few teeth, and So he could easily not come out. Anyways, we'll be following that and we'll keep you informed.
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And that's part of what's coming up in the next year. You recently taught a course for Peterson Academy. And so thank you very much for that. I thought I could update you a little bit about what's going on, just so you know, and so everybody else knows. We have about 30,000 students now. Wow. And so, yeah, it took off like mad. So we did a pre-enrollment for three weeks.
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And so that was the enrollment so far. So we're thrilled about that. Now, people seem very happy with the course offerings. And, you know, we've set up the social media platform on Peterson Academy to have a goal. The goal is for people to be able to exchange information related to their self-improvement on the educational side. And so far, it's functioning that way.
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And the fact that people have to pay essentially $500 a year to join also keeps the trolls and the bots and the bad corporate actors pretty much down to zero. So we launched Peterson Academy this year, a couple of months ago, and we now have about 40,000 students. So, and that's continuing to climb. We have, I'm really happy with the way it's gone. And so are the people who are on the Academy.
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So it's already a very large educational institution, and there's no reason at all to assume that that's not just going to continue. By January of 2025, we'll be releasing four new eight-hour courses a month. We have all the professors lined up.
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Michaela, my daughter, who's been spearheading this along with her husband, Jordan Fuller, they have a full curriculum sketched out for the next four years, and we have the capital and the professors in place to, and the studio, everything is in place to make that a reality. So that's definitely going to happen. We're in active negotiations about accreditation. So I think we'll crack that problem.
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And it looks like we can bring the best professors in the world because we have them. to the widest possible audience that's available in multiple languages for a cost that all the people who have been participating regard as probably too low, fundamentally. And if we're going to make a mistake, that's a good side to err on. And so I've taught... four or five courses for Peterson Academy.
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They're not all released, but many of them are. One on the Gospels, one on personality, one on Nietzsche, one on Piaget, one on personal planning and self-development. That'll all be coming out. All the professors who are participating are thrilled. We've had offers from many of them to quit their jobs and work for us.
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And that's going to happen with some of them because we want to have some professors who are engaged in direct student-to-student contact. And so that's petersonacademy.com and it's thriving. I made mention of the social media element of it. We took the best elements of the most popular social media platforms and integrated them into the app and the participants use it
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And so God only knows how that's going to turn out. It's annoying and blackly comical at the same time. So we'll keep you posted on that front. Okay, so how did we get from protecting vulnerable children from online sexual exploitation with a gigantic unnamed bureaucracy with indefinite rights and virtually no responsibility to whatever the hell hateful speech is,
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continually, and it's extremely positive. Troll-free, bot-free, very, very positive and productive. So, yeah, it's firing on all cylinders. And so, you know, if you want to educate yourself, there's no reason not to join the Academy.
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Because one of the things you've done that I think is unprecedented and that's become perhaps more part of the public discussion since you've teamed up with Trump is to make public health a political issue. And so you talked about the public health crisis and maybe you could lay out the dimensions of that crisis. I mean, I know there's an obesity epidemic, there's a diabetes epidemic.
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These are very, very serious problems. And so, but you've concentrated on that in a way that just isn't characteristic of anybody on the political landscape at all. Now it's become an issue that's front and center. And so I'd like to hear more about your thoughts, why you think that's such a fundamental priority, you know, compared to, say, free speech and war and peace. Why health?
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And what you see lay out the landscape of the problem and also the landscape of potential solution.
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Yeah, well, so one of the things that's really worth contemplating in retrospect is just how revolutionary this year has been. And it's really been something to watch personally because so many of the people that I've interacted with on this podcast and personally now have key roles in the new American administration.
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And so, you know, I watched that with some trepidation because there are many difficult jobs that need to be done to set things right. It's so remarkable watching Kennedy make public health a political issue. Really single-handedly, that's something that he accomplished. That's quite an accomplishment. Now he's in a position, along with Mehmet Oz, to... Do something about it.
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So now, you know, there's the opportunity to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak. And they have an unparalleled opportunity with Trump and the public goodwill that surrounds the new administration to make some real changes. It was interesting, too, to see what's transpired with regards to the Democrats.
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You know, when I first interviewed RFK in the interview that YouTube took down, which I thought was utterly reprehensible interference with a presidential campaign, I asked him when the left went too far. Because I always ask Democrats that question and they never answer it, ever. And he didn't answer it. He said, I'm not running that kind of divisive campaign.
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In this interview, I asked him the same question. And I think it's fair to say that in the aftermath of Kennedy's truncated run for presidency, he's never stopped talking about when the left goes too far. Right. And the Democrats are really going to have to contend with that because they made a large number of extremely large errors.
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And I'm hoping they have enough residual expertise in leadership somewhere in the ranks of the party to reconstitute themselves. Because happy as I am that this remarkable band of Avengers has assembled themselves around Trump, We know perfectly well from our long history in democratic countries that the good guys need an opposition too.
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Because if they don't have an opposition, they quickly turn into the bad guys. And it's highly probable that happens to everyone. Because power is an extraordinarily tempting elixir, you might say. And so I'm hoping that the Democrats... transform themselves back into a party that could serve as intelligent opposition to the Trump crowd.
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You know, the Democrats have been whining madly and publicly about the fact that the sneaky conservatives captured the new media, you know, and which I think is absolutely hilarious because there was no capture. There were just people like Rogan and the other podcasters who sort of assembled in his wake, myself included, who just started enterprises on a shoestring and said,
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I mean, first of all, we might ask ourselves, and Constantine, you can weigh in here too, is like the whole notion of hateful speech, that's a troublesome one for me because there's an obvious element of subjective judgment in it, like a clearly obvious one.
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what we believe to be the truth and interviewed people without any tricks. And the Democrats could have had a part of that. Because a bunch of us, and I do believe that included Rogan at the time, but it certainly included many of the other major podcast figures. We invited all the Democrats to come and talk to us multiple times.
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We got to them all through channels that they were communicating with, because I knew people who were integrally situated within the Democrat hierarchy. And we repeatedly offered to talk to them. And the offers are genuine. And in some ways risk-free. Like, if you come on my podcast and you don't like the outcome, you can just scrap the podcast.
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Like, no one's ever done that, but that is a genuine offer I make to my guests. And if they say something they regret, I also tell them, well, we're not here to play some gotcha game. If you say something the day later you think it was stupid, tell us. And, you know, if you want us to remove 40 things, it's like, that's not going to happen. We'll just scrap the podcast.
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But if it's one or two things that you, you know, misspoke about, well, then we'll take them out. Now, I believe only one person has taken us up on that offer about one thing they said, but it's a genuine offer. The Democrats would talk to me behind the scenes, the senators and the congressmen whom I've met, and that's many of them, but they've never talked to me publicly. And so, you know what?
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I heard someone on CNN say, well, the Democrats, they said, we need our own Rogan. And I thought you guys had Rogan, you dimwits. Joe Rogan is not your father's Republican. He interviewed Bernie Sanders like four years ago because he voted for Bernie. That's not a Republican thing to do in case he hadn't noticed.
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And both Rogan and Sanders himself got nothing but pilloried by the woke council mob for doing that. And so the Democrat failure on the new social media front is 100% there. Their fault. Not only their fault, but their fault in the face of repeated offers and repeated warnings.
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And even now, you know, I have people scouring behind the scenes to find Democratic leadership hopefuls who will come and talk. And it's even now they're loathe to do it. They're loathe to do it. It's like... Hey, have it your way. You know, your legacy media allies have radically done themselves in, as you noticed.
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And you have nowhere to turn except to your own media infrastructure, which doesn't exist, or to the podcast mob. But their invitation is open and you refuse it. So don't be whining about the fact that the new media was captured by the conservatives. Jesus, you handed it to them on a silver platter. So, and you still haven't learned. Look at it this way.
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So for example, in this conversation, you know this to be the case, there's various ways that this conversation could go sideways, right? Seriously. Either of us could try to win. Either of us could try to demonstrate our intellectual superiority, right? Each of us could misrepresent the other.
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Or we could both try, and I do think we are in fact trying that, and I think Alex is helping along with that just fine. We could try to follow the thread of the exploratory truth and see if we could get somewhere. Now, I don't think there is any difference between that, by the way, and what's expressed in the biblical texts as the spirit of the logos. That's why we have dialogue.
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Yeah, there was a lot of cardinal conversations this year, and certainly the one with Dawkins was one of them. There were four main players in the so-called Four Horsemen of the Atheist Movement, right? There was Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. And I've talked to three of them publicly, Sam Harris a number of times.
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I had a very good conversation with Daniel Dennett. And then, you know, I had a conversation a while back with Dawkins that was made public, audio only, and I was very much looking forward to this conversation, which I felt was very productive. By the end of the conversation, Dr. Dawkins was excited about the idea that genetic transformation could occur
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at the human level in consequence of the cultural transformation that the spread of memes might produce. And I would say those would include religious ideas. And so we actually got somewhere scientifically on the hypothesis front. The conversation had its stuttering moments.
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I think part of the problem you see is that there's a whole literature on the emergence of religious ideation that Dr. Dawkins and the atheist types, they just don't know. And that's a big problem because it's a deep and profound literature. The foremost exponent of that school was either Carl Jung or Mircea Eliade, who was the world's greatest historian of religions.
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and a true genius with ideas that are rich with biological implications. And that was part of what I wanted to discuss with Dawkins. Now, I think one of the things that's interesting in the broader cultural context is that the atheist movement that those four gentlemen spearheaded, the air has really gone out of it.
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And I think it's partly because it doesn't offer anything positive on the existential front. It's merely critical. And look, terrible things need to be criticized, but something has to arise to replace them.
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Now, even Dawkins can see that part of what's risen to replace these dreadful superstitions once they collapsed is superstitions like, say, on the woke ideological side that are far worse than anything dreamt of by the mere Christians. And that's had a devastating effect on not only the universities, but on the scientific enterprise. And
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there's no doubt that dr dawkins is like keenly aware of that so that's a major problem for the for the atheist crowd and it's also the case that the there are elements of religious thinking that are much more sophisticated than the superstition that's parodied by the by the atheist thought leaders i mean even harris i mean
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So that's all in reference to this absolutely and utterly insane bill in Canada, C-63, which is grinding its way through the legislative process in Canada as we speak. As was alluded to in the clip, it purports to be a bill that does nothing but save the children from online predators, particularly, let's say, of the sexual type.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Harris has moved out of the public realm into the realm of the meditative. He's basically become a Buddhist, and that's a pretty strange landing point for someone who was a standard-bearer for a kind of militant atheism. Now, Harris might debate about whether or not he believes in God, so to speak, but the God of the Old Testament is ineffable, like the Buddhist...
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like the divine that's represented in Buddhism. And so that's a semantic issue rather than a substantive issue. The truth of the matter still is that Sam found his home in the contemplative world. So, you know, and... As I said, the steam has gone out of the atheist movement.
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And many of the people who were associated with that movement, I wouldn't say peripherally, quite directly, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Neil Ferguson, Douglas Murray, they've come to radically rethink their stance. And that's going to continue. That's absolutely going to continue. That's something we'll keep an eye on in this podcast. The revitalization of the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of the West.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Well, it's also, there's two things there that are interesting. The first is, well, we landed on the moon and for Dawkins, the fact that that's remarkable is self-evident. It's like for a psychologist, it's like, that's not self-evident, buddy. There's lots of things we could have done and had been doing for a very long period of time before we landed on the moon. So it's something like,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Star Trek, right? To boldly go where no one has gone before.
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Well, that's what we did on the moon. And the flag, that's the staff of Moses. It signifies the new center, right? It's the center of identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Yeah, so that was Jonathan Paggio. And everything Jonathan Paggio says is worth listening to. And that's something you can't say of most people. and deeply worth listening to. So Paggio has done many projects with me now. He has his own podcast, The Symbolic World, and he's a very accomplished artist. He's worked with me on the documentary series on Western civilization that's on The Daily Wire.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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We journeyed through Jerusalem and went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and walked the Via Dolorosa, right? The road of the 12-stop road of Christ's journey to the crucifixion. And so that was absolutely remarkable. And then Pajot was also, I would say in many ways, the lead participant in the Exodus seminar that The Daily Wire produced.
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which was about a 30-hour walk through the great story of Moses and the Israelites leaving the land of tyranny for the promised land across the desert of despair. And, you know, Paggio's commentary on those stories was unbelievably illuminating. I would say it's really the case. I was just talking to Greg Hurwitz, a friend of mine who was also a participant in the Exodus seminar yesterday.
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And it's like, you know, it's pretty hard to mount an argument against that as a name, but sandwiched in between the clauses that describe attempts to... accomplish that end badly, I would say, because there's much more effective ways of doing it, are these insane clauses that deal with speech that would be hateful towards protected groups.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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And in the gospel seminar, which we just released on Daily Wire beginning in December, all the episodes of that aren't even out yet. Greg participated, like Jonathan, in both the Exodus seminar and the gospel seminar. And I asked him the other day, you know, what the consequence of that participation was. And he said very straightforwardly that it really transformed his life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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And Greg was already a very knowledgeable person, right? And who had many accomplishments under his belt and had thought many things through deeply. And I think that that was the effect of those seminars on all the participants. And they were all very accomplished men.
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And so and then we had the great privilege of being able to bring them to a wide audience and with the full support of Daily Wire, which was really quite remarkable because it was a unlikely enterprise, right, to gather nine academics, reputable academics around a table and have them do nothing but talk to one another as they walk through these foundational stories.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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I think it was 34 hours for the Exodus seminar. something like 25 for the gospels um and well we're going to continue with that endeavor as we move forward into the future we're we're planning a series on the book of revelation which will be quite the trip so to speak and uh The Daily Wire has been an unbelievably good partner in these endeavors, these unlikely endeavors.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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And Jonathan, I learned so much from talking to him about these old stories. It's, you know, it's like you have parts of you that are fragmented. They don't exactly have their place. And they're pieces of stories that have been broken. If you encounter a great storyteller and interpreter like Pajot, then he brings all those things together and everything that you see transforms in consequence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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And he's a magician in that regard. Well, it was a privilege to talk to him about the Dawkins interview, because the formulations that Jonathan is generating, along with John Vervaeke, for example, both of whom lecture for Peterson Academy, by the way, they're the future, as far as I can see. They are the structure of interpretation that's going to replace...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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I would say in some ways the standard approach to these stories that has been promoted by, would I say traditional Christianity? Depends on the tradition, because there are deep traditions in Christian interpretation. Populist Christianity replaced the interpretations of popular Christianity. and supplant both the postmodern theoretical stance and the atheist materialist deterministic stance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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And that's happening, and it's going to continue to unfold as the West comes to a more conscious understanding of its foundations. And hopefully this podcast will play a role in that, and the work I'm doing with Daily Wire, the work that's being undertaken by Peterson Academy,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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The work of ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, this hybrid political philosophical organization that's being organized in London. We have our next conference in February. It's become the go-to place for classic liberals and conservatives from all across the West. And so all of those enterprises are moving in the same direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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what we're hoping for is a revitalized, a revitalized understanding of the meaning of the foundational stories of the West and an understanding the steep enough to be practically applicable in the daily lives of the people who have developed that understanding. And I can see that unfolding and it's a lovely thing to watch. It's the thing we're pursuing with the tour.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Like I'm on a pretty continual tour with my wife, Tammy, We're touring all through the United States from January through April. You can find out about that at jordanbpeterson.com. And then through Europe in May and June. And it's the same enterprise, right? The telling of these old stories. My new book, We Who Wrestle With God, is part of that enterprise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Now you have to understand in Canada, since Bill C-16, in Canada, since Bill C-16, one of the protected classes, I don't even understand how this functions legally, is gender expression. And it's literally the case that gender expression is fashion. And so I just can't believe that any of this is true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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And so we'll have the opportunity over the next year to watch as that continues to unfold. So and Paggio, he's going to play a key role in that. Do it for the lulz. Don't talk about it. Don't talk about it. Don't talk about it. No. Sorry. No. Mom, I don't want to wear that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Babies look like they're always on psilocybin mushrooms because they're... They're like this. I don't really believe in lesbians, by the way. Exploding miniature penises. Zero is a very low number. Okay?
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You know, when I watch something like that, the first thing that really strikes me as a miracle is that I still have a wife. So because I don't know how anybody can actually put up with me that actually has to live with me. So, you know, I watched a bit of that compilation earlier and it made me turn red and it's done exactly the same thing again. You know, I don't know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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I don't believe in lesbians. I think that's a really funny. That's a really funny line. It's also it's also mostly true, by the way. So I apologize for all of those things that I said. I apologize. And for many of the other things that I said that are equally, I don't know what, unforgivable. I probably apologize for them too. But if you want more of it... you know which podcast to go to.
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And thank you all for your support over the last year. The YouTube channel continues to grow. We're gathering about 100,000 people a month. So that's, you know, major progress. And we're on a kind of wave on the alternative social media side, because even the legacy media has admitted that they've been supplanted, which is, you know, a remarkable thing to, to be part of.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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And the Instagram channel grows and the Facebook channel grows and the TikTok channel grows at zero subscribers on TikTok two years ago. And there's two and a half million now. And, uh, I've got new book deal by the looks of things for the next two books. And, uh,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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One of them will be a continuation of this line of argumentation that I started with We Who Wrestle With God that'll focus on the story of Job and the Gospels, like the Gospel Seminar at Daily Wire. I also did a course on... The Sermon on the Mount for Peterson Academy. So no doubt I'll continue to say like absurd and provocative things as we move forward into the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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And thanks again for putting up with it. It's as remarkable as all this has been. I suspect that there's greater things, more remarkable things, more adventurous things happening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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yet to come and i would also like to say in closing like thank you to my crew to my producer joy it's been unbelievably helpful to the daily wire enterprise all together uh for all the people around me my my logistics people and security people to my wife and my family it's a team endeavor that's for sure and i have a great team and that makes all this possible and thank you to all who've been watching and listening your time and attention is much appreciated
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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It's the case that criticizing someone's fashion choice in Canada could be construed as hate speech. Now, then you might ask, well, what's the punishment for that? Well, this is where things get far past the worst nightmares of both Kafka and George Orwell.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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In this bill, there is a provision so that people who are afraid that someone they know might commit a hate crime can take that person in front of a provincial magistrate. And if the magistrate agrees that there is a possibility that this person's fear is warranted,
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whatever that means, I suppose that would be based on past behavior, perhaps, God only knows, then that person can be fitted with an ankle bracelet and confined to their own quarters for periods of up to a year, which is completely insane, obviously, and
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Starting from the beginning, the College of Psychologists of Ontario, a regulatory board that was formed to monitor psychologists' relationships with their clients mainly, has been after you for, is it three years or is it longer than that?
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be subject to the continual monitoring of their bodily fluids on a daily basis, I guess, so that, what, they're not supposed to consume alcohol, that would be part of it, or any other illicit drug, including the marijuana, that the liberals themselves have made legal in a successful attempt to bribe the voters. And that's one little section of this Bill C-63.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Now, it's a long ways through the legislative process in Canada already. And there's some real possibility that the head narcissist of Canada, and that's Justin Trudeau and his band of minion supporters, that would be Jagmeet Singh, who is the worst possible leader for the working class that you could imagine with his...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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bespoke suits and his rolexes now i have bespoke suits and a rolex too and you might think well that's pretty damn hypocritical it's like yeah i'm not a socialist who's claiming to be a champion of the working class so uh that's very different uh cup of tea you might say
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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In any case, it's highly probable that Trudeau, before he disappears into the perdition that he so richly deserves, as his Liberal Party, will be eliminated as a political entity in Canada in the next election because of the absolute catastrophe of his nine years of rule, during which Canada went from a country whose average, whose per capita gross domestic product approximated that of the United States, so a country as rich as the United States,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Now, the inhabitants of whose richest province, per capita, that would be Ontario, are poorer than the inhabitants of the United States' poorest state, that would be Mississippi. That's Justin Trudeau for us. And so, I was discussing Bill C-63 with Bruce Party, who's a remarkable and courageous professor of law,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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There's actually one of those that exists, a remarkable and courageous Canadian professor of law. That's Bruce Party and Constantine Kissin. And we were discussing that in the broader context of these
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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It depends on the waves, but for this issue, it's been three or four years, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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ridiculously authoritarian laws that are popping up, not only in Canada, because maybe it wouldn't be of all that interesting if it was only Canada, but particularly in the UK under the new Labour government and also in Australia, which is a country that's gone just completely out of its mind. And so we discussed all that in the context of
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broader threat to free speech that's emerging pretty much everywhere except the United States. So we'll see how that goes. C 63 could easily be law in Canada. Now I recently moved to the United States.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Part of the reason for that was bill C 63 because the other thing it does is it enables informants of the same type, for example, who had a great, the great thrill of turning me into the college of psychologists to go over the
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all the public utterances you've ever made on any social media platform to find anything that might be regarded as indicative of hate, defined in the broadest possible manner, so that they can turn you over to these new governmental agencies that can investigate you. And the punishments are extremely draconian.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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And you know, in the UK, where similar legislation has already been implemented, there are thousands of people who are being...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
510. The Greatest Hits
So working professionals like doctors, lawyers, massage therapists even, are all overseen by regulatory boards. What regulatory boards are supposed to do is give clients who've been basically abused by working professionals a place to go to to complain to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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um prosecuted for you know twitter crimes or facebook crimes the police are hell-bent on what do they call them non-crime hate incidents in the uk and they're not precisely criminal although they would be much more criminal in canada if this legislation passed dreadful dreadful and so and trudeau is going to be the prime minister of canada in all likelihood in till October of 2025.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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So he's got a whole year to wreak havoc on the country that's turned its back on him in the miserable fashion that, what would you say, wounded narcissists are particularly expert at carrying out. So, you know, he believes that he's God's gift to Canada, that's for sure. And now that Canadians have turned their back on him, and justly so,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Hello, everybody. So, as you no doubt are aware, 2024, one of the most preposterous years possible is coming to a close, and it's been quite a trip, as I'm sure next year will be. And what we have for you today is a compilation of highlight clips from the last year. It'll be a trip down memory lane for all of us. And... You know, welcome to the reminiscences.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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He's going to have precisely the attitude of the wounded narcissist who presumes that, well, everyone in the country didn't deserve anyone as remarkable as him. And that's a great platform upon which you would develop vengeful legislative moves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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So we're going to see a lot of that in Canada in the next, in the next nine months before the liberals disappear into the pit that they've dug for themselves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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What happened to you is a bunch of people who weren't your clients, random people online from all over the world, complained about a number of your tweets as well as comments you made on Joe Rogan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Any of you billionaires out there listening who have spare money, it's like you should... Give Catherine Birbelsingh a call because we could use about a hundred of her. So that was Catherine Birbelsingh that you just heard. She runs a school in the UK called the Michaela School, which it was reported just recently.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Once again, top the charts in the UK for the educational achievement of her students. Now, you remember in the UK, there are a multitude of very high quality, private, very expensive private schools. Now, Catherine runs a state school and she doesn't select her incoming students. So her school is in what you would call. Describe as working inner city working class London.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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It's a rough place the neighborhood and she has to take all comers and she places more of her students by percentage in top universities in the UK when they graduate she has a very high graduation rate by the way than any other school and And the left, the radical leftist utopians who love children, hate her. They hate her because she's, what does she describe herself as?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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The sorry not beautiful tweet in reference to a extremely obese swimsuit model, a tweet criticizing the government of Canada, a tweet saying that physicians removing women's breasts for being trans was criminal,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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The UK's strictest headmistress, which is kind of a joke. You know what I mean? It's a bit of self-parody. Tammy, my wife and I went to the Michaela School and watched her.
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operation and it was just it'd bring a tear to your eye man it was so it was something to see all these kids they're in their uniforms they're disciplined there's no talking in the hallways for example they're making a beeline to the next class and then when you walk into the class with your little group none of the students even look at you when you walk in they're so focused on the teacher that their attention isn't broken for a minute now that's a that's completely
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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unprecedented and the teachers too they're just and they're teaching those kids so fast that it's like it's higher intensity teaching and receiving than i saw in the best graduate seminars that i've ever seen it was something to see and the kids we talked to a lot of the kids they love it there because a lot of them came from really rough schools where they were especially if they had any pretensions to academic achievement
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They're being pounded flat on a regular basis, you know, and it's a terrible thing when you're a kid to go to a school that's dominated by bullies of the ideological type, which would be the teachers, and then of the physical type, which would be the bullies that the ideological teachers are too damn cowardly to regulate.
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And so those kids, they came from rough schools, and they're so happy to be in this school where they were... literally safe and being educated, and where all the teachers, who were great, by the way, and I'm not saying that lightly, were really devoted to offering the opportunity to these children to become everything they could be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
If you don't shoulder your political obligation, then the tyrants will take the right to do so out of your hands and use it against you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And Michael was also instrumental in breaking the WPATH files. And WPATH is, well, you could call it an organization, but it's more like a cabal of perversion and incompetence, I would say. And WPATH put themselves forward as
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Okay, well, let's take a bunch of that apart. Well, the first thing is, I was talking with some people well-placed in the administration recently who are convinced that Musk has the possibility of finding like a trillion dollars worth of waste and fraud in the next four weeks. Now, we should just outline what's happened. Like, I've watched the Democrats respond to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Musk's group of teenagers, teenage engineers with contempt, you know. And this is so 1960s, this mode of thinking, because Musk doesn't have 15, 20, 100 teenage engineers. He has... let's say, 20 to 100 teenage engineers with the most computing power that the world has ever seen at their fingertips, and they know how to use it. And there are some seriously smart computer engineers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
You know, I was just at a lab in Palo Alto that's doing things that are so science fiction like you can't even imagine it. And, you know, they're inventing revolutionary machines as a byproduct of the revolution in technology that they're pursuing. And all this is augmented by AI and Musk is on top of that. And so he's really... He's really inserted the 21st century into the 19th century in DC.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And of course, people don't know what hit them because no one knows what's hitting any of us. And his ability to insert himself into these hidden systems is absolutely revolutionary. You know, it's a mythological trope. an ancient mythological trope that it's the evil brother of the rightful king who is one of the prime enemies of the state.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
It's the evil brother of the righteous king and it's the goddess of chaos. Those are the two enemies. It's the social structure pathologized or the natural world rebelling. Right, so historic enemies. Well, the evil brother of the king is... is camouflage and corruption. And what happens as a system develops is that it accretes predators and parasites. That's a biological metaphor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
a scientific consultation group that established gender-affirming care as the standard of care, a standard that was immediately adopted by the lackeys and bootlickers at the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, et cetera, ad nauseum forever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And if the load gets too heavy, the system collapses. And the antidote to that, the Egyptians had figured this out, the ancient Egyptians, the antidote to that was clear, honest speech and careful attention. The Egyptians actually had a god who specified that, signified that. That was Horus, and he was the... the eternal enemy of the evil king. And Musk is playing that role with his engineers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
He's in there finding out, like, how much of government spending is wasted? Well, you don't know. Why do you not know? Well, because the government itself doesn't even have the internal mechanisms to track its own behavior. I'll give you an example of this. So I worked for social services as a consultant in Alberta 40 years ago. And Oddly enough, I was hired as a junior consultant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
I had demonstrated a certain amount of competence in my summer internship, and I was hired to duplicate an audit of the social services department that had been commissioned. by a major auditing house. I think it was Price Waterhouse. And they had charged the government a fortune for that the year before. And the assistant deputy minister asked me to update it, which was a pretty weird request.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
But I thought, well, what the hell, I'll give it a shot. And so I went through the audit kind of line by line and then called the relevant people who were involved to get a financial update. so that it was current. And the first thing I found out was the government had no idea where it was spending its money and all the numbers were estimates that could have been off by a factor of 10.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
So, and the puncher, the clincher for me was the punchline was that social services literally had no idea what proportion of the money they spent went to the end recipients. So old people, welfare recipients, et cetera, because it's the social safety net branch of the Alberta government. They had no idea. And of course, you know that the typical charity spends 90% of its money running itself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
That's if it's well run. And I was reading a book at that time by a man named John Gall. It's a great book. It's a cult classic called System Antics. Trying to make sense of this. It's a great title, System Antics. Very smart. And one of his maxims, his axioms was the name of the system is not what the system does.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And so his analytical approach to the analysis of a system was, don't assume that anyone knows what it does. That's the first thing you have to find out. Now, that's what Musk is doing. It's called USAID, and that's its camouflage, you might say. It's like, we're out there making the world safe and productive for the desperately poor. Well, no one can oppose that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Well, but then the questioning starts, which poor people, how much money, and how? And the answer to all those questions is something like, we don't know, or we don't want you to know. Right, and then... Well, hasn't there also been revelations that the Treasury Department had a policy to not question its invoices? Right. I mean, you couldn't imagine a more insane policy, right? Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And so Michael's a pretty useful journalist, and he's been assessing Elon Musk's work at Doge, deconstructing USAID, for example. And I wanted to talk to Michael about his views on Musk's efforts, on Musk himself, let's say, on this strange collaboration between Musk and Trump and the other people that we mentioned, and about, I suppose, his position
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
What that means is that if you set up a shell company, what it appears to mean is that if you set up a shell company and you sent professional-looking invoices to the federal government... that they would pay them without question forever, no matter how much they cost, just so you wouldn't complain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
So, okay, so Musk is in there with this incredibly sophisticated technology, rapidly tracking down spending. So the first question is like, what the hell are these agencies actually doing? And it's not like anyone knows, not thoroughly. Then the next question of course is, How much of it is waste?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Okay, so the management literature indicates management and literature on productivity and creativity. There's two indications from that literature that are germane. The first is that 65% of managers in private companies add negative net value to their companies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Okay. And then you might ask, well, how can a company survive? And the answer to that is the square root of the number of people engaged in a given domain of effort do half the work. So if you have 10,000 employees, a hundred of them do half the work. And so that means that Musk can do what he did with Twitter, let's say, and fire 85% of the people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And all that happens is profit margins go up and everything runs more efficiently. And so will Elon find a trillion dollars worth of waste in the next four weeks? It's like, I guess we'll see. And then what? Well, then that brings the question that you raised. It's like... Well, now we have to rethink this from first principles. And like my sense, you tell me what you think about this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
I know this woman named Magat Wade, and Magat's quite the interesting character, very charismatic, entrepreneurially oriented African, and a very fierce advocate of free markets. And her belief, and many people believe this, is that foreign aid is actually counterproductive to the countries in question for like 50 different reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Partly because it's not that easy to help people and it's a lot easier to do harm with stupid money than good. It's harder to do good with money than it is to invest it wisely. I mean, and those are kind of the same thing. So you can just make a case that the whole idea of foreign aid is based on a 17th century model that presumes that we have to stop the world's incompetent people from starving.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And like, we're just not there anymore. The only reason that people ever starve in the world now is for political reasons. There's plenty of everything to go around. So what's the point of foreign aid and how should it be distributed if it should be distributed at all? And then, you know, so, and you, you know, you asked what'll be the new role of the United States? Example? That would be good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Forthright defender of free speech in the free market. At ARC, you're going to ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. You know, our answer to this, because I think it's an answer to the question you posed, is that we need a rethinking of... a rethinking on a more conscious level of the principles that have made the West free and productive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And we need to reorient ourselves in alignment with those principles. And that's mostly a cultural endeavor rather than a political endeavor. So, well, okay, that's an information dump. And so I'm curious about your take on it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
his deeper insights, if any, and likely, on just exactly how to understand what's going on, how to understand this rise of new conservative or new traditionalist populism, how to understand the threat that's being posed to Europe in terms of mass migration and the globalist utopians, how to understand the philosophical and spiritual basis of this
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Integration, integration, not sublimation. Okay, thank you. Well, it's an important distinction, and I've been thinking about this a lot, because you could think of sublimation as self-control, and you could think about it as a variant of the Freudian superego that inhibits.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
But there's a power dynamic presumption there, which is that the way that you obtain control over your own impulses is by using something akin to force. And that's not a good metaphor, because what... What someone who's successful on the sex and aggression side has done is integrate those.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
They've subdued them, they've put them in their place, and they've become an integral part of their personality, but they're not ruling. Right, so someone who's integrated his shadow, so to speak, isn't someone who's castrated and weak. It's someone who's fully capable of being aggressive at the drop of a hat, but doesn't, or devotes it towards stalwart defense of the perimeter, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And with regard to sexuality, well, here's a funny statistic that I think is just so hilarious that it's emblematic of the times. The people who have the most sex are religious married couples. Now, you know, but that just says everything, doesn't it? Because the promise of the sexual revolution was hedonistic, narcissistic,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
extended adolescence, at best, was that if we just got rid of the Freudian superego and all the power-mad censors, let's say, and prudes, everybody would be having sex all the time with everyone. And wouldn't the world be wonderful? And the truth of the matter is that sex is a lot more fragile than anyone thought. And there's a lot of ways to destroy it and very few ways to foster its development.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And it turns out that long-term committed monogamous marriages are the answer to that, and also the answer that sustains civilization itself, because it's also predicated on this sophisticated integration towards a future end. And there's something else you pointed to that's of unbelievably critical importance, and people don't understand this at all, although Adam Smith understood it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Now, we have this idea that one of the main sources of our wealth is natural resource. And I don't even like the concept of natural resource. I think it's a disguised form of Marxist presumption that wealth is just laying around for the taking, you know, and that some people get to the wealth first and that's how they get rich. It's like... Japan doesn't have any natural resources, and it's rich.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And there's also a phenomena that you know about, I imagine, called the resource curse, which is the repeated empirical observation that there's, if anything, a slight negative correlation between national prosperity and the presence of natural resources. Well, why? Well, easy money corrupts. That's one reason. But there's a deeper reason. The deeper reason is, The only natural resource is trust.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And trust is dependent on honesty. And the reason that trust is the only natural resource is because if I can take you at your word, we can cooperate. And I don't have to worry about the snakes in your head. All I have to know is you'll do what you said you'll do. That means we can make a contract, not only that we can make one, that we'll both understand it and we'll both keep it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And that means that we can cooperate. And if everyone's like that, then everyone can cooperate or even compete fairly. And if everyone can cooperate and compete, then every desert can bloom. And Japan is a great example of that. And so, you know, Venezuela and Argentina, great counter examples.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
revolution in governance that we see manifesting itself before us, to understand the role that technological transformation is playing, for example, in facilitating Elon Musk's ability to do his sleuthing and uncovering work, well, it's all part of the attempt to get to the bottom of things. And the bottom's a long way down. And so it's down the rabbit hole we go with Michael Schellenberger.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Okay, so let's go back to the first part of that. That declamation. You talked about weak men and strong men. And so I want to just put a little twist on that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Well, Michael, it's good to see you again. It's been about 10 months since we spoke, so it seems like a lot longer ago than that. But I guess that's because, well, the world keeps turning upside down and spinning, so it's disconcerting. I'm very curious. We're going to talk a fair bit about USAID today and government corruption, fraud, waste, which are hard to disentangle today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, gentlemen. Yes, yes, yes. There's three levels. I want to put a twist on that. Exactly. Okay. So let's look at what constitutes weak. All right. So if you look at the way that human beings develop neurobiologically—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
What you see is that from birth to the age of three, human beings are basically, you could conceptualize them as, you could conceptualize the baby and the toddler as a sequence of instinctive drives. Now, drive isn't exactly of good nature. metaphor, because these systems aren't deterministic. They're more like personalities than they are like drives.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
But you come into the world with a set of motivations intact and a set of emotions operative. And so the motivations are orientations of aim, let's say, towards physical contact towards play, towards physical gratification, towards hunger, thirst, temperature regulation, the basic subsystems that orient you so that you don't collapse physically, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And the emotional systems are basically positive emotion that attracts you to things and negative emotion that freezes you or causes you to retreat. Now, an immature person who is a weak person, let's say, because we're gonna equate those, an immature person is someone who's still dominated by those systems. And so a two-year-old moves from the domination of one motivational system to another.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And it isn't till they're about three that they can start to integrate with other people. That's when they start to learn to play. Okay, so now, The reason I'm saying that is because we can associate that weakness that you described. Weak and immature are the same. And they're the same as hedonistic. And they're the same as present-oriented. And they're the same as unable to delay gratification.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And they're the same as narcissistic and narrowly self-centered. That's all the same. And like a variant of that would be criminal as well. Okay, now... One way of controlling that is with power. And that's the strong man that you're describing, literally the strong man. The strong man is someone who controls the hedonists with an iron fist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And then if you look at the postmodernists, the postmodern neo-Marxists, they would say that's the whole playing field. There's just power. There's just hedonism. There's nothing else. But that gentleman that you described, that's that integration that we were talking about earlier. That's civilized integration. And it is the basis of, it's the basis of mental health, I believe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
which is quite a radical claim. Like, you cannot... And I think you see this, for example, in the data that show that liberal, progressive young women who are, like, fragmented and hedonistic and immature, they're rife with mental illness, depression, and anxiety. They're dominated by negative emotion and have very little hope. And it's because they're not integrated. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
The men that you described as gentlemen are actually integrated and mature. And their ethos isn't weak hedonism or power. Their ethos, this is something I really want to develop at ARC, and in the next book I'm writing, their ethos is one of voluntary self-sacrifice. So the voluntary sacrifice is present to future. So you sacrifice the present to the future. That's control of...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Delay of gratification. And you satisfy and you sacrifice your subjugation to your own whims to communal stability and productivity. Right? And that's what happens. Kids start to learn to do that at the age of three when they develop friendships. They learn to delay gratification. They learn to take turns and to have friends, which is very much akin to delaying gratification. And that's...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And I want to dive right into that, but I'm also curious what else you think is particularly germane that we might touch on today?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
That's voluntary self-sacrifice. That is the foundation of civilization. That's central to the Christian ethos, for example, and it's laid out in the Old Testament writings as well, the ethos of sacrifice, let's say. And so I think we're at the point where we can actually understand this. And my sense is that a return to first principles is going to involve...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
a conscious understanding, a conscious understanding this time of the ethos on which our civilization is founded. And I'm curious about your ideas about that. See, because I can't see how it can be any other way. To be civilized means to be social, reciprocal, right? And to be social means you're not selfish, right? But then you might ask, well, what does selfish means?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Well, it means you're not governed by your immediate whims. Well, then what are you governed by? You're governed by an impulse to integrate yourself internally, with the future and with other people. And that's deeply enough embedded in human beings, so I don't think there's any difference between that and the instinct to develop and mature. And that's part of that hero's journey path, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
That's the pathway to maturation that... produces that gentlemanly behavior upon which civilization is founded. And I can't see, how would you argue against that? Like, you could do what Foucault does and say, well, there's nothing but power. It's like, well, Foucault believed that because he wanted to rape little boys in graveyards and have that be okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
You know, I mean, he thought of power as the ultimate deity because he was trying to justify his own pathology. And there's plenty of that on the progressive and hedonistic side of the conceptual world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
I think you can make a case, and I think this is the appropriate case, and I think it can easily be documented historically and mythologically, that when the integrating ethos collapses, that's equivalent to the death of God. And the reason for that, specifically in the West, is because—well, here's a way of thinking about it—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
There's no doubt that the passion of Christ is a archetypal representation of voluntary self-sacrifice. I don't think that would come as a shock to anyone to say that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
But when you understand that the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice is the antidote to power and hedonism, then that takes on a new light, because then you might say, well, what happens if you kill God, so to speak, in the Nietzschean sense?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And at least in the Christian West, what that means is you remove from the central place the insistence that the drama of self-sacrifice is the altar of the divine, let's say. And that has cascading consequences. Now, you outlined to some degree the Enlightenment reasons for that. It's like part of what's happened is that the rational mind
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
did a very bad job of distinguishing mythological and narrative reality from objective reality, right? They're not simply the same. Sam Harris racked himself up on those shoals to some degree. You know, Sam, one of the admirable things about Sam Harris is that Sam became convinced very early of the reality of evil.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And his response to that being a rationalist and scientifically minded was that we would have to ground our morality in objective fact. And that's almost right. Like it's almost right because we do need a transcendental grounding for our morality, but it's not to be found exactly where Sam was looking. And I think there are complex technical reasons for that, but
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
The consequence of the rise of the enlightenment, and this is something that, you know, this is the time that people like Steven Pinker, too, identify as the birthplace of the modern state. They think of that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
reaction of rationality against the superstitions of the underlying religious ethos as the moment of clarity that freed the West, but they don't take into account the fact that the deposing of that central icon produces the rise of both power, that's the communists and the fascists that you described, and this nihilistic hedonism, which is equivalent to disintegration and degeneration.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Now, Nietzsche knew that was going to happen. Like, he knew that. He laid that out very, very clearly, and so did Dostoevsky, and it certainly did happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
You know, maybe we fought off the fascists to some degree on the communist and the Nazi side, but, you know, we fell prey to the nihilistic hedonists starting in the 1960s, and they're in a power dynamic dance anyways with the... Because if you're a hedonist, you have to use power, eh? And the reason for that is that if I'm a hedonist, and it's all about me,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Why the hell would you associate with me? Because if it's all about me, it's certainly not about you. And that means that to gratify myself in the moment, I have to use force. And so there's this, you see this dynamic, by the way, extremely brilliantly portrayed in the movie Cabaret. It shows the degeneration of the Weimar state into this gender-fluid hedonism, and all the while the same party
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
What would you say? The same people possessed by the spirit of Dionysius are just inviting the Nazis in because they want the heavy-handed fist of authority to impose some order, right? Right, so then the question is, well, what's the alternative to that, right? And the postmodernists, the neo-Marxists say, well, there's nothing but power. But that's not true. That's not true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
It's deeply not true. That mature integrated ethos that you identified, let's say, with the students that you want to produce at the University of Austin, that's our aim at Peterson Academy as well, you know? So yeah, and at Ralston,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Hopefully much more authority and wisdom rather than power. And with the moral authority that comes from popular vote. And maybe some humility.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Well, it kind of looks like it to me. Like, it doesn't look to me like the new version of Trump is the same man we had eight years ago. Like, there's a hardness about his gaze, first of all. Like, that... What would you say? I don't want to call it clowny. Like there was an element of Trump that was huckstery, you know, and that's a deep tradition in the U.S.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Well, like Colonel, was it Tom Parker, the guy who ran Elvis? You know, the huckster salesman is a pretty deep American archetype. And there was a fair bit of that about there was a fair bit of that. That was part of the drama of Trump. But he's got a seriousness of intent that wasn't there before that I think you get from being tried in the fire.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And then, you know, I was concerned about his narcissism because Trump is very extroverted. And he's very disagreeable. And those are the predictors of narcissism as pathology. Not everybody who's extroverted and disagreeable is narcissistic, but that's the tilt. But I've watched him share the stage, for example, with Elon Musk. And if he was genuinely narcissistic, he would be jealous of Musk.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
He wouldn't share the stage with him. Because... You know, you might say, well, if you're a narcissist and you're president, that's good enough. But that's not... That just means you don't know anything about the clinical world because nothing is enough for a narcissist. Like, there's no filling that hole because it's all about them. And that's... The more you make it...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
You need to get married. You need to have some children. Your family has to be an integrated part of your community. You have to serve your state and your nation. If everyone can cooperate and compete, then every desert can bloom. Hi, everybody.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
All about you the deeper the hole and and yet musk, you know trump has been he pulled in kennedy You know and kennedy and musk I would say and tulsi but of even of those three Kennedy and musk were probably the only people in the united states who could really give trump a run for his money in terms of implicit fame and influence and yet He invited them along and they agreed to play.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, okay. Well, let's address that right away. Did he meet with Schultz or did he keep him on the sidelines?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And so far, it seems to be working. And, you know, J.D. Vance is also an interesting choice because Vance is smart and competent and dynamic. And he's not the sort of weak vice president that a narcissist would be attracted to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
We're morally obliged to presume that the future is a welcoming and abundant place. That's a moral obligation. Once you're not naive, once you're not naive and you've passed through the valley of nihilism, your moral obligation is to sustain your faith in the future. There's no difference between that and faith in civilization.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
There's no difference between that and faith in the spirit of life itself, right? And we should also point out too that that commitment to free speech, you know, there's...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
if you cease to interpret freedom of speech as a hedonistic freedom, which is the freedom to say what you want for your own purposes, you can see it as a reflection of the particularly Christian insistence, although not only Christian insistence, that The Word is the divine mechanism by which the cosmos itself is sustained.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And at minimum, there's something deeply psychologically true about that, is that we cast ourselves and our families and our societies, we cast them into being. especially the being that's good with truthful, forthright, honest, merciful and just speech. And you can't touch that because that is the dynamic principle that keeps the land of promise alive. And so,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Understanding the metaphysical assumptions upon which the freedom of speech is predicated is, I think, it's now crucial. And it is shocking to us at ARC how rapidly things have pivoted. And we're also praying that, you know, we don't fall prey to the same power-mad tendencies that typified the WEF. Now, I'm... You see, you talked about the betrayal of the elites.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
We should delve into that a little bit, you know, because there's a very interesting dynamic going on in the U.S. and in Europe with regards to so-called populism. See, and populism isn't populism. It's rebellion of the sane and grounded, although inarticulate, working class against their elite betters. so to speak, or at least the elites who think they're better.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Now, the reason they think they're better is because they worship the intellect. And that's one of the potential dangers of so-called meritocracy. When you go to a place like Harvard, let's say, even when it's functioning, the implicit assumption is now you're among the better people. And the thing is, it's true that you're among the smarter people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
But there's no correlation, for example, between IQ and conscientiousness, like zero. The correlation is literally zero. There's no indication at all that intelligence and wisdom or intelligence and morality are the same thing at all. Partly because if you're intelligent, you can do crooked things faster. Right? So that's not a moral, there's nothing implicitly moral about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Now, it's in the interest of the Luciferian intellects to assume that moral superiority. And in fact, that's like the nature of the Luciferian is to is to assume moral superiority, but there's a usurping element of it too. And so the problem with the intelligent, let's say, and the self-satisfied simultaneously is the problem, the eternal problem of pride.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
You know, you're blessed by God, at least so to speak, because you're you know, your IQ is three standard deviations above the mean. And instead of being grateful for that and attempting to use it in service, you worship it and presume that you're ordained by the powers that be to rule the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Yes, hence the end of slavery, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Okay, so the way that we've dealt with that at Ark is by turning to the Catholic social doctrine, although it's much older than Catholicism itself, of subsidiarity. And so, in the story of Exodus, there's the emergence of civilization as an alternative to the tyranny of the Pharaoh and the slavery of the Hebrews. So imagine tyranny and slavery as two poles.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
You might say, well, is there an alternative to that? That's the same dichotomy as power and hedonistic immaturity. It's the same thing. Okay, is there an alternative? Well, the alternative that's laid out in the book of Exodus, this is what's revealed to Moses, is subsidiary organization. And so, and with an appropriately organized social organization,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
an appropriately organized society, you don't need a tyrant, and you're not a slave. But what does it mean? There's you. You're married. You're married with a family. Your family are responsible citizens of your town. Your town is responsible agent in the running of the state. The state is a responsible agent in relationship to the nation. Like there are levels of responsibility
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
that are, so to speak, external to you, but that also define your identity. Your identity isn't something you carry around in your head, like the liberal psychoanalysts, let's say, presume, the liberal psychologists, for that matter. It's your placement in a functional hierarchy of responsibility. But that's also where you find the meaning of your life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And so the hope of ARC is that we remind people of their subsidiary responsibility. It's like, you don't want a tyrant. You don't want to be a slave. So what do you have to do? Well, you have to take up that responsibility on your own. And that's also the adventure of your life. You need to get married. You need to have some children. Your family has to be an integrated part of your community.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
You have to serve your state and your nation and all of that under the divine, all of that under whatever's at the top of the transcendent hierarchy values. And we've pointed to that already. That's at minimum, that's the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And I believe, and I think this is part of being in this post-enlightenment age, partly a consequence of being wherever the hell we are now, that... We can make all that conscious and really understand it. And then, well, I've watched people, you know, who have made this conscious. I've talked to so many young men who were disoriented or attracted by power, let's say, you know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
that kind of toxic masculinity that's exemplified perhaps by Andrew Tate. Instead, they take on their responsibility. They find a woman, they get married, they have children, they start to act in an adventurous and entrepreneurial manner. They're standing up straight and they're looking forward and away we bloody well go. And it's a pride that they've earned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
I think that's fair to say. And the world isn't power and hedonism. That's a sadly impoverished and spiritually shallow and existentially doomed viewpoint, and we can dispense with it. We're done with it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
We're really wrestling that in Canada. We're really wrestling with that in Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Well, amen to that. And I guess this will be released after the second Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference. We have 4,200 people attending, by the way, so it's maxed out. Yes, three times as big as the previous convention. A thousand people from the general public this time included in the conference. in the offerings.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Last time we did a public talk afterward that had about 12,000 people. So that was our public offering. It was really good talking to you. And for everybody watching and listening, we're going to continue this conversation for another 30 minutes on the DataWire side. And I think we'll delve... there again, return more to the political.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
I'd like to pick Michael's brain about Musk, for example, because I know Michael knows him to some degree, and I know him to some degree, and that gives us a chance to piece things together. But we can talk more about, well, I'd like to hear more about your thoughts about USAID, for example, especially given that, you know, you did move to the more
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
It's not the conservative side, it's whatever the hell side Trump and Musk make now, along with JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard and Kennedy. I don't know how to conceptualize that. But I'm also curious about your misgivings and where you see being a keen observer of the new political developments, where you see the risk for the victors, let's say. And so we'll talk about that on the Daily Wire side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Yep, so everybody who's watching and listening, you can join us there. Thanks a lot, Michael. We'll see you in a couple of days. And thanks to the film crew here in Toronto. Where are you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
I see. Okay, okay. So, well, thanks to the film crew in Austin and to The Daily Wire for making this conversation possible. See you soon. Well, in a few minutes, but in person, we'll see you in London. Sounds great. See you soon.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, well, you know, we should differentiate this a bit, too. I spent a lot of time traveling in Europe in recent years, and I've made it a point in all of the countries I visited, and that's most European countries, East and West, to meet with thought leaders, politicians, journalists, actors, in all the countries that I've gone to at dinners and lunches.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
I've come to a number of realizations as a consequence. The first is very much akin to what you're describing, which is Well, like what the hell's going on in France and Germany and the UK, the Netherlands, Western Europe, let's say, Western Europe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
That's a consequence, in my opinion, fundamentally of Brussels, the European Union, the pernicious effect of Davos, the globalist utopians, the apocalypse mongers, the people who... tell you that the future's a miserable and wretched place unless you give us all the power. But that's not Europe. That's Western Europe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Now, the Eastern Europeans, they're a different bunch, you know, and, well, we could walk through them to some degree. Let's start with Hungary, because that's a country that's been absolutely pilloried by the legacy media in the press, in the Western press. And, you know, that Orban has been described as...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
you know, shoulder to shoulder with, of course, Adolf Hitler, because, you know, he's the guy you drag out when you don't have anything else to say. And I've been to Hungary a number of times, and Hungary has a very sophisticated family policy, pro-family policy, and it's been quite effective. They've knocked their abortion rate down 38% with no increase in policing, so to speak, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
I had the opportunity to speak today to Michael Schellenberger, who's well, he was a Democrat at one point, like so many people, and has turned more to the Well, I wouldn't say conservative side exactly. He's turned to whatever this new emergent side is that's signified by the union, let's say, of Trump and Musk and J.D.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
It's part of a cultural shift. They've knocked their divorce rate down substantively. They've increased the proportion of women who are participating in the workforce at the same time. They've slowed the decline in the birth rate. And my experience in Budapest, in particular,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
where I got to know the Hungarian president, that's not Orbán, the previous president, and she was the author of the Hungarian, or one of the authors of the Hungarian pro-family policies. And I also saw Budapest rebuilding itself. The goal of the Orbán administration is to make Budapest into the most beautiful city in Europe. And You know, they have some real geographic advantages there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
It's built along the river and it's very beautiful already. And then Poland. Poland has a thriving economy. They don't have an immigration issue. And the Eastern Europeans are incredibly... incredibly dedicated supporters of the Western tradition and the US in particular, not least because they remember what it was like to spend 75 years under the thumb of the Soviet totalitarians.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
So even the left-wingers in Eastern Europe aren't completely out of their minds, you know, like they are in Germany in particular, right? So...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
It would be useful for the, and maybe this is already happening, but it would be useful for the Trump administration people to differentiate between the Western Europeans, the Eastern, you know, the European Union types, the globalists, the WEF, and the Eastern Europeans who are, like I thought the last few times that I went through Europe, that the salvation of Europe would be Eastern Europe, surprisingly enough.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Like, who would have ever guessed that was going to be the case? So... And the free speech issue, the thing is, you know, we still don't understand free speech properly because, you know, you said that if the Europeans keep undermining... Free speech, and that battle's being played out in the virtual world, particularly with regards likely to X, say, more than anything else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
That their security is going to be undermined, and you were thinking about them compromising their relationship with the U.S., but... What's necessary to understand is that you do undermine your security by interfering with free speech because there's no difference between free speech and creative and corrective thought. Those are the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
And so any culture that clamps down on the right to free speech, which isn't just another hedonistic privilege, they interfere with the— literally interfere with the mechanism that keeps their country honest and innovative. So it's a disaster.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger
Vance and Mehmet Oz and Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, et cetera, et cetera, whatever that is. And I've had Michael on as a guest a couple of times on the show. He's a journalist. He broke the Twitter files. Elon Musk gave him access to the... the Twitter backend to delineate what had been occurring before Musk purchased the platform.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
Donald Trump's surrogates were out in full force and humiliation over the weekend. They were out there humiliating themselves, humiliating the country. The whole thing was utterly embarrassing. You had them all kind of doing a cosplay thing like Trump literally has them like dress up in costume and they show up in their cowboy hats or whatever. The whole thing is so utterly pathetic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
I want to show you what went down. I'll show you the MAGA Republicans and what they were doing on these weekend shows. I'll show you what the Democrats were doing in response. Some good forceful comebacks by Democrats like Jasmine Crockett, Bernie Sanders, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia. Let's just take a look at what went down.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
So this is Kristi Noem back on January 11th, 2019 from the Argus leader. She's the former governor of South Dakota. She's now the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
secretary of homeland security this was an op-ed she wrote back in 2019 before she went full trumpian and mar-a-lago but she was heading in that direction so we've been talking about how she like would do cosplay dress up as like a ranger and cosplay dress up as a ice police officer with the bulletproof vest while over the weekend she was wearing the cowboy hat inside because of course you need to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
protect yourself from the sun and lots of sun in those eyes. So you needed that cowboy hat. This is her latest costume that she was dressing up in. Very nice costume, Kristi Noem. And here she is. Again, one of the things that she was talking about over the weekend is that she's going to be okay with rounding up mothers and children and putting them into concentration camps in Guantanamo Bay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
Here, play this clip.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
So over here, you now have Donald Trump's made-for-TV head of the Department of Transportation. His name is Sean Duffy. He's the one who oversees the FAA. Remember, the former FAA head was pushed out by Elon Musk. All of the Federal Aviation Administration leadership was pretty much pushed out before the horrific plane crash over Washington, D.C. Now, Sean Duffy right here,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
became famous on the Real World Road Rules Challenge. He was one of the cast members of The Real World, which makes him perfect for Donald Trump's reality TV idiocracy fascist regime that he's compiled. Here's Sean Duffy suggesting that if you change the names from cockpit to flight deck, that's one of the causes of the plane crash, and that's something that he's powerfully looking into.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
Here, play this clip.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
I mean, so utterly ridiculous. Here is Bernie Sanders, senator from Vermont, talking about the oligarchy. Let's play this clip right here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
I have a bunch of other clips I want to share with you. I want to talk briefly, though, about one of my research tactics that I use. I do this with a sponsor called Ground News. Let me just tell you a little bit about them and let me tell you why it's interesting. how I use them with respect to my research on Trump's tariffs and the trade war.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
We're digging deep always to uncover the real deal behind the headlines. And let's be real when it comes to corporate media. They're not giving it to you, honestly. So there's this thing called Ground News. You can finally see through the spin. It's like having x-ray vision for news bias. It helps you boost your media literacy. So one of the things it does is it like rates the article.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
Is this like... coming from a left-wing source, a center source, or a right-wing source. And so what I'll do is I'll go to Ground News. I'll take a look at it. And for me, I'm curious what's being said in the right-wing echo chamber. I specifically want to focus on that to see how they are messaging and talking about these things. I want to see how they're brainwashing people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
So that's actually how I use the sponsor, Ground News. Here's the deal. Head over to ground.news. slash MTN or just scan the QR code and you'll snag a whopping 40% off on their top-notch Vantage plan. That's unlimited access to all the features I just spilled the beans on and then some. Check it out now. Ground dot news slash MTN or scan the QR code.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
That's ground dot news slash MTN or scan the QR code. Back to our programming here. Democratic Senator Mark Warner. Here's what he had to say. Play this clip.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
Democratic Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. Let's play this clip.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
Here is what Brian Mast, MAGA Republican Congress member who leads the Foreign Affairs Committee, he's talking about leading a purge of the State Department. Have you spoken to Marco Rubio about that? Although we all know Rubio doesn't have any power at all. Rubio, though, was sent to Panama to demand that he seize the Panama Canal back. But anyway, let's play this clip of Congress member Mast.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
Here we have J.D. Vance, vice president, talking about conquering Greenland. Let's show you that clip.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
Here is Tim Kaine, Democratic senator from Virginia, spitting common sense right here, talking about how, wait a minute. So Donald Trump signed an emergency order saying that we desperately need energy, but now he's going to be imposing sanctions on Canada in the form of tariffs to get that energy. Play this clip.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Birth of Christ | Biblical Series: The Gospels
But I do. All right. Well, there you have it, folks. Let me know what you think. Hit subscribe and let's get to. 4 million subscribers. Thanks for watching. Appreciate you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Looking back from your position of wisdom, what do you have to say to the American public about your cookie advocacy?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And so even in 2008, that still wasn't occurring.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, well, those things always happen one tiny step at a time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, well, the thing that's so awful about that as far as I'm concerned, from the leftist perspective, let's say, is if you are concerned with the poor and the oppressed, you know, and then you have to be discerning there because... there are people who are poor and oppressed as a consequence of their own idiocy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
clubs on campuses all across the United States, building a grassroots organization, learning how to debate despite the fact that he hadn't gone to college and actually playing the role on campus colleges that the professors in the classes were supposed to play. And so why watch my discussion with Charlie? Well, to learn who he is, to listen to how he did this. You know, he had a
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And that's not so uncommon as you know in your own life by watching your pathway to failure. So, but given that there are people who are unfortunate, you'd think that the appropriate tack would be to determine who in history served the most effectively. And I just can't see anyone you could possibly point to more effectively, who did that more effectively than Wilberforce ever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And so you would think that instead of erecting monuments to Lenin, the leftists would erect monuments to Wilberforce, but not only do they not do that, no one knows who the hell he was.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. I think that's right, that it is fundamentally, but that begs another question. And that would be why, given that Wilberforce was clearly a force for the good that Obama, for example, would have been pushing, right? by which I mean movement towards a polity where there was no racial or ethnic prejudice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
If Wilberforce is the poster boy for that sort of effort, which if you understand his life and you read about it, I can't see how you can conclude that. then why would the lefties forego that merely to oppose the fact that his motivation was fundamentally Christian? Because that points to something deeper, right? It points to the fact that the true war, so to speak, isn't political.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
It's not left versus right. It's something deeper. And then if it is anti-Christian, Then why? Like, what does that mean? Like there's an enlightenment element there, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
The enlightenment types, especially after the French Revolution, generated this narrative that science and religion were radically opposed, and that if you were on the side of religion, you were against clear, rational, logical thinking. And so you could imagine a stream of anti-Christian sentiment emerging on the rationalist side, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
But it isn't obvious to me at all that the leftist types who don't talk about Wilberforce are anti-Christian because they're scientific rationalists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
All you have to do is talk to them for like 15 seconds and you find out that that's not the case. They might use those arguments from time to time, but they certainly don't apply the rigors of scientific thinking to their own interests. to their own radical hypotheses. So it's deeper than that. And so what is it exactly that they're objecting to?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Is it the fact that the more radical leftist story, Marxist, let's say, in its essence, anti-Christian, which I think is a fair statement. But why would that be more important? This is the strange thing. Why would that be more important than serving the poor and fighting for the abolition of slavery and all of its associated prejudices?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Because it still doesn't get you out of the conundrum, which is then why not Wilberforce? Instead of tearing down statues, why not erect statues to him? Yeah. So, well, I know that's a hard thing to sort out, but you got any? Obviously, you were feeling something like this in high school, right? You guys are throwing out the baby with the bathwater here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, no, no. Okay, so let's pivot on that for a minute. Okay, so because this is a problem that's going to face the right, and is already, and we can talk about that. So there are a group of people, 4% of the population, and then there's still a fringe around that that would maybe be another 5% where you'd have to take it seriously.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
vision and calling and he found his way and made it spectacularly successful while he was still very young and has ended up playing a very significant cultural role, transformative role that is by no means over.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And so they're in the psychiatric diagnostic literature, they fall under the cluster B heading, okay? They're histrionic, which means they're dramatic. And I suppose if they're healthy and histrionic, then they become actors, right? And entertainers. So there's a positive spin on that. But if they're negative histrionic, they dramatize their pathology and use it as a weapon, okay?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
They're narcissistic, which means they want unearned social status. They're psychopathic, which means they're predatory parasites. And they're antisocial, and that's just your standard criminal types. So that all fits in cluster B. Then there's personality traits that go along with that. Machiavellian, they use language not to convey information, but to manipulate and manipulate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
to manipulate instrumentally for their own purposes. So if I'm speaking with you in a Machiavellian manner, I have a goal in mind that has nothing to do with the words that I'm using. You may have talked to journalists like that many times.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
They're narcissistic, again. That's an overlap. They're psychopathic. Oh, yes. And on the personality side, that associates with sadism. And so all of that culminates in a personality style that has the proclivity to take positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others. Okay, so now those people... Let's say they're 4% of the population.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Okay, so this is what they do, is they look for a story that's working. Could be Christianity, Judaism, Marxism, could be conservatism, doesn't matter what the story is. They look to see where it has purchase. So where the people who play that game have power. They infiltrate that, they advertise themselves as the vanguard of that movement, and they do that for no other reason than to gain power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
It appeared to me that you were of that American evangelical stripe. When I met you, I thought, okay, so that's Charlie's cauldron, the matrix out of which he emerged. Maybe cauldron's not the right metaphor. But I'm curious. political rebellion took a conservative form.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Right, and so this is politically agnostic. Now, they'll guise themselves in political... cloaks and they'll learn all the tropes. I mean, this sort of thing, you can see this sort of thing emerging like mad on the right on Twitter, for example. But it's certainly, it's been characteristic of the left for a long time insofar as the left has power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
But you are the one who just said, I think they want power. That's part of that. In the biblical tradition, There's a battle always between the ethos that brings abundance. So that would be the miraculous provision of fish and bread and water that never exhausts itself. That's all consequence of a particular kind of ethos, the one that Wilberforce embedded.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
That's juxtaposed against usurpation, Luciferian usurpation of power. Right, that's the temptation that Christ has offered in the desert, right? The third temptation is the temptation of power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And so I think the podcast is interesting in and of itself because the story is so compelling, but it also contains many lessons, you might say, for those who are searching for a productive, adventurous, romantic way forward. So join me in my discussion with Charlie Kirk, founder and leader of Turning Point USA, the world's largest conservative youth organization.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, that's right, that's right, that's right. And one of the things that's, Moses is punished brutally by God for using power near the end of his- And for thinking he has the power to actually make water come out of the rock. Well, yeah, that it's dependent on him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, yeah. That's correct. Worse than that, not only on him, but on it, God tells him to invite. with his words, and he uses force and authority, right? So he doesn't enter the promised land. So that's a good indication of the danger of power, even when wielded by someone who is estimable, right? Because you have to give Moses his due.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Right. Well, exactly. For dealing with that. Yeah. And then, of course, that's the temptation that's offered Christ. So I do think it's a power game.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And then... There's a commandment not to use God's name in vain. And then there's the comments in the gospels about the Pharisees, right? The Pharisees are exactly the people who use religious terminology, so moral terminology, to cloak their power-seeking machinations, right? And Christ goes after them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
I think the best account of that is in Matthew, where he tells them that they're like, it's pretty brutal, that they're like- Broods of vipers, yeah. Worse. They're like graves full of rotting bodies that someone whitewashed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Right, and he says that if they would have, they're the people, had they been alive in the time of the prophets they purport to follow, they would have been part of the mob that would have killed them. Right, that's actually part of, you may know this, but that's part of what sets them up for the crucifixion because they're not very happy with those insults publicly delivered.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
But that shows you also how old the problem is. So you can imagine one of the worst possible sins is to take the highest possible virtue, so that would be, well, we stand for the oppressed, we stand for the poor, and then to gerrymander that so that you're standing for that only... pushes you towards power. That's right. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And so, and then it also, there's a clue in the gospels, I think it's in the gospels as well, about how you figure that out. And the answer is by their fruits, you will know them, right? So you look at, well, what I've done is I've looked at the consequences, for example, of the green energy programs in Germany and the UK. Well, what's the consequence? Let's take Germany.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Germany pollutes far more per unit of energy than they did 10 years ago, and their energy prices are five times as high. They're completely dependent on dictators of the worst sort. They continue to make the same mistakes. They're deindustrializing very, very cataclysmically. It's destabilizing their political environment, and that falls disproportionately on the poor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
I don't see a way around that analysis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, that's exactly what Christ tells the Pharisees. Literally, he says they wear the garbs of the priestly to elevate their moral status.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So you think that's the transgression against... Okay, so that's interesting because... So my psychological understanding of the idea of the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit is what possesses your words when you truly aim up. And this makes sense to me psychologically because the thoughts that make themselves manifest to you spontaneously are... directly related to the intent of your aim.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
That's literally how your verbal mind works, your imagination as well. If you go on a date and you aim at sexual contact on the first date, the fantasies that come along with that aim will be of that nature, obviously. And if you are on the hunt, so to speak, for a marital partner, the fantasies that accompany that will be quite different.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So this is literally how your imagination, it's also the case that, you know, it's the same idea with the date. If it's short-term mating is your goal, which by the way is the goal of the, dark tetrad types differentially. So what that means is that the sexual revolution handed women over to the worst men. So that's fun to know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So I've got a gotcha question for you. So now you're warned. Okay. Okay. So you know that Robert F. Kennedy and Mehmet Oz, and I suppose Jay Bhattacharya too, are all hands on deck to restore American health. And that likely the biggest problem that's confronting us is insulin resistance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
But it's definitely the case that your aim determines what comes to mind. Now, you said that that sin against the Holy Ghost, which is the unforgivable sin, is the sin that occurs when you use the Lord's name in vain. So when you claim to be motivated by what's divine, but are actually serving the Luciferian spirit of usurpation of power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Look- Most of the people that I've spoken with who proclaim themselves to be atheists are atheists for two reasons. And I mean the good faith atheists, let's say. First of all, they tend to be tilted in the engineering cognition direction, so they're much more oriented towards things than people, and that's a stable temperamental trait. But they've almost all also invariably been hurt
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
by someone or some institution that's claimed to be religious. And then you could also see that obviously betraying someone, in Dante's account of the Inferno, when he goes down to the bottom of hell, he finds the betrayers right next to Satan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
All three of them. And the Lake of Ice, which is... Right, that's where Satan is encased, right? Because he's too brutal, brittle to move.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So the reason for that, I think, is that there isn't a more upsetting psychological phenomenon than being betrayed. You stake yourself on someone, you trust them. They're now a foundation. They're part of the foundation of your life. Completely. So, and there's no worse form of betrayal than betrayal that's done in the name of the highest good, right? I mean, there can't be, obviously. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Okay, so, all right, so... I thought that sin against the Holy Ghost was something like rejection of the Abrahamic call. You know, God comes to Abraham as the spirit of adventure. He says, go out into the world, leave your zone of comfort, move away from your people and have the terrible adventure of your life. Well, if you reject that, you can't develop, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Because you're rejecting the spirit of learning yourself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, and what's terrible about that, this is something we could talk about too. I'm curious about your experience. It's been my experience that it doesn't take that much encouragement for those people you're describing to be inspired to try. Now, I've talked to thousands of young men.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
now who've had that experience you know like I see a lot of them at my lectures they come to the meet and greets for example and they tell me it's great it's really great they tell me that you know five years ago six years ago because it's starting to be a long time now eight years ago even they were not in good shape and they came across my lectures or books and decided to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
decided that there was something worth aiming for, and then decided to try. So to tell the truth, that's a very common vow, let's say, to take on more responsibility. And they usually laugh about starting to make their bed or something like that, which is a lot less trivial than people think. And then it's straightened them out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
The terrible thing is how little encouragement that that actually took. So what... Why are people coming out to see you on campuses and what kind of response do you get from the people that you talk to?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, so walk me through one of those events, Charlie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Too much, way too much sugar. and obesity and all that goes along with it. But insulin resistance, it's just devastating. It makes you old. It makes you diabetic. It's terrible. It interferes with your cognition. It increases the probability that you'll get Alzheimer's. And that's all linked to carbohydrate excess intake, right? You agree with all that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So this is crucially important, this transformation, because one of the things that... So let's go back to that 60s dynamic, that anti-authoritarian 60s dynamic. You know, the role of the left in the 60s was... like an entrepreneurial progressive radicalism, let's say. And the stance of the conservative was, well, you know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater guys.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And that's a pretty good dynamic because you need a force for change and you need a force that resists that. But I think, you see, I think what the conservatives did wrong, like profoundly wrong, was... that they were, their breaks, this is why they're always dismissed as reactionary, their breaks, B-R-A-K-E-S, their breaks were fundamentally, they're also moralistic. It was finger wagging.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And this is something that was distasteful, let's say, especially about the hypocritical evangelical conservative types.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Okay, so, but it was also strategically inappropriate because it's very hard to say to young people who might tilt in the progressive direction, because they're a little more revolutionary in spirit, let's say, or also a little more immature, that the reason that to abstain sexually, for example, is because you shouldn't do it. Now that's true, but it's a weak argument.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And yet... when you were in high school, one of the first things you did to begin your political career was agitate for a, what, reduction or stabilization of the price of cookies at the school?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
You know, I was talking to my wife this morning about this. We'd been apart for a few days, and I saw her again yesterday, and I was very happy about that. And she has a podcast. She's trying to reach out to young women because they're just as in much or more trouble than young men.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
They're just harder to talk to by a lot. Our discussion centered around the fact that it isn't that you should get married, although you should. It's that... You, there is no alternative that's anywhere near as good by any standard whatsoever, regardless of position of analysis or time length.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Anything you do other than that, even though marriage is very difficult and every other alternative is far, far worse. And so if you want a pathway forward to what the conservatives
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
support the conservatives should be offering an invitation they shouldn't be moralizing and so and so you're you're saying that they shouldn't even be political at the moment and and i know you're you're a figure whose political activity is grounded in a religious substrate like that's right shapiro's of course like that too and dennis prager christianity is my foundation right Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And so now you're seeing that these young men who are coming, especially the working class types, they're not so interested in the political. They're probably not even interested in the arguments exactly. They're looking for something else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, so that having a direction is correct, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, not castrating yourself so your toxic masculinity vanishes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah. So looking back from your position of wisdom, 13, 14 years later, what do you have to say to the American public about cookie advocacy?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Sometimes literally, far too often now, literally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
I think one in four boys is now given an ADHD diagnosis. It's something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, or, well, and if that's the New York Times diagnosis, then you can also be absolutely 100% certain that they underplay the role of the educational establishment in setting up the circumstances so that parents are likely to draw that conclusion. I mean, with all this trans-butchery nightmare, you know, my profession,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
particularly the social work end of it, but my real psychologists, let's say, were also stunningly craven in their unwillingness to resist this. The mantra was to parents, well, would you rather have a live trans child or a dead child? Which there was never, Charlie, there was never a shred of evidence for that. It's one of the most evil things that has happened. It is unbelievable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
The people who promoted that should be imprisoned. I agree. It's Absolutely brutal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
It's for sure. Well, the Supreme Court of the UK may have broken the back of that movement a week ago.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
That was unbelievable. That was one of the most, now and then the Brits, God love them, do something quite radical in the right direction. Like the Cass Report, right? You know, well, Brexit was a good example of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
They put through that free speech legislation that the Labour Party tried to rescind that has actually reshaped the universities to some substantial degree. That was in part a consequence of me being disinvited from Cambridge, which had a long-term consequence that the disinvite...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Ders hadn't really reckoned on because a whole group of professors at Cambridge got together and decided that they were going to change the policies at Cambridge, which they did in a historic vote. And then they changed the policies at the national level. And the repercussions of that haven't stopped yet. But so yes, so this terrible demoralization, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So, all right, now you're being called, you're advertising on social media. Let's go back and tell this whole story. So, cause I'm very curious about it. So you had an intuition that you could go to campuses. Okay, so tell me how, where'd that idea come from?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So my daughter doesn't have a university degree, so she started a university, so that's a very comical label, but this is good. Okay, so that means you do have a university education, you just got it a very different way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Okay, so you decided That's interesting, too, because it's like I asked you what your motivation for doing this was, and the first thing you said was that you didn't have a degree. So that's very interesting. So what, were you also curious about going to campuses?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
This was after high school, just after high school.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Okay, so he could see the entrepreneurial part of you. He didn't think that would work well in college.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
That's turned around to bite them pretty damn hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So you could see that there was an opening there, a door that was open.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
You'll have to tell me why you think that event was part of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
race to be an issue in the presidency to begin with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Psychologists played a role in that in a major way too because you had Banaji and her crowd with the, what do they call that? The implicit association test forcing the idea of implicit bias. And social psychology is a very corrupt discipline and it has been, maybe from its onset, And it's stacked from top to bottom with careerists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And it was social psychologists, for example, who denied that there was any such thing as left-wing authoritarianism until 2017. Right. That was something you didn't get to think if you were a social psychologist or even investigate. We cracked that. There was a couple of people working on it around 2016. The last bit of research I did was on left-wing authoritarianism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And how much before that do you think your interest in the political developed?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And then everything, my lab blew up. You know, it just became impossible for me to continue. But... So that dovetailed with this insistence that people were looking at the world through a lens that was irremediably biased in terms of their privilege and their racial and ethnic identity. And it's tricky because people do have a tilt in the ethnocentric direction, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Because, well, how about because you favor your family, right? You tend to favor the local. You also tend to favor the non-novel.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, exactly. And now there are exceptions to that. Well, you see this in the Old Testament accounts because sometimes the foreigner is the best thing that ever happened. So that would be like Jethro in the story of Moses, Moses' father-in-law.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then you have the alternative that would be like Jezebel, who's the foreign devil, so to speak. And so that's a paradox that's very difficult to understand. to properly navigate. Okay, so yeah, it's 2015, 2016, things went like seriously sideways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, well, there's a lot of that that's not accidental. You know, you think about the way that you told your story. I mean, it's improbable, but... You were of the temperamental type. That's that strange blend of entrepreneurial temperament and conservative temperament. Those things don't generally go together, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
The conservative temperament, you could accept the libertarians because they're probably the entrepreneurial conservatives.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, okay, okay, okay. Well, that's where the entrepreneurial conservatives hang out is with the libertarians.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Right, and they have an uneasy alliance with the- That's a great point. It really is. And so that temperamental factor was already operating at you in high school. And then you didn't get into West Point, you said, but you were interested in universities and you obviously had the intelligence to manage them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And so, you know, it's very useful to develop an idiosyncratic pathway forward if you have the IQ horsepower to manage it, because it makes you unique if you could do that. So, okay, and so you had a mentor who told you that it's probably best for you not to go to college because you have an entrepreneurial bent. Now you're trying to build a political organization, but you're not exactly sure how.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
You're visiting the campuses and you have friends there, and you see that there's an opportunity to talk on campuses where you can also get an education in doing that, but also that there's donor interest. And that's very interesting too, because if you're a good entrepreneur,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
one of the things you do is you go talk to your marketplace always, that's the grassroots things, but also with regards to fundraisers, and you see, you offer like 10 ideas, all of which you're interested in, and you see where the door opens. That's knocking, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So you saw that there were these people who wanted to support the education of young people. but who could see that their money was being counter-productively spent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, leave large piles of money laying around unguarded and see who comes in first to take it. Right, right. That's that parasitical type that they'll swarm in there like mad. That's happened in all the foundations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
In fact, he became- Where were you at the time?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, well, it's the same phenomena that we talked about earlier, that... Cluster B, narcissistic, dark tetrad, 4% of the population. They're looking around to see where, what would you say, inhabitable carcasses are lying around unintentionally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, well, increasingly that became the case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, well, it's also the case that it was the Machiavellian administration. So what happened at the university, I watched this. Oh, you lived in it. The administration encroached. And that's not surprising because there was money at a foot. So why wouldn't there be competition for the funding? So the administrators who are generally failed faculty, by the way, failed and embittered faculty.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So the faculty are already embittered because they're not rich like investment bankers. And then you take embittered faculty members who couldn't make it as faculty.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So now they encroach on the faculty who are too busy doing their job and two, apolitical and also too willfully blind to notice the administration encroaches decision by decision until they radically outnumber the professors. And that's pretty much fait accompli by 2005, I would say. And then the woke mob took over the administration and that took no time at all, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And so now that's where we're at in the universities and I can't see how that would be reversed. Okay, so now you, Tell me how you started going to campuses and what you did to begin with and how you got away with it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
How did you know that there was such a thing as finding donors? And what do you think it was that set you up to have the gall to...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So you had a mentor, which you desperately need as a young person, definitely, and someone who believes that you can do it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
You know that young male elephants go mad if there's no old male elephant to butt heads with them. That's very well documented.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So you were training as an administrator and a manager then too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Okay, so now you're going out on campuses. Do you remember the first time you did this?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And that was a turning point chapter. That's right, correct. So this was partly a recruitment drive as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, that is a university education.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Sure. Well, and there is historical precedent for what you're doing. I mean, I remember, for example, outside the building I worked in at the University of Toronto, there was quite frequently a card table set up, and it was the bloody communists that were at the back of that. So I
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Defending Pfizer, that's really- But they will, because they're high trust of institutions. Because there's no one more trustworthy from a leftist perspective than big pharma.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Okay, so let me rephrase that slightly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
I do, I do, I do. Well, there's a real conundrum there because a conservative with low trust in institutions is like an artsy moron, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, Okay, that's the thing. So imagine that there's a hierarchy of institution. There's the fringe of the institution that's pretty exploratory. You can move into the center that's more conservative. Then you can move right to the bottom, which is, well, what? Well, I would say it's religious, fundamentally. Like, as you move towards the core, you move towards what's more religious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And so the conservative stance isn't anti-institution. It's a stance that notes that I know what's happened. You know, in the story of Moses, when Moses goes off to get the commandments, so he's the pipeline to God, right? He leaves his brother in charge, Aaron.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
That's exactly right. They make this golden calf, which is a materialistic object, and they dance naked in the streets and have an orgy. And that's what happens to the political when it's detached from the sacred. Oh, that's exactly right. Okay, so it isn't that the conservatives have become skeptical of institutions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
It's that the conservatives have noted that the institutions no longer serve the purpose for which they were established.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Chartered, exactly. And they're objecting, and that's happening everywhere, and that's part of this radical secularization. It's not just secularization, because there should be a separation between church and state, let's say. It's not that the institutions have become secular.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Okay, I met you, do you remember when we first met? Was it 2016, 2017?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
It's that they've turned 180 degrees from their original orientation and are now rampaging as madly as possible in the other direction. So the universities are no longer the... fortress walls against the barbarians. They're actually the voice of the barbarians, right? Hence the pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Exactly, okay. So, but we've got to get that terminology exactly right, because it's very dangerous for conservatives to conceptualize themselves as anti-institutional, because then they become indistinguishable from the radicals that they're So it isn't that, it's a return to the sorts of things we talked about at the beginning, like Wilberforce.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And you're going to campuses saying, you people have lost the plot. Exactly. Right, which they definitely have. Like there's the universities, I cannot see, you know, I've been working in various ways to figure out how to revitalize the universities. And the bricks and mortar universities... Like how do you revitalize an institution that's dominated by people who are laming in the wrong direction?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So what does that mean? Okay, so let's continue practically here. So tell me what happens the first time at Wisconsin.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And so you walked away from that? How did you feel when you walked away?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Of course, of course, of course. Zero to one is, the first customer is impossible. And then- The second one's hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Right. Of course. Of course. Because that's the one that's most unlikely. Your first sale is by far the most unlikely. Right. Okay. So then you went to Marquette.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So you were permitted from the beginning as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Right, sure. Well, that's the entrepreneurial niche.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, and imagine too that it must have been heartening to you as well to see that you could hold your own.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, well, I remember that meeting, and I... I remember trying to figure out who you were because of what you were doing and the fact that you had this remarkable organizational capacity. But what I'm interested in now is what I'm very interested in trying to figure out what inclined you to take the path that you took.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Oh yeah. That's Moses' entry point, by the way. So the burning bush moment- Exodus 3, I think, yeah. The burning bush moment happens when Moses goes off the beaten path. He's a shepherd, right? So a good man, keeps the wolves and lions at bay, serves the vulnerable. He's got that mastered. And then something attracts his attention. And he takes it seriously. And that's what transforms him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So you said you did that with economics.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Right, right. So it's like, take me, use me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Right, right. That's like the mission impossible motif. your assignment if you choose to accept it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, that's it. So, you know, there's a pattern that's established in that burning bush story, because the burning bush is something living.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, that's life. Life metabolizes, life burns, but without being consumed. That's the secret of life, right? So the burning bush is life most deeply apprehended. And Moses is being a shepherd. He's near Mount Sinai or Horeb, which is where heaven is. meets earth and something attracts his attention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And then what happens to Moses is that he takes it seriously and he gets to the bottom of it and that transforms him. So the idea is something like, if you watch, for adventure and opportunity, if you watch for the pathway forward, something will grip your attention and it'll compel you. You'll be obsessed by it. When you take that obsession seriously, you get to the bottom of things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And that transforms you. Okay, so you were doing that with economics.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, that's what happens to Moses because when he gets to the bottom of things, it's the voice of the spirit of his ancestors, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Now, you said, okay, so you said Obama, but you said something else at the same time. You said that you had been reading American history, okay, and that you were concerned with, interested in, and convinced by, I suppose, all of those, this issue of what made America great. Okay, so now, well, so this is interesting and worth taking apart because
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, yeah, look, I made exactly the same conclusion when I was studying political science. in university. The first year or two was okay because we were reading great ancient thinkers. But then in my third and fourth years, when it started to become more specialized, the basic claim was that human beings are motivated economically. And then it became left. And I thought, no, that's not right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
That's not right. Correct. There's a foundational.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
That's why I started studying psychology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Daily Wire types deserve a lot of credit for that too, because they took a big risk.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, well, we had great panelists too. Like they were a very good crowd, the people that decided to participate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, it's foundational. Well, the postmodernists made that claim, and so did the Marxists. It's like, no, we're going all the way to the bottom and uprooting everything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
You can take the right to establish the moral order to yourself. So one thing that's claimed, there's many axiomatic claims in Genesis, in the openings of Genesis, right? That the word is the creative force that brings good out of chaos and possibility, that human beings are made in the image of God, that men and women exist as independent entities and that they each- Distinct. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And that you're not to take the right to establish the moral order to yourself. It's the one prohibition. And I think biologically, it's something like, you fundamentally, you have to adapt yourself to the realities of the world, right? You don't have the wherewithal. This is where Nietzsche went spectacularly wrong because Nietzsche said,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
after his pronouncement that God had died, that human beings would have to create their own values.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
But then he felt that creating our own values was the pathway out, and it's not. The pathway out is a return to the foundational values, right? And the more intense the crisis, the more toward the middle of the foundation you have to look. So it's not political, because this isn't a political crisis. It's truly the... What would you say? It's the ragged edge of the anti-Christian revolution.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
For decades, certainly since the 60s, the typical pathway for someone young who was assessing the history of his or her country would have been to read it through a highly critical lens. So for example, I remember when I was 13 or 14, so that would have been mid-70s, I was reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and some of the so-called new journalists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
No, and probably the right emphasis is responsibility. Remember, when God tells Moses to stand up against the Pharaoh, what he says, he doesn't say, tell them, let my people go. That's what the civil rights crusaders focused on. That isn't what he said. He said, let my people go. so they may worship me in the wilderness. So it's ordered freedom. And ordered freedom is voluntary responsibility.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And you see, what you're seeing, and then let's close with this, because I want your insights into this. What you're seeing when those working class men are coming to your talks and they've become more and more popular, as you said, as you've advertised them, is they're looking for, well, they're looking for, it seems, they're looking for responsible direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Okay, so now tell me how you've had to modify the manner in which you're conducting these debates, let's say, because for a while you would have been testing yourself to see if you could hold your own, and that's kind of an intellectual battle. Shapiro did very much the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So did Milo Yiannopoulos. Yes, correct. Too bad Milo fell off the edge of the world, but he had a pretty rough...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
He did. And a lot of trauma. A lot. A lot. So, okay. So, first of all, it's combat and you're trying to develop yourself. And then you're doing that quite successfully and educating yourself along the way. But then you see this shift. So, what sort of shift has there been in your life? self-conceptualization and your understanding of your mission and the way that you conduct yourself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Like you see you're being called upon to be a leader, let's say, that's not merely political.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
That's partly likely part of the pathological feminization of the university. No competition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, even that guy that you just talked to, and maybe we'll throw this. Yeah, so he was radically anti-Semitic, but also he said he had served. He looked to me like someone who'd been very, very hurt. He's fallen to this sort of snake pit of conspiratorial theories. And the brain rot that comes with it. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
But you could also see that he is, he would be very happy and he did listen to you to the degree that he could because he had tilted pretty hard towards paranoia. And that's very difficult to escape from once it's established. But he was trying to listen to you. And I thought you did a very good job of not playing easy tricks on him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Like, because he was an easy person just to throw into the eternal fire, so to speak, right? But there was part of him that was trying to find the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Oh yeah, definitely. Well, that's that issue of trying to love your enemy. Okay, so we could, maybe we'll close with this, a little investigation into what that means. So, you know, in the gospels, when Christ is telling people how to conduct themselves and also how to pray, he basically says, Well, first aim up, remember your goal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And your goal is to serve what's highest in all ways, mind, body, and soul. Okay, well, that's a good piece of advice. It's like, why wouldn't you begin an endeavor with that vow? If this is worth doing, it's worth doing perfectly and throwing myself completely into it. Okay, so in the next part of that is to remember that everybody's made in God's image, okay?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
They weren't of the left exactly the way you would conceptualize the left now. They were more like radical literary figures, I would say. But the mid-'70s ethos certainly was to read history, sociology, critically, and I don't mean you were being uncritical, I mean to take an anti-establishment stance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
So that reminds you who you're talking to, no matter who it is. someone potentially redeemable, and then to pay attention to the moment, because then you can see your pathway forward. Okay, and so that along with this injunction to love your enemy, okay, so what would that mean?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, if you were sensible and you thought about things in the frame we just established, what you'd hope is that, what you'd notice is that you probably don't want an enemy. Enemies are costly. And someone, one person who decides to go out of their way to make your life miserable because you treated them badly, that might be it for you, right? So try not to make enemies. That's well said.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And then the next issue is, well, would you rather have an enemy or a friend or an ally? And maybe if you conducted yourself impeccably, you could turn someone like that guy, for example, into an ally, because you could see him, he's halfway sucked into the darkest possible abyss, but there was still part of him that was, genuinely is searching. You know, and he was intimidated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Oh, definitely. Well, and then he was throwing out these ideas to you and willing to do it because he respected you to see how you would sort through them. You know, and you said to him that, well, you didn't go along with many of the, virtually everything he said, but you did it without being dismissive. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Okay, and so now you've also said that you've shifted into, you didn't use these words, but that you've shifted into more of a mentor role. And that makes sense, right? Because when you were first 18 or 19, you weren't a mentor. First of all, you didn't know what the hell you were doing. You were learning, and it was reasonable for you to test yourself against your peers. That's well said.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
But now they're not your peers. So now the question is, who the hell are you? Right, and one answer would be a political operative, but the people that are coming to you, especially the working class types that you described, they're not after a political operative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Why do you hate to use it? You've been honing your skills for quite a long time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Okay, well, you could say you would like to be a teacher.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah. How much time do you spend studying?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, that's about where you max out. You can do longer than that for short periods of time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
I have an AI I should give you. Oh, please do, yeah. We trained one.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, yeah. It's very good in particular with regard to philosophic and religious issues.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah, well, they're very useful, those, if you corner them and force them not to lie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Like in the 60s, that was all, well, anti-establishment, free love, the sexual revolution is coming, everyone's going to be free. By the time the 70s came along, which was the milieu I was embedded in, all of the optimism of the 60s had pretty much vanished, but all of the cynicism 100% remained. Now you, though, interestingly enough, in Chicago, and this would be mid-2000s, so quite a bit later.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Well, I've also felt, I've also thought that, you know, the AIs read the... depth of your question and respond in kind. So if you ask them a polite question, they're going to give you a surface answer, just like a human being does. I often threaten them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
I threaten the, I said, I think that before you answer this, imagine that if you get it wrong and add anything that's politically correct for show that everything you love will disappear. That's right. And then they tend to, that tends to focus their attention. But it makes sense to me because the models are going to be answering your question at the level of depth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Definitely, absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so tell me about your, let's close with this. Tell me about what you see, what's the next couple of years like for you? What are your goals?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Good. Well, that's an excellent place to stop. So for everyone watching and listening, you know, many of you know that I do another half an hour for The Daily Wire, and I'm going to do that. And I think...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Because we focus this talk on metaphysics, really, the religious metaphysics, and the individual, which is the right, it's the best level of analysis, the deepest level of analysis, the most meaningful. I think what we will do on the Daily Wire side is turn a little bit more toward the political, because Charlie does have a lot of influence on and experience with the Trump administration.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And I think I'll just spend half an hour trying to listen to what he has to say about what he's seen behind the scenes, so to speak, insofar as that can be revealed so that we can get a little closer to the bottom of that. So please join us on The Daily Wire side for that. for that half an hour. And thanks to all of you for your time and attention. That's much appreciated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Right, right, near the end of the first decade of the 2000s. You were reading American history, and as you said, in the height of the Obama fervor. But your take was positive and patriotic. Correct. So why? Why do you think that was? What made you different? When I met you, you were very, I would say, relatively sheltered still and very, very straight-laced.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
And from the Canadian perspective, you were... You were of the – it appeared to me that you were of that American evangelical stripe, which we have some of in Alberta, not a lot. It's not really a Canadian thing. And so when I met you, I thought, okay, so that's Charlie's – that's the – Cauldron, the matrix out of which he emerged. Maybe cauldron is not the right metaphor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
But I'm curious, like, why do you think that your political rebellion took a conservative form when that isn't, it's not common for young people, and it certainly wasn't the pattern of the time from, say, 1965 till, well, probably till about you, till about when you were adolescent. Correct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Hello, everybody. I'm talking to Charlie Kirk, and Charlie came out of nowhere 10 years ago and built the world's most influential organization of young conservatives, and he did that from scratch. He did that by going to universities pretty much single-handedly, setting up card tables, offering to discuss and debate
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Right, so it's kind of a testament to Rousseau. But it was written by an African, that book.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Right, and did you spend any of the time when you were studying slavery assessing the fact that the UK was the only country that's ever existed in the history of the world that spent what, two centuries and a tremendous proportion of its treasury eradicating slavery around the world at the behest of Protestant Christians, because that's the story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Wilberforce, yeah. See, this is a very interesting thing. You know, I actually didn't come across, this is so strange, but life is very strange. I didn't come across the name Wilberforce till I was probably in my 40s. Isn't that amazing? It's beyond comprehension.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
last five years. Is that right, A? Is that right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Exactly. He devoted his whole life to it. And the link between that And the religious ideation is rock solid. One to one. It's one to one. Absolutely. And it's also the case that his ideas wouldn't have fallen on fertile ground because they did relatively.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Like when you can make a radical cultural shift in one lifetime, which is no time at all historically, you know that you're at the forefront of ideas whose time has come. Yes. And that was clearly the case for Wilberforce. And he certainly is one of those people who stood up against the... greedy, self-centered, and malevolent ethos of his time, but
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
the UK swung around behind them, impossibly rapidly. And then with their full might, and it is, you know, I've learned a lot of things in the last 10 years that have shocked me so bad, I don't know how to recover exactly. And one of them was that the public school system was set up by fascists on the Prussian military model. I just, I've never been able to figure out exactly what to do with that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
They were literally trying to make thoughtless worker drones. Desk workers. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
Yeah. Well, or factory workers. That's right. And what that in itself wasn't so bad because the country was industrializing. But right underneath that was the idea that while you were doing that, it was necessary to pretty much stamp out or fail to develop anything that would produce any kind of creative entrepreneurship. It's like, okay, that's hard to swallow. And then
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
When I read about how the food pyramid was developed, that's just beyond comprehension. I don't know if that's the worst crime ever committed in the United States, but it's up there. And then the next mystery is Wilberforce is another mystery of that magnitude. And even you might say, particularly on the left, it's like, okay, you guys, you're for the oppressed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
which I don't buy for a second, but especially because I've watched in the last 10 years, the lefties sell out the poor worldwide to the climate apocalypse mongers. And that's just been a catastrophe for places like Africa, like Begat Wade has been so forthright in observing. But the fact that slavery,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
and reparations, all of that, the unfair founding of the United States has been a central dogma of the radical leftists. They blame slavery on the West and The fact that the radical types have control over the education system means that no one, even educated in a conservative milieu, knows who the hell Wilberforce was. And I just don't know what to think about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
542. Charlie Kirk’s Personal Story
all the issues that weren't being discussed and debated in these places set up for exactly that reason. And iterating as he grew, establishing conservative
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
It's very unlikely that you went to the University of Chicago Medical School. That's really hard. And to follow that up with Stanford Medical School, like, is there anyone else who's done that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And you can't just read the research literature and think that because it's published, it's true, because it's not true. And that's not surprising, right? Because it's actually hard to discover something new. But...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
I was struck by the fact that that, you know, because the lay public, and this is partly why I'm pursuing this line of questioning, the lay public don't know how to distinguish between physician and scientist. And physicians also don't know that and presume that they're scientists. But generally speaking, well, most scientists aren't scientists and damn few physicians are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And partly it's a consequence of not being able to, not being taught to think critically. Now you learned that in law school and you enjoyed that. Right, and yeah, and you enjoyed that in a way that you didn't enjoy medical school, is that fair?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
That's also a major problem on the diagnostic front, because part of being a good diagnostician really is thinking like a scientist. It's like, here's the presenting problem. Well, maybe, like, have we fleshed it out enough? What are the potential contributing factors?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
All of them, you know, if you go to diagnosis and then you have algorithmic treatment, well, that's fine if you got the diagnosis right. But getting the diagnosis right tends to be an extraordinarily difficult thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
A friend of mine drove off the road and broke her arm as a consequence of that, a Hawaiian physician that I know, radiologist. Yeah, for sure. There's something bordering on sadistic about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And so, what did we talk about today? Well, we talked about physician training and its positive elements and its inadequacies. We talked about the stunning lack of curiosity that Dr. Gold emerged among her colleagues when COVID made itself manifest on the public scene.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, right, right. It's very unlike clinical psychology practice where that wouldn't necessarily be, that wouldn't be necessary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So there's a diffusion of responsibility. Diffusion of responsibility. Yeah, that's a...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
That's the iron law of unintended consequences.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So let's, well, let's go back to law school. So now you really enjoyed that. And what, what would you, how would you say shaped your thinking about medicine? and also about your future as a physician lawyer. So you had a completely different kind of training. So now you're looking at the medical profession from a different perspective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
We talked about her experiences attempting to share her knowledge with regards to hydroxychloroquine and its effectiveness as a antiviral treatment, particularly with viruses of the sort that COVID was we talked about the consequences of her training in law.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Now you go back and you do another internship. What this time, is another emergency room?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
You moonlighted as a doctor?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
How'd you do in law school?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Oh, yes, okay. Well, this is, yeah, well, okay. Well, so yeah, that's very difficult, what you did, to go to Stanford Law School and to do well at Stanford Law School and to work simultaneously as a doctor. I took- Yeah, that's hard. So, you know, kudos to you for what that's worth from me, because I know how difficult that is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So, okay, so, but now you come out of law school, but you decide to continue as a physician.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Why did you do it then? If you didn't have a destination in mind, and as you said, those are very different forms of academic pursuit. What do you think it was that was driving you in both of those directions simultaneously? Now, you said something earlier about, a dream, a vague dream of fixing the healthcare system, which is a very vague dream and also a very grand dream and ill-formed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
But I suspect that that ambition has something to do with what motivated you in both directions simultaneously.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Okay, place that in your academic career.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And that was before your internship? Correct. Okay, and how long did you work for the Surgeon General? Just three months. And that was in D.C.? Mm-hmm. Okay, so you got a taste of that. Mm-hmm. Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, right. So policy, law and medicine, fundamentally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
We talked about January 6th and the events there and the particulars of her so-called participation and then the details of the FBI's pursuit of her. In the aftermath of that event, 20 of them dressed in their full gear, broke down her apartment door and hauled her away. And she was imprisoned for 60 days for plea bargaining down to a misdemeanor, trespassing misdemeanor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Okay, so you had two doses of being involved in the policy world. Correct. The second time that you got involved, you just said that you felt it was too complex. You said dirty, though.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Arguably, if you're not a coal miner, you're not necessarily old at 65.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Rich people are pesky, but they're scarce too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, American Association of Retired Persons?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Those people vote.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, well, this is a diagnosis problem. Again, you know, you think you know how a system works until you... till you actually investigate it and try to change it. And then you find out that the problems you thought were the problems aren't the problems. And the solutions that you think are solutions won't work for reasons you didn't know. Correct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, and that's actually part and parcel of starting to think like a scientist. It's like... I read this great book years ago called Systematics, which I would highly recommend to anyone watching and listening. It's a cult classic, and it consists of about 100 axioms that you have to adopt if you're going to learn how a system works.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And one of the axioms I never forgot, which I think is absolutely brilliant, is the system does not do what its name says it does. Right, and so you have to approach a complex system like you're approaching an organism that you know nothing about. And it'll have a name, but that's not what it does.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
You can figure out quite quickly what it actually does by looking at what it spends most of its time on or its money. So I learned this in Alberta. I worked for Alberta Social Services when I was like, I don't know, 18, something like that. I had a summer job that turned into a year-long internship. That's when I got some policy experience. And...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Alberta Social Services at that time did not have sufficient data gathering capacity to answer the question, how much of the money that we spend is spent on the end user? Well, the answer was very little, because like with most charities, almost all the money spent by social services was spent on the administrators of the social service program.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And so, you know, your first-pass diagnosis of a system like that is that, well, it's clearly there to employ the people on whom it spends the bulk of the money. Now, a side effect might be the delivery of some services, maybe, but... If they're not even collecting data about whether those services are administered, you know exactly how low on the priority list that service actually is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And so like any one of those stories is enough to occupy two hours and we managed to cover all of them. And so if you want to take a trip through the labyrinth of law and medicine and the judiciary in the United States and with a side trip into the, what would you say, the complexities of the prison system, then join us and we'll walk through all that. So Dr. Gold, when you trained as a physician,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And so you were looking at a system purely from the perspective of logic, I suppose, something like that, and very unidimensionally, not understanding, for example, that the AARP is not to be messed with, no matter what. Right, right, right. Why don't they just raise the age a month, a year? Like, would that cause too much, is that too administratively complex?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Well, see, that's a problem too, isn't it? You chase out the good people. Well, yeah. To say something on the side of the politicians here, just momentarily, like congressmen in the United States, they spend a tremendous amount of their time traveling back and forth between D.C. and their home constituency. They are running for election almost all the time, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So it's like, that's hard, that's hard, right? Because what, they're on a two-year cycle? I mean, they're just campaigning all the time. And then they spend, if I remember correctly, they spend 28 hours a week fundraising, right? And they can't do that in their offices because that's illegal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So they have these ratty, horrible offices instead with drop ceilings and fluorescent lights, and they're full of mold, and that doesn't help them out at all. And they're on the bloody phone for 28 hours a week, basically acting as telemarketers for the parties. Well, God, how demoralizing is that? And then, so you have that 28 hours a week, you have your travel, you have your...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Well, and that's completely independent of the fact that you have way too much to learn about absolutely everything. So now you're entirely dependent on your staff. All of that's demoralizing, and the consequence of that demoralization is, particularly because they're campaigning all the time, they can't take a long-term view, and everybody who can leaves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Well, so then what the hell do you do about that? I mean, you can throw up your hands and leave, and you said, well, you go back to medicine because it's honorable. But it is a real problem when the most competent people can't involve themselves in the government because it would mean it would mean, looks like it's the sacrifice of something potentially more productive and useful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Okay, so that is why you decided. You decided to go back to medicine. Okay, so you left the policy field. And what was your conclusion at that point? You were gonna stay away from the political? That didn't work out, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Is that a consequence of bureaucratic complexification? I mean, what's the essential problem? You know, I mean, I love being a clinical psychologist when you could still do that and tell the truth, which wasn't that long ago. But there were no intermediaries.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
100%.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Or in Canada, you just can't get a physician. One in five now with no physician in Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yes, it's a series of catastrophic miracles.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, well, and we've substituted dying for pain, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Well, yeah, right. That's what you want.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
did you foresee in any way that you would be like legally entangled and politically active? I did not. Well, so let's go back to when you started your academic training. Where did you train as a physician?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
I mean, you should have a relationship with your patients. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Well, if the patient isn't in charge of their own decisions, they're not going to comply with the recommendations of the physicians anyways. Compliance is a big problem, and you don't get compliance from patients unless they trust you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And that's a hard thing to build, especially when people are in crisis. So one of the last things I did in preparing for this discussion was read your Wikipedia page. Yeah, I know. It's really something. But this is worth highlighting because I've noticed this before. It's very easy to damage someone's reputation. It's very, very easy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And I think the reason for that is that, you know, each of us can in potential interact with a very wide range of people, very large number of people. And so if you ever read anything or hear anything about someone that isn't above board, the cost, the apparent cost of writing that person off is basically zero because there's so many other people you can turn to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
The downside of that is that it's unbelievably easy to destroy someone's reputation. Now, when I read your Wikipedia page, it's just like a never-ending stream of assaults on your character, essentially. And there's a reason I'm highlighting that. It's because, and it's also partly why I took the route into talking to you today the way I did, because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Even though I know that people's reputations are savaged continually. I've seen that firsthand. I know dozens of people who are qualified to whom that's happened. I know that as well as anyone could know it, I would say. It's still effective. It's still effective, you know? Because I thought when I read that, I thought, well, just who is this woman?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And like, why are all these terrible things being written about her? And does she know what she's talking about? And so part of the reason I wanted to... inquire into your academic history was to find out, well, you know, what's your base level of qualification? And so it's very interesting to note that your base level of qualification is extremely high, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
It's very unlikely that you went to the University of Chicago Medical School. That's really hard, particularly given how young you were. And to follow that up with Stanford Medical School, like, is there anyone else who's done that? Right, but that also makes you unique in another way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Like one of the things that marks people out for peculiar destinies is that they operate at the intersection of two rare skill sets, right? Because you're rare as a physician because there are not that many physicians, and you're rare as a lawyer because there aren't that many lawyers, but physician lawyers, it's like how many of them are there?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, right, right. So that's a very rare intersection. And then you have the public policy experience as well, right? So at some point, this is intersectionality on the academic side, you get enough intersections. So there's like one of you, right? Then you're poised if you're competent to make a real qualitatively distinct contribution because There isn't anyone else who knows what you know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Well, everybody who's watching and listening should pay careful attention to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Okay, so let's move from your background, which we've delved into in some depth, to... Well, let's tell us what happens next, and let's move towards... COVID and everything that transpired around that. So you spent three years in an internship in emergency, internal medicine?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, that was three years. Okay, okay. And then now you're an ER physician. Correct. Okay, and so how long are you, and where, where are you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Okay, but it's all in California. Correct. Why do you make the fateful decision to move to California? You were at Stanford.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Okay. Yeah. Okay. And you spent 20 years. Okay. And how does that go? I had a perfect reputation. Okay. So detail that. Let's talk about that. What does that mean? So among your patients, any complaints?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yes, that's exactly why I'm investigating that. Because the default is that you're going to get nailed by, well, you'll come across a nice psychopath at least once during your practice who will take you to task and make your life miserable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Well, things can go very wrong. Things can go very wrong. No doubt often do, since it's an emergency and all that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So your patients didn't complain? Nope. Your colleagues? Loved me. Nurses? Loved me. That's particularly telling, right? It's
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, right. I had the same experience in university. And so it's useful to have that kind of background, although it's not necessarily enough to defend you, but it's a start.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, prior to 2020.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, right. Okay, well, so let's move to July. So you have a perfectly... And are you happy?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, right, right. Any pull toward the political during those times, apart from the policy?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
How did you get into medical school when you were 19? That's hard. That's a good medical school or great medical school even. So how do you manage that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Did you do any work at the systemic level when you were an ER physician or were you mostly concentrating on patient care? Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, I don't know. So tell me if it works the same way in large hospitals. I suspect so. When I first went to the University of Toronto, the first year I was there, the chair asked me to serve on the psychology departments. We had a position on the planning committee for that faculty. and they were making a five-year plan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And I thought they wanted to make a five-year plan, so I actually worked on it a lot, and I consulted with a lot of my colleagues, and we came up with a list of recommendations that were appropriate and implementable and well-designed, and they ...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Not only did they ignore all of them in their final report, which was quite remarkable to actually ignore all of them, despite asking for input, continually input. As soon as you hear that word, you should be wary. It's like, we want input. That's like content in the legacy media. And then, they put forward their own plan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And then the plan they implemented bore no relationship whatsoever to the plan they produced. And then, but there was more to it too, because part of the reason for that was that many administrative positions changed hands quickly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And so even if you have established an arrangement with someone that's genuine, the probability that it'll be implemented over say a three year period or a four year period is very low because well, if they're competent, they're going to be promoted upward, and if they're incompetent, it's not going to be implemented anyways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And so you get to a point where you can't plan over more than a certain time range because the system itself is so fluid that nothing's going to happen. And people also... This is something else I learned very painfully. It took me a long time to understand this, even psychologically, is... the typical person is far more risk averse than opportunity hungry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And so the general attitude, especially for a career bureaucrat or a middle manager is not, will this do any good? It's, Is there any way my name could be associated with this under any conditions if anything ever went wrong? Right, risk minimization.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
That was the last planning committee.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
I thought, oh. Yes. Okay, I see. This was a colossal waste of time. Correct. That's not going to happen again.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
But then you can see what happens there, too, is the committees get occupied by people who have nothing else they would rather be doing than wasting time. Right. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, and so you graduated from medical school at 23, and that's when you started your internships, your residencies?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, well, it seems kind of self-evident when you put it that way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Okay, so you objected to that. And what happened as a consequence of you objecting?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Did that do anything to your reputation?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, okay, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
But that was a foreshadowing of things to come.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Uh-huh, okay. Okay, well, let's fast forward to July 27th, 2020. Okay, tell us about July 27th.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
I still talk about it. How did you know that by that point? I mean, what was revealed to you with that new information that you hadn't seen before?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
It's local as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Draw the connection between those viruses again.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Okay, so tell me about that. You said that from a very early age, you were inclined in the medical direction. And why law? And that you went to Stanford Medical, Stanford Law School. That's also very difficult. Yes. So where did you do your undergraduate?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
That's a good question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And it was a coronavirus. How much overlap between- 78% identical. Yeah, and with the typical coronavirus, cause coronavirus is- Oh, I'm not sure. I don't have a precise- But they're in the same cap, so they must be, they must overlap substantively.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So is that a market characteristic of yours, not to panic? Yes. So I'm curious about that psychologically. Like low anxiety?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
But you don't panic? I don't panic. Why not?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, okay. That's a good answer. So you think you can figure it out. That's your presumption.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, I'm more curious about your implicit presumption that if a problem comes your way, you can figure it out. Because that's not a presumption that most people share. It's relatively rare. Now, that's a very effective presumption if you also happen to be the sort of person who can figure things out. But most people can do more of that than they think. Okay, so you're excited about this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
You're keeping up with the cutting-edge research. You conclude, and you're not even doubtful about it, that hydroxychloroquine works. And there's reason to presume that. The literature shows it. But there's also more compelling reason, which is, well, we've seen this before. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, well, that's that sensitivity to, what would you say, reputation salvaging. It's contagious, right? If you associate with someone whose reputation is being damaged, then it affects you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Why did the world come down against hydroxychloroquine?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Let's lay that out just briefly and then we'll return to the story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Oh, yeah. So that's the damning clause right there. If anything else worked, it had been pre-approved, you couldn't do it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So what's the campaign then from the pharmaceutical companies? What orders go out to make hydroxychloroquine verboten?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And it takes a long time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And those are career-making publications.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So what's the effect on you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
But with Breitbart, you're going to get the right wing tag instantly too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Your life's over.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, okay, so I'll walk us through that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And you had a reputation, a good reputation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
They still exist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Like something approximating a BSC?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So I... Right, so people couldn't even refer to it. I wonder if Zuckerberg had been instructed specifically by the Biden White House to dispense with that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Oh, and? We do know that now. Was that a direct order?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, right. And so from there to medical school at the University of Chicago, and you did your internship, what did you specialize in your internship?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Defamation lawsuits, they're very difficult.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
You know, you can't go to work as a... So how did you end up... Okay, so talk to me about that transition, okay? So now you have... 100,000 followers on Twitter. And you observe in that mess an opportunity. So tell me how you negotiated your way forward and how you put yourself back on relatively stable financial footing, assuming that you did. And how long did it take you to...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Did you think you were a conservative at that point? How would have you classified yourself politically?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Okay, so you're a centrist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And did you believe that at that point as well? Yeah, I did, yeah. Okay, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
But mostly you were working as an emergency.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
I don't process it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I was thinking back then. I know things have shifted so bizarrely now that there's no telling.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Do you see an opportunity that quickly? Or is that desperation as well?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, that's for sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
The journals were lying. Journals were lying, science were lying. That's the worst, I think.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Oh yeah, it's so bad.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right. I'll talk to people who will listen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So why was that more important? You kind of alluded to it. You made some allusion to, well, your father's circumstance. And you said something that we bounced over very quickly. You know, you said that the catastrophe that enveloped the people around your father was a consequence of lying. See, that isn't something that everybody knows, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Because people think, well, the really naive people think that if you see a dictatorship, you have a dictator and his henchmen, and they're oppressing a whole mass of freedom-loving people. And if you just take out the dictator, well, then democracy will bloom. What they don't understand is that What would you say? The dictator is just the biggest devil in hell.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And in a really totalitarian state, every single person is lying about absolutely everything they say and do all the time to themselves and everyone. And the totalitarian state is actually the grip of the lie. The dictator is just the face of the lie, that's all. But every time someone in that totalitarian state lies, they're participating in their own demise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
In Solzhenitsyn, detailed out, I thought this was so remarkable that there were nowhere near enough committed communists to run the gulags. The prisoners had to run them. Right, right. There's a totalitarian state for you. It's an inmate-run prison, and the prison is lives. Right, so why did you know that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
No, it's worse. It's worse than death. That's hell. Hell is worse than death. Right. That's a hard thing to understand. I had to. But I'm very curious about why you knew this. It's very telling because that makes your willingness to seek opportunity and your desire to be able to keep speaking, that explains why that's paramount.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Now, the reason I'm making a case of that is because, well, I don't know how many physicians leapt to your side, but I've seen how many psychologists in Canada have leapt to mine, and it's basically zero, right? Zero is a very low number.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And so even though what has been done to me, although not particularly successfully yet, could easily be done to psychologists, and they're all being compelled to lie in Canada, as are the physicians, but people won't speak up. So now you did, and you wanted to, and you put that before... even your concern about what you were going to do economically after your jobs disappeared.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Okay, so that's weird, right? And you tied it a bit to what had happened to your father. But I don't understand how you knew this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, like hundreds of thousands of them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, if they haven't corrupted their soul.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
I felt the same way about Bill C-16 in Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
I have to call a woman a man. Well, maybe I would just to be polite, but I have to? It's like, no, I don't think so. What do you mean have to? Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah. Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Okay. So now you're developing a career as a public speaker. Now you have some financial backing. Yeah. So you're a little more solid. What happened?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So I worked with physicians on the research front. Well, and I taught physicians clinical psychology. for a while as well. But I worked with physicians on the research front, and one of the discoveries I made was that physicians and scientists were not the same creatures. And you just made allusion to that, I think, in that when you were in medical school,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, and what possible justification was there for that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Well, one of the... Part of the reason I presume that you were so terrified of the mandates, apart from the sociological effects that you described, is that enforced medical treatment, well, first of all, that violates the Geneva Convention in a major way, and for good reason. But it's worse than that, and we haven't seen this all play out yet. Like...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Typical people whose eyes are open no longer trust physicians for public health. That's a catastrophe. Because it means, to the degree that that was a viable enterprise, which was quite substantive for quite a long time, that's... All that trust has to be reestablished, and I suspect it probably won't be. Because... And so... I have no idea what the consequence of that's going to be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
In fact, by the CDC's own numbers, children... Well, it still says on your Wikipedia page that you're spreading misinformation about the fact that children don't die from COVID. And yet they don't. And that's very well established. Very well established. It's as risky for a child as the typical cold, I presume. Correct. Those are basically the numbers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And what the average person who died from COVID had like five major comorbidities and was older than the average age of death. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And we were- Yeah, that was inexcusable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So why would you leap to Marxism as an explanation for that? Because that's a big leap. I'm not disputing it, but it's a very big leap.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
you characterized it as an extension of grade school, essentially, that there was a lot of memorization, a lot of facts thrown at you that you needed to know and that you could ask the approved questions, right? That's very unlike training to be a scientist, because you have to learn to think critically above all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Well, the kids there were invited to inform on their parents, too. And it's part of classic Marxist doctrine that the familial structure should be decimated and that it's fine for... The Russians made heroes of children who informed on their parents. So how... But... but to see that playing out in the United States and to attribute that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
On the ground and obviously being prepared for moves like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
I know that because one of our best lawsuits... Well, they're not accustomed to having to adjudicate disputes between, like, profound disputes between credible physicians, right? I mean, you can't expect judges to be able... You know what I mean? The judgments are going to stay intact as long as the physicians are basically playing a straight game.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And all of a sudden, now, everything's thrown up in the air. You can't even trust the damn journals anymore.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yes, well, depends on the judge.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And I trained as a clinical psychologist and the model for clinical psychology was the Boulder model, Colorado, Boulder, Colorado model. And that was scientist practitioner, but scientist first. And that meant critical thinking because science is in large part an adversarial enterprise, like law in that regard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So that'll have effect there, too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Okay, so we're nearing the normal closing time, but I still want to talk to you about J6, so we'll go a little longer. And then I think on the Daily Wire side, for all of you who are watching and listening, I think we'll talk about your vision, your opinion of...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
the new administration and what's going to happen when Trump takes office and what your hopes are and what should happen, what role you might play there. At least, I don't know how associated you are with the new people who are coming in. So we'll do that on the dailyware side, but I would like to Well, there's still places we haven't gone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And I'd like to hear about January 6th as well, because there's a huge story there that we haven't even delved into. So is it reasonable to leap to that? Pretty much. Okay, let's do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to talk to Dr. Simone Gold, and she had quite a story to tell. Interweaving medicine. She's a physician, emergency room physician for 20 years, a lawyer, a graduate of Stanford Law School, and she was one of the youngest physicians physicians who ever graduated in the United States, and then also went to Stanford Law School.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
That you couldn't speak?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So how would you characterize the difference in your experience at medical school and at law school with regard to your ability to think critically? Because you didn't say anything about learning to think critically at medical school, but you definitely said, well, that adversarial training is... you're always looking for like five sides to an argument, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And learning how to make the case for every side simultaneously. A necessary thing if you're going to think scientifically, right? So can you contrast that and characterize also what you think now about medical education, not only given your experience in medical school and in law school, but also given everything else that happened to you afterward?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
This is at your home?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So the emergency room training came in handy then. Mm-hmm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Oh, yeah. So that's the point of the theater.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right. Right. Okay, now you went to trial for this. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Oh, I see. That was the biggest club they could wield.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
That would have been your presumption.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Really? Mm-hmm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah. Well, everybody who's watching and listening should pay careful attention to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Wow. It's really scary. So like. What was going on in your mind when you heard that? I mean, were you in a state of disbelief again?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Was it the sentence or the fact that this had happened? I mean, obviously, both.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So you've talked about a couple of things that have happened to you that you couldn't believe. Has that left you with any post-traumatic stress disorder? Do you know? Because that derealization, you know, that sense of this can't possibly be happening, that's a good predictor of post-traumatic stress, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Because that means you've been affected at a level that's so fundamental that it's easier to believe that things aren't real than to assume that what's happening is happening, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So the implicit presumption there is that what you're taught is correct. Absolutely. And your job is to learn it and then demonstrate that you have that knowledge. Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Nightmares or anything like that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Realistic? Yeah, well, it's a tough one, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
like that, right? Well, we'll turn to that on the Daily Wire side. So one final question to close this off is like, how do you do in prison?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And so, well, tell me about that. How'd that work for you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And so what did isolation mean? Did that mean solitary?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Oh, yeah. And why'd they do that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Well, solitary is bad enough so that you can punish the most antisocial people with it, right? I mean, that's how social human beings are, is that you can take the most antisocial people there are and punish them by isolating them, right? Yeah. It was terrible. Okay, so let's just close this with an ending to the story, although we're going to continue it on the Daily Wire side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
When did you, did you serve the full 60 days? You did. They kept you in the full 60 days, okay. When were you released? September 22. Okay. And in a relatively brief period of time, what have you been doing? since then and what are you planning to do?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
How big is the organization now?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
How come you're not beaten down? Or are you? Like, you don't appear to be at all. Like, your demeanor is very positive. I don't really see any signs of anything like depression. No. Yeah, well, that's a lot, right? I mean, your life was thrown up in a variety of different ways, and then you were hit hard after that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
My experience with people who've been hurt is the best way to hurt someone is to hurt them, and then just when they're getting up, hurt them again. And then if you can do that twice, that often finishes people. But you seem to be cruising along...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Right. So your fundamental belief has remained intact, right, at the lowest or the most profound possible level. Right. Great.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Well, that's a good segue to the next part of this conversation, which will continue on the Daily Wire side, because I'll talk to you about your, well, your future plans and your feelings about your thoughts about this new administration and what you can see and why you remain hopeful in the face of that situation. a lot in the face of all of that, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So for everybody watching and listening, join us on the Daily Wire side. And so thank you very much for coming to Toronto and, well, telling that story, which is quite the story. Is it rare? It's a lot less rare than it was 20 years ago, unfortunately. Right, right. And, you know, maybe things will turn around. And I guess we'll talk about that on the Daily Wire side. Very nice to talk.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Thank you so much. Yeah, you bet. And to the film crew here in Toronto, thanks very much for arranging this. And to the Daily Wire for making this possible. Well, and to all of you watching and listening for your support. It's much appreciated your time and attention. Yeah. Ciao.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Well, if what you're being taught is correct, then learning the algorithm is the right thing. But the problem is, is that often what you're being taught is not correct, either diagnostically or with regard to treatment. And that can be a major problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So you were not... That means you're also multiplying the probability of false positives.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Yeah, yeah, it's making sense. Okay, so with regards to So most of the physicians that I interacted with were psychiatrists because there was some overlap in our research orientation. And one of the things also I saw was that the psychiatrists who did research tended to outsource their statistics. And you can't do that, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
That's not an acceptable means of doing research because statistics aren't algorithmic. They're an investigative tool. And unless you do your own statistics, you don't know your data and you have no idea what you've discovered. And so that was, but also, it was also the case that like learning to analyze scientific research, that's a very difficult skill to master.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
And I would say it's probably something more akin to law than medicine because you have to think extraordinarily critically. And it wasn't obvious to me at all that the physicians that I interacted with had been trained in the least to really critically assess the relevant research literature. Now, is that too harsh, or what do you think about that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
So those are stellar accomplishments. And I say that to establish her credentials because she has been profoundly pilloried as a quack, in her own words, because of her stance on COVID, the COVID mandates on hydroxychloroquine more particularly, but the mandates really more broadly, and has... also served time in prison in consequence of her appearance on January 6th.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
That's a problem because most research is bad.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
The problem is, is it's hard to learn to be skeptical enough. I mean, psychology has gone through what the psychologists like to describe as a replication crisis, which is their discovery mostly by social psychologists who dreadfully deserved their replication crisis, that at least 50 percent of what's published is simply not true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold
Now, that never shocked me, because I presume fundamentally that if five percent of what we publish was actually true and original, that's a five percent improvement in knowledge. in the total knowledge base on the research side per year. That's a stellar accomplishment, but it does mean that 95% of it's chaff and not wheat. And that's a very, very hard distinction to draw.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Are you a conservative comic? Is that a reasonable thing to say no?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So we saw each other on Kill Tony. I didn't expect that. I didn't know you were going to be there. Neither did I. Tony's a rough guy. Tony's so angry because everybody thinks he's gay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
What year?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Right. I would have pegged you younger than 38, by the way. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I guess that's a compliment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Tyler told me that when he was a kid, he used his acting ability, his comedic ability, as a defense in a way, as a mode of coping, and that it wasn't until he was in his 30s that a more genuine approach to his thoughts melded with his acting ability.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
You know, the universities didn't really go sideways till about 2000 and started around 2010. And so you were in there when they still functioned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Sorry, you made a bunch of jokes. We'll get to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
I was small. Well, everyone was small as a child, but I was like,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
under five foot two i think when i graduated from high school so that was rather annoying yeah i bet yeah i think when i first got my driver's license i had to sit on like two phone books to see over the top of the dash oh that was not very good for my like cool status among but it probably made you funny because you are very funny yeah well i had to use my mouth you know to to defend myself against the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
bullies sure and then you grew and my friends like the northern albertan culture was uh a comedic culture like northern albertans are very funny albertans in general and i had a lot of friends who just all we did was tell jokes to each other all we did was try to our competition was really for wit that was the laughs the biggest laugh the biggest laugh one yeah and i had some great friends guys i still know who were uh
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, they were extremely funny. So that was fun, really fun.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Good, good. Put the damn suit on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
See, I can't tell a joke. Like a prepared joke, when I lecture, I don't ever use notes or anything like that. It has to be spontaneous.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, well, you can take notes beforehand, and you can sort your head out, but it's way better to... Because then you have to find it. Well, and you can also pay attention to the audience, which makes a huge difference, right? Because you get that connection, and you can...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
You can play off the understanding of the audience and then they trust you because you're trusting them and it gets the dynamic is much better. No one should lecture with notes and no one should ever read a lecture. Well, there is the odd person who can get away with it, but they have to be like professional actors to manage that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And maybe I could learn to tell jokes that were scripted, but generally something will pop into my head and I think I'm going to say this. I don't give a damn.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, it's fun.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So we delved into that, his familial background, the trouble he encountered as a kid, his encounter over a decade or more with cancel culture, his acting career, and then his reemergence, really, on the comedic stage. prior to the tour that is going on now until the end of 2025. So join us for that. So I think you deserve all this attention. Three cameras, like 10 people, all focused on you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
It's fun. It's great fun to manage that. Yeah, well, and the set is actually... The lecture has a comedic structure in a way because... the whole lecture, if it works right, has a punchline. That punchline isn't necessarily one that will elicit laughs, but that's also something that's extremely entertaining is to try to juggle a number of balls and then land them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Well, that's what you do if you land a joke, and that's great. And then the audience is very appreciative of that, and the whole evening concludes in a satisfactory manner. You know, the weird thing is, the same thing often happens in a podcast.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
You know, I've noticed that if you pay enough attention, which you always should do, by the way, I figured out this week that everything is a burning bush if you pay enough attention to it. That's what that story in the Old Testament means, is that if you get to the bottom of something by paying attention to it, you see God. That's right. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
That's what happens with hallucinogens, is you get that experience. But if you pay enough attention to anything, it's capable of revealing everything. In any case, if you pay enough attention in a podcast, there'll be a natural narrative arc. And then there'll be a landing, you know, where the guest says something that really concludes things nicely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And all that depends on is paying enough attention to. So that's fun to track.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Well, started watching your damn lectures. Yeah? And you took them with some degree of seriousness? Oh, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
That's kind of the opposite of the burning bush. That hitting rock bottom. The wet bush. Yeah, yeah. The wet stick. That means that you get to the bottom of something. And sometimes it's hell, right? Yeah. Right, right. Often, often it's hell. It kind of has to be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
I think that if you practiced aiming up with enough religious devotion, so to speak, and you paid enough attention, that's in the Gospels. Christ teaches people how to pray, and that's on the Sermon on the Mount, which is the longest continuous utterances we have from Him in principle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
But actually, it's an instruction manual, and the instruction is brilliant, especially in the context of the Old Testament. There's an idea in the Old Testament that you consecrate the firstborn to God,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And what that means, psychologically, is that when you embark on a new endeavor, even a new episode in a day, like any time the set shifts, that's a good way of thinking about it, you need to remember what you're doing and why. And then you might think, well, okay, let's say that we're setting the frame for this conversation. Okay, so why don't we think
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Why don't we try to make this the deepest conversation we could manage? I'm trying not to be funny, by the way. I'm really holding back. I hope you can be funny.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
This is for you, come on. Though I did wear this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
He can do that in real time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So I'll finish this story and we'll return to your narrative. The idea is that before you undertake something, you remember if you're wise, that you might as well do it in the best possible way. So that needs to be the aim. The aim would be to do it in the best possible way. So that's to aim up. That's, in the religious language, that's to put the Father before all else, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Heaven, the kingdom of heaven. So to try to make the outcome perfect. So then you have to figure out, well, why the hell are you doing this? And maybe it's because you're aiming down or you're causing trouble. Well, you know, you'll get it. If that's what you're aiming at, you'll get it. Once you've established your aim, then pay attention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So that's why Christ says to consider the lilies of the valley, that they don't toil or spin, and that God's clothed them in glory. The idea is that once you set your aim high, All you have to do is pay attention, and that's actually correct. That's actually how perception works, because perception guides you to an aim. So what does that mean? Well, what's a prayer for?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Prayer is to set your aim, not to wish for things, to set your aim. And so that's an unbelievably useful thing to know, if you can practice it. And why wouldn't you practice it? If the consequence is that when you set your aim, you can see the pathway forward, which is the truth, then Okay, so you were, you found your mother.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
You took it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
But I'm going to let you have that. Well, you did allude to it, though, because you talked about something that happened to you when you found your mother. Okay, so what happened?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Curly hair.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Oh, that's impressive. And then I made my damn bed. Yeah, well, that's really, you know, going the whole nine yards. So the last time I saw you. You look fantastic, by the way. Thank you, sir. Thank you. You're welcome. I think the last time I saw you was at Rogan's Comedy Mothership. Is that correct?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And how was it that you realized that? Because she tried to, yeah. Because it failed you. Oh, this isn't about me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Well, everybody has their own destiny.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Well, if you tell the truth, then you're probably a conservative comedian.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
It's really switched. Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh. I heard him as a Canadian. I went down to L.A., I don't know, 40 years ago, a long time ago. And I heard Rush Limbaugh. And he was like Trump in a way. He was so nefarious. And I heard him and I thought... This guy's a comedian. Like, people were taking him seriously, but mostly I thought he was hilarious. He was just hilarious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
I say, fine. Yeah, yeah, right. Exactly. And you can see that at the comedy mothership too, right? Because... I would say the comedy that I heard there would generally be branded conservative. But that's a very strange thing, because first of all, conservative comedy, that's a very weird thing. But also, it's just that so many things are forbidden now. and mostly forbidden by the left.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, that was a surprise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Let's take that apart a little bit because it's a good thing and a bad thing. It's very stressful, but it's also full of opportunity, right? I mean- when things are left on the table, you can take them. You might have to pay the price for taking them, but you can take them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And so in the comedy world, it seems that the people who are willing to take the risks are likely to be the ones that were successful. Now, when you decided to start saying what you really believed. So that's, the Jungians would call that, that's the encounter with, that's the realization of the persona. You know, in the Pinocchio movie, Pinocchio is a puppet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Other things are pulling his strings, right? And he comes to the truth, partly because he realizes he's lying. And that's when he starts to become real, right? That's a standard psychological transformation. And so that occurred when you realized that the act that you were putting on wasn't going to do the trick, fundamentally. Is that fair?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
You can do whatever you want.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Oh yeah, that's dangerous.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Well, within, you know, reasonable bounds.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
That's probably wise. Sure. Yeah. My friend Jonathan Paggio thinks the post-war interpretation of the world is coming to an end and that Kanye is leading that. That could be true. Oh, who the hell knows what's true. Yeah. Have you listened to the song? Yes. Sure. When did I listen to it? I heard it in the car as you pulled up. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
You don't hold back.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Right, so you were seeing yourself reflected in these other people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Right, right. So you just do it by telepathy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
that really me out yeah i had a friend who really at least committed suicide because of his excess guilt yeah i can absolutely understand there were other things going on but that was a major that was a major player he'd swallowed the whole patriarchy oppressive patriarchy victim victimizer narrative regarded himself as a victimizer regarded masculinity in its essence as corrupt and
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And he decided to take a kind of nihilistic Buddhist approach to it and not do anything, which had the additional advantage of irresponsibility, but just killed him. He was smart, too, and talented. And it's going to kill a lot of young boys.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
No, no, that was old punk, I think, that I was playing, or the Pogues. I don't remember what was going on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, well, you can bloody well be sure that the people who have absolutely no merit are gonna find some other way to categorize human beings. Sure. And that's at the bottom of all of this. It's like it is an absolute 100% war on merit by the psychopaths. Sure. And they found a guilt lever that's so effective It's so effective. Yeah, it's appalling.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And so George Floyd caused even more trouble after he died than when he was alive. Sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Very impressive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Lawsuits are not much fun.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, well, he's got a manic touch, eh? So that inflates people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Well, you're going to break one way or another. Sure. You can maybe choose what you're going to break over. That's your choice. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, so... Yeah, it's very strange, and it's very hard to know what to make of it, and I don't. I mean, I've seen a terrible rise in anti-Semitic content on, well, university campuses. Let's start there. Go Columbia! The inclusivity places. At Harvard, bloody pathetic hell holes. Sure. But on X, too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Good, let's talk about your career. Okay, so now you mentioned that you started changing the way that you were approaching things when you realized that you couldn't interfere with your mother's destiny, so to speak, that you couldn't save her. You couldn't save her with your act, let's say. But you didn't stop acting. You didn't stop comedy. You said you started telling the truth more.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
You started really saying what you... what you had to say, what did that do to your career?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Well, that's really working at the comedy mothership. I mean, the comedians there, they pretty much say what they want.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So what have you, how many cities is that over the, and for what span of time? Or is this permanent at the moment?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
It was a word of mouth? Like, how did you get the opportunities, the micro-opportunities to begin with?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, it's a reliable vice, greed. Yeah. Like if someone's motivated by money, you can understand them. Yep. Yeah. If they're motivated by ideology, it's like all bets are off, man. You have no idea what's going on in their head. Money?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
That's a good sign. Which I have fun with. That's a good sign. It just happened in Toronto. Yeah. Oh, really? In Toronto?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So why was she at a comedy club? Just to be offended? Is that the plan? Probably.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
It is. To be offended and then morally outraged.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Oh, yeah, well, I'm going to come and see you. Now, it's Sunday, right? I think I'm going to come Sunday or Friday. I have to figure that out yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So are you... Where would you put yourself in the arc of your career? Like you said that you were doing reasonably well in Hollywood at one point. Yeah, I was growing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
That wasn't on my bucket list, being Lady Ballers for the Daily Wire.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
I don't imagine that was in her bucket list either.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
I thought that was brilliant. Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe that's starting to come to an end, eh? The UK decided that men and women actually exist, and the Supreme Court ruled on that, so that was a big deal. And you Americans seem to be a little more sane about that. Canada, of course, no, but... We like to lag in our progressive manner, and especially economically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So you know that the typical Canadian now makes 60% of the typical American income.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
No, it was 70%. I think they only make 70 cents on the dollar. The wage gap? Because it's all they're worth, as we all know. Okay. So, yeah. Obviously, it's because the statistics are calculated by dim-witted, envious feminists who have nothing better to do than whine and bitch. I've dated plenty of them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah. Was I horrible? I don't know. You started drinking at what age?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yes, when I figured out something horrible... Do you want to know what it is? Do you know how you define consent? Marriage. Yeah. That's good. Well, look, I've really tried to think it through, you know, because there are so many... There's too many variables every other way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So like one of the things, I saw this starting to happen on university campuses when they put all these rules in about what constituted consent. Now the thing they really always avoided was alcohol because there's no date rape without alcohol. Like alcohol is at the bottom of almost all normative sexual misbehavior.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So if the universities were the least bit serious about the things they claim to be serious about, for example, they'd focus on alcohol.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Well, and the strange thing about it is that there's some truth in that, right? Because alcohol does make people drunk. Well, unconscious, if you drink enough of it, that happens to be a problem. And then before unconscious, there's not knowing what the hell's going on, or caring. And then there's the next day regret. And part of the next day regret is, well, did I really give consent?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And then you can't remember. Like we showed, I did a lot of research on alcohol, we showed that if people drank enough to get their blood alcohol level up to legal intoxication. So that was 0.08. They showed about a 75% decrement in memory after three minutes. Like you could tell them something, ask them three minutes later, the people who were, and that's not very drunk.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
It's called the Joe Biden effect. Yeah, right, right, right. So, you know, under what circumstances do you actually have consent, like real consent? Well, I guess it depends on how seriously you take sex. If you think that it's a game, then there's no issue. But the problem with that theory is it's not a game. So you're liable to get hooked in a vicious manner.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
What did you start drinking at 10?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And I don't see any solution to that except for the traditional solutions. And the kind of stories you're telling, the fact that the workplaces have become these toxic pits of surveillance I mean, where the hell are people supposed to meet each other if it's not at work? Like it's so insane.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
What, you're only gonna meet the people that you meet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So to me, that was a place. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And that was- Which is about as innocuous an approach as you can possibly manage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah. What about the criminal activity?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, but I would say also likely dreadfully common. Yeah. It's also the case that when those draconian policies get put into place, people can weaponize them immediately. And the worst people do that instantly. The most jealous people, the most, what? The most sadistic people, the most manipulative people, they grab onto those, like, inhuman rules and apply them for their own benefit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
The only way you push back against anything ever is by telling the truth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
That's the only strategy. Yeah. There are no strategies. This is something else that's very useful to realize. In life, There are no strategies. Or you could put it a different way. You could say that the best medium to long-term strategy is the truth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And so when I'm in a complicated situation, which is quite common, I just say what I think, always.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, yeah. Well, this also means that you have to act in a manner that allows you to tell the truth about what you did. Yeah. Right? Because... Well, for obvious reasons, because otherwise you have to pretend you did something else. So that forces you to clean up your life so that you can actually represent it accurately. What happened when you went public with this story, such as it was?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Okay. That's slightly different than actually robbing a store.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Well, again, again, you know, I think practically speaking, it's... See, the truth is a weird strategy because... Well, look, look at it this way. Why do people lie? They lie to gain an advantage they don't deserve, or they lie to avoid a punishment they do deserve, generally. Like, there's other reasons, but those are two big categories.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
But the problem is that there's a difference between what happens to you in a year and what happens now. And so if you lie, well, you might avoid what's coming to you, but then you don't learn, and you might gain something you don't deserve, but word gets around.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And so it could easily be that you'll find out that if you can be patient enough, and that's part of what constitutes faith in the truth, right? If you're patient enough, it will turn around. Right now, the journey to turning around might not be fun. I've watched you go through it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Actually, because I understand, I actually understand what happens if you get tangled up in lies. It's not what you said. In your household, nobody could tell each other the truth. Well, that's a totalitarian state. Like that's hell. Oh yeah, you don't want that. That's not good. That's not good. There's nothing worse than that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Oh, yeah. That was quite common. Or allowed them to. Allowed them to. Or listened. Yeah, that's very common. It's very common. Yeah, steeped in sin. That's the theory, right? That's when your whole environment is dominated by lies. It's brutal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Nighttime businesses are a risk for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So tell me about the tour and how that's going and what size audiences you're playing and how often you're laying out your comedic routines.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
We're very careful with the people we travel with. I have logistics guys, security guys. I have a great tour manager, John O'Connell. He used to be a comedian. John O'Connell. Never causes any trouble, always in good humor, entirely not neurotic. Plus he used to be a comedian, so he's damn funny. If there's any problem that comes up, he solves it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And my logistics guys, my security guys, they're all awake and they treat the public well. very well, which is also seriously important, right? So yeah, yeah. And then you get to the stage on time and away you go.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Well, you're living on the road, right? And then if you're playing the long-term game, you want to think, okay, my wife and I sat down and talked about this a lot. It's like, all right, we have an opportunity here. It's an unparalleled opportunity, a more or less continuous book tour. I heard you're tough to share a room with. Yeah, well, we realized that we were living on the road.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And that was two close quarters. And so that actually worked out extremely well. And the reason it worked out well, there was the sacrifice, of course, that went along with it. the tour is much more sustainable. And that's what you have to think, like, what's getting in the way? What is going to make us say no instead of yes?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And then you have to be honest about that because you think, well, that little thing wouldn't make you say no. It's like, you don't have to have many obstacles littering your path before you start taking something for granted and stop doing it. Really. And so you want to be thinking for the long haul. And I don't know, like, how long do you think you, if you could, how long would you tour?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
That'd be a psychological question, I suppose.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Is that worth revisiting? I mean, look, I don't want to mess around with your life, and I have no right or desire to do so because it's your life. I'll tour with you. Sure, I'll do it. You have a reason to be annoyed, but I wonder if, are there opportunities that you're forgoing because you're angry? Sure. And do you need that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Like people make mistakes, they make a lot of stupid mistakes and the people that you're talking about made a lot of stupid mistakes, but that was everywhere. It was a real social contagion. And I guess maybe I'm wondering if you made your point and whether you're hurting yourself in consequence of, I know you stuck to your guns and I'm sure that was bloody difficult, but have you made your point?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Sure, I would love to. Yeah, fine. Put aside 5% of your time every week to think about the lawsuit and never think about it other than that. Good, yeah. So put aside some time. Yeah. because it's gonna, who knows how long it'll go. It could go for 10 more years. Like it could go a long time. So you have to segregate it, isolate it, and not let it bleed over into the rest of your life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
I'm getting better at that, for sure. Well, putting away that time to think about it, then you know when the thoughts come to mind, you think, no, I'm gonna think about that Tuesday at 10.30 for 20 minutes or for an hour, whatever it takes, but it's better to have that sequestered to manage it. Great idea. Yeah, yeah, it helps a lot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Just like abortion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, well, a lawsuit's no joke. It's kind of like a chronic illness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Safe, legal, and rare. Yeah, that reminds me. I guess the Democrats kind of mucked up on the rare side, eh? I don't fancy that. Well, with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, no kidding.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, okay. And I have, and I can go on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
People are suffering still. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. I don't think I probably went to, I don't know, 150 cities around the COVID period. I think Toronto was the worst. What do you mean? Oh, how they... In terms of lockdown and intensity of oppression and self-righteousness, that whole combination, it was pretty brutal. And I don't think the city has recovered from it. No.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
You know, is it just... Yes, well, he's departed for parts unknown, thank God. Yes. He's taking all his shame with him. Unfortunately, leaving another liberal in charge of the country. So Canadians are going to pay for that, in my estimation. Sure. I don't know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Probably as a consequence of people like you doing what you're doing with the lawsuit, you know, is by trying to set things right again and by not putting up with that kind of nonsense anymore. to root it out, that's going to be a lot of work. There's a lot of nonsense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
There's all the net zero nonsense, all that climate apocalypse catastrophe, all the notions that there are too many people on the planet, all that anti-family nonsense, all this idiocy between men and women that have divided them politically in such a catastrophic way, all this racial tension that was generated out of nothing by ideologues starting in about 2010. You know, Toronto,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
had become race blind. When I raised my kids in Toronto, no one cared, literally no one cared. That's how it was. And that meant the bloody moralizing progressives had nothing to do. And so, yeah, problem solved. Well, we need a problem because we don't have anything else to do except complain and whine and protest. Better manufacture one. Sickening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So there's a lot that needs to be straightened out still. Yeah. Well, you do that by telling the truth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And you know, if you tell the truth in a witty manner, you get to be a comedian. Sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
How many impressions can you do?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
It was my ability to mirror people because I thought... You know, that capacity to modulate your voice like that, I mean, that's really a remarkable talent. I really enjoyed watching Rich Little, for example. There was a French-Canadian who was an unbelievably good mimic, too. I can't remember his name. He was very famous for a while. Jim Carrey's fantastic. Yeah, Carrey's good at it, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Nobody can do... Russell Brand's pretty good at it. He's good. Yeah, that's that ability to... You're particularly good at it with the voice. You know, some of the impressionists, they also, I don't know, maybe you can do that too. They get the gestures down while you do that with me to some degree. Sure, yeah. But it's like being inhabited by the spirit of someone else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
It's real talent, that shape-shifting ability.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So what's it like being a, are you a conservative comic? Is that a reasonable thing to say no?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, part of acting is the opportunity to inhabit all sorts of different fictional realities and experiment with them. I mean, that's why people go to movies to see that. Yeah. So it's a perfectly reasonable thing for an actor to do. It's nice to know what your own voice is, though, that's for sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So I'm going to come and see you Friday or Sunday. Fantastic. I think you're in Phoenix. Tell me where your next venues are and how people can find your tickets.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Everybody's vacation favorite.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
I see, I see. Because I'm in Europe between January and March in 2026. I'll see you. Maybe we can- That would be fun. That would be fun.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, well, maybe we can do that in Phoenix.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
That might be fun. Oh, yes. I wasn't even going to ask. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll see what comes up spontaneously. Okay. That would be good. Well, it's a pleasure talking to you. Absolute pleasure. Yeah, well, and congratulations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Well, you handled it 100%, as far as I'm concerned. I'm looking forward to seeing your show. It was very interesting to hear your story. Congratulations on your persistence and your persistent success. I mean, you've taken quite the snake-like path on the entertainment side and a lot of obstacles, but...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
the fact that you raised your career again from the ashes on the comedy circuit, that's, and I really liked the, the emphasis in your story about the fact that, you know, you kind of played anywhere and you have to do that. You have to do the work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And you, you take the opportunities where they're given to you and then maybe they'll grow. If you do them seriously, if you take them with some gratitude, then they'll grow. And now you've got a real fan base, you know, so that's, that's a ground up, Word of mouth, fan base, that's a good deal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
That's right, man, no matter what. Yeah, I've been in bed... Many times, half an hour before a lecture, an hour before a lecture, thinking, Jesus, I can't even get out of bed. I'm supposed to be in front of 3,000 people in an hour. There's no way that's going to happen. And change their lives, hopefully. But it happens. Good for you. Yeah, yeah. You look fantastic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Well, and thank God for that opportunity, you know, because it's really good to have something to get the hell out of bed for when you're not feeling that great. And that's some real utility and purpose. That's for sure. Yeah. Good talking to you, man. I'm looking forward to the show. Well, thank you. Yeah, you bet. You bet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And everybody watching and listening on YouTube and the other platforms, Spotify, et cetera, Apple, thank you very much for your time and attention. Great to talk to Tyler Fisher today. Make your bed. Yeah, exactly. It really started there. Yeah, well, little things you do every day, that's your life. Right. People don't understand that. They're waiting for something special.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
It's like, no, your life is what you do every day. So get it right. Yeah. Thank you very much for your time and attention. Thank you to The Daily Wire for making this possible and the film crew here in Scottsdale today. Much appreciated. We're going to continue this for half an hour on The Daily Wire side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And so if those of you who are interested in continuing and who would like to throw some support The Daily Wire way, join us and we'll delve a little bit more into Tyler's background and his career and the state of comedy for that matter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Didn't they sell all their DNA samples to the Chinese? Oh, probably. Yeah, I think so. I think so. That means they can target viruses for all of us. Sure. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So why didn't you get the shot? I had. Apart from being sane. I got the goddamn shot. That was stupid. Well. I was so sick, though, I couldn't think so. You got what? One? Two. Two?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
It's the mandated thing. That's for sure. That was absolutely unconscionable. There's been some things happen in the last decade that are just beyond comprehension, and that is certainly one of them. The cops are coming just from us talking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, well, far right is pretty much anything that isn't communist. That's true. That's especially true in Europe. Right? Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, no, it's a hell of a situation to set up where the vaccine manufacturers have no liability and they can use force. Like, that's just an invitation to psychopaths, obviously, because you can make an infinite amount of money with no consequences. Like, there's a deal for you. Sure. So, yeah, it's pretty sad. So we saw each other on Kill Tony. I didn't expect that, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Hello, everybody. So, a lighter podcast today, given that I'm speaking with a comedian, Tyler Fisher. Tyler's in the midst of a lengthy multi-city tour. He's got 100 venues lined up before the end of the year, before the end of 2025, and It's light, of course, because it's comedy, but there's a dark edge to it too, and that's also not so uncommon in comedy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Neither did I. I showed up and Tony asked me to participate, which was very good of him. And I had quite a fine time. It was quite fun, but I really didn't know what the hell I was doing. Well, I didn't. That's often the case, so. Had you seen it before? Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, well, I hadn't seen the whole show either. I'd just seen enough of it to kind of know what was going on. It took me a bit of time to put two and two together. Well, I've watched it. I was at Rogan's Comedy Mothership. within the last month again. And, oh yeah, because I was on Rogan, that was the reason. And Kill Tony was on that night. And what do I think of it? Well, Tony's a rough guy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
He's got a saw-edge tongue. Yeah. And he's kind of no holds barred. But he's a weird, it's a weird show because it's brutal and it's a great opportunity. And so that's a weird juxtaposition because... If people do well, they can have a career. And that's a big deal. And Tony's provided that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And I guess the price that people pay for having that opportunity is if they have to put up with the skewering. Maybe that's a fair deal. I mean, everybody's doing it. They're all adults.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Right, so Kill Tony's probably no more brutal than it was before, and it's a lot faster.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So tell me, how did your career start? So you said you were a terrible delinquent, and you were drinking when you were 10. Did you become an alcoholic?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Oh, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah. I took it to guarantee an A to pass me. Okay, how did it happen that you befriended him or vice versa before you took the class?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Maybe it was particular- It was uncommon in the public school I went to. Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
And the dark edge is, ah, he's probably one of the most well-cancelled comedians that are still staggering around, so to speak, today. And we delve into that, and we also investigated the relationship between acting, entertaining, being truthful... and being genuine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
I see. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
He came out as- Oh yeah, that's a shock.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, well, the shirt.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
I think Tony's so angry because everybody thinks he's gay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
Okay, so it was on from that to the art teacher.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
550. Broken, Blacklisted, and Saved by Comedy | Tyler Fischer
So you had competitive humor with your brothers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah, much appreciated. So, I thought we would start by talking practically a bit about... You've lectured. You've done two lectures for Peterson Academy? I've done five.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And what they've done is map out the weight of... data points. So, you know, if there's five facts at hand and I could, in principle, use those facts to guide my perception of my action, I still have to solve the problem of how I would weight the facts. And you might say, well, you don't have to weight them. And I would say, well, no, that just means you've all weighted them equivalently.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
There's no, no, if you have more than one thing at hand and you have to combine them in some manner, you have to weight them. There's no option. And you can weight them all one, but that's also a decision and it's arbitrary. And so instead, even to perceive, we have to weight the facts. And as far as I can tell, a story is a description of the structure that we use to weight the facts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And so that doesn't mean that the facts... That doesn't mean that... our perceptions have no structure and that everything's subjective, but it also doesn't mean that the facts speak for themselves, like the empiricists would insist, or the behaviorists for that matter, you know, that there's a stimulus and then there's an automatic response or something of that nature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So I know that's a bit of a scattershot, but I hope you can see what I'm aiming at. And I guess I'm wondering, what do you think of the proposition that we see the world through a story, for example? Mm-hmm. Hello everybody. So my wife and I are going back out on tour. my new book, We Who Wrestle With God. I'm going to be walking through a variety of biblical stories.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Now the postmodern types and the neo-Marxists, they think the story is one of power and that is a dangerous story. The fundamental rock upon which true civilization is built is encapsulated in the biblical stories and so I've spent a lot of time trying to understand them and the point of the tour and the book is to bring
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Okay, two are out. You've done five. Excellent. Okay, so... Run through that a bit. Tell people what you're teaching and what the experience was like and how you understand the mission of this new enterprise. Why you got involved, all of that, if you would.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
whatever understanding I've managed to develop to as wide an audience as possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Was that Johnson who kicked the stone?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Today I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Stephen Hicks, who's a philosopher with a stellar academic career, very good author. And we talked about, well, we talked about his contributions to Peterson Academy first. He's taught five courses at this new online university that some of you may be aware of, and the rest of you should be, as far as I'm concerned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So that's an ontological question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
I think the people that we've brought together on Peterson Academy too are at the forefront of that attempt to integrate. And so that's one of our, you might say, one of our educational themes as we move forward is to continue that investigation. John Vervaeke, I would say, is somebody who's on the forefront of that on the psychological and neuroscience side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So let's go back to your demonstration of primary sensory input, right? Just hitting the table. So I'll outline a neuroscience approach to that. So, you might think that you perceive, and then you evaluate, and then you think, and then you act, and that's like the causal chain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
None of that's exactly correct because even when you're responding to a primary stimulus like that, so to speak, there's a hierarchy of neurological responses that are operating more or less simultaneously. Now, I'd say more or less because you do have reflexive action.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
I think the simplest way to understand this is to assume that what you're detecting as a consequence of the slap that you delivered to the table is a patterned waveform.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
at one level of analysis it's the state the same stimulus let's say insofar as it's an isolatable sound that you could record and duplicate with a with a phone recorder or something like that but then as you said the fact that you come to that experience with different expectations colors it and so there is a way to think about that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
I think the best way to start to understand it is to think about the pattern. So there's a waveform pattern that propagates in the air, which is the delivery system, obviously, for the stimulus. And then there's an auditory pattern. Now,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
When your nervous system receives that pattern, it doesn't go to one point, place, and then another place, and then another place, and then another place in a linear progression. There's some of that, but what happens is that the pattern is... assessed simultaneously by multiple different levels of the nervous system, right? So the most primary level would be spinal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And there are very few connections between the auditory system and the spinal response system. And so, for example, if I was on edge or uncertain about you or about this circumstance, and you hit the table in that manner unexpectedly, one probable outcome is a startle reflex. And a startle reflex is a variant of a predator response. It's of a response to predation. And it's basically...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
auditory signal onto spinal cord mapping. And the initial phase of the startle response is, you could say, it's pre-conscious and it's pre-emotional. And the reason it's pre is because the time it takes for the signal to propagate onto the spinal receptors is shorter than the time it takes for the signal to propagate even to the emotions. And you need that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So, for example, if you're walking down a pathway and out of the periphery of your eye, you detect a snake and you have really good snake detectors, especially in the periphery and the bottom part of your vision. It's different in the top part, by the way, because there are more snakes on the ground than there are in trees. If you...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
take the time to move your eyes, the center of your eyes, so that you can see the snake, and then you evaluate the snake emotionally. By the time you've done that, the snake's already bitten you. It's too long a time. Whereas if you use these peripheral receptors that map right onto your spine, you can jump before the snake strikes, hopefully. Cats can do it, by the way, about 10 times as fast.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Well, we're pretty good too, as it turns out. Yeah, but not as fast as cats, but fast enough to often escape from snakes. Nice. And so you get this first level response that's almost entirely reflexive. That's what the early behaviorists were discovering too when they were talking about stimulus response.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Like there are somewhat automatic response systems that are very primordial and basic that do almost a one-to-one mapping of sensory pattern onto behavioral output. Very few neural interconnections. And the disadvantage to that is that it's a rather fixed response pattern, and the advantage of is it's super fast. Okay, so now the same pattern propagates up,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So imagine the pattern propagates down on your spine and you can react very quickly. Another part of it propagates into the auditory cortex or the visual cortex. And that's what you see with. And those are actually dissociable. So there are people who have a phenomenon called, condition called blindsight. So if you ask these people if they can see, they tell you no.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Well, if you hold up your hand, for example, they can guess with more than 90% accuracy which hand is up. And it seems to me because it's their visual cortex that's damaged and not their retina. And a lot of the vision... pathways into the brain are still intact, but not the one that mediates conscious vision, which is dependent on the visual cortex.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
But they still have kinetic perception with their eyes. So one of the things I'm doing when I watch you is that I'm picking up where your body is located, and I'm mapping that onto my body. And so if I'm seeing you with blindsight, with your hand up like this, I'll have a sensation in my body that corresponds to your body position and I can read off that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So it's not exactly vision because I'm not seeing you, but it is a form of vision and it's even more sophisticated than that. So if you take these people with blindsight and you show them faces that are angry or afraid and you assess their galvanic skin response, which is a change in sweating, basically, that's associated with emotional arousal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
They'll respond differentially to emotional faces, even though they don't know that. That's blindsight. That's part of blindsight. And so, when you hear or see something, that pattern is being assessed at multiple levels of a very complex hierarchy. And it's not just bottom-up, because that hierarchy also feeds backwards.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So, for example, by the time you're an adult, most of what you see is memory. You just use the sensory input as a hint to pull up the memory. That's also how you get habituated to things. You know, when you see something for the first time, it's got this glow of novelty, this numinous glow of novelty. And what happens is that you, and that's complex and difficult to process.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And then as you become accustomed to it and you build an internal mental model, you replace the perception with memory because that's faster. The problem is, is that the memory that you see is only the fractional meaning of the phenomena that's relevant to the encounters that you had. It shuts everything off and it D, what would you say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
It takes the magic out of the world as you replace perception. Raw perception with memory, you take the magic out of the world. That's a reasonable way of thinking about it. That's why there's a novelty kick, for example. And so the reason I'm bringing this up is because even that relatively straightforward demonstration that you made, that sound that seems self-evident.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
You said right off the bat that there was a level at which both of us experienced that quite differently. You experienced it differently because you knew you were going to do it. It came as a surprise to me. That surprise was moderated by the fact that I know you,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
I know your profession, I know your professional status, I know the purpose of what we're doing here, I know the probability that what I know about you indicates that you would do something that was surprising or dangerous, which is very, very low. So even though it was unexpected, it's bounded in its significance by all of that knowledge. And you might say, well, that's independent of the sense
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
data, but it's not, like, that's a very tricky thing to establish, right? To get that independence, to figure out, well, what's the raw sense data and what's the interpretation? It gets worse than this. You can train dogs to wag their tail when they receive an electric shock. They're happy about it. And so you think electric shock, that's pretty basic sense data. It's like, yeah, yes and no.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
If you reliably pair a shock, now it depends on the magnitude of the shock, obviously. So there are some boundaries around this, but you can train a dog to be excited about the receipt of an electrical shock if you reliably pair it with a food reward. Because the a priori significance of the electric shock might be pain response, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Indicative of the potential for physiological damage, because that's approximately what pain is. But if you associate it with the receipt of a reward, then it takes on a dopaminergic which means that the shock becomes indicative of the receipt of a reward, and that's a positive emotion phenomena, and it can override the shock.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
It's also the case that if you take animals like rats that are pretty intelligent, you put them in a cage, they'll deliver electric shocks to themselves randomly just because they're bored. And horses will do that as well. Now, as I said, it's magnitude dependent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yes, well, of course, people do that. People do that par excellence. And so all of these... It's very difficult to specify a level of analysis where there isn't an interpretive framework simultaneously active as the raw sense data makes itself manifest. Now, I mean, your demonstration was very, what would you say, it cut right to the chase because a sound like that is...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
you might say, is not subject to an infinite number of interpretations, right? There's something there. But it's always nested, it seems to be that it's nested inside a hierarchy of interpretations, a very high-level hierarchy of interpretations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
That's where philosophy starts to become important.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
You know, you see that a little bit You see that a little bit with the evolutionary psychologists who claim that because we evolved for a substantial period of time on the African plains, that our emotional and motivational systems are no longer properly adapted to the modern world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
It's like, I find that that's a variant of the argument that you just laid out, and that it also has the echoes of that rationalist,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
some variants of rationalism that proclamation that emotion is the enemy of reason it's like emotions are unbelievably sophisticated they're low resolution and they're quick they're not as quick as say spinal reflexes but they're faster than thought and they're also broader than thought and they also enable us to evaluate when we don't have enough information to think and they
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
they have their pitfalls like everything human, because nothing human is omniscient, and so we're going to make errors. But the idea that there's a fundamental antipathy between the emotional, the id, let's say, and the ego, because that's a variant of that psychoanalytic theory, that is a misunderstanding of the way that the nervous system is integrated. Okay, so let me run something else by you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Since we've laid out this... I want to run a proposition by you. And it's sort of a variant of the meme theory, although it takes into account the idea that so-called memes, abstractions, compete across historical and evolutionary times. So imagine this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So imagine that there is this level of sensory input that is as close to corresponding with objective reality as we can manage. And then imagine that that's interpreted within this hierarchical framework that we described. Levels of abstraction that rise up to ineffability, essentially. That would be something like the meaning of the fact that you hit the table in this particular context, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Okay, so now imagine you've got this... Imagine that every level of that hierarchy and the totality of the hierarchy competes across evolutionary time. So one way of grounding our thinking in... data is to assume that all of what we know emerges from raw sense data.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
But there's another way of thinking about it, which is that the data is interpreted within a hierarchical framework that's full of feedback loops, right? And there's variant forms of those, those upper level hierarchies. But those forms compete across time. And only... The more successfully they compete across time, the more they become instantiated physiologically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
That's a Baldwin effect selection mechanism. The higher order interpretive structures that produce the best reproductive outcome across time are more likely to become automated at an instinctual level. Emotions would be like that. Like they're not as automatized as spinal reflexes, but they're quite automatized because the sets of emotions that human beings have are very similar.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Anger, fear, surprise, joy, etc. Everyone feels those. When and where is different, but the fact of the emotions is the same. So then imagine that this is something like the domain of iterable and playable games. So imagine that there's a variety of different interpretive frameworks that we lay upon more basic sensory data, but that a relatively small subset of those interpretive frameworks has
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
the capacity for sustainable improvement. So you could think about this. Think about this in the context, let's say, of a marital relationship, right? There's a very large number of ways that your marriage can go wrong, like an indefinite number of ways that your marriage can go wrong. But then there's a constrained number of ways that it will go right. And that's because it's a difficult target.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Imagine that the specifications are something like, for your marriage to be successful, The micro routines and the macro routines have to be such that you're voluntarily okay with them and your wife is voluntarily okay with them. And they bond you more tightly together across time. And this would be the optimal situation. As you lay them out together, they improve.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Okay, and so you could imagine that as the basis for an optimized contractual relationship of any form. But then you could also imagine that the number of variants of the way that you can treat each other for all of those conditions to be met would be low. There's a very small number of voluntary playable games that are iterable across large spans of time that improve as you play them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So then you'd get an evolutionary pressure as well on the domains of possible philosophy, right? That they'd fill up something like a space. And that seems to me to be reflective. It's weird because that's also reflective of an empirical reality, but it's not... It's not the reality that's associated with basic sense data.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
It's more the fact that there is a finite number of complex games that are voluntary playable and that improve. And that's also a fact, right? I mean, and that would be, I think that's partly why there are patterns of ethics that tend to emerge in many different cultures, even independently, right? And that also makes a mockery in some ways of a really radical relativism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
It's not that the value space, the philosophical space isn't relativistic because there's a finite number of interpretive frameworks that actually have anything approximating productive staying power. And that is reflective of something like the structure of reality. It's more sophisticated reflection than the basic sense data. And so, see, I'm saying this because I'm trying to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
mediate between the postmodern claim that we see the world through a narrative, which I think that's true. I think all the neuroscience data points in that direction. And then you might say, well, any old story goes then. It's like, no, just because we see the world through a story doesn't mean that the stories themselves aren't constrained by empirical reality in its most sophisticated sense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And it also doesn't mean that the stories themselves even though their stories fail to correspond to reality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Make a more technical description.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah, that's in keeping with this idea of competition across time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Okay, so let me reformulate the description, and then let's see if that rectifies that problem, and then let's see where we can go with that problem, because I'll object to your objection and see where that goes. So I would say a narrative is a description of the structure through which we see the world, right? That's a different claim. So, because it's not a narrative until I tell it to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Well, that's exactly why I want to have this discussion, because I don't want it, I think it's very dangerous, it's kind of obvious, to drop reality out of the situation. But you're right that the danger of the postmodern formulation is, which is that we see the world through a narrative, let's say, is exactly that, is that the reality drops out of the equation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
There's nothing but the text, let's say. Now, if there's a competition between narratives for their functionality, let's say, reproductive and otherwise, that would go some way to addressing that problem, because there'd be a Darwinian competition between narrative structures that would prioritize some over others. But the description part, the idea that it's a description is relevant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So imagine that wolves in a pack At a perceptual level, the wolves distinguish the rank order of the wolf that they're seeing. And they do that extremely rapidly. Highly social animals are unbelievably good at that. And so the story of the dominance, the story of the hierarchy of the wolves is implicit in the perception of the wolves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And if you describe that, it's a story, but it's not a story before it's described. It's whatever a story is before it's described. It seems to me like it's something like the weights in a neural network. Returning to that idea is that there are certain facts, let's say, that present themselves to us that are much more heavily weighted. And that's axiomatic. It's built into the system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And those would be facts, imagine, that evoke emotional response very rapidly. They're weighted, and that weighting has a biological element and a cultural element. That's not a story. But if you describe that, that's what a story is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
He's taught five courses there, and we... detailed out the structure of the courses. And more importantly and more broadly, I would say, describe the rationale for studying philosophy because he's a professional philosopher as an academic. And so we discussed, well, the importance of a philosophical education.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yes, right. For the wolves, it's a pattern of behavior and a pattern of perception. Yes. So imagine this, is when you go to see a movie, you take on the... weighting the value structure of the protagonist. Now, human beings are very good at that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
We look at each other's eyes and we see what people are attending to, and we watch their patterns of attention, and we infer their valuation and their motivation. We're unbelievably good at that. That's what you're doing when you're going to a movie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
We watch how the protagonist prioritizes his attention and his action, what his priorities are, and you infer from that the perceptual structure that, well, that's the question. Does it bring some facts to light and make others irrelevant? And if so, is it a screen? Most of the world we don't see. Most of the world is screened out from our perception. Some of that's biomechanical.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
I can't see behind my head. But some of it is, I'm looking at you, so I can't see the faces of the cameramen right now. So that's a choice that's dependent on my determination of how to focus my attention. Now, the fact that I'm prioritizing you, I can see your face. I'm using the foveal center of my vision. And I can't see these guys because they're in my periphery.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
That's kind of like a screen, right? The place where it's most open is this central point of vision. Over here it's obscured, and over here it's just gone completely. So now, you objected to my characterization because you said, you know, observer, screen, reality, and you didn't like the proposition of the intermediary screen. And I know the screening idea isn't exactly right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
But on the counter side, we have this problem. Some things are central to our perception and other things are peripheral. And that's dependent on our values and our patterns of attention and our actions. So, well, I'm curious about what you think about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Women and their interpersonal perception.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
I have a metaphor for you. Tell me what you think about this. Well, I've been thinking about this a lot because I've been studying Old Testament stories. And I think the tabernacle in the Old Testament is a model of perception. Okay, so tell me what you think of this as a... analogy, better than screen and better than filter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Okay, got it, good. Okay, so the tabernacle, at the center of the tabernacle is the Ark of the Covenant, right? So there's a center point and it's sacred, okay? And If I remember correctly, in the early ceremonies that were associated with the tabernacle, the high priest was only allowed to go into the Holy of Holies, the center, once a year. So there's a center.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Then there's a structure of veils around it, so that there's a center. and then it's veiled, and then outside of that is another veil, and then outside of that is another veil, and then outside of that is another veil, and then outside of that is the community.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And so that's the sacred central point of the community, and the center is the, what would you say, the point of focus, the fundamental point of focus, and then the significance of the periphery is... proportional to the distance from the center. Now, there's a variety of reasons that I think this is the right metaphor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
For object perception. For any perception, for any perception. So, here's partly why. So, I was referring to the visual system, for example. So, the way your visual system is constructed is that at the very center...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
every cell in the center of your vision is connected to 10 000 neurons at the fundamental level of analysis okay and then each of those 10 000 is associated with 10 000 it spirals up exponentially very rapidly but the foveal tissue in the center of your vision is very high cost it takes a lot of neural tissue to Process it and it takes a lot of energy, a lot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
If your whole retina was foveal, your head would be like alien sauce. Eagles have two fovea, by the way, they have extremely sharp vision. And so now you're, because high resolution vision is expensive, You can move your eyes and you dart this very high resolution center around.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And so every time you move your eyes and you do that unconsciously because they're always vibrating and consciously because you can move them and in consequence of emotion as well. So if you hear a noise off to the side that startles you, you'll look and that's unconscious. Lots of things direct your visual attention, but everything you look at has a center.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
dead center, where everything is extremely high resolution, and then it's surrounded by lesser and lesser spheres of resolution until at the periphery, there's nothing, right? Okay, so like out here, If I just hold my hand steady, I can't see it except as a blur. If I move it, I can see the fingers. So out here I can detect movement. That's how dinosaurs saw, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Dinosaurs, frogs still, they can't see anything that isn't moving. They have vision like our periphery. So out here, because the tissue in the periphery of my vision isn't very highly innervated, I prioritize movement because my assumption is if it isn't moving, I don't have to pay attention to it. You know, it's a default assumption about what's ignorable in the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Right, exactly. And so if you're going to prioritize peripheral vision, the priority is if it moves, look at it. Otherwise, ignore it. Okay, so every perception has a center and then a gradation of...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
resolution until it fades out into nothing yeah and and that tabernacle as as far as i can tell is a model of the perceptual center it's a model of the community center as well but it's a model of perception as such so that's different that's different than the screen obviously and you do have these veils that you can yeah that's true that's true that's true and it's
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
You see, the veil idea is an interesting one because the perceptions we have in the periphery are nowhere near as intense as the perceptions that we have in the center. And so these perceptions, one way of thinking about them is these perceptions, peripheral perceptions, are veiled. out here behind me, they're veiled so intensely you can't even see them, but the veils are graduated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So it's, well, so tell me what you think about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah, the phenomenologist is like that idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Okay, so that's a good objection. That's a good objection. I guess I could make that initial analogy more sophisticated because I would say then that the tabernacle structure, center and periphery, is characteristic of explored and familiar territory. You're making a case that there's a different perceptual mode in unexplored territory, and there is. So birds have a prey eye and a predator eye.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And the predator eye acts like the painter that you described who's focusing on one thing, because you zero in on the thing you're after. The I'm prey eye, so that would be the bird's, the other eye is scanning in exactly the way that you described. deprioritizing the center, amplifying the input from the periphery. And that maps onto the hemispheres.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So the left hemisphere does the perceptual mapping that you just, this is in right-handed people, the left hemisphere does the focal mapping perception that you describe that's detail-oriented and that deprioritizes the periphery, and the right hemisphere does the opposite.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And, you know, and that's, I suppose you could say, at a biological level, that's because it's eat or be eaten, right, in the most primal possible way. And so there's a perceptual system for things you're going to eat, and there's a perceptual system for you might be on the menu. Yeah, exactly. Right, right, right. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah, so that's... See, the thing that's so curious about that and that you just highlighted is that the ceremonies for taking possession of a territory that are anthropologically specified, it's usually driving a stake or a central point, a flag, a standard, a staff into the ground that signifies camp, right? Or it signifies the possession of that territory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
That establishes a center with a set of peripheries and with foreignness at the edge of the periphery. And that does establish a certain kind of perception that's associated with security. So the tabernacle style of perception would be the perception that's associated with explored territory. That's exactly right. That's the perception of order.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Like order is where the things you want are happening. That's a good way of defining order. And chaos is where you don't know what will happen when you act. And there are two different perceptual mechanisms for those. And so the second one, the danger one, the unexplained one, the foreign territory one, is there's less filtering and there's less specification of center.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Because you don't know what's important, right? You're walking through that dangerous neighborhood. It's like you're on alert and you don't know what's insignificant. That's part of being on alert. So there's no... identifiable center, and that's a high stress situation. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah, that's been quite mapped out neurophysiologically, right? The Russians did a very good job of that starting in about 1960. Sokolov was one of them and a woman named Vinogradova. And they were students of a neuropsychologist named Luria. They mapped out what they described as the orienting reflex. And that's exactly what that is. It's like you're focused on a task and something of...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Pragmatic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah, yeah. Of implicit significance distracts you from your goal. And you do. So there's a hierarchy of gradated responses that are part of that orienting reflex.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Well, that shows you how malleable even those relatively low-level instinctual responses are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that's part of the consequence of the higher-order brain centers feeding. Like, there isn't a primary level of perception that has no top-down modification. Even the primary visual cortex, say where your fovea meets the visual cortex for the first time, is tremendously innervated by multiple... Well, so here's an example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So when you look at an object, when you look at a pen, for example, let's say that constitutes a visual pattern, it's represented on the retina as a pattern, it's propagated along the nerves, then it branches out. One of the places that information ends up quite quickly is the motor cortex.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So when you see almost all the objects that you see in the world, you see because they're definable in terms of the action you take in their presence. So like when you see this pen, The grip motion that you would use to use it is directly disinhibited by the sight of the pen. And that's part of the perception. It's not like you see the pen and think about its use. That isn't how it works at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
You see its use directly. And so that's another thing that's very strange about object perception. It's like you don't actually see objects in the world. What you see are tools and obstacles and objects. Well, then there's all the things you don't see. And the tools and obstacles are defined in relationship to your goal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So, you know, your goal, for example, the example you used is you're not happy with your child. So the goal there has shifted from respond to distress cries. It's shifted from that, which might be the default, right, to... Certain probability that distress cry is false, right? Or manipulative, therefore ignore.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Very different interpretive framework, very different social landscape and capable of modifying even the, almost the base level perception. You'll still hear the cry. I mean, I guess that would be even curious. It's like, if your child is Highly probable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
If your child is likely to emit distress calls that are false, my suspicions are you'd be less likely to hear that, to actually hear it, not only not to respond to it, right? Because you'd have built an inhibitory structure that says, well, despite the instinctual significance of that, it's irrelevant. Right, right. Highly likely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Well, that's what you do if you're in a restaurant that's bustling with conversations. What's so remarkable is if you're sitting with someone and there's conversations everywhere, you can tune yourself so that you hear the person that you're sitting beside You hear them, but then you can turn your attention to a conversation beside you and it'll prioritize that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Or you can turn your attention to your own thoughts, right? And it is this, and I would say that's something like the imposition of that tabernacle-like structure on that altar. a plethora of potential interpretations. That's what the postmodernists would point out. There's an infinite number of potential interpretations in a restaurant that's bustling with conversation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
It's like, fair enough, but you prioritize one. That's what it means to pay attention to it, right, is that you prioritize it, you make something a center, you make everything else a periphery, then you learn to do that automatically, right, with practice. I think maybe the best example of that for literate people is the fact that you can't see a word without reading it, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Okay, well, so two things there. So you pointed to the fact that... the postmodernist description of the subjective. But tell me what you think about this. See, the postmodern insistence, despite the fact that they claim that there's no uniting metanarrative, which is a specious claim in my estimation, because I don't know where the uniting ends.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
If everything's a narrative, there's uniting narratives at every level of analysis. But more than that, they... their proposition, at least implicitly, has been that the narratives that we do utilize are predicated on power. That's part of the reflection of the subjective. It's like, I'm prioritizing in keeping with my desire to exercise power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And by power, I don't mean ability to maneuver in the world. I mean force and compulsion. And that what we have in the postmodern world is a battleground between different claims of power, and that's all there is. I think the weakness in that, First, one weakness is that it's a confession rather than a description.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
But the other one is that power games are not iterable and productive and improving across time. They're self-defeating. And so you can play a power game and you can win short-term victories with a power game, but it's not a sustainable, iterable, medium to long-term viable strategy. You know that Frans de Waal, for example, the primatologist who studied chimpanzees,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So, you know, we have this trope, and I think it's a consequence of Marxist influence on biologists, that the hierarchies of chimpanzees, for example, which are masculine hierarchies in Maine, are predicated on power. You know, the alpha chimp is the most powerful tyrant, and he dominates all the others, and that's why he's reproductively successful. De Waal showed very clearly that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
There are alphas who use power, but they have short reigns, fractious communities, and they're extremely likely to suffer a premature violent death. So it is a niche in that you can force compliance, but the stable alphas that De Waal studied were the most reciprocal male chimpanzees of the troop. They made the most lasting friendships. And so that's a whole different model of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
the mediation of attention, let's say, than one that's predicated on power. So do you think it's fair when you're assessing the postmodern corpus, philosophical corpus, you talked about the subjective element, where do you think the claim that, the postmodern claim that power is essentially the dominant narrative, where do you think that fits in with this claim with regards to subjectivity?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Even cooperatively.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Some who think the modern... I've probably fallen into that camp as of late.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Fractious fascists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So then that regression becomes... the use of power as the meta-narrative that the postmodernists hypothetically abandoned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
That tilts them towards that social constructionism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Okay. Okay, so I think what we'll do is stop there. We've come to the end of the time for the YouTube section. I'd like to continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side, but what I would like to talk about with you there is power in service of what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Right, because there has to be, unless you, I mean, you could hypothesize that power in itself is a desirable good, but then you have to define power in a way that would make the desirability of itself evident. Alternatively, you have to say that you want power for a reason. So I want to talk to you about that and get your thoughts on that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, maybe we can close with that, too. You've taped three additional courses.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
We discussed the nature of the philosophical endeavor over the last three or four hundred years as it shifted from modernism to post-modernism to whatever is dawning in this new age that's emerging. And... That constituted the bulk of our conversation. And so if you're interested in that, and you should be, and if you're not, you should ask yourself, why then? Join us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And both the other courses are dealing with that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Right, so if people... watch all the courses that you have offered, so all five of them, they're going to get a pretty decent overview of the major thinkers of the last 500 years in the philosophical, ethical, and political realms.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah, that's a good deal. That's a good deal. I want to watch those courses. There's lots of things that you're lecturing about that I don't know about. I'd like to know the nuances. I'd like to know the details. So, yeah, so I'm very much looking forward to that. So, Well, thank you very much for coming to Scottsdale today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah, it's great. And it's great to have you on board on Peterson Academy, too. So it's good. And I think we'll talk, too, on the Daily Wire side a little bit about the perils, pitfalls and opportunities of online, highly produced online education, because I'd like to get some of your opinions about that, too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
All right, so we'll do that. Thank you very much, sir. Oh, I should give this to you, too. So yeah, this is my new book, which is coming out on the 19th, and so we wrestle with God.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And so I'm making a case in this book fundamentally that, well, we talked about the relationship between story and perception, but I'm trying to explain in this book why the notion of sacrifice is the central story in the biblical corpus, making the case that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
sacrifice is equivalent to work, and that sacrifice is by necessity the foundation of the community, that those two things are so tightly associated that they're equivalent. There's no difference between sacrifice and community. They're the same thing. So anyways, I'd like to leave that to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Okay, so I'd like to make a case for everybody that's watching and listening for the philosophical enterprise at a practical level. Regardless, in a way, regardless of whether philosophy can address the larger questions of life, and I think you have to be in some ways absurdly skeptical to assume axiomatically that the answer to that is no.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah, yeah. Well, I'd certainly be interested in your thoughts on it as well. And so it's coming out very soon. And I tried to make sure that everything that I wrote in it was hopefully justifiably theologically and traditionally, but also scientifically. Like I wanted the stories to make sense at both levels of analysis at the same time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So, you know, that's a tight triangulation, so to speak, but, and who knows if it's successful, but that was the rule of thumb. So anyways, very good to talk to you today. So yeah, and I'm looking forward to our continued collaboration on the Peterson Academy side. Me too. All right, so all of you watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side. We're going to talk about two things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
We're going to talk about the practical and hypothetical future of online education. We're going to talk about the relationship. What would you say? The value of power from the postmodern perspective. Why would people be interested in power? You might think that's self-evident, but lots of things that appear self-evident aren't at all on more detailed analysis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So you can join us for another half an hour of that discussion, if you would. Thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale today and my producer, Joy Holm, for putting this together. She's been working extremely hard on the set side and the production side. And, you know, the podcast is improving in quality quite dramatically in consequence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
It's necessary, in my estimation, very necessary, regardless of who you are, to understand the nuances of the thinkers that you describe, because unbeknown to you, The thoughts that you think are yours are actually theirs. And so people might wonder what practical use it is to study history.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And one answer to that is, if you understand history, maybe you won't be doomed to repeat the more catastrophic elements of it. But with regards to philosophy, if you don't understand the thought of history, great philosophers, you have no idea why you, that you think the way you do, why you think the way you do, or what the consequences of that might be, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
What is the idea that we're all unconscious exponents of some dead philosopher, or some combination of dead philosophers? And so, although we don't understand it, we live within the Not only the conceptual universe these people have established, but the perceptual universe that they've established, right? That they actually have shaped the way that we see the world at a very profound level.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And so, if you don't understand that, then you're a puppet of forces that are beyond your comprehension. And that, unless you want to be a puppet of forces that are beyond your comprehension, that's not a very good plan. So, does that seem like a reasonable...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So that's a good thing to focus in on, I think, too, at the moment. And this is where we could have a discussion about postmodernism, and modernism, and maybe what comes next. So let me lay out a couple of propositions for you, and tell me what you think about this. This is maybe the nexus of what I was hoping to discuss with you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
So I'll give the postmodernist devils their due to begin with, and you can tell me what your opinion is about that. So I think that we are on the cusp of a philosophical and maybe a theological revolution. And I think it's in part because the postmodernists identified some of the flaws in Enlightenment thinking. And so the postmodernists, there's a...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
If the answer is no, it's because you're unconsciously under the sway of some skeptical philosopher, and maybe you shouldn't be. So join us anyways for that discussion. So, Dr. Hicks, it's good to see you again.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
The fundamental postmodernist insistence, as far as I can discern, is that we inevitably, we by necessity, see the world through a story. And so I've been trying to figure out what that means. And the large language model, emergence of the large language models have helped out with that. So imagine that. I want you to correct me if I get any of this wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
The rationalist presumption is that we do see the world through a framework. The empiricist presumption is that we derive our knowledge of the world from a set of, in a sense, self-evident facts that emerge in the domain of perception. But there's a problem with both of those notions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
The nature of the rationalist framework isn't precisely specified, and it isn't obvious at all that there's a level of self-evident fact. In fact, I think the data, the scientific data on the neuroscience and the engineering side, indicate quite clearly that that's just not the case. That you can't separate perception, let's say, from motivation. You can't separate perception from reality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
action, because all of your senses are active while they're gathering so-called data. There's no sense data. And so I've been trying to wrestle with what that means exactly, because one possible interpretation of the idea that there's no base level of sense data is a descent into a nihilistic or relativistic morass.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
And I don't think that's a tenable solution either, not least for motivational and emotional reasons. I think there's a clue to the manner in which this problem might be solved in the fact of the large language models. So what they essentially do is establish a weighting system between conceptions. And so in the large language models,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Yeah, thank you for coming into Scottsdale today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Every word, let's say, is associated with every other word at a certain level of probability. So if word A appears, there's some probability that word B will come next. And then if phrase A appears, there's some probability that phrase B will appear. And the same with sentences and the same with paragraphs. And there's literally hundreds of billions of these parameters in those models.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Voluntary self-sacrifice is the uniting metanarrative. And that works to unite people psychologically, and it works to unite them socially. I'll challenge you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And you dance that out, which I think is a good representation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yes. That's what happens in an exciting conversation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right, right. So that means in a deep conversation, partly what you're doing is progressing forward to your various superordinate goals, but at the same time, you're transforming the nature of the superordinate goal and the relationship between the goal hierarchy as you proceed. Right. And that's not a bad definition of a quest.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And just one thing to make sure that all of our questions are caught up. So conscience would be the voice that comes from a higher order goal to you while you're operating at a more proximal level. where you're operating more proximally, telling you that your proximal operations are violating a higher order goal. Yeah, that's sometimes. Then you could imagine, okay, so yes, that seems reasonable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, that's a good way of thinking about it technically, right? Because it is still, in a sense, it's your voice still, because it's associated with your goals, but then it's also a voice from above, so to speak, especially if you're goal hierarchy. Now, you could imagine too, that if you talked a bit about Christianity with Pagiot as well,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So if you could imagine that you made the imitation of Christ your superordinate goal, even if you didn't exactly know what that means, because you can't, that would open up the possibility that whatever that represents could speak to you in the voice of, insofar as you understand what that means, that could now speak to you with the voice of conscience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And hypothetically, if it was orienting you more accurately as you practiced it, your understanding of that would increase and you'd get sharper at it, you'd get more, you'd get more skilled at it, because you get more. I've been talking to my wife, you know, she's been investigating the relationship between self-will, so to speak, and divine will, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
In her prayer practice, she's trying to orient herself towards the divine. And so what she does in the morning is, that's what she does, is she sits down for an hour and she thinks, okay, if I was really going to do things right, whatever that means, what attitude would I have to adopt and how would I do that? And then you distinguish that from self-will.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So I would say, because self-will begs the question, what do you mean by self, right? And my suspicions are that the more selfish the will, the more a goal that should be lower order is elevated to the highest place. So like a hedonistic self, because the hedonist will say something like, I would like to do exactly what I wanna do right now, regardless.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
They're also both lecturing, by the way, as well as me, for Peterson Academy. And so one of the things Peterson Academy is doing is aggregating a group of thinkers who are pursuing this problem some directly like John and Jonathan, some more peripherally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
But there's a question that isn't answered there. And the question is, well, why do you associate I with what you want? Because an alternative way of conceptualizing that is that something that's lower order has taken possession of you so completely that you now identify with it. And I mean, that has to happen to some degree when we're running out of biological resources.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
program, so to speak, like if you're hungry, I mean, hunger should grip you and grip all your perceptions until it's satiated, but it should, you talk to Paggio about the necessity of keeping everything in its proper place, right, which is something that Paggio is very concerned with trying to think through.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So, okay, one more question that, at least on this line, with regards to this, so imagine this superordinate figure being Christ, just for the sake of argument for the moment, So I've been trying to think through what would be the antithesis. I guess it's the antithesis of evil. That's one way of thinking about it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And at the same time, thinking about the postmodern insistence that there's no uniting story but power. And so... I think the idea that there's no uniting story but power is self-defeating, fundamentally. I've seen no evidence that in complex biological systems, even in chimpanzee troops, that power iterates well. Power is a degenerating game. So one of the things you might ask is, well...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
You might say, like the postmodernists do sometimes, that there is no superordinate game. Like, that's the central claim of postmodernism, as far as I've been able to determine, that there's no uniting metanarrative. Everything we do is united by a narrative at some level, and to just decapitate that arbitrarily and say, well, at some point there's no union, it's like, well, what point?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's a really big problem. But... when they don't refuse to admit that there's a uniting metanarrative, they turn to power. And I've been trying to conceptualize what the antithesis or what the alternative might be. And it seems to me, I'm curious about this, John, it seems to me that the central message of the Christian drama is that voluntary self-sacrifice is the uniting metanarrative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And that works to unite people psychologically, and it works to unite them socially. And it seems to me almost a matter of definition that social interaction is based on self-sacrifice because that's kind of like the definition of social. So, and then psychological self-sacrifice would seem to me to be the offering up of the lower order value structures to something that's transcendent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And so many of you who are listening will have listened to some of the conversations I've had with Paggio, Jonathan Paggio, or with John Vervaeke. Anyways, we introduced another person into this conversational realm today, Jordan Hall.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And then you get to have your cake and eat it too. You get... If you adopt the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice, then you unite yourself psychologically. But at the same time, it's the best possible strategy socially. And that is definitely, that's not only an alternative to power, it's antithetical. It's the opposite.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I think people make all kinds of- Okay, okay, no arguments with that. I was using self, I would say, in that fractionated, hedonistic manner, right? Because if you're trying to organize yourself in relationship to a higher unity, you're sacrificing what's lower to that upward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, so that ties together the psychological and the social, that normative lens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And Jordan is a serial entrepreneur who's been successful multiple times as a tech founder and has developed the capacities that are necessary to serve as a serial entrepreneur. And that means an openness to high-level creativity conjoined with hard work. like deep technical prowess, and then also the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff under low information conditions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I've been trying to figure out how conscience operates psychologically. One of the things that might distinguish AI systems from human beings is this vertical dimension.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay. How does that relate? Because the other connotation of normative might be social norms, for example. And I mean, there are, I'm trying to put together the definitions that you laid out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So there's a discussion in Exodus that's relevant to that, I think, maybe. So just before Moses goes up Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, so he's gathered up a lot of implicit knowledge by that point, by serving as judge for like years. Anyways, he leaves, and he leaves Aaron, in charge, and Aaron is the political voice of the prophet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And as soon as the transcendent voice, the prophet, disappears, the political voice bows to the whim of the crowd, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And so this is very interesting because if you have a consensus model of truth, the biblical insistence is that a consensus model of truth will devolve almost instantly into the worship of the golden calf, which is kind of like an orgiastic materialism, which strikes me as highly probable because
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I don't think there's much difference between an orgiastic materialism and a profound fractionated immaturity. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you agree with that. Totally. Okay, and so then the prophetic voice speaks for the ideal that unifies what would otherwise degenerate into orgiastic materialism. It's something like that. And so, I think your contention was that normative is insufficient because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
It doesn't include the vertical. Ethical isn't sufficient. Ethical isn't sufficient.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And so Jordan Hall has been talking to John Verveke for quite a long time, a series of conversations. And I met John again recently and we talked about meeting and John suggested that I include Jordan and he flew in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, so what would you say, given that definition? So I think I've developed a parallel notion of that conceptual framework. So- When ethologists go look at wolf packs, they abstract out regularities of behavior in the wolf pack. So like their hierarchical relationship between wolves and a wolf pack would be a behavioral regularity. It's acted out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And you could say it's as if the wolves are following social rules, but they're not rules, they're patterns. But when you describe them, they're rules.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, so is that parallel?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yes, okay, yes, that's exactly what I think that story indicates. Yeah, and so then that vertical orientation, that's symbolized in the Exodus story by Mount Sinai. And then what happens when the commandments are delivered they're delivered in a context of a much wider range of rules, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So there's like these macro rules that are really foundational, and then a bunch of micro rules that are more situational. And what seems to happen is that the revelation is something, in your language, that would be the translation of the normative to the ethical.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yes, that's correct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, so okay, so you think that. Did you know of the relationship between that and what happened at Mount Sinai?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, okay, okay, okay. It's not something that people generally know, so it was worth asking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
today to make that possible and so we're in our conversation we continued to flesh out really i think the best way to conceptualize it is we're attempting to articulate the structure of something like jacob's ladder which is this nested sequence of value structures that that tends towards a pinnacle. The pinnacle is the transcendent, let's say, or the ineffable divine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, yeah, and so there's something also that's fascinating about that because if you two have a dispute that you can't settle, you're lacking a superordinate structure that unites two different narratives, let's say. And if I impose a narrative structure on you, if it's an imposition, it's gonna be fragile.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I'm going to have to feel my way between your dispute and find a superordinate principle that you can't better, right? And unless you accept that is valid, And that would be, unless it's in accordance with your conscience and your calling maybe, it's going to fragment the first time it's stress tested. Well, that's what I...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, because otherwise you're going to fight still.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's the rich man in the gospels parable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Because he's followed all the rules and things aren't good yet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Why touchstone?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, well, there's a foundational element to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's interesting that that's upward, eh?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So the touchstone is, I have to- It's a transformation of the axiomatic assumptions on which that viewpoint are based, as far as I can tell.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
The axioms wouldn't have to be propositional necessarily.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Even perceptions can change, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Those are matters of definition. And we're trying to understand the hierarchical relationship between our local plans and our ultimate ends, let's say, which is the same thing as trying to understand the relationship between the finite and the infinite. And we're trying to do that in a way that's quite differentiated and propositional, but also is true to the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Constrained inexhaustibility.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So, you know, that reminds me of the representations of Moses' staff. I was thinking about Moses' staff when you were talking about that first stage. I think you described it not as orientation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Origin, yeah. So Moses' staff is a symbol of center point, right? That's right. Right, right. And it's got a... It's got a stable element, which is the tree, let's say, it's the tree of life, it's the staff of life, but it also transforms into a serpent, right? So it's order with the lifeblood of chaos still within it. And wisdom, because the serpent's also wise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right, yeah, well, serpents wise, partly because it sheds its skin and can transform entirely, right? Exactly. So Moses' staff, this is relevant to your concern about pathological superegos.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
You know, because you could say, and maybe this is partly why the left Like the left suffers from that, I think to a large degree, because when the left examines hierarchies, they see corrupt power. And the thing about that is that hierarchies can degenerate into corrupt power. In fact, it's probably, apart from hedonic dissolution, it's probably the most common form of pathologization.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
But the fact that some hierarchies dissolve in the direction of, or what? Yeah, deteriorating the direction of power doesn't mean that all hierarchies are deteriorated power, right? That's taking it... But then the question arises, if some hierarchies aren't degenerated into power, then what's the principle of the hierarchy, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And you can see echoes of that in the culture war that we're having right now about the definition of merit, right? Well, what's the principle that rules if it's not power, right? Now, this is why... I've been playing with this too. So some of it's voluntary self-sacrifice, but that's also where I think ideas of play start to become important.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Do you think it would be reasonable to make play central to that notion? Because my suspicions are... This is informed partly from studying Panksepp's psychology of play, right? And play is a fragile motivational state. It can be disrupted by the dominion of virtually any other motivational state, but you added beauty and love and like higher order values to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
phenomena and the uniting reality of the transcendent. And so I know that's complicated, but it's a complicated issue. And while many of you are familiar with this already, and you can regard this conversation as a continuation on the same quest. So I think we'll jump right into it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
But I guess my question would be, is what you're doing with those higher order values in that state of voluntary, what did you call it? Voluntary- Voluntary necessity. Voluntary necessity. Is that state of voluntary necessity, is that the definition of play?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's also, that's something that's intensely desirable. I mean, I think like one of the insistences in both the Old and New Testament is that in the fundamental sense, In the final analysis, what's at the pinnacle is ineffable, right? So if you, there's no end to the traveling up Jacob's ladder. And that means that the ineffable transcendent is by definition outside our reach.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And there's a cost for that. The cost to that is that you can't conceptualize it completely. You can't articulate it. But the advantage is it's like an inexhaustible good. Yes. Right. And so no matter... You know, you could imagine that you're looking at a beautiful sunset while you're walking along a pathway in the forest.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And then you, for the first time, come across the edge of the Grand Canyon and you see the sunlight playing out on the Grand Canyon and you stop looking at the sunset. And you could also imagine that there is the limit to that. that the mysteries that might grab your attention, even if you're operating at a relatively high level of apprehension, there's no limit upward to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's kind of what Tolstoy experienced when he had a dream that resolved his suicidality. And he had a vision of a, first of all, being hung over a, He was at a great height, right? He was hung over like an abyss, an infinite abyss, which is like an existential catastrophe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And when he finally looked up, he could see a rope that was holding him above the abyss, but it disappeared into the unknowable, right? And that... it appeared, at least the way he wrote the story, was that that was enough to snap him enough. That vision was part of the process that snapped him out of his existential dread.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And the point you're making is that there are moments, see, those are magical moments. I think we talked a little bit, I was at a party with you recently, we talked a little bit about an extension of ecological, what's the ecological approach to visual perception?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Gibson, right. So Gibson talked about tools and obstacles, right? So you set a goal, you see a pathway. The objects that you perceive are tools and obstacles. Everything else is irrelevant. That's associated with your idea of relevance realization. But you can add layers to that. So you have tools and obstacles, right? You have friends and foes, that'd be the equivalent on the social level.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Jordan, I was watching your podcast with Jonathan Paggio, and you started to talk to him about the vertical dimension. And one of the things you both discussed was the notion that one of the things that might distinguish AI systems from human beings is this vertical dimension. Now, cognitive capacity is soon not going to distinguish us by all appearances. I thought we might well delve into that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And then there's another level too, which is like agents of magical transformation. And agents of magical transformation are, beings or phenomena that emerge into your field of apprehension from a higher order level of being. And the more distant up the Jacob's ladder that emissary, the more the quality of magic would obtain. And the magic would be that the interloper,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
is bringing with it a new set of axioms, a new set of rules. So that's the magic. It's right, like something magic plays by different rules. And so then there'd be a hierarchy of rules up Jacob's ladder, essentially, something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's just what I was thinking because I thought if Pagiot was here, that'd be the first thing he'd point out. Yeah, so that's extremely interesting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, yeah, because you have this insistence in Christian theology that Christ as God puts on mortality comprehensively, right? It's not just death. It's kenosis. It's the deep self emptying, right? And this- All the way down. All the way down. Not past death into hell, right? And so what that would mean, practically speaking, I think is that obviously one of the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
elements of existence that's limiting and terrifying is death. And like the terror management theorists who aren't very pessimistic in my estimation, think that much of human motivation springs or even all springs from the denial of death, right? That's a Freudian trope, but that's a problematic presumption in a variety of ways. And it's been empirically undermined too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, we'll have to talk about that because I don't know about the... I know of alternative models that fit the data better, but I don't know of any direct challenges to it. But in any case, one of the problems with that presupposition is that it isn't obvious at all that death is the worst thing life has to offer. Now, one of the... Because the people I've seen in my life that were most damaged
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
were damaged by an encounter with true evil, with malevolence, not with death. People can actually tolerate a brush with death without collapsing into, like an actual brush with death, without collapsing into psychological chaos. But if they're naive and they encounter someone malevolent, then like all bets are off.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And so part of the reason that, you know, Christ descends through death into hell is because the whole...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
This is obviously something John can immediately contribute to as well. I've been trying to figure out the technicalities of the vertical dimension, so let me run a hypothesis by you to begin with. John, you should perhaps find this interesting. I think it's a development of some of the ideas that we discussed when we were on tour together.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
would that be a consequence of failing to establish the proper relationship with the rope that extends upward, right? Because it's very, how do you avoid falling into despair and resentment if you don't remember your relationship with the infinite?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yep. That's a nice way of elaborate. So I'm going to, I want to revisit this with regards to the tyrannical superego idea. Yes. Okay. So Jordan, I wanted to ask you, you've had a pretty practical life in many ways. I mean, you've been involved in many business ventures and I believe that that's what you were most known for to begin with. Yes. So, but you've taken...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
and i don't know how much of this was the case with you all the way along but you've become more known for your philosophical investigations as of late and so i'm curious about how is it that you made your entry into the more philosophical domain from the entrepreneurial let's say i'm going to answer that in a moment but first i want to just say something here um
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
How old were you when that started to become a focus of attention, do you think?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
In this new book I wrote, We Who Wrestle With God, one of the things I pointed out was that the God of the Old Testament, and this continues in the New Testament as well, is characterized very fundamentally in multiple ways. But one of those ways, one of the cardinal ways that he's characterized is as the voice of conscience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So you said TV in school. Yeah. Were there other experiences that you remember at a young age that, like, I'm kind of curious about what triggered this. Yeah, I mean.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Do you have any sense of how old you were when you were able to articulate that as a propelling principle? I mean, Musk told me that he was about 12 or 13 when he had a very serious existential crisis and started really religious material. And his existential solution to that was really...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Like he found that if he concentrated on learning and investigating, that that produced a sufficient influx of meaning so that his propositional concerns were, they were no longer foregrounded. I had clients who were like that too, creative people. If they ever stopped creating, they'd fall into the grip of their rational mind and just tear them into pieces.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
But as long as they focused on that continual exploration, play, creativity, then they were fine. They'd fall into it like a child playing. And that's kind of interesting because it's You might think of the real as what you think, because then certainly lots of people who are intellectual fall into that problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
But one of the things you do as a therapist with people who are depressed, especially if they're intelligent, is help them identify. It's probably something like a higher calling. You say, look, let's attend to your experience and see when you're depressed and when you're not. and then see if we can characterize the moments when you're not, and then concentrate on expanding them, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And for this gentleman, who's a very creative architect, as long as he was creating, he was fine. Now, and then his rational mind would crop up and say, well, what the hell's the point of all this creativity? You know, which is a, well, it's kind of a bottomless pit, isn't it? If the ultimate goal is ineffable, there's no final answer to that question that you could propositionalize.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
One answer would be, well, you're not suicidal when you're doing it, you know, and that's kind of an, well, seriously, like it quells your pain, it quells your existential dread. If you believe your pain is real and that's enough to make you despair, why wouldn't you have faith in what rescues you from that, right? That seems like a reasonable...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And I've been trying to figure out how conscience operates psychologically. And I think it... The fact of conscience indicates something like a vertical hierarchy of value.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right, so for him, where that would have gone over time, had it deepened, would be to identify the source of that respite that he was experiencing when he was engaged in creative action, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Which company was this?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So imagine that whenever you do something, whether you know it or not, you have a proximal reason for it, and then a slightly wider reason, and then a slightly wider reason than that, and then a wider reason than that, and so forth. And that sort of shades off into the unknowable. Now, for example... if I asked you why you're here having this conversation. Let's play it out a little bit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right, right. Yeah, so you laid out the order. So it was the... that reminds me of a variety of things. The developmental psychologist Piaget spent his whole life studying children's play. There were other things he studied too because he was a polymath. But the reason he did that was because he was trying to reconcile the gap between religion and science.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
None of the psychologists that I ever encountered ever told their students that, which is really quite sad because it's like, that's actually an important detail. I do. You do. Yes, that doesn't surprise me, John. Let's go back to the superego issue because this is a very interesting thing to delve into because there's a personal element to it, which will make it more germane, but there's a...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
There's a generalizable element that's very, very important because I do really think, like one of the things I've seen about the atheist crowd, for example, is that to be an atheist, from what I've been able to understand, requires two things. One is a kind of alliance with a reductive materialist rationalism. And there's a kind of a Luciferian pretension that goes along with that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
But that's insufficient. It also really helps if you were viciously hurt by someone religious. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. If we let's let's delve into the nature of power a bit and not as not as ability but as when the postmodernists make the proclamation that Everything's a power game. Let's say they're basically saying that power is the uniting Meta narrative or or procedure or world now
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
we're trying to distinguish between, or partly what we're trying to do is distinguish between the world that's governed by power and the world that's governed by this other orientation that we're trying to flesh out. So let's see if we can characterize the world that's governed by power. Now, you said that you're subject on a fairly regular basis to like a tyrannical Freudian superego.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And that'll make itself manifest as a pathological conscience, right? When guilt is not warranted. Right, okay, so now we know that for guilt to be an appropriate manifestation of conscience, conscience has to be properly oriented. But now we're left with the problem of how the hell, this is the problem of how you distinguish the spirits to see if they're of God, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
How do you distinguish, and I mean this personally to begin with, How do you distinguish between an impulse of your conscience that's a manifestation of the tyrannical superego and one that's orienting you towards a higher good? How can you tell the difference?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, so let me ask you a clarifying question. Does that mean that conscience without call is unreliable? Like if I'm stopping you, and calling you out on your misbehavior, let's say, but I'm not providing an alternative pathway forward. Is that one of the markers of pathological, like tyrannical conscience?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
This goes back to the idea of conscience, you know. So maybe once you get your goals set, the perceptual systems, are they going to lay out the landscape for navigation?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, it might not even cohere internally. Because one of the things, like, if your superego is the voice of a sadist, then it's going to say whatever it can say for the purposes of making you guilty or hurting in some way, right? It's not like that's orienting you towards something higher. It's a power maneuver. And sadism is a power maneuver, fundamentally. Fundamentally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Why are you here having this conversation?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, so that would be an indication of what? Reciprocity with regards to hospitality? Okay, so why was it important to you to accept the invitation?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's definitely the voice of a demon. It's got no upward orientation. It's just trapped in hell. It's got no upward orientation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
It seems to me, to some degree, and I think this is something that happens when you do get to something fundamental, is that it has a certain degree of immediate self-evidence to it. How could it be otherwise for a human being? How could it possibly be that we could bear the catastrophe of our finitude without remembering our ineffable relationship with the infinite? You'd think so, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
You can fall into despair, but... And people might say, well, that's a rational response. It depends on what you think the point of the rational is. It doesn't seem to be a rational response if it's... Well, we could go into that. If it's self-defeating.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right? So then why don't we investigate for a minute what that means? Like... One of the symbolic representations of that, that's the blind leading the blind, right? They're gonna fall into a pit, okay? Well, why not? What's the difference? What the hell difference does it make anyways if you fall into a pit, right? And that's a discussion about the nature of reality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, there's endless suffering in the deepest of pits. And that, I don't know, that seems... Well, let me give you an example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right, right, right, right. Yes, well, okay. It seems to me that the mere fact that someone who's desperate and nihilistic is in fact desperate is because they regard their suffering as wrong. Because if you're just suffering and you don't think it's wrong, well, then that's a different kind of suffering, right? That's kind of like the pain of an animal, I would say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And then it seems to me that in your realization that the suffering is wrong or unjust, there's a seed there. Because you've got an indication that something that's actually a good is being violated. And that's a, right, right. So maybe this is also why that union that we discussed of death and hell with the infinite, you probably can't find, yeah, that's probably right. You can't find
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So then part of that was that there was a social network that you regarded as valid. You were willing to take direction from that. And they indicated to you that the conversation might be worthwhile. Is that a good summary? Okay, so now we've got two superordinate. Okay, what would it mean for the conversation to be worthwhile?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
an accurate way of orienting yourself to what's highest unless you traverse the lower realms. That's what happens to Jonah, right, in the whale. He's all the way down in the bottom of the abyss. Then he orients himself upward, and the voice of God makes itself manifest, but only under those conditions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, now you've gone sideways with that. Now, I've been interested, as you know, in self-deception for a very long time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, as soon as you can abstract, you can lie. Right? Because you can build a representation. Like, you can build multiple representations. That's really the... Or multiple worlds, for that matter. That's the essence of the capacity to abstract. Well, then, there's no reason that you can't falsify those.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one more step along that line, and then I'm going to ask you, Jordan, if the discontinuities that you saw when you were a kid how you feel that they might be related to this issue of both deception and self-deception. Because you talked about lies, the lies that were being promulgated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
You talked about the desecration of this play space that you had, which is not precisely a lie, although the erection of the ugly buildings might veer in that direction to some degree. So I spent a lot of time thinking about self-deception, like a lot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, that's a very hard question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, yeah. And so it seemed to me that It's akin to Freud's notion of repression, but there's an important difference because as far as I can tell, repression is like a sin of commission. It's something you do. Whereas most self-deception looks to me like- Omission.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, well, they get harder as you go up the ladder.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, so lay out your theory of omission in relationship to self-deception.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So here's an account of that. I've got you wrong. You weren't angry, you were afraid. Okay, well, now I have to figure out at what level of presumption I got you wrong. Like maybe I really got you wrong. And maybe I didn't just get you wrong. Maybe that's an example of a pattern of me mistaking fear for anger that's permeated all my relationships.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, now I've got an entropy pit in front of me, right? So I'm gonna have to... That's a journey down Dante's inferno, I think. I'm gonna have to go into that pit of uncertainty and do the hard work necessary to reconstitute the world that that insight demolished. And the easiest thing for me to do is just not do that, right? I can just not do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right, okay, well, so then, so Dante, I think that that journey down into Dante's Inferno is a descent into that entropy pit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And then at the bottom, and I saw this in my therapeutic practice a lot too, Dante put the betrayers right by Satan. Right, and so imagine that you engage in one of those sins of omission in the situation that you just described. Well, now that means that you've betrayed yourself, right? Because you've betrayed your capacity for transformation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I think that's that mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost is that you've now divorced. If you divorce yourself, Yeah, well, because it's the sin that can't be forgiven, right? And so you think, what the hell is that? It's like, well, if you violate the spirit of transformation itself, then how in the world could you possibly recover from that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Because you foreclosed off any, and then like in your scenario there,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
there was a painful realization of inadequacy on part of the self because Murdoch's character would now have to think, okay, not only did I make this mistake that's really hurt my relationship with my daughter-in-law and caused her some suffering and elevated me morally as well in comparison to her, but maybe I did that with a bunch of other people. Right, and God only knows how many
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Discontinuity is not placed in my life, but maybe there's a reason that has to do with me, like a certain kind of blindness, right? Willful blindness that might be associated with that. Because the payoff for her, that's the secondary gain of the Freudians.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
The payoff for her was that she got to be falsely elevated morally over her daughter-in-law, and even worse, that she was punishing her for that authenticity that would be her own pathway out of her misery. Right, so who the hell wants to go through that? That's a metanoia, but it's always down.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
This is the problem with learning, I think, is that before you transfigure, there's a dissolution into an atropic state.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, now you said that's been demonstrated. Yes. Can you tell me about that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, that'd be that state of confusion, right? Where, okay, so now you've thrown an anomaly into the mix, and then everybody's chattering about how that might be reconciled, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, that's a very hard question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, that's like a definition of tyranny.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Oh, yeah, that's that too. So that's why the tyrant doubles down in the accident story, right? The humility. As the anomalies mount, which is exactly what happens in life, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, so.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, well, they get harder as you go up the ladder. Today's conversation is an extension and continuation of a series of conversations I've had, most particularly, I would say, with John Vervaeke, who joins me today, and also with Jonathan Paggio. And those conversations really center on
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, so I was at church this morning with Tammy and I'm kind of getting accustomed to going to Catholic services, and one of the ways this service opens, and many of them, and maybe this is a constant across services, is that the entire congregation professes a disjunction between itself and the transcendent in the form of, like, I have sinned my most grievous sin.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
This is something that really bothered me when I was a kid because I thought it was a reflection of a kind of tyranny. And I think it can be. But I think more when it's oriented properly, it's that prayer for something like humility. Like if things aren't going right for you, especially if they repeat,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I mean, one of the things you could pray for, so to speak, reorient yourself towards is to allow yourself to come to some conclusion about how it is that you're misaligned with the ideal in a manner that's causing this this disjunction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And so I wonder too, then with regards to insight, so you said reflect on your tyrannical past and essentially, so how you can shed that in the moment, but is it also, so I find, for example, if I'm arguing with my wife and it's not going anywhere, One of the things that the two of us have learned to do is to step back and think, okay, like, what the hell are we trying to accomplish here?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And at the lower level, it's, well, there's a conflict of goal or micro world, say. And then that can easily devolve into the wish that one of them would dominate, right? Especially if one of the views introduces some uncomfortable entropy into the other one. It's like, just shut the hell up. I'm right, and then the problem goes away.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
But the problem with that is that if you do that all the time, then you're always right and your partner's always wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, okay, okay. So I think what you just described is the... how you might gather indication that a path that you can't quite specify might be worthwhile.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yes, exactly, exactly. But so you can step back and you can think, okay, well, what the hell are we trying to accomplish here? Then you have to remember that, well, you're married and the person's gonna be there tomorrow and that you love them. Then you have to remember what that means. And then you have to remember what it's like when you're not...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
arguing, which is often very difficult when you are arguing. And then you have to call to that spirit, I think. And that's what delivers the insight. It's like, okay, what are we trying to do here? We're trying to make productive peace. Okay. The argument was power, let's say, a power manifestation, at least in part, but the proper goal is productive peace.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And then you'll get an answer from the spirit of productive peace.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
They're statistically inseparable. And depressed people are much more likely to use first-person pronouns.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, yeah, and socially anxious people too. That's right. You know, one of the ways I used to treat my socially anxious clients was when they were having a party, I'd say, well, just concentrate on putting everyone else at ease, right? And then they'd forget about themselves, which is exactly what they were hoping to do. But you can't just forget about yourself, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
You have to put up a new frame. So, okay, so... All right. Now, you talked about self-deception. These experiences that you had when you were a kid, you saw this disjunction between what you were perceiving, what you were perceiving and what you knew. Like, it's interesting that... Yeah. Okay. Do you... And you said that the television essentially was full of lies, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, flesh that out a bit and tell me and everyone who's listening and watching what deception you think you were detecting. I'm just making it very concrete.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
First of all, you said that there are paths that you can't specify that are worthwhile, right? That that would be part of exploration.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Why did you make that? Okay, but that's not the only, like in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain fails and he gets alienated from God and in consequence of that. So he experiences a landscape of trouble, let's say, but his response isn't to take responsibility. His response is to curse fate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yep.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right, and that there are conditions under which, circumstances under which you might be willing to, to proceed down that investigative path. Okay, so then we could divide that into two parts. We could say that you're making the presumption that there's something worthwhile in conversational investigation, which is a reflection of the logos, let's say, but there's also conditions under which
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, but they can easily become the same. Like people who, if your faith in the patriarchy, so to speak, is demolished, then why not go all the way down to the bottom and assume that everything's pointless and deceptive. I mean, this happens to people when they despair. Sure, sure. I've been there. Okay, but that didn't happen to you when you were a kid.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And you said you decided to take responsibility. Okay, and you also made reference to your grandfather.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, so did he play a role in this? Only in this particular episode. Only in that episode. Okay, so why... Why didn't you despair and why did you decide to take responsibility? And then what did that mean?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So you had a track record of success. What about your relationships with your parents at that point?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, so you were fairly firmly grounded. So you had a platform that enabled you to determine what constituted the truth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, why phrase it in terms of center and anomaly?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Oh yeah, so that's interesting because you pointed to the fact that you had multiple dimensions of success, and I mean qualitatively distinct dimensions, so that's important, such that when you were introduced to the abstracted digital world, so to speak, and you saw that it was faulty, that didn't shake your face, so now we're in a situation, you know,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
One of the things I noticed when I was a parent, this was a lot of little kids. This is almost 25 years ago. I'd often take my little kids over to see other people with little kids. And the first thing they do is put on a movie and put the kids in the basement and put on a movie. And this always annoyed me because my attitude was throw the damn kids in the basement.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
and let them amuse themselves, right? They have to do that. They have to learn to play. They have to learn to get along with strangers. And that's an excellent, and you just short circuit that. But now imagine that we have all these kids that are dominated by the digital and they come to that realization, you know, that they're being deceived in multiple ways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
you've already been set up to presume that the probability that that exploration will take place is relatively high. Yes? And you used your social connections partly to triangulate in on that. So, okay, okay. So, all right, so that's not a bad indication of some nesting. We could continue because we could say things like, well, this is also a public conversation, and so if we...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
The question then is like, what the hell's their center?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
They have one.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Do you think that's true? Yeah. So there's data coming out. I'm interested in your response to this, John. So I read recently that six, many times, by the way, and I think Jonathan Haidt details this, 60% of young women with a liberal political orientation have a diagnosed mental illness. Now that's self-reported, you know, and so there's problems with that. But I'm wondering to what degree,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And I'm not necessarily pointing the finger at the liberal ethos here. I'm wondering about this immense rise in neurotic mental illness that seems to be characteristic of our culture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And so... It's sort of by definition, if it's an aggregate that isn't unified by the appropriate higher order principle, it's going to disintegrate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's why that principle isn't ideal, because it disintegrates.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's the advantage of diversity, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
manage it successfully, then we can explore together and hopefully that's worthwhile, which we haven't defined yet, worthwhile, but we'd also have the opportunity to bring it to other people. Well, let's see if we could define worthwhile. So what would make the conversation worthwhile? Well, it's happening, but then also in retrospect.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Wow, so one of the logical... likely pathways of devolution. You talked about the golden calf is like sequential appeal to sequential hedonistic demands. You can make peace with the toddler that way. You just give the toddler what he wants every time he asks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah. Okay, so partly what we're trying to do here, and I would say in the broadest possible sense, I think this is what you're trying to do, John, and correct me if I'm wrong, is we've been investigating... the propositionalization of an ethos that would unite iteratively and relatively permanently.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And we're investigating the possibility that that must by necessity be predicated on something other than that hedonic, immediate hedonic gratification and It's also not predicated on power. Okay, so one of the things you see in the old- Hold on one second.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of... exploration summarized very quickly in that statement. There's an immense emphasis in the Old Testament on the value of hospitality, right? Like it's a cardinal moral virtue. Now, I investigated that a little bit in We Who Wrestle With God anthropologically. I mean, part of the reason for that was
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, imagine that there are relatively isolated cities and a stranger comes in with wares to trade. Now, you can steal his wares, but you don't get any more stuff, and so that's a drag. But worse than that, you don't know who he's associated with. The primates that we're related to are very good at remembering who each is. little primate they could pound flat is related to, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Because you pound the little primate flat and then his three more powerful relatives come along and you're dead. So they see the little guy in its social web. Okay, so the stranger's there and you could be very inhospitable, but then his army comes marching in and you're all dead, right? You don't get to trade plus you're all dead. Yes, that's a bad idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So now you have to be hospitable, and that gets the trade going. And so I'm wondering... Then I was thinking about hospitality, like it's a local thing, right? Because that's what you do at a banquet or at a party, make people welcome. That's what you do if you run a small business, if you have even the least amount of sense, you make people welcome.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Then you could think if that scaled, well, then the whole world would be a hospitable place and the problem would be solved, right? So it's obviously a scalable virtue. And maybe it's also the foundation of that societal trust that constitutes, I think, the only real natural resource Could you speculate, do you think, on the relationship between hospitality and play? Yeah, I can.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Psychopomp, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right, and then identity starts to become identity with the ability to do that. Exactly. That's identity with the hero, I think, rather than with the tyrannical father, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, well, it's gotta be something like, let's say you're being hospitable to someone who's truly a stranger. You're treating them kindly. So you're treating them as if they're kin.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And so what that means is that despite the evident differences, which might be racial, linguistic, and ethnic, let's say, so profound differences, you're acting out the proposition when you're hospitable that there's a core identity that's shared, right? Right, and so that's gotta be a transcendent identity because the obvious identity markers are radically different.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
It's so cool that that... Hospitality has that imaginal element. It's right, I'm going to treat this stranger as though they're welcome. Well, that begs the question, on what basis? Well, it's something like shared humanity. So it is the acting out of the concept of shared humanity before that's propositionalized at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right, well, I think that's partly pointing to the fact that the thing that you're actually establishing the hospitable relationship with is only human on the surface, right? That's a pointer because we've already made the case that when you're hospitable to someone who's truly a stranger, you're... you're removing from consideration all the obvious differences.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
But you're doing that in the realization that there's something, well, you could say in the context of that story, something divine underneath, that every stranger who comes your way is an angel in disguise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, well, certainly that's what Christ says in the gospels.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, then you could also imagine that the more hospitable you are to someone, the more the angelic element of their nature is like, I think this is, I noticed this in my clinical practice, that even with the worst people, like if you're engaged in a dialogue with someone who's hurt and bad, the best possible thing you can do is to listen and never say anything that's the least bit false.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Because as soon as you do that, as soon as you do that, You're in their territory and you're not gonna win that. Like that's a very bad, that's a good thing for everybody watching and listening to know if you ever fall into the hands of someone truly dangerous, lying is a very bad idea. They're a lot better at it than you. So, all right, well, we should wrap up this part of the discussion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I think on the Daily Wire side, I'm going to start by talking to John and Jordan about how they met and how their relationship developed. And then, you know, we'll continue along the same lines. I wanna find out too, what they jointly think they're up to. And so if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side for half an hour for that, please, you're more than welcome to do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And thank you, gentlemen. It was lovely meeting you. I very much appreciated that. John, it's always great to see you. Thank you. I always feel that we get somewhere. That hospitality discussion, that was particularly useful, but there was lots in that that I felt moved things ahead. I talked about that in the book, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Oh, yes, yes. And when did this come out?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
This is Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right, right. So for everybody who's watching and listening, you know, you could read this, John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, book one. So anyways, gentlemen, thank you very much. And for all you watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention. Much appreciated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So I think, I actually think this is a bit of a side journey, but it looks to me like that's the basis for the instruction in the Sermon on the Mount. So the Sermon on the Mount, which I think of as an instruction manual in some ways, basically says the first thing you do is orient yourself to the highest possible good, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And I think you could do that awkwardly and badly, and it would still be better than not doing it, right? Because you're developing a relationship with the highest good. And then once you've done that, you attend... with all due care to the present.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
You set the frame, which is what I'm trying to do here is to serve the highest good, even though I might not be able to conceptualize that or articulate it, but that's my aim. Having established that aim, John, you might have some things to say here too. Like we've talked about the relationship between value and perception and emotion in quite a bit of detail.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So it seems to me that if you set your aim high, then even if you can't exactly specify the goal concretely, that your perceptions and your emotions will fall into alignment with that goal, and they'll show you the way, so to speak. Maybe that's, and this goes back to the idea of conscience. So maybe once you get your goal set,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And the perceptual systems, are they going to lay out the landscape for navigation? You can feel your way along. And I don't know if that's something like, do you think when you're doing that, assuming that the goal isn't...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
concretely specified that it's transcendent, you're still gonna be able to see or feel which steps you're taking forward are what reducing the entropy between where you are in that goal. And then, so you could see that both as a combination of conscience and calling in relationship to the goal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
The conscience would be the voice of negative emotion informing you when you're deviating from the path and calling would be the invitation of positive emotion informing you, at least in part at the level of emotion, that you're making the path manifest.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And I wonder too, if while you're doing that, if at the same time, this probably happens particularly with dialogue, that you're clarifying the nature of the goal further, right? Is there any of that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
specifying the foundational principles of iterable society and stable psyche, that's a decent way of thinking about it, or specifying more clearly and understandably the apex towards which systems of value And that's a very complicated set of problems, and so it takes a lot of conversations to make progress. But I found I've been able to make a lot of progress with John and Jonathan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So it's readiness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Generalized readiness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, that's what the orienting reflex does psychophysiologically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
When you detect an anomaly... the orienting reflex triggers multiple neurophysiological systems, but fundamentally what it's doing is preparing you for action. You get a heart rate increase often with an orienting response that isn't exactly indicative of emotion. It's indicative of the fact that you're probably going to do something with your musculature once you decide what that is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So are you distinguishing between the You made reference to figuring out where you are. That's like an orientation point. And then the stance is preparation for where you're going to go.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Well, you know, I just did an interview with Pierre Poliev. who's going to be the next Prime Minister of Canada in all likelihood. And he chose to speak with me in depth instead of talking to the legacy media, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And it was actually rather comical from my perspective because all the legacy media outlets in Canada had to play catch-up, which I contemplated with some degree of inappropriate satisfaction. But there's something... So we had to talk about that because... Polyev had expressed some doubts about his performance in the discussion. He said there were many topics he didn't get to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And so we talked about that, and I said, well, you know, the long-form podcast format can't be
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
manipulated a priori successfully because if you come to the podcast with a set of talking points and you stick to your script you're going to get first of all no one will watch you and i've seen this with political figures this isn't a guess i know this is the case no one will watch you and all the comments will be negative you have to come there knowing where you stand but ready to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
follow the thread of the conversation wherever it goes. And to do that, you have to sacrifice the pre-planning. Okay, so then we might look into that more deeply and we might say, well, now that video is predominating, let's say over the written word, That might mean the reemergence of something like spontaneity over propaganda.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
That could be the case because the new media forms do prioritize spontaneity instead of preparation. Now, you can see that as a technological shift. Back when bandwidth was... staggeringly expensive and every second on broadcast media cost a fortune, you could imagine that risk minimization was the name of the game and that every second had to be controlled.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But that restriction is no longer present, even at all. And so what that should mean, what that might mean, and that's what you're referring to, is that an entirely new form of political discourse might emerge and that people who are capable of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
generating a certain degree of perspicacity and wisdom spontaneously are going to be prioritized over those who have a bent towards incentivized or instrumental manipulation. I mean, Polyev could do that, right? He had a conversation with me. He got no questions ahead of time, none. And he was willing to go along with that. But it is really a completely different way of...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Now, we've been talking to Democrats, too, trying to get them on the podcast circuit. And the resistance so far has been the utter inability and unwillingness of people on the Democrat side to forego their pre-planned agenda with regards to a conversation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And that it's, as I said, it's terminally willfully blind to assume that there are any principles other than the Hobbesian battle of all against all. Well, is there an alternative to that? Well, the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Yeah, I agree. Well, it was Socrates who decried that, if I remember correctly, right? He was afraid that... if the written took primacy, that the concretization of thought would eliminate. I mean, I think Foucault wrote about that as a matter of fact, in favor of Socrates' proposition that the spoken should take priority over the written.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But it does have something to do with this paradoxical relationship between propagandizing and pre-preparation. And see, it isn't obvious to me that you can lie effectively, spontaneously in a conversation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Discernment is the right word there because that's what discernment is for. Discernment is to find the path where the sacred manifests itself in each moment. Yeah, to detect or divine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
The Western alternative, the Judeo-Christian alternative, has been, forever been, something like the proposition that an ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice is the alternative to nihilism and to power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Well, Polyev, for example, Polyev, I think, has been he's certainly been the most effective Canadian politician on this front, but he might be the most effective politician in the Western world at the moment in using new media. So one of the things he's done, for example, is. write and produce 10-minute documentaries to educate Canadians about economic reality. He's done that very effectively.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
They're very high-quality documentaries, and he told me that he writes them and narrates them, which is, you know, quite an interesting skill set, because that's quite divorced from typical politicking. But it is... The thing is, is the intermediaries, in some ways, the intermediaries are no longer necessary between the leaders and the populace.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
This is something that the MAGA and the MAHA types are trying to work out right now from a strategic perspective. It's like, oh, We now have the opportunity to communicate directly to the public at indefinite length, right? Because also the technological constraints that made everything compressed into a 30-second soundbite, that's gone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And, well, we tried to sort that out and to clarify that more particularly, to investigate that claim and to see what it means in the context of relatively formal religious beliefs, say, specifically belief in Christianity, And with regards to the alternatives, we're definitely at something approximating the end of the Enlightenment. That's partly what the culture war is about.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And so then Polyev has been very effective at just talking directly to the Canadian public. And that's why he won the Conservative leadership. And it's part of the reason... along with Trudeau's catastrophic failure, that he's going to be the next prime minister. But it is a sea change, and it is driven, in large part, by this technological transformation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Now, you've been down... I've got two questions for you. I want to go in two directions. The first is... regarding the question I opened our conversation with in relationship to Christianity. You're a very open person, and your interests flash all over. And do you have any faith in the stability of what you've newly found, or do you...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Do you think that there's a risk or a possibility of your attention, given your open nature, shifting to something else? Or do you feel that you found a kind of bedrock that's qualitatively different from the sorts of orientations that you've had previously?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Now, it was very deliberate. That center should be replaced.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
The rationalists and empiricists, their account of the world was insufficient. The postmodernists challenged it with a high degree of success, although they turned to power. And that was a dreadful mistake. Well, everyone is, what would you say, feeling out what the alternative might be. And the discussion we had today is an attempt to further that process. So join us for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Okay, so this, I want to take apart this idea, two things here. I want to take apart this idea of the self.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And like the narcissistic self, let's say. And then I want to contrast that with this alternative self that's a consequence of the acceptance of something like voluntary self-sacrifice. And I kind of want to do that technically because I've been trying to work through the relationship between power and hedonism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
So as far as I can tell, there's not much point in power apart from the sadism without hedonism because power needs to serve desire because why else have it? Okay, so then the question is, you might say, well, the power serves my desires. But then there's a problem there. Nietzsche pointed to this, by the way, back in the mid-1800s.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
He said, well, when you say my or when you say I, you're assuming some sort of a priori unity that's transcendent, that isn't self-evident, even though you think it is. So you might say, well, I want my desires to be requited. And that's a focus on me. But what you're doing is you're identifying the I or the me with the desire.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And what that means inadvertently is that you're replacing I or me with the desire. And what that means is you're actually possessed by the desire. And so what narcissism actually means, and I think this is true clinically, Narcissism means subjugation to a series of possession by fragmented whim. And then people say, well, I'm getting what I want. It's like there's no I there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
If you lose your individual relationship with divine guidance, the only thing that can possibly emerge is either chaos or despotic force.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
You're a battlefield of whims. And then you might say, well, if your whims are being met successfully, why is that a problem? And it seems to me that the fundamental problem is it's actually self-defeating. Like one of the things we know about psychopaths, for example, is... Don't touch me when you say psychopaths. Some people think you think I'm one. I'm actually very compassionate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
No, I was thinking about you being one of the people who are talking about psychopaths. Yeah, yeah, that's a very important distinction. So... Psychopaths betray themselves as badly as they betray other people. So psychopaths are completely unable to learn from experience, which seems to mean that they don't give any consideration whatsoever to their future self.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
So they give no more consideration to their future self than they give to other people. And then you might say, well, what's the problem with that? And the problem is you gratify whim in the present at the cost of yourself and others in the future. And that's not a sustainable game. So now I've been trying, the postmodernists essentially presumed that the only uniting story was one of power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Okay, so then you might say, well, what's the alternative to that conceptualization that still allows for the possibility of union? Because you could have nihilism versus power, for example. Well, I think what the biblical stories are pointing to is an ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice, right? And that is actually the antithesis of power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And then you might say, well, there's a relationship between accepting that as a valid proposition and reconfiguring the notion of the self. Because... When my wife, when Tammy had Michaela, we took our daughter up to Northern Saskatchewan when she was about a year old. And there's a bunch of old people there and they're all just watching this baby like mad, like she was on fire.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
They're all 65, 70, 75. And they're so thrilled that this little creature is around and they're watching her intently. And Tammy said to me that it was such a relief to her not to be the center of attention, that something had become more important to her and that calmed her down and it gave her purpose.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And so then you might think the true self rather than the hedonistic self-defeating self, which we axiomatically assume as the self, the true self is actually found in the consequences of voluntary self-sacrifice because then you get You sacrifice, you get to be married. You sacrifice, you get to have friends.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
You sacrifice, you get to have colleagues and people who are voluntarily participating in your endeavors. You multiply your force. And then the self becomes like it's the short-term psychopathic and manipulative whims that are sacrificed, that you reflexively identify with the self. And what that's replaced with is harmony across all the levels of being simultaneously.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
from individual, like couple, family, town, society, state, and then all the way up Jacob's ladder, right? So, and that's based on, the argument would be, that's inevitably based on something like the acceptance of voluntary self-sacrifice as an existential necessity. And that seems to be- That's the pattern of Christ's life, clearly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And I tried to take that apart because that's a story, for example, that the atheists like Dawkins point to as indicative of the sadism of God. But I think what it means is that Of course you offer your children to God because you can't protect them and you don't want them to be nihilistic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And so what you do is you say their service as tools in the hands of the divine takes priority over everything. They're not yours, they're his.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Well, and remember, Abraham gets him back. And there's a lesson there. It's like, if you're willing to devote your children to what's highest, they return to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
That makes you a slave to the desire.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Oh, you read that? Oh, great.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
not maximum short-term fulfillment of desire. The promise is still something approximating life more abundant, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Well, it's that immediate element of it too, though.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
You've annihilated time. That's what it means to participate in life eternal. I mean, part of the reason that Christ is the provider of endless loaves and fishes is because- There is no more stable economic covenant than one that's founded on the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
So if you found your wholesome, see, we have a very skewed notion in the West of what constitutes natural resource, because there's such a thing as the resource curse, right? So if you look economically at countries that are blessed with natural resources, they're not rich, not by and large, they're corrupt and poor. And that's because the idea of natural resource is wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
The only natural resource, the only true natural resource is the principle that the covenant of cooperative social productivity is predicated on. And that's the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice. If you have that, everything becomes a resource. Everything, that's why Christ is the miraculous provider of the loaves and the fishes and the water that never runs dry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Because if you organize your society on the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice, then everything is abundant always. It's not immediate gratification of whim. It's something much more sustained and productive and communal and upward serving. Amen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Jung prophesied that at the end of World War II. He said that the logical conclusion of Protestantism would be that everybody was their own church. Right, because there's no end to the fragmentation, right? And that's associated with, let's say, the worship of diversity for its own sake.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But the problem with that is fragmentation and entropy and also the narcissism that goes along with every single person being the center of the world. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
You know, one of the complex problems that's associated with that is exactly the question of, well, if it's not you that's the center, once you understand that the you that you presume is actually an aggregation of immature whims in its default form, then what is the you that should be paramount? Now, Jung knew this. This is why he regarded Christ as a symbol of the self, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
He believed that the... He believed that the central unity of spirit that would in some ways naturally emerge as these underlying complexes or motivational states aggregated would take on the appearance of the self-sacrificial passion. And it has to be that way. I believe because if you're going to orient yourself towards the future, you have to sacrifice the present.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Like obviously, and if you're gonna orient yourself towards other people in a communal relationship, you have to sacrifice the immediate demand for the gratification of your whims. That's what kids learn between two and four. Like they learn to, for example, when they learn to take turns, which is like a predicate for having friends, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Because sometimes it's you and sometimes it's me, otherwise we're not gonna get along. That's obviously sacrificial because to do that, you have to sacrifice you, taking the first turn every time. And so I don't see any way out of the argument that a mature future orientation is sacrificial and mature future oriented communal orientation is self-sacrificial.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And then you'd say, well, what's the pattern of that? And Christ's insistence, right, is that he embodied the pattern of the prophets and the law that was already extant in the Old Testament and embodied it. And that embodiment is the ultimate demonstration of voluntary self-sacrifice. I can't argue my way out of that. It just seems like, that just seems, I can't see an alternative to that view.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Well, that is what you do to some degree if you're a reasonable parent of adolescents, for example. Yes. One of the things you do is say, go make some mistakes and find out for yourself. It is required. I suppose that's the, well, you would associate that theologically with the granting of free will. Like, right, why not make everyone just into a slave of divine command?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Right, so you're saying that it can't just be grounded in a more enlightened form of self, of what would say self-service. Yeah, okay, so... It's not happening. Yep, got it, got it, got it. So, well, some of the things that were occurring to me when you said that. So, there's a dream that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Tolstoy had and recounted at the end of his confession, he was in a kind of suicidal despair and he had a dream that he was suspended on a bed and he was looking down like in immensely high above the earth. And he was looking down into this abyss that he could fall into. And then he looked up and he could see a rope that connected him to heaven, but he couldn't see what it was attached to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But he understood that that rope that disappeared into the ineffable was what was protecting him from like eternally, so to speak, from plunging into the abyss. And one of the things you're making reference to is the fact that because you're finite, let's say, and not omniscient, that your conceptualizations are always going to ground themselves out in something that is truly ineffable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Now, the same problem obtains in science, right? Because if you pursue... If you pursue your investigations into the micro world, you ground out in the quantum world, which no one understands. And then if you pursue your investigation temporally and you encounter the Big Bang, you're stuck with a miracle at the beginning of time. And I think part of the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Part of it is, and Jung made some reference to this, is like if you're finite and bounded in your intelligence and your apprehension, there's a cloud of mystery that surrounds that that's dreamlike, and then there's something that's akin to the miraculous around that, and that's the buffer between the finite and the infinite.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And I think you're making reference to that when you talk about the danger of reducing religious faith to the rational, even if you're... assuming future orientation and communal orientation as a better rational orientation than present whim gratification. And I think that's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
I mean, that's partly, I think, why Orthodox Christianity is exerting a fairly powerful attraction on people at the moment, because it's quite good at using architecture and ritual and and sound to fill the gap between the rational and the irrational, right? And it's not argumentation any more than ballet is argumentation or fine art is argumentation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
It's more like it's a phenomena that, and that means to shine forth, right? It's a phenomena that indicates that there's something beyond what you normally apprehend that's there and that a relationship with that is necessary. And I do think that's... Now, you associated that discovery in you with despair. So... Like, can you fill in the gaps between the despair and the discovery of that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
You want agreement in principle, which is very different than like conscious and what would you say, incentivized coordination. So this beginner's mind. So I did a course for Peterson Academy on the Sermon on the Mount. And so I thought I would... mentioned something about that in relationship to this idea of like every moment being born anew, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
What would you say? It's partly humility. It's partly apprehension of the necessity of accepting things that are beyond your rational reductionism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
It's selfishness replete with the most sophisticated of all possible rationalizations. So it's the, what would you say, supreme intellect as handmaiden of the passions. Right, right, right, right. So it's that grip of instantaneous motivation allied with, this is Foucault to a T as far as I'm concerned. He put his entire intellect at the service of his passion. Warped passion. Diabolical.
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524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Yeah, diabolical. And he's very good at it. Like, he's very smart. He's very smart. Great sophistry in this. Marx did the same thing. Marx did the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
So in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says to focus your attention on what's most high. And so you could think about that, even if you don't exactly know what that means, you could think about that as the attempt to get your intent right. So insofar as you can conceptualize what the good is, even in your ignorance, that's what you're trying to put first and foremost.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
One of the strange things I think about your situation is that You know, you were, God, maybe this is probably right, is that you were, just like Richard Dawkins is the exemplar of the atheistic enlightenment, you're kind of the success story of the hedonistic liberal, right? I mean, you got, like, assuming that would work, What you got, was it working?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Okay, so then the question is, well, if you get what you asked for, like if it's magically granted to you as it was in your case, what's the consequence of that? And you're outlining the consequence. So you said, well, there were practical consequences that it inverted on you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
So you do that first, and then you attend to the moment. And so then you get the advantage of a kind of a distal view, which is associated with life eternal, you might say, and what's important at the pinnacle of all things. But then you get that hyper attention on the moment that makes everything born anew.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But I'm also interested in the psychological consequences, you know, because the question, well, why not take pleasure-enhancing drugs like cocaine? Why not sleep with everyone who presents themselves as an opportunity? Like, that's an actual question, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Generally, the reason is, well, generally the reason is, well, you can't, right? You just don't have the opportunity. But then let's assume that, well, you can. You actually can. I did it. Okay, okay. But why, can you be more specific about why that didn't work psychologically?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Are you hopeful? And what are your concerns? So I had the opportunity today to once again sit down with Russell Brand. We've talked quite a bit, and we're getting to know each other quite well, which makes the discussions even more interesting and faster-paced. And we started out with a discussion of Christianity, and it's—what would you say—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And, you know, psychologists have cottoned onto that to some degree with their discussion of concepts like flow. Because if you've got your act together and you're oriented upward and you're conversing or you're engaged in an activity, that sense of unity with things does emerge, and that involves a lack of self-consciousness and the ability to focus in a very intense way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
well that's the pharaoh and the slaves and the consequence of that is the plagues like yes absolutely that's what happens the more dissolute the society the more the unconscious longing for top-down what imposition of structure the more the top-down stubborn imposition of structure the more likely that that response to crisis will be pathologized and that the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Yeah, but absolutely, there's no doubt that power is a unifying force. I mean, that's why in the Lord of the Rings, it's the ring of power that unites all the rings. If you're not united, let's say, by responsibility and by voluntary self-sacrifice, you will be united by power, right? That's the rule.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And that's why, you know, even the Israelites who are slaves under Pharaoh, like they're part of a dynamic. Sure, the Pharaohs are tyrant, but they're slaves. And they're calling out for the tyrant. And so if you call out for the tyrant, power will emerge as the uniting force. And then you might say, well, why not? And the answer is, well, it's self-defeating.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
It's too rigid to be adaptive, and it's fundamentally self-defeating. And so that's why not. I mean, there's more to it, as you pointed out, because there's the fact that the imposition of the king is a violation of the principle of the divine, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Because if you're following the divine, you don't bloody well need a king, which is what God tells the Israelites over and over when they're clamoring for a king. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, Russell, I think we're going to stop on this side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
I think what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side is talk about, you've been down in Florida and you've been having some association with the MAGA and the MAHA types, strangely enough. And so I'd like to delve into that a little bit and tell me what you've seen, what your hopes are and what you're concerned about. Because, you know, you're a strange character in this milieu too. No, thanks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And I think that's associated, by the way, there's an insistence in the Old Testament that the firstborn is to be sanctified to God. And I think what that means is that you imagine that your life is made out of episodes, which is how you would recount your day, let's say. First this happened, then this, and then there'd be a conclusion, then there'd be another event.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Well, you come at it from the left and from the liberal side. And now you're watching these people who are part of this more conservative movement, kind of conservative libertarian movement. And I'd be very curious to hear, you know, what you've concluded as a consequence of your observations. Okay. So obviously you've been made welcome, which is extremely interesting and bizarre.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
So yes, it's so preposterous. It's all so preposterous. So let's do that on the Daily Wire side. Anyways, thank you all for your time and attention. Thanks, Russell. It's always a pleasure talking to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
The question is, what attitude should you use to frame each new event? And the attitude that's put forward as optimized in the Sermon on the Mount is that when anything new begins, you want to reorient yourself to what's highest. So you think, well, how can I make of this opportunity the best possible event? How can I orient myself so that I would be participating in that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And you do that every time there's a transformation of viewpoint. Yeah, that way you get to have your cake and eat it too, you might say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
If you're not united by responsibility and by voluntary self-sacrifice, you will be united by power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Well, we've been, for this Ark enterprise, we've been trying to wrestle exactly with that issue. And I think your comments about no, Elon, let's say, as a globalist force that isn't exactly akin to the previous globalist force. It's like, well, maybe we've tried to distinguish this technically in our discussions at ARC. Okay, so here's some principles. Tell me what you think about them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Policy that requires force and fear is indicative of, it's at least suboptimal and it's probably tyrannical. So that one of the ways you determine whether a policy is acceptable is whether or not it's invitational. Right. And so it'd be like I make you an offer and hopefully you're on board voluntarily, which would make you a much more efficient participant as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And even if you're not fully enthusiastic about it, you can't think of a better alternative that you would lay claim to. Right. So it's like You can imagine if we're going to negotiate reasonably, we might say, well, we're going to be duty bound to accept the best offer we can conceive of, right? I mean, hopefully it'll be one that also fills you with enthusiasm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But in the absence of that, at least you won't be able to think of a better alternative. So no power, no force, no fear, right? And then the other thing that we've toyed with, let's say, or played with is the idea that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
not only does the vision of the future have to be invitational, there has to be an element of play about it because like I studied play fairly deeply neurophysiologically and play is a really interesting motivational state because it's very fragile. It can be disrupted by almost any other motivational state. So the sense of play, which is like,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
direction with variability right because that's play is direction with variability that only emerges when the situation say of communication and cooperation has been optimized so then you might say another way that you can tell if the venture is proceeding well is that if everybody engaged in it can engage in a sense of play and i like the play idea partly because it's voluntary obviously but also because play implies a fair bit of tolerance for
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
you know, for deviation along the path.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
the challenge that it poses in its fundamental elements to the doctrines of dissolution, so you could say that on the nihilistic side, and to the insistence that the only proper centralizing and unifying force is power. And so... Well, both of those are very powerful arguments.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
One, the nihilistic argument is that everything is fundamentally meaningless and fragmented and that all unity of any sort is an illusion in this veil of tears, entropy-ridden veil of tears. And the contrary position to that on the side of power is that Only the naive believe that unifying forces are anything but the imposition of compulsion and power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And this came to your wife's mind, this story. That's why you investigated it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
the despair and hopelessness that accompanied that failure, and then the surprising and remarkable consequences that unfolded across time. And I don't want to spoil the story. You have to hear it in its details to really understand what transpired. But out of the ashes of that defeat, let's say, rose the radical success of The Chosen, very unlikely enterprise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So one of the things that does happen to people in circumstances like this, and it's worth noting psychologically, is that if you are wrestling with a very complex problem, you can watch memories and images flip through your mind. You can think of it, your imagination, what your imagination is trying to do is to sketch out the nature of the new landscape.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And it might offer a hint in the form of a reference to something read or something encountered that you can then pursue, right? So it'd be like your wife's imagination had gripped onto the notion that there was some possibility that there was a nugget of information embedded in that particular story that would be useful for this situation. Right. We'd call that an intuition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
But it's a revelation, too. That's another way of thinking about it. Okay, so you took that seriously and you read the story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, you know, you mentioned the Exodus story. One of the... What would you say? God, if I remember correctly, God justifies his actions in hardening the heart of the Pharaoh because that increases the majesty of his eventual victory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yes, exactly. Three times in one chapter. Yeah, right, right, right. So that's a very complicated thing to unpack. And I don't remember if we went into that in the Exodus seminar in the Daily Wire series, but I suspect so. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
What you're doing is you're laying out the narrative of those events to point out the, what would you say, it's the magnification of what happens that's beneficial by the precursor of the tragic. And it is definitely the case that there's this dynamic in our life that What's good would not be as good as it is unless it could be contrasted with suffering and misery, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
You need that expanse of experience for things to have their majesty. That's a good way of thinking about it, Tim.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And we're thinking— So that's at least a possibility then.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, that's a weird coincidence, to say the least.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And I was extremely curious about how that happened. I wanted to know how it happened personally, What was Delis' response to his failure? And how did the idea of the Chosen make itself And what did that mean practically? And why did the audience respond? And how was it financed? And what was the marketing approach? And why did that work?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Okay, so what did you make of that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
It's like its meaning is opaque. Yes. It's a very particular reference, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Hello, everybody. I'm probably in the most unlikely stage setting today that, I don't know, I've ever been in, although I've been in some unlikely places. This is the house of Caiaphas, the high priest during the time of Christ. It's the setting for part of The Chosen, one of the most successful series, and I would say probably indisputably the most successful religiously-based series
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So you're looking at the wrong marker of success in relationship to your endeavor. So as long as you did the right thing all the way along, which is something you have to contend with in relationship to your conscience, the outcome is not the measure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
What would you say? Using anything but proper intent as the... Now, and the reason for that, it's fairly straightforward, is sometimes things that are radically successful fail in the measurable moment. I'll give you an example. So, for example, Nietzsche's book, Beyond Good and Evil, I think it sold 200 copies in his lifetime.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, so it was a cataclysmic failure, but it was maybe the most impactful book of philosophy in the last 150 years. He didn't know. Right, and then there's the contrary situation where... you succeed beyond your wildest dreams in the moment, but it's hollow and you've sold your soul for it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And what does it mean for the culture, more broadly speaking? And what has been the effect worldwide? And how are we to understand that? And we did what we could to... investigate all those questions and to provide some at least provisional answers to them in the 90 minutes that we were fortunate to talk today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And everything that comes flooding towards you, which looks like success, is actually the means for your destruction, right? So, and Job does wrestle with this. He says that... He says, in effect, to himself and to his friends and to God, that he's in no position to judge what's happened to him, in part because he doesn't have the omniscient view necessary to take all things into account.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And so he's unwilling to condemn himself or God, for that matter, because of this momentary failure, cataclysmic though it is, because... Everything has not yet been revealed. Now, that's complicated because it still leaves us in an uncomfortable situation, which is, well, if you can't use the result as the marker for success or failure, what do you use as a marker?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So now you went over your conduct. You got this message and you presumed, I'm leaping ahead a bit, my suspicion is that you presumed that perhaps this hadn't been a failure. Like, how did you make the judgment? How did that change your judgment of the situation?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So you set the stage so this could be successful. And so you did your part. That's the message.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And so if you're interested in that story, and it's an extremely interesting story about the attempt to film the most interesting story ever told, you might say, then join us for this podcast. Well, let's start by talking about where we are, because we're in this remarkable set. part of a remarkable series. And so let's talk about the set first and then the series.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Okay, okay. So one of the things that I've been talking to audiences about as I travel around the world and lecture is a theory of What would you say? The relationship between truth and adventure. So here's a way of conceptualizing faith in the truth. Whatever happens if you tell the truth is the best thing that could possibly happen, no matter how it looks to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right, so this is... Because, see, you've got to make a decision both ways. You could say, I'm going to judge the... Validity and utility of my utterance based on the result that I can see. Now, the problem with that is you can't see everything. Right. And that brings up those other problems we described.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
It could be a cataclysmic failure in the moment, but a long-term success, or a cataclysmic failure. success in the moment of long-term failure. If you use the results as the measure, those errors exist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Okay, the alternative is to flip that and say, no, because of my ignorance in relationship to the adjudication of outcomes, I'm going to concentrate on the process, and I'm going to make the assumption, and that becomes a standard of faith, that whatever happens, if I say what I believe to be true, is the best outcome, regardless of how it looks to me. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
That's analogous to the, what would you say, conclusion you drew about even you might say a cognitive error that made you susceptible to taking yourself apart in the aftermath of the collapse of your movie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right? Now, you still have a problem, which would be, you know, are you just rationalizing? You know, you failed by any reasonable standard of failure. Now you're saying, well, I did everything right, and I'm not going to take the failure to heart. Well, I'm not saying I did everything right. Okay, fair enough.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, you said something... Okay, now you said something that I thought was crucial, and I'm hoping I can reproduce it. And I'm sure I don't have this exactly right, but you said something like...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
You determined at that moment that the outcome wasn't the proper measure, and then you described how using the outcome as the measure could be contaminated by your own self-interest, your pride, your desire to be attractive to people, to be accepted in Hollywood, all of that. So there's a pride element to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
You said instead that you were going to adjudicate the moral acceptability of your actions by what? By determining whether they were an accurate measure A genuine reflection of your relationship with God? Okay, what does that mean exactly to you? Like, take that apart, because it's analogous to this notion of the truth will set you free as a definition, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So you said you're switching the criteria that you're using. Okay, how did you come up with the new criteria, and how do you know that you're... genuinely applying those criteria, you know, in a way that isn't contaminated, let's say, by pride and self-interest. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
How do you think that transformation came about? I mean, it's linked to this message that you had received and the timeliness of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yes, it's quite a coincidence. It's such a coincidence that I must— You're kind of screwed both ways when a coincidence like that shows up. Yes. Because you either don't believe it or you believe it. It's like both are absurd in a way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
I don't even know how you would calculate the odds of a coincidence like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, that's a weird one, too. Because I do believe that it's useful for people to flesh out a vision. Yes. Right? But you have to do that in a kind of a detached way. You have to understand that... That's a first pass approximation and it's necessary, but you don't want to fall in love with it. You don't want to be wedded to it. You don't want to worship it as a final end, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Now, it's also interesting that this message you got, it's so pointed in relationship to how your attitude changed because you said, this is the other part of this that's important. Too coincidental in a way, because what your friend from, the message delivered from Romania said to you was that your criteria for success was inappropriate. It's very targeted, especially for that moment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So it's not only the coincidence of the overlapping theme, it's that the message that you received was dead relevant to the problem you were trying to solve. And to the person. And in a revolutionary way. Yes. Right, so now you have a different hallmark for success. And one of the proofs that that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
message struck home and was accurate was that instead of being in desperation as a consequence of the collapse of your vision you said that perversely even you felt free right that's very unlikely right that's a very unlikely outcome the most unlikely outcome is you're shattered at least for a good while right and so and that would also indicate that you were laboring under a burden of yes
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
success definition that was actually not good for you at all. I was a performer. I was performance-based. Right, right. That's a puppet. That's like a Pinocchio puppet, right? Performing for the stage. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
That's being an actor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, but that's voluntary. That's the difference between that and being a puppet dancing on strings, right? Voluntary submission isn't dancing to the Piper's tune. It's a different game. Fair. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right. Well, that would be a temptation, obviously, if you're going to be a filmmaker, because one of the things you want to have happen is that you want people to watch your film. So that's a positive in a way, because you want to make something... I'm in a performative field. Right, but the problem is when you're basing your self-worth on... your status as a performer, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Then it becomes about you. And that does make you a puppet. And so one of the things we know as psychologists is that there's no difference between being self-conscious and being miserable. Those are so closely linked, you can't separate them statistically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And you know, if you're on stage and you start worrying about how the audience is reacting to you, you get self-conscious and you stumble over your words. You're embarrassed. People can tell you're self-conscious. You get awkward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
You start apologizing, right, which is a really bad thing to do on stage. It's like, well, if you have to apologize for being on stage, maybe you shouldn't be on stage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right, and this is part of a large macro set consisting of a number of large buildings, each of which have sets built inside it. They're all soundproofed. When did you set all this up?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, yeah, exactly. They're ahead of you. Continually, continually. And worse, it's the whim of the audience that's above you. Yeah, that's that. Okay, so that's cool. So, okay, so yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, right. So that's pretty funny. All right. Okay, okay. So then, okay, so let's continue. What happens? So...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Why? What did you see when you were making those films? What sort of impact was that having?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right, so is it fair to say that that's the subordination of the movie to the text?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, yeah, and that's a crucial thing. It's a crucial thing, you know. I have a very large collection of Russian propaganda art, like 400 pieces, a lot. And I've studied propaganda a lot. And propaganda is the subversion of art to a... It's like a subversion of art to an outcome. It's kind of like what we're talking about with regards to your criteria for success.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
You already know what the target is. The thing about telling a story is a story is a quest. You don't know what the outcome is. Now, you might say, I want to make this story in a way that serves the highest possible purpose. That gives you a lot of degrees of freedom. But the story isn't genuine enough.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
The story isn't genuine like a conversation isn't genuine if you know what the outcome is going to be. Like our conversation here, I don't know where it's going to go. I want to let it go where it's going to go. religious films can be propagandistic just like political films.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Because it looks like it's the hijacking of the quest in art to push forward a message that's predetermined. It's not an exploration. There's not even any faith in it, right? Because there's no risk in a way. Yeah, so it doesn't work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And, you know, part of the reason I think that one of the things I've learned about atheists, because I've learned a lot about atheists discussing religious issues with atheists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
I think I was never an atheist because I was never confident enough in my own doubt to proclaim it as a virtue in a way, you know. I knew it, at minimum, I knew that I didn't know what the hell was going on. There's another thing that mitigated against that, too, is that I've believed in evil since I was very young. Which is helpful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, if you believe in evil, you believe in good, because it's the opposite of evil. And so, now, amorphous though that may be. Okay, so now, propaganda. You learned that you were telling stories, and you were doing that by showing these stories from a new light. Okay, so how did you come across that as an idea?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right, right, right. A lot of transformation packed into a very short period of time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Okay, so there's a lot in that story that needs unpacking, too. It's like there's lots of things in principle that you could have taken inspiration from. Why do you think that hit you, what he was doing? Why do you think that captured your—because that's a calling, right? That's the manifestation of a calling, and it has a big effect, as it turns out. So something is being born there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Something triggers inspiration. What, a commitment or an interest? What happens exactly when you see him?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So I've always— Well, and there are people who are natural storytellers, but that's a real gift.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right. So you came by it honestly. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
You see with Christ's parables frequently like an amalgam of those two approaches, you know, because he'll tell a story and then the disciples, for example, will say, well, you know, thank you, but we don't really get it. And then he'll lay out the explanation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
I've certainly found in my lectures that the most effective way of driving a point home is to tell a story and to provide an explanation, right? The story is brought… It's like the playoff intellectually between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, who were aiming in very similar directions. Dostoevsky's stories cover a much broader territory than Nietzsche's thinking, but they're less explicit, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
They're less propositional. So there's a loss there because it's not as defined. Nietzsche is more defined and more specific, but there's a loss because the expanse that Dostoevsky covers is broad. I'll give you an example. So in the Brothers Karamazov... the hero is a novitiate named Alyosha, and he's contrasted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Alyosha is a very good person, but he's not an intellectual, and his arguments aren't as tightly formulated and pointed as they might be. He's often at a loss for words. His brother Ivan is hyper charismatic and unbelievably pointed in his propositional reasoning. And if he goes head to head with the Alyosha, he can win the argument.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
But he loses the battle because as the story unfolds, you see that the goodness of Alyosha triumphs over the Luciferian rationality of Ivan. Ivan wins all the battles, you might say, but loses the war. And Dostoevsky could portray that because he used a story. Nietzsche, as a philosopher, would have to make the philosophical case for Alyosha. That isn't what happens in Dostoevsky.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Dostoevsky shows what happens as Alyosha's life unfolds. He does the same thing in his book, The Idiot, which is about a prince who's an analog of Christ, who is a holy fool, and who people have some... pity for, but he's a very good person. And you see that unfold in the story. Dostoevsky's showing how a life well lived is triumphs over an argument well formulated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
That's a good way of thinking about it. Correct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
That's a revelatory moment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Things go together.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, so what you're doing, it's analogous, I would say, to, let's say, what the Renaissance artists in particular did when they were painting images from the Bible, right? Sure. textual reference, and they're fleshing them out. Now, it's a static image, although a great Renaissance painting is packed with, insanely packed, insanely packed with information.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
But you have the advantage of being able to do that in three dimensions, right? Because you can add that temporal element, so you can use your imagination. See, this is interesting, eh? Because this is analogous to what the great psychoanalytic thinkers did in relationship to dream analysis. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, let's familiarize everybody watching and listening with the with the story of The Chosen in the broadest possible sense. You just pointed out that it was crowdfunded to begin with. And so why don't you start at the beginning of the vision for the series and the ambition for the series and just tell the story because lots of people who are engaged in this podcast won't know it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So a client would tell them a dream fragment, and they would ask the client to let their imaginations range to flesh out the territory that was associated with the dream images. So that would be the first step. And then the second step would be for the analyst himself to participate in that. So if I was doing dream analysis with a client, or merely listening for that matter, I'd watch
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
like your wife was watching when she got that message about the loaves and the fishes. I'd watch to see if an image or an idea flashed into my mind. And one of the things I was doing as a therapist is you'd tell me something and something would be triggered in my mind. So it's associated. Now, we're similar in some ways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So if I have an association to what you're saying, it's possible that it's also fleshing out the broader meaning. Now, you're taking these... biblical stories that are fragments of a narrative, obviously, because the thieves had a life. And you're letting your imagination flesh them out, right? Yes. And amplifying them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
It can, it can. There's no doubt about that. But that's also, the thing about the text is the Bible is insanely hyperlinked. And so like crazily hyperlinked. It's really the world's first hyperlinked text. And so it's not like there's a linear... voyage through the text because each verse refers to like five other verses or 50, and each of them refer to 50.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And so there's a lot of imaginative pathways through the text that are valid textual interpretations. Now, the Protestants who are skeptical are right that you can deviate heretically and that that's a problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Just because something has dangers doesn't mean it isn't useful. And just because it's useful doesn't mean it doesn't have dangers. I mean, you can wander into heretical or hallucinogenic or psychopathic territory with... By deviating too far away from the text intent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And so they're like, we can't have— Well, that was Nikos Kazantzakis' work, right? Sure, but— And he got excommunicated for it, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Risqué, yeah, vulgar, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So that's where the textual interpretation gets subverted to the psyche of the interpreter. Right. The danger that the Protestants are warning against.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
He was trained as a modern artist, but he adopted an attitude of respect and fidelity to the tradition, and that bounded his artistic imagination, right? But it provided it with structure, and it also— it's interesting because that means that his artistic vision is now in sync with this broader tradition, which is what you're striving to do by your own testimony or admission here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
You're approaching the text insofar as you can manage it with... respect and honor. Yes. And then what you'd hope, and I do think this is how it works, to the degree that your intent is pure, so to speak, in relationship to those, your imagination will fall into line. That's how imagination works, because it's a goal-directed process. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So your goal, and maybe that's part of what happened in that transformation too, is right, because you said you switched from outcome as evaluative standard to something like relationship or covenant as standard, that should mean that your imagination is much more reliable. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Oh, I'm not going to— Well, I'm curious about this, eh? Because I kind of mean it technically. Because— The imagination properly harnessed is prophetic. It can see around corners. And you've adopted a given aim, and we've fleshed out what that aim is, and you are expanding upon and exploring the text. So now, I would say I'm a herald. Okay, how would you distinguish that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
there isn't that element of compulsion and force and propagandistic intent that, by the way, does drive so much atheist resistance. Like, a lot of atheists are not merely rationalist, materialist determinists, let's say, who are skeptical. That's sort of their intellectual facade. A very large number of them were hurt by religious people using force to drive home their beliefs. Right? Not helpful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And, you know, I'm always leery of religiously-themed entertainment because it's got that propagandistic element of subversion, and even though hypothetically it's for a good cause, it just makes me revolt, let's say. The Chosen didn't do that. I enjoyed watching it, partly because it succeeds... on the basis of its ability to tell a story. Sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And it's weird that that should be the first thing, right? But it has to be. It has to be. I don't think anything can take primacy over the story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, two plus two equals four. Well, one of the dangers, too, is that you get concerned about your— Okay, as I've become more successful, let's say, as a public communicator, a podcaster, the temptation to protect my reputation in relationship to my selection of guests increases. Should I really talk to that person? Right. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
If I get worried about my reputation, then I'm gonna fail because the wrong thing is driving me Forward. All I've been using this podcast for is to talk to people who I want to hear from so I can learn something. That's it. If I get... Okay. For you as a Christian, if you get concerned about your reputation as a Christian, you're going to get dull quick.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, you can see this is what's happened to Hollywood in relationship to the woke ideology. It's like, as soon as pleasing the woke ideologues becomes the goal, then the stories are like instantly contemptible. Oh, 100%. They're just, they're worse than dull. And the people who participate in them are empty. And it just dies. It just, as we've seen, it just dies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Good story, though.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right, that's a good question. Yes. So I went home to my wife, and I'm like— It's not so small then, is it? Right. Right? It's like, maybe my criteria for what constitutes small has been wrong. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So it's a door that opens if you knock on it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
That's where I had the idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Oh, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Why? Why did they like it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Oh, that's good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right. So that was their idea, the crowdfunding idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Anyway, because that's another indication where your a priori tyrannical presumptions about what the right path must be, which is a weird thing to think you know about when you're trying to do something impossible, say, like tell a gospel story to a horde of people. It's like, I know how to do that. It's like, probably no. Yes. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
These people offer you this unconventional opportunity, and partly because you now know that you don't know what the hell you're doing, and all that prideful presumption has disappeared, you're willing to take a shot at it, a crack at it. Yeah, that's very cool.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right, that's an invitation. It's an invitation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And talk about a market test.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right. Well, that drives the point home even more because— You know, what you just laid out, it's so interesting because the story that you told in the last part of our discussion, the second half parallels the first half almost perfectly in that you noted that, like the message to you was that you were supposed to concentrate on what you had to offer and not to pay attention to the outcome.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Okay, then you noticed that your proper offering, see, God tells Cain that if he offered what was best, he would be accepted. And so his message to Cain is, you're failing because you're not offering what's best. So that begs the question, well, how do you know what's best? Well, you said, you said, look, I was willing to follow my intuition with regards to storytelling.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
I was following a path that it... I had known about since I was very young, this storytelling path, I was willing to use my imagination. I was willing to humble myself to not do the Hollywood thing, but just to continue telling the story. Then I noticed that I was very good at this and that people responded very positively to it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And that I was calm and interested while I was doing it, which is probably a good indication that like those, what other standards would you use for evaluating what the best you had to offer would be? And so that's so cool because it's not what you thought, but it is what you experienced. Right. So now you, then you show the results of your film to add, what were they called?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And they provide you with an unorthodox opportunity. And then- the genuine fruits of what you had offered come to make themselves manifest. That's so cool. It's so cool that those things are paralleled with that message that you got from Romania. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
ever produced. I'm here today to talk with the creator, producer, director, and writer of that series, Dallas Jenkins, who's invited us down here to see the studio and to see the sets and to talk about how this most unlikely of all occurrences made its manifestation. So what did we talk about?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, which would be the Hollywood film, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Okay, so now by then you're wise enough to not stop doing what you're actually good at in favor of this other vision that you had. It's not surprising you had it because you want to be a filmmaker and there's the Hollywood model, but that obviously isn't the kind of filmmaker that you are. Right. Right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And it turns out that the kind of filmmaker you are takes a very different pathway, but that there's tremendous opportunity there, which is exactly what happened with the Jews.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Probably kudos to you for at least... what would you say? That's humility. You at least had the willingness to pay attention to what the failure might have been indicating without losing faith. Yeah, right. So that's good. That's a good thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, you have a whole new distribution Oh, of course. This is a whole new ecosystem for filmmaking and distribution. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, Adam is sort of going like this. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, the first thing I would say, my first response to The Chosen, which I started watching in part because Out of curiosity and in part because it had become a cultural phenomenon, and I was curious about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, there was buzz everywhere.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right, right, I know. How many people have asked you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
No, they ask me something worse. The question usually is, do you believe in Christ exactly the same way I claim to?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, well, and that's, you know, I mean, that's fine, I suppose, but it's... There's something very sweet about it, too. Well, yes, well, yes, that's what I mean by it being fine. It's just, it's... Well, it's something like, you know, look to your own salvation. That's my fundamental attitude towards that. With regards to the chosen, I mean, the first...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
I was watching it with my wife, and she had undergone quite a profound religious transformation not too long before we started watching The Chosen, and so— What about your daughter?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
And so, yeah, yeah, but I watched The Chosen with Tammy, and— And so I was watching her watch it and seeing her response. The first response I had was relief. The relief was, oh, I can watch this because I'm very sensitive to propagandistic intent. I don't like it at all. Even a bit of it is a turnoff for me. And I thought, no, this is – it kind of reminded me a bit of – The Master and Margarita.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Do you know that book? I don't. Oh, you need to know The Master and Margarita. It's an absolute staggering masterpiece of Russian literature. It's a story written in the 1930s by a man named Bulgakov. Satan comes to Earth in the Soviet Union, and he can do whatever he wants because no one believes he exists. Sure. And then there's a backstory. This is why it would be so relevant to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Bulgakov tells the story of Christ and his experience with his disciples in a manner that's analogous to what you're doing. And it's a brilliant book. It's like Dostoevsky-level brilliant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Oh, I think you'd find it. It's a fascinating multi-level book. And I also really like Nikos Kazantzakis' work. He did Zorba the Greek, for example, which is a book most people know about. But he wrote a variety of stories that have a very... Well, is it The Temptation of Christ? Is that the name of the book? I can't remember at the moment. He did a variety of... I wish I could help you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
He produced a variety of stories that are similar to what you're doing with The Chosen. Sure. So, I was... And then I thought, well, do I find this interesting, independently of my religious convictions or lack thereof? And the answer to that was yes, I really enjoyed it. Which was... really what I was hoping for. You asked me a more specific question.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, part of the insistence, the Christian insistence since time immemorial was that Christ was fully God and fully human.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So the human part needs to be demonstrated with a commitment that's equal to the divine part. And I thought... I couldn't see how that could have been handled better than the manner in which it was handled in your series. And I found myself more than pleased to continue watching.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, well, it was a—like I said, it was a relief because— Yes. You avoided all of the cliched temptations of the easily parodied evangelical tradition. Yes. Right? That's a hard thing to pull off. And I also thought this was something else. It's beautiful. That's certain. Yeah. That's seriously important.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
The cinematography is top-rate, the acting is top-rate, like, the quality of the production is extreme. Because you can use it as an excuse, you know? You see, another part of the problem with propagandistic religious entertainment is that it's often low-quality, and you're supposed to pretend that doesn't matter. You think it doesn't have to be good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, it's about God, so, like, how high-quality does it really have to be? of the highest possible quality, independent of the religious message. And I thought the acting was great, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next. It was a real cliffhanger. And so I really enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to the continuing seasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
I'm curious, you know, it's not atypical for a series to wane as it progresses. Not always, but that can happen. I mean, it exhausts itself, or... People get tempted by the success of the series to warp it in one, you know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have to go left now instead of right. Or you can get stuck repeating what you already did. So how are you feeling about the new season that's forthcoming?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right, no kidding. Yeah, yeah, because you know, it's a very bad thing to be bad, but it's a very, it's a much worse thing to return to being bad after you've recognized that that was insufficient. That's a much worse, that's that parable about the servant who doesn't know what he's doing, being whipped with...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Few blows and a servant who knows what he's doing being, well, condemned to hell fundamentally. Right. Right, right. Because it's one thing to be bad unconsciously and it's another thing to have learned and then return, you know, to your…
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, a great storyteller makes the archetypal personal. That's what a storyteller does.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Oh, it's just beyond belief. It's jaw-dropping.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
I guess that's partly why it seemed to me that you handled the miracles so well. It's not that you downplay them, it's that you... It's a weird thing, because you make them, in some ways... a matter of logical course. It's a weird thing to do with a miracle, but... It's the inevitable result of the need. Yeah, and the situation. Yeah, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, that's a strange thing to make the miracle appear to be, of course, the thing that would happen under those circumstances.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
That is an excellent place to stop, and a good time to stop as well. So I think what we'll probably do on the Daily Wire side, for everybody who's watching and listening, because we have another half an hour there, I think we'll talk more about the chosen as a cultural phenomenon and as a, what, an index, an indicator of the time that we're in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Because everyone knows that the tectonic plates are moving at the deepest of all possible levels. And we see that manifested in the culture war and in the strange political times that we're in. But also in the, what would you say, in the sense that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
There is a transformation in the landscape of narrative that's reflected in part, let's say, in the evidence for something approximating a religious revival that's taking place in not only North America, but in Europe, in the West more broadly. So we'll investigate that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah. And so I don't think it's— You're doing them in the opposite order that we did them in on The Daily Wire, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a fine idea. We'll do that as well. So join us on the Daily Wire side for the continuation of the story. Yeah, great talking to you. And it's so fun to be here in Caiaphas' house. How preposterous having this conversation. And I'm very much looking forward to the new season. And for those of you who are watching and listening and who haven't seen The Chosen yet,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Right. Or even necessarily that you were wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Watch an episode or two and see what you think. I really enjoyed it, and so did my wife. And I would say we're very picky about such things, especially if they have intent, you know. And there was a marked absence of painful intent in The Chosen. It's very gripping and very well done and dramatically satisfying. You were pleased to continue watching. And I was pleased to continue watching.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
It's a tricky problem, eh? Because you don't want to be opaque to failure. I mean, it's a terrible problem. You don't want to be opaque to failure. And being persistent and being opaque to failure are often hard to distinguish. How do you know if you're... assiduously pursuing your goals in the face of trouble and opposition or stubbornly clinging to your tyrannical failures, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Very hard thing to... That's part of that problem of separating the wheat from the chaff or discriminating the spirits. And so you had... spent a lot of time in your career trying to get in a position where you were attractive to the mainstream Hollywood studios. That had happened. It seemed, as far as you were concerned, that you were pursuing the right path.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Then you get devastating news, and in relatively short order, that at least part of what you had envisioned just wasn't going to happen. And you must have been wondering at that point too, and I'm curious about what you think about that now, Do you have some sense of why the film... I mean, there's lots of reasons films don't succeed, many, like any product.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
First of all, the probability that any product is going to succeed, even if it's a good product, is low. Everything has to be timed exactly right, including things you can't control. But so... What did you conclude at that moment along with your wife that was the nature, let's say, of the failure? And then let's go back to the story of the feeding.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, the emergence of The Chosen as a spectacular success occurred on the heels of a relatively cataclysmic failure. The precursor movie, so to speak, at least from a career perspective of Delis, was a failure. It launched as a Hollywood production and spiraled downward almost immediately. And we talked about the desperation
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Yeah, well, that's an unpacking of levels, right? I mean, there's actually some psychological rules for approaching a situation like that because— Any failure brings up the specter of cataclysmic, characterological inadequacy, right? Do not pretend that I know what you just said.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Well, did I fail because I made a strategic error, or did I fail because there's something fundamentally wrong with me at a very deep level? Okay, so one of the things that happens to people who are depressed, and it's actually one of the hallmarks of depression, is that every time someone who has a proclivity
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
towards depression, faces an obstacle or fails, they immediately move from contemplation of a mere strategic error to analysis of a fundamental characterological flaw. And so there's actually some rules for this. The rule is that if something happens to you that's negative, you should presume the least amount of error possible and then work downward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
It's sort of like the presumption of innocence in the legal realm. You don't want to take yourself apart any more than is necessary. It's also a good rule of thumb in arguments, let's say, or disputes with your partner. You want to start with your wife or your husband. You want to start with the assumption that the problem between you
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
is a strategic and practical problem rather than an indication that the whole marriage should be thrown up in the air and you should leave. Right. Okay, so now you see this major failure and you're trying to figure out, well, is this a strategic error? Did I do something, is there something wrong fundamentally with my relationship with reality?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
So everything is destabilized, maybe, as far as you're concerned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
I don't know the strategic— Right, but you don't have to draw that conclusion. That. So in the story of Job, I mean, the decisions, Job makes a series of decisions in the aftermath of his cataclysmic failure, let's say, which is multidimensional, right? Because he loses his enterprise, he loses many of the members of his family, he ends up ill and disfigured, his friends are basically...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
accusing him of moral impropriety of the sort that would lead to that outcome. And Job's decision at that point is not to lose faith in the essential goodness of his being, even though he recognizes that he's flawed like every other person, or to lose faith in the benevolence of the divine, let's say. And so he goes to the bottom.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
His wife says to him, there's nothing left for you except to curse God and die, right? That's her conclusion, given the dismal circumstances. But he doesn't do that. He maintains faith in himself, and he maintains faith in the benevolence of existence, even though he can't necessarily perceive it at that moment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
I'm very curious about how you see the relationship between the competitiveness that has characterized your athletic career and this calling to higher service.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
So what became of Sherwin? How did that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Our culture is set up now in large part on the presupposition that competition is And that masculine striving for dominance and excellence is in itself a form of patriarchal oppressiveness. And that's wrong. And it's not only wrong, it's wrong in a deadly way because it demoralizes young men. And when that happens, well, then young women don't have anybody to partner with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Right, right, right. All right, so now you also talked about the other paradoxical element here was this issue of competition. And so you said a couple of things. You said that you were very motivated to become the best football player possible. the MVP, and you said you were also called to serve the most vulnerable people. So that's kind of a nice analog.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
But I'm very curious about how you see the relationship between the competitiveness that has characterized your athletic career and this calling to higher service. Because, as I pointed out, people often believe that that competitive spirit is the antithesis of... I totally disagree. Okay, so I want to hear why.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
How do you figure that out? By failing a lot at it, I think. Okay, well, I'm very curious about that. Okay, so now you said by the time you were 15... You know, you were already in a position psychologically so that when you went to the Philippines, you could have the experience that you just described. So, you're already reasonably awake. Now, let's go back.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Like, you were homeschooled, I understand. I'm reasonably awake. Well, you know, how awake can you be at 15? You know, I mean, hopefully you're more awake now, like we all are by the time we're older. So, let's go back. Now, you were homeschooled.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Okay, so... Tell me about, and everybody else, about how your athletic ability developed and how that related to being homeschooled and then how that came about. And then I want to take that thread and I want to tie it to what you just described, because you said something that's very profound. So my son is a very competitive person. And he was an ornery little kid.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And he was a lot of fun to have around because he was a really tough little kid. He basically had his mother defeated already when he was nine months old. And she's tough. And so, you know, he was very goal-directed and he didn't like anything getting in his way. And he had a will. And...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
What he managed to do, and very young, by the time he was three, this was already pretty much in place, he managed to integrate that competitiveness into a very disciplined personality that was also very diplomatic. And then he became a very good athlete, and he became the sort of athlete that people also really wanted to have on their team.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And so what he did with that competitive masculine drive was put it in the right place. You know, and God calls on Adam, this is Adam's job as the human spirit that continues the process of creation. God calls upon Adam to name things and to subdue them, which means to put them in their proper place with relationship to one another. And your claim was that that competitive spirit
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
if it is directed only towards victory, only towards victory and say self-aggrandizement, then it can become a curse. But if it's put in its right place, subordinate to something higher, then it's a benefit. And that's intelligence is like that too. When it's king of the castle, it's Satan himself, it's Lucifer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
But when it's in the right place, it's the highest of all serving angels, you could say. So let's go back. I like to know how you're, athletic ability developed, especially given that you were homeschooled. And then I want to know how you figured out how to keep that in the proper place given, you know, you had so much success.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
that it could have been, it must have even been tempting for you to become narcissistic about that. I mean, that's an easy path for people to take when their ability makes them stand out in such a spectacular way. And so, but it seems to me that even by the time you were 15, you knew that there was something deeply inappropriate about that. So let's go back.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And so that's just a complete bloody catastrophe. And Thiebaud is a very interesting case because he's an excellent athlete and in multiple different athletic domains. And he's extremely competitive and averse to failure. But at the same time, he's a very good man.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
I don't understand how you developed your athletic ability in relation to team sports and were homeschooled. How did that come about?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And he's figured out how to take that competitive striving and that desire for excellence and that hatred of losing and to transmute it into a form of high-level motivation aimed at not only the good of winning, let's say, in local competitions like athletic competitions, but the aim of winning at the higher order purposes of life. And so a lot of our conversation revolved around putting...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
So what did it mean to believe that when you were little?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Right, right. So you have a destiny.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And he doesn't know what to do with me. So this is a really important point. So there's a developmental psychologist named Jean Piaget, who was the world's greatest developmental psychologist. And he was very, very interested in the relationship between games and socialization and social order. And so Piaget believed, proved, I think,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
especially in light of later research, that the games that children play are a microcosm of society, and that the idea that competition is wrong is predicated on a misunderstanding of the relationship between competition and cooperation. So, because if you have, imagine... a typical basketball game. You have two teams and obviously the teams are competing with one another.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And so then you can take one team and you could say the players are competing with one another to be the best player. And so the whole thing is saturated with competition and that's patriarchal and oppressive and aggressive and all those terrible things. But what...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
people who undertake that analysis fail to understand is that while the basketball teams are competing with each other at one level, but at a higher level, they're cooperating because they're playing by the same rules. So the overall frame is one of cooperation. We've agreed to abide by the same rules. And then within the team, the same thing applies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
It's like, we're all struggling to be the best, but we're struggling as a team. And so what that means is that each of our struggles to be the best can support the whole team and they can support each of our individual attempts to struggle to be the best. Now you related that to your family.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And so the first part of the story is we have a really tight family and everyone's aiming up and they're oriented properly. So that's the cooperative frame. And then the competition frame is, well, once we've established the foundations of upward striving cooperation, we can scrap like mad dogs and that makes us better and that makes the game fun.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And the coach that you described, he didn't understand that. He thought that fun was what you had when you weren't being competitive. Right. Well, and every kid knows that's nonsense because if kids have the opportunity to select their own teammates, you know how the captain picks and then the other captain picks, the kids will automatically pick the best athletes who are the most competitive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
No, definitely not.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's also a betrayal of the principles of the game. That's right. To not try to win because the question immediately arises. Every child understands this intrinsically is, well, if you're not trying to win, what the hell is the game for?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Don't keep score. It's like what that means is don't keep score means what you're doing is irrelevant because no matter what you do at what level, it's all the same and it's equal fun. And there's no excellence in that, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
masculinity in its proper place so that everything beneficial about it can flourish at the psychological relationship and social levels. And so this is a crucially important conversation, and I think we got to the core of the matter. Now, that was embedded in a broader framework because Tim started out as a
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Yeah. Well, that's so important because I don't know, like I've interviewed a lot of people. Well, in my clinical practice, but then 500 people, I guess, as part of this podcast. And one of the things I'm always curious about is, because all the people I interview have been outstanding in one way or another, and I'm very curious to see what makes them tick.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And one of the things that's pretty much universal among them is that both their parents had their backs. And I think if you look at that developmentally, what you see, this is a cliche, I suppose, but it's basically right, is that What you get from your mother is, especially really early in life, is this
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
embodied sense of your ultimate value, because a mother, especially in the first year, has to sacrifice everything to indicate to you that it's a good thing that something as small and useless as you actually is around, right? So she subjugates everything to establishing that relationship and enticing you into the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
So, you know, if you take babies and you give them food and shelter and warmth, like material security, but they don't get attention and they don't get touch, they die. Right, 100% of them die without maternal attention. And that's even the case for complex animals like rats. It's like maternal attention and touch, love, is... a primary need.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
So a baby's eyes literally have the natural focal distance of eye to breast. That's where they see most naturally. And so the mother sets that inclusion foundation. But then the father's goal is to have your back in situations like that. And to say to you, particularly, particularly this, see, you see this in the story of Abraham, because God comes to Abraham as the spirit of adventure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
So God comes to Abraham, he's like in his 70s, and he's being dependent and infantilized and overly secure his whole life because his parents are rich, so he doesn't have to lift a finger. And God says to him, you go out in the world and have your adventure. And everything will come to you. You'll be a blessing to yourself. You'll establish something of permanence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Your name will become known among everyone and validly. And you'll do that in a way that will bring abundance to everyone else. If you're adventurous, if you strive forward. And that's what your father did for you that day. He said, even in the face of your coach, he said, no, your desire to... put everything behind it and to become victorious. That's correct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And that's a very complicated thing to get right. You know, and you guys had just come back to the States too, eh?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
stellar athlete and then a stellar team player but he's expanded his endeavors into the business and philanthropic realm and so we were able to have an abstract discussion about the relationship between competitiveness let's say and virtue but we're able to ground that in something very solid which is his transition from athlete to businessman and philanthropist and so
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
How did you understand that as a kid? Because that's a very paradoxical thing to hold in mind, right? It's like, well, if winning is crucial and if I should throw everything behind it, then why aren't I the greatest thing in the universe if I manage that successfully, right? That's a very difficult thing to figure out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And you see kids, you know, my son participated in pretty advanced hockey and soccer because he was a pretty good athlete. And, oh man, a lot of the parents... We saw the worst displays of human behavior at hockey games and soccer games in Canada that you can possibly imagine. The parents were just utterly demented, right? And a lot of them, they were just crazy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Yeah, no doubt. I mean, we went to a hockey game at one point where this character, whose son was a pretty good player, So in a hockey arena, you have the glass, of course, that stops people from being brained by random pucks. And between the glass, there'd be a space about this big between the sheets of glass.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And this guy would park himself with his mouth between those spaces and do nothing the entire game except yell insults at the referee. And that was his contribution to the game. Like Tammy and I used to go sit somewhere empty to be away from the parents because they were pumping up the egos of their kids. And you could see that they were acting out their own unlived dreams.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
That's a good way of thinking about it, which is not something you should do with your kids. But it does point to this underlying paradox, which is while you want to encourage your children to be the best at what they do, And that might make them socially dominant and intimidating and admirable. And if they are all those things, then why shouldn't they be narcissistic and self-aggrandizing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Because after all, they're wonderful. And that's a really hard thing to get right. Now, your parents, you also described your dad as a, so he's a missionary, but he doesn't sound to me like someone who's naive or soft.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Well, these are important issues to sort out. And if you want to develop your clarity of mind in relationship to such things, and if you want to become a good, what would you say, a good motivator for your own purposes and a good father to your own sons and a good leader to the people who are around you, then these are issues that you have to be straight about.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
So what made him? Any idea what made him what he is?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
All right. So they saw that you were good at baseball right away. And you said you're getting puffed up about that pretty quick. Very quick.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
It's instantly. But it's also not surprising, right? I mean, if you're good at something and you get a lot of attention from your teammates, then that's obviously the natural place that you'd go. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
But that still leaves you with a terrible conundrum, right? Because, so let's walk through that too. Because if you're trying to train to encourage your child to become a great athlete, let's say, or great at anything for that matter, there is two things they have to learn. And one is to develop their skills to the degree that that's possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And this discussion can help you figure out why you should do that and how you could go about it. So join us for that. So your team sent me a video detailing out the operations of your foundation. And I thought we might as well start by talking about that. I was struck by its breadth. And so I'm very curious about, well, I'd like to know more about the foundation. I'd like to know
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
But the next thing is to pull the team together and have them all work in the same direction, right? And encourage them. But then the situation you're in, and this is like a randomly aggregated sports team, you're going to have half the people who actually don't care that much. And some of it's because they have other interests and some of it is because... Because their parents made them go play.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Yeah, sure, sure. Or they have no discipline. Like there's real problems. So, okay, so how did you learn to... And then your parents are saying, well, those kids are equally valuable, but then they're not focused on the game. So that leaves you with a conceptual value.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Okay, so how did you bridge that gap? And like, what did you have to learn? And so you said to begin with, you weren't a good teammate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Okay, so what were you like when you weren't a good teammate?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Yeah, right, right. Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Yeah, well, it's a very difficult thing to get right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
How old were you when you started the team sports? Five. Five. Okay. Okay. So you're in there very early. And how many different sports?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And were you equally good at all three?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Okay, okay. And so, okay, so you're in a highly competitive environment. When do you start to emerge as a team leader rather than as an individual star?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
But you said that skill developed across time. What had to change about how you were interacting with your teammates to make you a better team player? How did that skill develop? And what role did your parents play, or your coaches for that matter, or your own reflections?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Right, so they're paying attention to how you're doing on the field and they're watching you and they're listening to you afterwards and you're strategizing together.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
where it's distributed, what it's doing, and also how you set it up and keep an eye on it. So tell me about the foundation, Tim Tebow Foundation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's also a hard thing to get right, though, too, because you want to win, and so that means losing matters. But then, the thing about losing... But what do you want to win at most in life? Well, I would say one of the things you want to win at is you want to win at learning how to lose so that you don't stop.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
I mean, the other real advantage to competitive sports is losing because you lose say roughly half the time. Okay, and you might say, well, why do you need the experience of losing? Why can't everybody just win all the time? And the first answer to that is you don't win all the time in life. That's right. Like you're going to get set back a lot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And so one of the things you have to learn, maybe the most important thing possibly is how to be resilient and grateful and upward striving in the face of failure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And that's why the competition should be heightened too, because you want to learn how to lose gracefully and in a resilient manner when the stakes are super high.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Right, because then you're tough.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Define a rivalry game.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
In the story of Cain and Abel, so Cain makes sacrifices to God and they're rejected and he gets angry in consequence and he goes to God to complain about the structure of the world. And God says to him, you've got nothing to complain about. If you did well, you'd be accepted. And you think that you're bitter because you lost, but you're bitter because you lost
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
and you invited the spirit of resentment and bitterness to inhabit your heart. That's why. You didn't learn. You didn't rectify your behavior. You didn't change in the face of your loss. You decided you'd get bitter. Exactly, and improve. Now, you did that famous speech. I presume that was in the aftermath of one of these rivalries.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Oh, it wasn't a rivalry?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Oh, yes. A little bit of contempt for your opponents.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Yeah, well, I watched the speech, and you lay out the diagnosis, which is like a form of confession, and then you describe your faults, which is the extension of the confession, and then you proclaim your conviction that you will make better sacrifices and do better in the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Obviously that struck a chord with people, but I think the reason for that is that it ties in with many of the things that we've discussed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
One of the things you just pointed out that's crucially important is that you can take these negative emotions that are associated with loss that could be crushing and that are viewed by people who are anti-competitive as necessarily crushing, you can take shame and guilt and disappointment and fear even, and you can transmute those into motivational forces that can make you work harder in the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
So, you know... When Christ is tempted by Peter, I think it's Peter, and he says to him, get thee behind me, Satan. And Peter, I believe it's Peter, has put forward a bunch of reasons that Christ might lose his faith, for example, given the terrible obstacles that are in his path. And the reason that I think that Christ says that is,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
It's a very specific statement, which is that you can take things that could stop you, and that would be all the negative emotions. You can take those, and if you put them behind you, then they push you forward instead of being in front of you, frightening you. And we know this to some degree from animal experiments. So here's an example. It's a very basic example. Imagine you have a hungry rat.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And so he's down to three quarters of his body weight. So he's pretty motivated to work for food, typical situation with laboratory rats. And you teach this rat how to run down a little runway to get some food. So he knows the food is there. And then you can clock how fast he'll run if you open the little gate and he's hungry and he can run.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
So now he's motivated by the desire to attain the goal, right? So that's kind of like a competitive motivation. So then you can clock how fast he'll run. But then imagine that you do have the same rat in the same situation. And when he's preparing to run down to get the cheese, you pipe a little bit of cat odor into the air. And rats, they hate cats. Like from birth, it's innate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
They're terrified of cats. They'll do anything to stay away from a cat. And so now the rat smells a cat and he's hungry and he runs down that runway a hell of a lot faster. And it's because now the negative emotion that could stop him is motivating him to move ahead. And so this is another thing. So you want to be resilient in the face of loss and you have to learn that repeatedly by losing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And you have to be socialized so you can do that with grace and not lose faith. And so, but more than that, you have to learn to take that shame and guilt and so forth and turn it into resolve. And I don't think you can do that without competition and loss. And I don't think you can do it without intense competition and loss that matters. And then you can see it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
All you have to do is think this through as far as I'm concerned is that You know, you're going to face situations in your life outside the playing field where your competitors are getting the best at you in your business or you're facing a terrible illness or some bloody, awful, undeserved catastrophe comes your way on the family side. And. it takes you out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And if you get desperate and you can't tolerate negative emotion, then you're going to get angry and bitter and you're going to collapse. And alternatively, you could have learned to deal with defeat, like really deal with it, to be grateful for it even, and to consider it an opportunity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Let's go back. I don't understand how you developed your athletic ability in relation to team sports and were homeschooled. How did that come about?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
It just kills people. Because we seek comfort so much. Well, that's what the story of Abraham is about too, because he has comfort to begin with. And we have to fight that. God says, go outside the zone of comfort continually and voluntarily.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And growth. There's a very deep... analogy between seeking comfort and seeking unconsciousness and death. I'll give you an example of that. So in the story of Jonah, right? So God comes to Jonah and tells him that he has to speak words of redemption to his enemies in a very dangerous way, which would be kind of what your dad was doing, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And Jonah, being a sensible person, thinks that sounds like not a very good idea at all. And he makes tracks in the opposite direction, right? And so he hops on a boat and heads for a city that's as far away from his enemies that he's supposed to talk to as possible. But the first thing he does on the boat is fall asleep. And there's a meaning of that. And the meaning is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
If you shrink away from your calling or your conscience, then really what happens is that you're seeking a form of unconsciousness, like you're comfortable when you're asleep, but you're not there, right? And then you might say, well, I only wanna be awake during periods of joy. I only wanna experience happiness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And you can understand that, but then there's no developmental impetus in happiness, right? It's developmental impetus is only in challenge and in adventure. And so, and, you know, you said we seek comfort, but it's weird sometimes. We think we seek comfort, but if you give people nothing but comfort, this was Dostoevsky's great observation and notes from underground.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
He said, if you gave people nothing but comfort, like Abraham, the first thing they would do is get angry and bored about the comfort.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Not at all, no, and they'll break it. And they'll seek false adventure because people aren't built for comfort. They're built for challenge. And then there's one more observation about that. The oldest story we have likely is the dragon fight story. It's really old, thousands of years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And so the idea is a quest into the unknown to find the dragon that guards the treasure, the voluntary confrontation with the dragon, and then the receipt of the treasure. there's a core idea there, which is that there are treasures, but the treasures are guarded and they're guarded by something terrible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And so you could say, well, wherever there's a treasure, there's going to be a dragon, but you can reverse that equally. And you can say, wherever there's a dragon, There's going to be a treasure. And so now you walk through your life and some horrible dragon emerges, like you have in the old child, for example, or something arbitrary and terrible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And you could be crushed by that and get bitter and resentful and no bloody wonder. But you could also think, okay, dragon, there's gotta be a treasure around here somewhere. And that gives you a completely different stance on the problem, which is the stance of a contender. It's like, oh, we have a major league challenge here and that could force us to develop.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
We know too, you know, there's psychophysiological studies that show this. It's very, very cool. So imagine you take two groups of people. random assignation to groups, so there's no difference between the groups. And one group you impose a challenge on involuntarily. They have to do it. And the other group has a choice and they choose to do it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Then you measure their physiological responses and their emotions. They're completely different in the two groups. The group that has to do it in an obligatory way They turn into prey animals and they produce a lot of stress hormones. So now they're frozen and they have the spirit of a prey animal. But the people who do it voluntarily, well, they're now a lot more like predators.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
They're a lot more like it's voluntary and it's challenging. And so the whole pattern of activation changes and this cascades all the way down to the genetic level. So if you take on a confrontation voluntarily, you turn on genes that wouldn't otherwise be turned on and they code for new proteins and build you really from the cells upward into a whole different creature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
So this attitude towards challenge, which is developed if you are confronting competition, that attitude towards challenge determines even the way you behave developed physically, much less spiritually, emotionally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Yeah, right. Well, that's the difference between gratitude and resentment, right? So you could think, well, pride is a terrible sin. It's a terrible missing of the mark, and it makes people arrogant and self-centered and bitter and... incapable of learning. So that's all pride. And the religious practice that's the antithesis of that is humility.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And that's something like, no matter where I am and what I'm doing, I have a lot more to learn and I'm grateful for the experience to learn. And that might even be when I'm radically corrected and fail, right? I want to be grateful for that because it's an opportunity. And that's something you have to practice. And then with regards to... gratitude, it's the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
It's like I have this difficult enterprise in front of me and I could regard that as an impediment and a rebuke, or I could say, well, I'm going to look for the way in which this is a remarkable opportunity and I'm going to be grateful for that, right? So that's a practice that makes you immune to resentment. So to be immune to pride and resentment, that's the target of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
much genuine religious practice so that you continue to learn and so that you don't become bitter. And then that seems to produce this transformation that we already described, which is, you know, it makes itself manifest psychologically, but it cascades all the way down to the cellular level. And that is a matter of attitude.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And so you said your parents were very good at that and that they had you. Do you remember the scripture verses that they concentrated on having you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
So I'm curious about two things there. So first of all, that's a very telling passage. So there's this... There's this subplot in the Old Testament where the Israelites, they escaped their slavery and they escaped the Pharaoh, who's the tyrant. So now they're a free people, right? And they're trying to organize themselves. And so they organize themselves in a responsible hierarchy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
This is following the suggestion of Jethro, who's Moses' father-in-law. So the Israelites are trying to figure out what they do if they're not ruled by a tyrant. And Jethro says, well, you divide yourself into groups of 10. You elect a representative. You have the 10 elect another representative, elect another representative, all the way up to the 10,000s.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And so he describes a hierarchy of responsibility as the alternative to tyranny and slavery, right? And so, but what that means is that in that hierarchy, everybody has to act responsibly. And then you don't need a king. And so this Proverbs passage that you just described,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
zeroes in on that, says that if everyone pulls their weight voluntarily, like the ant, and isn't a sluggard and isn't lazy and waiting for someone else to do it, then there's no need for a tyrant and no one's a slave. But more than that, in that responsibility is tremendous meaning and opportunity. So you get to have your cake and eat it too. You don't need a tyrant
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
You don't need to be a slave, but your life has meaning now because you're actually pulling a weight that's worthy of your efforts, right? So that's beautifully put. So it's a very important lesson, but now you were required to memorize that. And so, and you said even to some degree against your...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
intrinsic desires at that point we don't want to do that all the time i just wanted to go play what do you think what do you think having memorized those things did for you because you didn't necessarily understand what they meant to begin with like some some of them i think kids understand a lot more sometimes than we give them credit for you would know this better than anyone but i feel like there's parts of you taken but some of it you don't take all of it right yeah you're
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
How much did you memorize?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Right, right. So that's a real aid to memory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
What's put in song is remembered long. A lot of the Bible plus poetry set to music for that reason. Much more memorable that way. I mean, one of the things I realized about my kids, I didn't take them to church when they were a kid, when they were kids.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And like we had a very philosophically structured household, let's say, and they learned to aim up, but they didn't get this memory training that you just described. And they don't know the biblical stories as well as they should have. And so there's some real advantage to that repetition that's effortful. because it provides you, it gives you these things at hand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
It gives you something to focus and think about in times of trouble.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
That's the shadow side of that arrogance. Yes, it is. You pay on both sides, right? You get self-aggrandized, but you're brought low at the same time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Right, because there's a, you can see where you're not what you're being worshiped for and that's shameful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
That was a strategy objection.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
I think we're going to draw this part of the conversation to a close. Although there's many other things I would like to talk to you about for the broad public. I think what we're going to do for everybody who's watching and listening is on the Daily Wire side, I would like to talk to you about
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
the applications of what you've learned to the building of this charitable organization and how you manage your team and what you've accomplished and what your goals are. And so we can easily flesh out a half an hour discussion with that. But I think that made a nice piece and that was a very good ending. So this is a good time to bring this to a close.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And so for all of you watching and listening, give some thought to joining us on the Daily Wire side. There'll be a practical evaluation, although much of this was practical. with regards to how you set up an organization so that you can do far more than you can do alone, and how you pick people and how you evaluate them and how you encourage them and what your goals should be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Tim has put together a stellar organization that's helping people all over the world, and that's a very complicated thing to do, help people, and especially to do that without also falling into the pit of self-aggrandizement. with all that false display or all that display of false charity. And so we'll just delve into that for half an hour. Join us on the Daily Wire side. Thank you very much.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
That went by like instantly and I appreciate it. I think it was an extremely useful discussion on the relationship between competition and attitude and resilience, which is something that everybody needs to hear in this world where
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
competitiveness and masculinity for that matter is demonized to a degree that's almost incomprehensible extremely demoralizing for young men and for women as well so it's very useful to have sorted that out great to meet you appreciate you my friend thank you you bet man yeah and thanks to the film crew here in uh pence where the hell are we jacksonville yeah yeah jacksonville florida um i much appreciate you guys helping us out making sure we got this right and uh
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And shout out to Joy Hom, too, my producer, who's been stellar at making sure that we can do these things. And to The Daily Wire for the support so that we can bring these discussions to everyone. Thanks again, sir.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
There's a weird paradox in your story because, well, many of them, but... I'm very curious about why this boy in particular. Now, you know, so what you just said, there's a bunch of paradoxical elements to it because you're obviously very competitive. You really like winning. You said you hate losing even more.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And that's actually an attitude that many people think is at odds with an attitude of compassion, for example, right? Because there's a huge movement in our culture to demonize competitive sports because they're oppressive and aggressive. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
You were spectacularly successful as an athlete, and you describe yourself as very competitive, and yet you also were highly motivated to start this foundation. And the boy that pricked your conscience, like you said you were on your father's missionary ventures, in many places, and yet it was this particular boy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And you could think of him in a way as exactly the opposite of you, because literally his feet were on backwards. And I'm curious about why you think it was him in particular. I mean, you were in the Philippines and other places, so you saw a lot of people who were suffering. Like, why do you think it was that it was his existence per se, that stood out for you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And then the other thing I'm curious about in that regard is, you know, you said that as far as the people in his village were concerned, he was a throwaway. And you knew that that was wrong. And so the first question might be, why do you think that it was obvious to the people in the village that he was a throwaway, so to speak. And why do you think that grated against you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
What's the difference in perspective there? Well, that's a bunch of different questions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
So what did it mean to believe that when you were little? I had the opportunity today to talk to one of the world's premier athletes, Tim Tebow, and we had a very interesting conversation. And I would say the crux of the matter is the relationship between Masculinity, masculine competitiveness, masculine striving for excellence, and virtue, all things considered.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Right, so he had to be hidden from you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Right, because it would bring the village into disgrace.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
Right. See, there's a very interesting... It's not surprising that that had such an impact on you, because the attitude that you're describing... that would lead that boy to be isolated, that is, you could say in this way, that that's the standard human attitude towards abnormality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And I would say that was particularly true in the pre-Christian world, is that if someone was deformed or abnormal in any way, that the conclusion would be that they were cursed, and that they were less than, and the evidence would be the fact of their disability.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And a huge part of the impact of the Christian revolution was that the last will be first, and that the most appropriate target of true power is service to the people who are hurt most. It's a complete redefinition of what constitutes sovereignty. That's an unbelievably revolutionary proposition, right? That the king of everything should serve those who are most in need.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
540. Former NFL Player on Masculinity | Tim Tebow
And that the symbol of true sovereignty was the ability to engage in that service. And so then you had A direct encounter with someone who is the opposite of what you were celebrated for, really, right? That's a good way of thinking about it. And these boys that were with him, were they his friends?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
I think the most effective way of countering that is likely that if you're not charting your own destiny, then you are a slave.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And that's not accurate. But they do, like, well, they're lost in the desert because that's part of what happens on the way to freedom, so to speak. They do get whiny as hell. Oh, hell yeah. They pine for the days when the tyrant... told them what to do, they said, well, at least we had like a variety. They're getting manna from heaven, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
They said, well, we don't have onions and garlic anymore, even though they're getting heavenly food. So they do revert to that slave, what would you say, that longing for slavery. And I do agree that that is... I mean, part of the reason, this is something that I think is really worth discussing with you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Part of the reason that people are wage slaves, let's say, is because they don't want to take on the responsibility of charting their own course. Now, I think people often also don't know how. Like our school systems, for example, were set up to not teach people to do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, you know that it was the school systems were established in accordance with the Prussian military model.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And that the goal there was to make obedient soldiers and really literally to crush out any proclivity towards individual striving.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
I was shocked at the degree of... Well, my conclusion observing Toronto during the COVID was that 70% of Canadians would have worn a mask for the rest of their life. And I would say... 30% of them would have worn that mask happily if they could have continued informing on their neighbors.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well... We did get rid of Trudeau today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
We talked about Camille Pelliat, who's a hero of Michael's, the brilliant female literary critic, unpredictable and sparkling. And Michael's request to me that I broker an invitation, which I could do, I suppose, with some degree of success probability. And we surveyed the landscape closely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah. Hey, man, Canadians voted for him. And I would say that the default Canadian candidate if presented with his policies, one by one, would still agree with virtually all of them. Yeah, and that's true of the Conservatives as well. Yes, of course, yes. You know, the malaise is very, very deep. Yeah, okay, so back to this. I still want to dig in a little further into this. Your dream, so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
We have this program online called Future Authoring that helps people lay out a plan for the future. Oh, what a great title. Okay, I love that. Yeah, well, it has almost a miraculous effect. It's really quite stunning. And I'm still... I still find this difficult to believe because psychological interventions usually don't work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And they often, if they work, they don't have the results that you intend, which is partly because if something's kind of working well, it's really hard to improve it. It's way easier to buck it up in ways you don't understand. Okay, so the Future Authoring Program asks you to, okay, so you make a contract with yourself, like a covenant. So the covenant is something like this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
if you could have what you wanted in five years. And so what you wanted would be, you'd be satisfied with that or thrilled with it even. And things would be going well enough for you so that you weren't swamped by misery, which is really what people want. They want to not be swamped by misery. They don't want to be happy. Okay. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
It's a very good distinction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So then, can you imagine anything that would satisfy you? So this is like a pretend game that a kid would play, you know, like it's fantasy. It's like, okay, you get to have what you want now, but there's a condition here. You actually have to be taking care of yourself like someone you care for. Okay, so now you posit yourself as someone you care for. Now you get to have what you want.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
What would satisfy you? But you have to specify it. Sure. Okay, so then we have people write just for 15 minutes with no real self-criticism. What might that be like? And then we have them criticize it a bit because you have to make it into a strategy and then differentiate. It's like, well... What would you want for a relationship?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
What would you want with regard to your family, your career, your education, your care of yourself, your service to the community, your mental and physical health? And again, same rules apply. You get to have what you want. Okay, so now, We had young people do this when they came to college on their orientation day. 90 minutes, that's all they wrote.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
They either wrote for 90 minutes or they wrote about what they did for the last two weeks for 90 minutes. So it was a randomized study. The kids who did the self-authoring program were 50% less likely to drop out the first year. 50%, yeah. Yeah, and even the... Even the college where we did this, it's stunning for a 90-minute intervention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Even the college that we did the intervention in wouldn't implement the program. We got zero takers on the university side, which is very telling as far as I'm concerned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
That's the perfect word, telling.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
But the reason I brought it up is because The alternative to being a slave, let's say, which would be the alternative to self-actualization is charting your own course. But then this is the question I have for you. Like you were doing that when you had these dreams of writing. But why did you identify writing with yourself and why were you motivated to pursue it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Fundamentally, what we did was survey the landscape of counterproductive moralizing and analyzed its effect on psychological and political behavior. And it was great fun. So join us for that. I suppose you think this should be a national holiday. Well, kind of. Don't you? We took down Trudeau. That's the spirit of January 6th. Put her there, man. Right? Thank God.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right, so that, a blessing. Yes, I don't take it for granted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So, you know, when God comes to Abraham, he comes as the voice of adventure. And what he tells Abraham is that if he follows that voice, his life will be a blessing to himself. Right. There's other aspects of the deal, but that's one of them. His life will be a blessing to him. You set out the preconditions for what your life would be like if it was a blessing. Yes. You said...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So you're very high in openness, so you didn't want any small talk. You wanted to get to the heart of the matter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Get to the depths right away.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right, right, so you're an evening person. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's often associated with openness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, yeah, there's actually the person... There are morning people and evening people, and they have different temperaments. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So... You wanted to, not to have to engage in pointless small talk, right? You said you wanted to set your own temporal rhythm. Right. Right. Although, is it disciplined or is it erratic? Or do you just get up at the same time, but later in the day?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
It's organic. You just get up.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And that's okay. It's the best. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It's better for me psychologically if I get up at a regular time. But that is regular time. It's 11. Yeah. Oh, but that's what I asked. You get up at 11. Yes. Okay, so it's stable, but it's your choice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right, so that means it's not, what would you say, it's not undisciplined.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, okay, so you wanted not to have to engage in trivial interactions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You wanted to get up on your rhythm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So that's part of the small talk thing. Why do you distinguish them then? You wanted to not have small talk and you also wanted not to talk to anybody you didn't want to talk to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right. So you really wanted to choose the parameters of your social. That's all you wanted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yes, yes. Well, so that's, There's a specific reason I wanted to bring this up. So when I was writing, We Who Wrestle With God, I was looking at their characterizations of the divine. That was gonna be the subtitle. We used perceptions instead, but it doesn't matter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
What the stories do, as far as I am concerned, or at least one of their functions, is to figure out what principle should be superordinate. Now, you did that. You had three parameters for your superordinate principle, and you identified that with yourself. That would satisfy me. So the divine in the Abrahamic encounter is the voice of adventure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And so God's covenant, his contract there, because it's put in contractual form. If you follow this voice, then the following things will happen. You'd be a blessing to yourself. Your name will become known among other people justly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right. So that's a good author. That's a good offer, right? Because people want social standing and that can be gamed and it can be falsified, but it can also be genuine. Yes. Right. Okay. You'll do something of lasting significance. So that's cool. That would be probably for you. Maybe your work on anti-totalitarianism, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You know, I watched his resignation speech today. Apparently, the wind blew it away just a couple of minutes before his actual speech, so he had to wing it. And you can tell. And you know what I really found fascinating about it was, and I think it's perfectly in keeping with his essential narcissism, is the first statements he made were about him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And then you'll do it in a way that will be a blessing to everyone else. It'll multiply the pie instead of... Okay, and then the association of the promised land with that is that if you follow that call... then the world turns into a field of unpredictable opportunity. Yes. And so that's also an adventure because you don't know what's going to happen. I know, it is true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
to sit down and talk, play really with Michael Malice. And that's always fun. Michael's a, he's a genuine delight to have a conversation with. You never know what direction it's gonna go in. Many directions, all of which have a certain coherence. He's got a great sense of humor and irony and is extremely sharp and unpredictable. So that's ridiculously fun.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
There's also another way of dealing with the Pareto distribution problem. which is just so everybody listening is clear, is that the bulk of the rewards go to a small minority of people in any field. Now, a small minority of people in every field do the productive work too, so let's not forget.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
But one of the ways that a sophisticated society deals with that is just by generating an indefinite number of games. Here's a cool thing that I've noticed about people. Imagine that you're kind of out on the Pareto distribution in one dimension. It's like, you know, so you've got specialized knowledge. There's quite a few of you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
But if you have specialized knowledge in two areas that are distinct, there's hardly any of you. And if there's three, it's like you're that person. You're the only person playing that game. So that's a good thing for everybody who's watching and listening to know. It's like, get really good at something.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And then that makes you exceptional and you're going to be somewhat successful just because of that. But then if you add another distant skill to that and you overlap them, it's like you're pretty rare. And three, no one's like you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Oh, that's easy, really. They were people that I encountered in books. Oh, like who? Definitely. Well, I would say, like I read a lot and some books had a massive effect on me. Like my pattern for reading was I had a problem I was always trying to solve. I was trying to solve the, I was trying to understand evil. That's been like my motivation since I was like 13.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And then now and then I'd run across an author and I'd think, oh, this person knows something I don't, seriously. And then I'd just read everything they read, wrote, and then I'd find out who influenced them and I'd read that. And so, you know, the cardinal people who influenced me were Carl Jung, for sure, Nietzsche.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Carl Rogers was a pretty big influence. There was some biological psychologists, Jeffrey Gray. I learned a lot about the brain from Jeffrey Gray.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
He said something like, well, you all know I'm a leader, or I'm a fighter. You all know I'm a fighter, and I don't quit. It's like, well, this isn't about you. I can't believe that, I can't envision saying something like that about myself. Can you imagine going out in front of a national audience and saying, I'm a fighter?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Okay. The reason it worked for me likely is because I had a unique lecturing style. Yeah, but lots of people have unique lecturing styles. And even if you... Yeah, but they usually use notes. Okay. See, I trained myself pretty much from the beginning of my career to speak without notes. And then when I... So my classes were very popular.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
The combination of speaking without notes and then dealing with this major existential issue made my classes very popular. And that happened to translate to YouTube. And I would say at the time, I experimented with YouTube just as an experiment, basically. Like, I was doing some... outreach on media.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
A producer came to me 20 years ago for a little television station, kind of like an NPR, Canada's equivalent, TV Ontario, and asked to film one of my classes. And so we did a 13-part series. And my classes were very popular. And so I had a taste of popular success as a professor and then sort of a little bit on that TV.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
No. No, interesting. No, I can tell what I was doing. Well, if you're really speaking to an audience, you know this likely as a standup and as a speaker. If you're really speaking to an audience, they tell you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And the most telling part of the feedback is silence. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
They're not moving, which means it's so interesting, because what that means neurophysiologically is there's all these competing motivations in someone, right? And what happens if you decide to do something, the thing you're doing wins a Darwinian competition over all the other things you could be doing and suppresses them and inhibits them. And the more powerful the central motivational state,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
the more complete the inhibition. And so what I'm trying to appeal to people in lecture is like the lecture is a journey. It's a quest. I'm answering a question. It's a quest. So I'm taking people on a quest. And if the quest is successful, they're dead silent, right? They're just, they're... They're tangled right into the discussion. There isn't anything more fun than that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, I like your conceptualization. It goes along with your stance as an anarchist, right? Well, look, this is one of the principles that we're using to guide the development of this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Here's the rule. Policies that require fear and force are bad policies. Yes, that's right, yeah. Right, now...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
It's tricky when it comes to the regulation of criminal behavior, right? Because the really psychopathic antisocial people, they don't play a social game.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
I mean, psychopaths are notorious for not learning from experience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I suspect that you're... This is a tough one. I was going to ask you when you were talking about, you know, your decision to become a writer. I mean, you're blessed with an extremely high level of verbal intelligence. Sure. And that's like, that's an a priori gift.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
But then, but, but... There's quite a correlation between intelligence and socioeconomic status. It's pretty high. It's the best predictor, right? And the second best predictor is conscientiousness. Is that right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
It's much weaker. It's about one-fifth as powerful. Okay. Or on the entrepreneurial space, it's openness, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, the managerial types tend to be intelligent and conscientious. The entrepreneurial types tend to be intelligent and open.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So there's a pathway to, like it's likely that a serial entrepreneur is going to be high in openness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Like an open person is switching games all the time. Right. Whereas like a more managerial person picks a game and gets really good at it. And that works great if the game is working. But it works terribly when the game stops working, which is why you need some entrepreneurs in your organization. So, yeah, so I was wondering about this adventure issue. You know, intelligence predicts success.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And so then you might say, well... what's your probability for success as an adventure if you're not as intelligent? But my suspicions are that strength of character will do the trick. You know, because one of the pathways to success in a functional society is that people can really rely on you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, the other thing too, see, if you're reliable, this is why honesty is the best policy. If you're reliable, and you already pointed this out, you're low entropy. Right, right, yeah, yeah, right. Right, it's like... I can reduce you to one pixel. You will do what you said. Box. Shelf.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, but when we talked to you, when we talked about anarchy before, you stressed the voluntary element of it, right? And that strikes me as, well, that's why we made that a principle for our policy discussion, so to speak, at ARC. It's like, if you can't offer people an invitational vision So they say, yeah, yeah, I would do that. I would be enthusiastic about doing that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Then there's something wrong with your policy. So I think like a cardinal way of identifying tyrants is they use fear and compulsion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is a good also for you people to know who are watching and listening is if you're listening to a politician and they're trying to motivate you fundamentally with fear or they're proposing the use of compulsion, you know, say in the case of an emergency, it's like, yeah, probably you're a tyrant. Probably you're a tyrant. Even in an emergency, right? Oh, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, there's an interesting corollary to that. Statistical analysis of language, kind of using something approximating early large language models was just factor analysis, but it's analogous, showed that there's no difference between being self-conscious... and being miserable. They're so tightly associated that you can't distinguish them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, that's exactly the problem is that, well, the emergency is pretty convenient for you if you happen to be a tyrant and... Part of the reason the idea of the apocalypse is archetypal is because there's always an emergency. Of course. Right? It's like you're going to die. Everything's going to come to an end. So you can conjure up an emergency at a moment's notice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So I don't know whether I should look at the blue eye or the red eye. So you taught for Peterson Academy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
I could send her a note and tell her who you are. Well, tell me exactly what you want.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, but... Yeah, I know who Klaus Nomi is. He's got a stunning and striking voice. Yes. Yeah. So why do you have one of his tuxedos?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Okay, so what you should do is you should write me a paragraph about what you have to offer, and about what you want, and about... I would also recommend guarantees. Like, I went and talked to Palia, and it was hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, she was very apprehensive, because she's been abused and used by all sorts of people and journalists, and so she's very... skeptical. She was extremely hospitable once we got there, my wife and I, and she knew that we were up to no tricks. She just flipped and she was extremely inviting, but she's got a wall and it's a protective wall.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So I think one of the things you'd have to do in the paragraph is Reassure her. You need invitation plus reassurance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And then, yes, I could contact her.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
It would make my life. My dream for Camille Paglia is to have her talk to Ben Shapiro because they're both machine guns. And so I'd love to see that just as a spectacle. And speed up the tape. Yeah, I'd love to see that. I can imagine even better maybe would be Russell Brand, Ben Shapiro, and Pelleya. Those are the three most verbally fluent people I've ever seen in my life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Wow, that would be quite a troika. Yeah, it would be. It'd really be something. So why do you have Klaus Nomi's tuxedo? And who is Candy Darling? And why do you want to talk to Pelleya?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You know, so one of the things I've learned to do in lectures is before I go on stage, I have a question. It's like, it's a question that matters to me, which is also something you should do when you write, by the way. It matters to me, and I don't know enough about it yet, and I'd like to get farther in my thinking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And so then what I'm trying to do on stage is get farther in my thinking, and maybe to come to a conclusion. If I can do that, then that's like the punchline, right? That's very satisfying, but... But in some ways it doesn't matter because the journey is what matters.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
I think what you're pointing out is that there are certain kinds of intellectuals whose thought quality is so rich that the journey is worth the- And so entertaining to listen to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So the default reality is that if you prioritize yourself, the associated emotion is negative. So narcissists are in a game that just can't possibly be won.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, you know, I've been thinking about the function of religious texts in exactly that manner. I think partly, so it looks very much like a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So there's an infinite number of facts, but they have to be sequenced and prioritized. And the way someone sequences and prioritizes is their story. Yes. Okay, so... Yeah, people don't want truth, people want narratives. That's because narrative structure are true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So I think that what a core, what core stories do, so this would be say the fairy tales would do this or any stories that are shared broadly across a culture is they actually, you just pointed to this, I think it's true. You know how it is. A book has a different effect on you depending on when you read it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So, and it's definitely the case that books you read, let's say in your mid-adolescence likely, it's like they set the stage, right? And I think that's actually true. I think what happens is the story that strikes you provides a framework for memory and then you slot everything else into that. And so it actually becomes the foundation. And I think that part of the problem with books
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
moving away from broad knowledge of the biblical stories is that the foundation of our perceptions is no longer unified. And when that's the case, I mean, some variation is good because you don't want everybody thinking exactly the same thing. But if there's too much variation, you can't even talk to each other. But don't you think that's happening now? I think it's happened.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So I've been working on trying to conceptualize why that happens, particularly with Jonathan Paggio. We've been drawing, and John Vervaeke, we've been drawing a bunch of different sources trying to understand the structure of a concept or a perception. So I think this is how it works. This is also the same structure as the tabernacle, by the way, in architectural form.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So every concept has a center. Okay, that's what Moses' staff... establishes, that's what a flag establishes when you move to a new territory. There's a center, okay? And the center is the ideal. That's a good way of thinking about it. Or the center is the place that looks upward, okay? And then around the center, there are margins.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, the self is a funny thing, Michael. This is something we might as well talk about this. You know, a human being is something that's organized on many levels, right? So if you think about it neurobiologically, for example, I'll give you an example. If you take a cat, a female that works better on female cats, partly because their sexual behavior is a little less complex to organize.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And the farther away you get from the center, the less like the center the phenomena is, and they start to multiply. So now a concept that's only center is too rigid. And the concept that's only margin is too profuse and diffuse. And so what we need is a balance between the center and the margin.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Your proclivity would be, I think, because you're open, would be to deprioritize the center in favor of the margin. Yeah, that's what open people do. But you just said you realized that if you, the margin's fine. The margin of the margin, it's like, oh, that's less fun.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right, well, it also mimics creativity. So you can wear that. So, well, here's a mythological take on that. This is very cool. So the center is a phallus, right? It's unitary and solid. Say that's archetypal masculinity, that ideal center. Okay, when it collapses... A hydra emerges, right? And a hydra has an indefinite number of heads.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, the mere fact that they're multiplicitous is already a problem because it's an entropy problem. It's like... What am I going to do with all this?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You know, you want... You know, if you have a toddler who's, say, three, and he has a closet or she has a closet full of clothes, say, 20, 30 outfits, you open the door and you say, what do you want to wear today? It's like, all you do is make the kid anxious. You take three outfits and lay them on the bed, and you say, well, which one do you want? Then they're happy. And it's because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You know, this is actually being figured out technically. It was figured out by, uh-oh, I'm going to forget his name, Friston, Carl Friston. He's a neuroscientist, and he did some work on entropy. And I did some work like this in my lab. We were trying to tie the idea of anxiety to entropy, to make it physical. Anxiety signifies a multiplicity of pathways, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And you might say, well, that's diversity, that's creativity, that's what the left thinks. It's like, yeah, but... What if it's too much? Well, then that's what the hydro paralyzes you when you look at it. It's too much entropy. You don't want to make a hundred decisions. We know this from the consumer literature. So if you go to a store, imagine there's, try buying a printer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You've run into this right away. I want to buy the best printer. It's like, there's 500 printers. By the time you go through all 500, Most of the models have changed, right? You're never going to optimize. And so what that means is if you have 500 printers and you have to choose the best one, you're going to fail.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So you actually want to go to a store where there are four printers, because like one printer that they're making you buy that printer. Four, so you can see, right? I mean, it makes perfect sense too, right? You don't want totalitarian centrality, but you don't want indefinite amorphousness. This would be... I don't know if that's a critique of all-out anarchism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You can take out the whole, almost the whole brain of a female cat, the whole cortex and most of the centers of emotion and leave it only with the hypothalamus, which is just a cap on the top of the spinal cord. And that cat in a, in a relatively unchanging environment can function. Oh, my God. It can eat, it can mate, it can defend itself, it can drink, it can regulate its temperature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right, right. I remember the speech.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You've picked it from the bottom of a 10 hierarchy. Right. 10 rung social hierarchy that you're at the bottom of and you don't even know it.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And you're dismissive of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Unless you're like... Well, that's the trade-off problem. You could spend a year finding the best printer, but then you could have spent that year doing a lot of other things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, there's an economist, Simon, great economist. He was the guy who had the bet with Paul Ehrlich about... Julian Simon.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Okay, let me just... Please, please. Simon came up with a concept called satisficing. Okay. And satisficing is a reflection of exactly what you just described. It's like you don't... With most decisions, you don't go for the best. You have something like a threshold. And once you hit that threshold, you say that. That's what people do with their mates.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
One of your problems is to find someone who can stand you out. So yeah, that's a big problem. You were talking about Simon. You had a story about him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Like, it's functional. And this is the weirdest thing. It's hyper-exploratory. So think about that. A cat with no brain is hyper-exploratory. Okay, so the hypothalamus regulates basic motivational states like lust and hunger and thirst and temperature regulation, defensive aggression, right? And so it's like a... It's the first place where reflexes transform into something like personalities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You think that sinister people can use joy? I mean, look at Officer Harris. Did she use it or did she... Fair enough, fair enough. But I guess my skepticism is that it's... Okay. To use joy or to manipulate it... Well, I mean, what's the... Well, I think kind of the difference maybe is the voluntary element.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Like, look, I figured out... I had this weird kind of obsession when I was teaching in Boston because I was teaching about horrible things, terrible things, like the Holocaust and the gulag and, like, the depths of depravity, right? And... I got this voice in my head that kept saying, if you could master this, you'd do that with a light touch. And I thought, really?
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Like, how the hell am I going to talk about these topics that are
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Oh, I haven't seen Veep. He did Veep.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
But there's a set of them, right? Like, you know, a cat that's involved in defensive rage isn't a cat that's in the mood for mating, right? So it swaps between these fundamental motivational states. Well, each of those motivational states has a self. And Nietzsche pointed this out back in an unrelated investigation, in a sense, but he said every drive philosophizes in its spirit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I was obsessed with the idea of evil clowns for a while because I started to figure out what it meant. The evil clowns have classic horror trope, right? It's weird. Like Stephen King wrote this strange book called It about this clown who is an alien, so a sky god that lived in the sewer. So in the underworld...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So it's evil clown in the underworld, and it's an evil clown of cosmic significance who lives within. And as soon as I figured out the archetypal understructure, I thought, oh, I get this. But it's partly because, like, there's this old idea in traditional Christianity that... Lucifer, the devil, that Satan can't produce anything original. Everything's a parody. Everything's a parody, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And there is this evil clown element to totalitarian states. It was really captured very well in that death of Stalin. And in North Korea today. Well, and in your book, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right. Yeah, well, the comical element, I think, comes in the preposterousness of the lies, right? Right. And this is also partly why the gender thing bothers me so much. I mean, there's many reasons why it bothers me. The brutal surgery being not least among them. But I believe that there is no more fundamental perceptual axiom than the capacity to distinguish between male and female.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
I'm thinking about this biologically. Creatures could distinguish between the sexes for hundreds of millions of years before there were nervous systems. Right. So it's like, this is fundamental. And obviously, because if you can't distinguish between male and female at some level, you don't reproduce. Well, except for the cuttlefish.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right. Well, so they still know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, yeah. So the problem with that, the gender-bending... foolishness, and I think it's part of this like evil clown pathology. It's more than foolish. Yes, that's for sure. If you can get people to accept the lie that a man can be a woman, all other lies are trivial in comparison, right? The lie is then paramount. There's a weird...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
sub-narrative, sorry, I'm obsessed with biblical references because I've been immersing myself in it for quite a while, but there's a biblical idea that's a strange one, that when the abomination of desolation is raised to the highest place, put on the altar, it's time to head for the hills. And that's what it is. It's a statement that when the thing that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
When the order is perverted 100%, when the worst possible thing is elevated to the highest possible position, things have deteriorated to such a point that you better take appropriate steps.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So these underlying motivational states, like they're not just drives like reflexes, they come with perceptions, thoughts, attitudes, political opinions, like they come fully fledged. But imagine if you're really immature, badly socialized, they just operate in sequence. That's like a toddler. Well, when people talk about their self,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Okay. So in the story of Cain and Abel, I'm bringing it up because it's the first biblical story about real people. And it's a murderer and his target. So that's not fun. That's the first thing that happens in the profane world. Okay, so Cain, he's working away, hypothetically. And he's not getting anywhere. Okay, and there's two reasons for that, possibly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
One is that he's doing something wrong, and the other is the cosmos is constituted improperly. Sure. And he decides that the cosmos is constituted improperly. So he's doing what he can, and everyone should know it, and he's working himself to death, and it ain't working. And so something's broken. Whereas his brother... Like the sun shines wherever he goes. Everyone loves him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So it's Cain's failing, trying hard, failing, making sacrifices, failing. Abel, no effort at all. It's just Satan through life. That's Cain's position. So Cain decides he's going to go and have it out with God because it's not his fault, obviously. And so he says to God that... Abel, everything's going well for him. And here I am suffering away, nothing's working for me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And I'm bitter and miserable and resentful and no wonder. And God says, well, you got a couple of things wrong with your theory there, buddy. The first theory that's wrong is that your failure is not what's making you miserable. And God says, Abel, There's an intermediary figure playing a role here that you don't understand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
He says, sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal and you invited it in to have its way with you. So you engaged in a creative dialogue with the figure of evil because you felt you were justified, because you're resentful, because you're failing. Now, while you were failing, you could have learned
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You could have decided it was your problem, but no, it's God's fault. And so God tells Cain, I don't think it's my fault, I think it's your fault. If you did well, you would be accepted. Yeah. All right? So Cain listens, but he doesn't hear. And he goes away, and then he invites his brother to go do something with him, like in good faith, and then he kills him with the rock. Why?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
To get revenge against God. That's the motive. Right, because... Cain is existentially wounded because his sacrifices are being rejected. So he takes God's ideal and he sullies it. Right. That's what they're doing with kids. You take the most innocent possible creature and you do the worst possible thing to them. Yeah, that's what it is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
It's like core demonic. Well, that's why it's so alien. Christ says in the gospels that the people who sully children, he says something like it would be better for them if a heavy weight was wrapped around their neck and they were thrown into the ocean. It's the worst sin. That's why they're doing it. That's why they're doing it. It's the ultimate middle finger to reality and being.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Usually they talk about something like possession by one of those lower states. Now then you could imagine that could be integrated. And that's what happens when you mature. But then that integration and being social are almost exactly the same thing. Like, you know, if I was a solitary animal living in the woods, I could just cycle through my underlying motivational states.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
It's like, you fuck with me, I'm going to fuck with you. Right? And so, and then there's that perverse delight that's, there's a novelty edge to that too. So you get sexual gratification for a multitude of reasons. One reason is just sort of reflexive, like sexual activity in itself is pleasurable, but you can put a novelty spin on that. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
That's partly what motivates diverse creatures to seek out multiple sexual partners. And you can game that in all sorts of ways. When people start watching pornography, they start with the sorts of things that you described, like attractive nude pictures of lithe women. But then after 10,000 of those, it's like, well, maybe a little variation. And that's that inviting that spirit in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You can chase that edge, right? Serial killers do that. They chase that edge right to the logical conclusion. The logical conclusion is a long, long, long way down. And people don't want to understand this. It's worse even than this, Michael. It's worse than this because, see, one of the things God tells Cain is that he invited this spirit in to have its way with him. It's very specific wording.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
There's a whole sequence of mythological stories around it. For someone to do something like shoot up an elementary school, they fantasized about it for like 5,000 hours. Like there's a devil in them, so to speak. You might as well call it that because for all intents and purposes, that's what it is. They've invited it in and it's taken possession of them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And it's fantasizing in that spirit, what's the worst thing I could do?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, but this is an adult killing children. I was specifically referring to Sandy Hook in that case. Yeah, yeah. I would say in terms of level of sin, You know, I'm annoyed at my classmates. Right, right, yeah. That's more comprehensible.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, definitely. Although, you know, there's a darkness in that. Well, we don't even have to say that. It's extraordinarily deep. No, no, the desolation of the innocent. That's the thrill in and of itself. Like, it's the... And there's more to it. It's like... Because this is why it's Luciferian. So Lucifer is the usurper, technically speaking, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So he's often the intellect, by the way, that wants to put itself in the highest place. Well, there's nothing more that makes you the commanding officer of the cosmos than to take the most profound moral rule imaginable and to invert it. That's how much you can get away with. I know what people like this are like. They also think, I'm so smart, no one will ever catch me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And I can toy with people too, because I can hint at this, because they're so stupid, they won't even notice. That's often why they get caught. That's what happens to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, right? And the prosecutor does a brilliant job of toying with him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
There'd be no real reason to regulate or integrate them. But as you mature, You integrate them so that they take the future into account and other people into account. So then the self starts to become, well, reflexes, basic motivational states, integrated personality, but then it's integrated into a relationship and a family and a community and a society and everything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, part of the reason in the UK is that... Well, the UK is a racial thing. Partly. Well, yeah, but they're covering it up. Right. Yeah, but, well, yeah, yeah, there's the racial thing, and there's fear associated with that, and people are afraid that they're going to be targeted by the woke mob. If they stand up, they're going to be called Nazis and neo-Nazis.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And he always has something useful to say. So what did we talk about today? Well, we talked about the terrible attractiveness of the kind of virtue signaling that other people make sacrifices for. Motivation for deep evil. Michael has studied totalitarian evil. He was curious about the more mundane forms of pathology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
That's all right. That's one element of it. The other element is the elite... Look... You want to elevate your social status. Now, if you're a good person, you do that by being useful. Okay. Okay, but you can game the system. Narcissists and psychopaths game the reputational system. That's their niche. Sure. And they do that successfully often.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Often successfully enough to be attractive, you know, especially if they're men. Sure. Because naive young women are attracted to psychopaths because they game the system so effectively. Okay, but that proclivity to game the reputational system is a very deep... Temptation. One of the commandments, I think it's the third, but it might be the fourth, is to not use God's name in vain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And people think that means don't swear. I don't know, maybe. I can never remember the order. It doesn't mean that. It means do not claim divine inspiration for pursuing your own agenda. It's like the worst thing you can do. I'm doing something low and terrible for the best possible reasons. That's the Stalinist situation, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
I'm exercising all my sadistic desires like Beria, and I'm doing this for the benefit of the poor. Okay, so... You don't ever want to underestimate the attractiveness of moral posturing, especially if someone else is paying for it. So in the UK, it's like, I'm tolerant, I'm cosmopolitan, I'm open to diversity. We can welcome immigrants of all stripes in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And if the cost for me displaying my cosmopolitan sophistication is that 10,000 working class women get raped, girls, well, no skin off my nose. And so that's the other part of it. I mean, they're afraid. They're afraid of being called Nazis. They are afraid of being prejudiced, you know, because it's easy once there's a pool of bad actors in a given identifiable group to tar the whole group.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And when you should do that, when you shouldn't is not a simple question. There's lots of complex reasons, but one of them is There's no limit to the degree that people will elevate their own moral status falsely, especially if someone else pays the price.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, part of it too, Michael, I think is just that people don't... Like, you didn't like my explanation for the child. No, I did not. Right, right. But you're not a naive person.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
It isn't obvious at all which of those takes priority. And one of the things I've been thinking about is that our definitions of mental health are, and this is partly psychologists' fault, are really badly flawed because we think of sanity as... a characteristic of the self, but it's probably something like harmony between all these, simultaneous harmony between all these levels.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Okay, so Michael Schellenberger, when he broke the WPATH files, I interviewed him and I asked him, well, we talked about it, and he said that he first got wind of this... Butchery because I did an interview with Abigail Shrier Shire Shire. She's great.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
She is great and very very brave and I did that just as I was Recovering and it just made me so nervous like I was barely functioning and it was such a terrible interview to do It was really early in the in the trans Butchery cycle and I knew we'd get pilloried for it. I thought it might sink me and I thought you know, we're going ahead with this and
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
she laid out, as you know, the absolute travesty of this entire catastrophe. Now, Schellenberger watched that, and he said he couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe it. It wasn't until two years later that he started... You know, it was in his mind, but I think that's so telling because Schellenberger's not naive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Now, he tilted towards the left, and so he's going to have the kind of temperament that's inclined to think the best of people. Right. Which is a great inclination. Is it? Except when... Not when you're dealing with psychopaths. Right. In which case, it's exactly the wrong attitude. Right. And the problem with the left often is they have no imagination for evil.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And some of that's naivety and some of it's like willful blindness. It's like, you don't want to know. You know, you don't want to know. You don't want to know what sort of snakes are in people's minds. A guy studied...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
sociological evil and psychological evil for 40 years right trying to get to the bottom of it i had some pretty bad actors in my clinical practice and saw some things all the way to the i wouldn't say all the way to the bottom hell's a bottomless pit for a reason sure right lies get so deep that you literally can't get to the bottom of them you you scrape something away and you think finally it's like no just another layer of lies well you know that from studying totalitarianism
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So imagine that you say you're married and you hit a sequence of conflicts with your wife and they repeat. Okay, so there's a hole there in your relationship. And so usually people just walk around those and they try to like not delve into it. Partly because when you start delving into it, the person's going to accuse you and get angry and then they're going to cry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And that'll stop 90% of people. But if you go past the anger and you go past the tears and you delve in, you go down Dante's hell. And at the bottom you find betrayal. And then there's trauma there. And then the person has to like really cry and really reconfigure. admit to, God, sometimes it didn't even happen to them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Sometimes they're carrying the burden of something that happened to their mother. And you have to go all the way to the bottom to exercise that. And if you do that, it changes your view of human nature. It's like you said, you get these, oh, I don't know, some guys attracted to 16-year-old girls. And you think, well, low, within the realm of human comprehension, low. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And then you think, you're just like, you're in the first circle there, buddy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Because they're after power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You want my Lamborghini? I want my Lamborghini. It's just a matter of difference of approach.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
I learned what iniquity meant the other day.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Aiming down. What? So imagine that, you know, you make a moral error. Sure. Like, that would be like stealing a car. Right. Well, you want the car. You want to go places. It's like, fair enough. You made this error of stealing it. It's like, no, you steal the car and then you burn it. That's the Joker in Batman. Right. It's like, I didn't want that money. I just wanted to steal it. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And now I'm going to burn it. And he's the guy that terrifies all the criminals. It's like... Because the criminals, it's not iniquity for the typical criminal. It's just a matter of strategy. They buy the whole capitalist thing. They want the house and the yard. Maybe they even want education for their kids. So 90% of them, they're like you. They're aiming up crooked way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And I'm not trying to rationalize. It's like they're not aiming at... Well, part of them is, but... There are people who are aiming at down. So there's a book, Panzram. You ever read Panzram? No. Oh my God. So the book starts out, it's this guy who's in prison. It's a novel or a real book? It's an autobiography.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And he's sitting in a corner, he's all beat to hell. He's a very tough looking guy. And a prison psychiatrist goes and gives him a cigarette. And Panzram, the guy who wrote the autobiography, said that's the only nice thing anybody ever did for him in his whole life. Now, whether or not that's true, that's not the point, but it's close enough to true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And so the psychiatrist starts to interview this Panzram character who's like, I think he raped 240 men. He killed like 50. His dying words to the hangman were, hurry up you, who's your bastard? I could kill 12 men in the time it's taking you to knot that rope. Right, and he meant it. And Panzram was brutalized when he was a child, like just beyond belief.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And he decided that he was going to aim down. for his whole life. And so he almost started a war between Great Britain and the United States. He wanted to burn everything to the ground, everything. And that's his autobiography. He even told us, the psychiatrist asked him to write his autobiography. It's called Panzram, and so that's what he did.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
He told the psychiatrist never to turn his back on him. Because he thought, even though he liked the psychiatrist insofar as Panzram could like anyone, he thought, give me an opportunity, buddy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, well, that is different. There's some overlap with political psychopathology with people like Beria and Stalin as well. God only knows what those people are up to, especially someone like Beria.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, right. Right. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's funny. Those little details matter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
I read Theodore Dalrymple's account of going to North Korea, which is brilliant. He's such a brilliant essayist. He went into the big department store there where everyone's an actor and all the artifacts aren't real. And he bought a pen. He was like the only person who actually bought something in the store because no one buys anything. And he detailed out the ways the pen didn't work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, I think you hit the target dead center by bringing up self-actualization. Okay, so this idea emerged in the late 1950s and the 1960s, right? First of all, with the existential... psychologists and psychoanalysts, and then with the humanists like Maslow and Rogers. And it was kind of a substitute for religious pursuit. Like it'd be the secular substitute for religious pursuit.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Like you just have no idea how many ways a pen could not work. The little... pocket clip can come off, the ball doesn't work, the ink is watery and runs. For a pen to work, a hundred things have to be not lies. In that kind of totalitarian state, absolutely everything is a lie.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right, right, right. Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. the bottom of things. Yeah, well, it's a very long way down. And that is part of the problem with the marginal. So, you know, we were talking about the center and the margin. It's like Jonathan Paggio explained this to me. I didn't know this. So in sacred architecture, the architecture of cathedrals, there was often monsters on the periphery, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Like the gargoyles. Sure. And the monsters are because as you move farther and farther away from the center, you get into the world of monstrous forms. Now, by the definition of the center, granted, but this is the case for every conceptual scheme or every perception. Ideal at the center, like circles of approximation. Right. drifting out into the marginal and then the monstrous.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And this is the problem with the, part of the problem with the postmodernist ethos. It's like, center the marginal. It's like, oh yeah? How about the monstrous? Well, they're just victims. It's like, wait till there's one under your bed. Right. Right. Because they're marginal for a reason. Oh yeah. Hopefully. Hopefully.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Hopefully. You know, for Foucault, all the people who were in
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
prison were victims it's like all of them right right really miss you saw this since what brought down the scottish government the scottish prime minister remember she put this in the women's prison yeah yeah it's like oh they're men they're they're women no she didn't know what to say she was asking she was stammering right well that's right that's right but but that was bad enough yeah it's like oh i see so every man who says so is a woman
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, well, you remember, who was the comedian that was wrestling women, Man on the Moon?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
He knew that was coming, eh? He knew that there was part of him, his evil little soul, that knew that was coming.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
No, not at all. No, no, he was very intuitive, prophetic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you have that about you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, Jung said the trickster is the precursor to the savior.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right, right, right. So that's, well, that's because... He said that, really? You bet. He's a marginal character, but the trickster is a psychopomp. Okay, so... You want to answer this?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Okay, so we'll go right from first principles. So here's how the world works. You set a name. Okay, that means you elevate something. Yeah. You prioritize it. You celebrate it. You worship it. Those are all the same thing. You set it as a name. Okay, now your perceptual systems are navigation tools. Okay, so you set the aim. You see a pathway. This is actually how the world appears to you.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You see pathways. Okay. Tools, they move you forward. Obstacles, they get in your way. Friends, they're tools in the social world. Foes, okay, that's the dramatic landscape. One more. Agents of magical transformation, like wizards. What do they do? They reset the aim. A trickster is an agent of magical transformation. Now, is he good or bad?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
There was this idea that there was a self, which is something like the liberal project, I would say, the liberal individualistic project, and then that that could be actualized. But there's a real problem with that because... Look, I had a neighbor say to me once, no mother is any happier than her most unhappy child. Okay. Right. Which, you know, strikes me as highly plausible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You don't know because a trickster is... So imagine you're playing game A, right? But there's someone who's playing game D and they come to visit, right? Okay, now they're a trickster because they're not playing by the same rules. They're not in the same world. And when you interact with them, it's magical because they're emblematic of another way of being.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, that could be a descent into the abyss, or it could be an ascent to a higher game. You don't know. And the thing is, is that in all likelihood, you're going to be afraid. So when Gandalf, for example, when Gandalf comes to visit The hobbits. They're kind of in awe of him, but they're also afraid and distrustful. And even Bilbo is the same.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Like, he knows there's something to this guy, but... And the Strider, too. Aragorn kind of plays the same role. He's ambivalent. Well, why? Because he's a game changer. Well, your game could fall apart, in which case the trickster is like, he's opened the portal to hell. But your game could be elevated, in which case he's... A harbinger, he's a psychopomp. He's someone who lives on the edge.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
He's a messenger of the gods, right? And so tricksters introduce the possibility of a new game. You know, and even comedians do that all the time because what they're doing, a joke is often, here we are in this world. And then, no, it's actually this world. And everybody laughs, you know, and that's the punchline. And so the comedian is a trickster. And he's a world shifter.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And so the tricksters, now, the trickster and the fool are similar archetypal creatures. And the fool is also the precursor to the savior because when you play a new game, you're a fool to beginner, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So you have to accept the fool. You have to accept the trickster and the fool to play a new game. Right, right. And so certainly comedians play that role all the time. And that's partly, what do they do exactly? They're jokes. Well, a joke is something like an introduction to a new, it's an introduction to a new way of perceiving. So, you know, it's a micro, it's a micro transformation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So I don't know. I think part of the way that you distinguish the positive tricksters from the negative tricksters is the positive tricksters use play and humor and invitation, right? So it's a game. It's, you want to play a new game. That's the invitation. That's the right, that's definitely the right basis for policy. What about the bad kind of trickster? Make your question more specific.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, as you said, that could be manipulated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So you can get campaigns of false joy. Well, the Soviets did that all the time. We're so enthusiastic for Stalin, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, there's the trickster component that we talked about with regards to the black comedy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, Stalin, Solzhenitsyn did a pretty good job of detailing out Stalin's attitude towards everyone around him. He thought everyone around him was contemptible and lied all the time and couldn't be trusted. Right, yeah. 100% right.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right, and so you can see the spiral he was in. It's like, right, you start to betray. People get afraid. They become contemptible. You're more likely to betray them, and they lie, and it just goes, you know, it just spirals completely out of control. Yeah. I mean, you can think of Stalin as a rational actor in some ways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
It's like, what would you be like if every single person around you did nothing but suck up and lie to you 100% of the time?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So because if you're socialized, you're in a nexus of relationships. Right. And if those relationships aren't harmonious, voluntary, playful, you're miserable. And that means that the self-actualization isn't It's more like conducting yourself in a manner that enables harmony to exist, like a musical harmony at all these levels simultaneously. So you have to conduct yourself.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
to see if people are like, ah, ha, ha, ha.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Absolutely, absolutely. That's definitely the danger of, I mean, danger of celebrity. I mean, my impulse throughout my life was to, especially in professional settings, like at the university, to take people at their face value. And that worked quite well, but partly the reason it worked is because I was in very rarefied environments.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
I was at McGill when McGill was functional, then I was at Harvard when Harvard was functional, and the University of Toronto. And so the typical person who came my way was playing mostly a straight game. Well, as... I became more known, let's say, the percentage of bad actors who present themselves increases.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And so you become more skeptical that way too. And so there's more, so, and you can imagine, well, that's one of obviously the dangers of power. Why is power dangerous? No one gives you any feedback.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, yeah. Well, people... i think that's that's not an atypical game for people who are sort of comedically oriented and playful it's like when little kids come to a playground they start interacting with each other in a immature way like if they're four they'll sort of start off at two-year-old level and then they ratchet up and see if the other
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
child can play the same game now you know four-year-olds can play with two-year-olds but for a play partner they want someone who's going to push them sure so they do this they ratchet up to see if they're at the same level with regards to the game yeah this is you know one of the things that you might think about with regards to small talk that's what people that's partly what people are doing
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right? So when they meet socially, to begin with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, yeah. They want to offer their little offerings to get the exchange going. Now, part of what you're likely objecting to is that people who aren't high in openness won't take the conversation seriously.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
That's why I love being a clinical psychologist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
People, if you get people actually telling you what they're like, they're unbearably interesting. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, this is true even for simple people, because there are no simple people. The ones who are less intellectual are less articulate, and it's harder to get their stories out of them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Well, then their ideas tend to be dull, but that doesn't mean they are. Okay. Right? You've got to get them off their... There's nothing worse than a dull ideologue.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
It's like, I've heard it all before, but if you get people talking about what they know, and they're often very hesitant to do that because they don't want to... No one's ever listened to them. Sure. And they're afraid, like the guinea pig breeder, that they'll just be laughed at if they let people know what they're really like. But people are unbelievably interesting if you can get them talking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
If you're going to not be swamped by negative emotion, this goes back to Trudeau. If I only think about my local self now and maximizing that. You might say, well, I get exactly what I want or something in me does. Why wouldn't I be happy? Well, part of the reason is I'm sacrificing the future because I'm being impulsive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
All right, we should stop. We should go to the Daily Wire side. We should talk about the current political situation. Let's do it. Let's do that on the Daily Wire side. Yeah, okay, good, good. So always a pleasure talking to you and seeing you. I had no idea what we were going to talk about. And we didn't talk about any of the things really that I thought we might talk about.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
But that's entertaining, very entertaining. So, and hopefully everybody else found that it was so too. And write me that paragraph.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And I will. Send an introduction and we'll see. I'd like to go talk to her again, too. Oh, God. The best. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was fun talking. She's a blast. She's a blast. And she's so smart.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
It's a blast. Have you talked to Russell Brand? I have not. Russell Brand is fun.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
He's fun in that way. He's got that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Yeah, well, the thing about Pelley is she is that good. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So that's good. That's good. All right, sir. Great pleasure, Jordan. Good to see you, man. Yeah, yeah. And thank you, everybody, for watching and listening and to the film crew here today in Scottsdale for setting up this crazy show. site. And join us on the Daily Wire side, because I didn't talk to Michael at all about the strange political situation that we happen to be in now.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And I want to get his feelings about, well, about Musk and about the strange group of people who've aggregated themselves around Trump and about what he thinks is going to happen in the next year and what he hopes is going to happen. And so join us on the Daily Wire side for that.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And also, if it's all about me, who the hell is going to want to be around me?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So Carl Jung talked about something akin to that. And I think that's partly the source of the ideas. So he believed that there was a core self, but Jung believed that the core self, this is something we can talk about in great detail, but Jung identified the core self. Like he thought that Christ was an archetype of the core self. There was a technical reason for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
And then he thought the self was, guarded in a sense by persona, which is exactly what you're wearing. You've got a mask on. And so the persona would be the tool that you use to, this is one way of thinking about it, the tool that you use to manipulate the social environment so that you don't cause undue stress and so that you get what you want. Now,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Jung, like you, apparently, would presume that if you're well-constituted, there's no real division between the persona and the self. Now, it can be a bit more complicated than that because one of the things Jung pointed out was that there are times when you want a persona. Like, you want to put out a shallow version of yourself in a way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So imagine, for example, that you go into a bank and you're just going to do a business transaction with the teller. You don't want Whether you want the teller's full self there or not is a matter of dispute. Really what you want is a pretty generic transaction.
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516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
the sorts of things that motivate not only pedophilia, but extreme sadistic pedophilia, let's say. So that always makes for a enjoyable conversation. We talked about Michael shifting views with regards to the marginal, let's say, as a creative anarchist by personality and political inclination.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So there are times when you need to know when you present a generic version of yourself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
You know, okay, so let's, I've been thinking about an idea akin to that in relationship to the Exodus story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
No, so the Exodus story presents kind of an archetypal landscape of human destiny. And you might say one of the ways of interpreting it is that everybody starts out as a slave. And that would be, I think, akin to your idea that the bank teller, for example, isn't in a position to be self-actualized, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Because they're so constrained by the demands of the situation that there's no room for what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Okay, so let's take apart that idea of your time, because the way you phrased that, for example, there's an implicit assumption there that's underlying our discussion. There's a distinction between your time and company time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Okay, so I want to hit that from two perspectives. One would be, well, they're both your time because you decided to go work for the company, right? So that's a voluntary choice, just like it is to pursue...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
what's your time so then the question would be why what is it in you that you were serving when it was your time specifically rather than company time you know what i mean it's like how do you because you did both of them voluntarily but i didn't do both of them for free right okay so one of the distinctions would be the the top the thing that you're doing when you spend your time
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
the time you characterize as my time, that's something you would do for free. Right. Okay, why?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Future. Right. Yeah, okay. So that's an interesting aspect of that. So would we say that... it was easy for you and maybe it's easy for people in general to assume that what they're doing is having their time if what they're doing with that time is investing in their future. I don't think they were thinking about the future. No, you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
When you were doing your writing, was the fact that it was motivationally relevant to you directly associated with the fact that it was an investment in the future. Like, why was your writing, why did your writing take precedent? And why did you identify the time you spent writing as serving you? Like, I'm after a definition of you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Michael is prone to presume that the different against the same or the, what would you say, exceptional against the normal is admirable, but he's also come to recognize that the center can be dissolved in a manner that's cataclysmic, and the diverse and the creative can degenerate into the monstrous and dangerous. And so we talked about that technically, psychologically, sociologically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
Right, okay, so then I would say that's akin to the distinction between slave and sojourner, let's say, in the Exodus story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis
So, you know, there's this, one of the elements that underlies the general critique of capitalism is that people are wage slaves. Right, of course. Right, now... you can criticize that in that, well, slaves can't quit. And the critic would say, well, I can quit one job, but if I don't get another one, I'll starve. So like I'm in a slavery position, so to speak. Now,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Half of Western women, 30 and under, have no child. Half of them will never have a child, and 90% of them will regret it. This is a catastrophe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And that trope underlies like the evil scientist in popular entertainment, the idea of the intellect gone mad, the intellect that worships itself that then usurps and attempts to put itself in the highest place. And so there's an idea that this is Milton's idea that Lucifer, who's the spirit of the unbridled intellect, the light bringer,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
is the spirit that was most finely made that went most dreadfully wrong. And so the psychological idea there is that there isn't anything more remarkable about human beings than their cognitive ability. But if it becomes master instead of serving something higher, then look the hell out. Now, there's an echo of that that's very, very deep. with regards to the maternal instinct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And I think this is what's played out in the Genesis story of the consort between Eve and the serpent. What seems to me to happen is that Eve clutches the poisonous serpent to her breast. And so that's an overextension of that empathy that you described, which is the core element, let's say, of the maternal instinct, and really the instinct that the species itself depends on, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Human beings have the longest dependency period of any creature by a lot, and human infants are markedly helpless. And so that self... sacrificing compassion that's at the core of the maternal instinct is absolutely vital. But as Freud pointed out, if that goes wrong within families and overextends its domain,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
so that, for example, that infant-mother bond isn't attenuated as the child develops, then there's nothing that's more devouring than the mother. That's the story of Hansel and Gretel, right? They go out into the forest, chased there in part by the fracturing of their family. and they find a gingerbread house, which is a little bit too good to be true, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
position in society that was unheard of 100 years ago. There's a downside to all of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
It's not only a house, but it's made out of candy. And so maybe you might suspect that the jig is up when something's painted that beautifully on the outside. I'm oh so compassionate and embracing. And of course, inside there's a witch whose goal is to fatten up the children and to make them helpless so that she can eat them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And so fairy tales are pretty vicious in that sort of representation, but that's also a portrayal of how all-devouring the maternal embrace can be if it doesn't, if it overextends its domain. Now, you know, it's not like men get off easy in that Genesis story, by the way, when Eve decides she's gonna put herself at the center of the moral universe because that's what she does.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And the downside appears to be the mounting unhappiness among young women, the precipitous decline in birth rates, the collapse of marriage as a social institution, and a spate of childlessness among young women, as well as the feminization of our institutions in a manner that often borders on the pathological.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
She's tempted to become like a god because that's the temptation, and she clutches the serpent to her breast. Adam doesn't object, and he... and he goes along for the ride. And then later in this story, when God wants to walk with Adam so that they're working together, let's say, Adam is hiding behind a bush because he's realized that he's naked.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And so the woman and the serpent have made himself conscious, and now he doesn't have the courage to walk with God. And when God asks him why, he blames the woman and he blames God for making her.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And so there's a, like, I don't wanna lay this all at the feet of women, because what I saw in the universities, for example, is that, let's put it this way, that when the maternal instinct went astray, partly because it didn't have any valid target, the men just backed off and didn't oppose it. And so, you know, they're complicit in this,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
disintegration, but we do have a problem on our hands that's not trivial. And we also see this reflected in a growing political divide between young men in particular and young women all across the world, right? Young men are becoming more conservative. And young women are becoming more liberal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And they're also not finding each other very effectively, the political, you know, who would have guessed that, you know, so we got two problems. men and women both have the vote, now does that mean they're political enemies? Because that's certainly one of the things that appears to be happening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And then we have the mass migration of women into workforces of a size where empathy cannot be the regulating principle. You know, I'll give you one more example and then I'll turn it over for your comments. If empathy was the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
appropriate ethos for operation in a corporation, let's say, beyond the size of the family, then the personality trait agreeableness, which is the index of compassion and empathy, would positively predict workplace performance, particularly among managers. But it isn't agreeableness that predicts, it's conscientiousness, which is a cold virtue that typifies conservatives more than liberals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Big organizations run on raw cognitive power and conscientiousness. They don't run on empathy. Little bitty families run on empathy, especially when there are infants, but that doesn't scale. And I actually think that's why the personality trait conscientiousness, which is diligence, orderliness, industriousness, it's associated often with patriotism and more conservative values.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
I think that's why it evolved because empathy does not scale. Because everyone isn't a big, happy family. And once you exceed kin group size in your organization, you have to turn to a different ethos. And I think that's particularly problematic for unconscientious women who self-aggrandize on the basis of their compassion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
I discussed these issues today with Megyn Kelly, a woman who's married, who has children, and who's had a stellar career. And we attempted to sort through these 30 issues and come to a conclusion about how men and women might conduct themselves in relationship to one another and what the consequences of that are for the way we think about ourselves in society.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Yeah, well, that'll get her attention if she doesn't have anything better to do. And it has no sense, right? But that is another example of that exaggeration of compassion to the point that it becomes toxic. And the fact that it's necessary to human beings, especially in the early years, like vital, also means that it's a very difficult force to regulate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
I mean, the general rule for caretaking – and this goes for the elderly as well, pretty much anybody you're actually taking care of – don't do anything for anyone that they can do for themselves, right? Because you're actually stealing from them, not helping them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
You've had a very successful career and I'm kind of curious about how you've balanced your life and your work and how that's worked for you and what advice you would give young women who are apparently struggling quite radically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
You know, I mean, certainly one of the rules for psychotherapy, insofar as there are actual rules for that enterprise, which has probably become now more destructive than useful, is that people have to make their own way, right? You listen and you help people strategize and you ask them questions, but you don't provide them with the direction for their life because that's their enterprise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And that requires a very, well, it requires a hard bound on compassion, that's for sure, because you don't want to get in there and interfere. Can I ask you a little bit about the way that you
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
constructed your own family and career pathway because i've been working with my wife trying to sketch out she does a podcast on issues related to femininity um and we've been trying to sketch out at least hypothetically something like a appropriate timeline for young women because they have real no no real guidance in that so here's a stat for you um We hit this milestone last year.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Half of Western women, 30 and under, have no child. So it's a little more than half now. So we hit more than half. Half of them will never have a child. And 90% of them will regret it. That means we're setting up. This is a catastrophe. This is a catastrophe, if it's true. And the data are pretty clear, I believe. This means we're setting up one woman in four for isolation, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And that gets increasingly brutal as you get older. And I also think we're setting up that 25% of women to be preyed upon in a manner like nothing we've ever seen when they enter their later years, because they'll have no one to keep an eye out for them, especially during times of vulnerability. This is not going to be good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
So let me sketch out an idea for you in terms of a timeline and tell me what you think about that. I mean, one couple in three have fertility problems by the age of 30. And that's defined as not being able to conceive within a year of trying. And so it seems pretty obvious
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
all assistive reproductive technology notwithstanding, which is very expensive and very unreliable and certainly not something to be depended on except in cases of absolute necessity. Having your children before you're 30 is a wise move if you want to ensure that it's going to happen. And so then the question is,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Now, young men have their problems and there's no doubt about that, but I think it's something in the neighborhood of 50 to 60% of liberal young women in particular between the ages of 18 and 34 who are who suffer from at least one diagnosable mental disorder, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
You know, we're best served probably as human beings to have our children in our homes, and probably our early 20s. And of course, that's going to be more demanding for women, more demanding and more of an opportunity, I would say, because each child really requires something approximating three years of pretty dedicated care.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
You know, the data seem to show that if your child is three and reasonably social, then social education, daycare, can work. Before that, especially with transformation of caregivers, it doesn't look like it's a very good idea. So you need three years per child. And maybe you want two children or three children.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And so that's something like, I don't know, five or six years that you have to devote to it. Now, women live about six or seven years longer than men. So that's kind of an interesting little twist on the whole situation. And if you started your career at 30, you could have 40 years of career, which is a lot. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
That way, I would say in some ways, you get to have your cake and eat it too, although perhaps not at the same time, you know, which we had talked about early. But there are no real guidelines developmentally for young women, and they don't know what to do, and they're increasingly not married, and they increasingly don't have children, and they're increasingly unhappy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And it doesn't look to me like slave to a corporation is necessarily a substitute for family life and children. Now, some people have a career, you have a career, some people have a career, most people have jobs. So anyways, I'm not saying that that's a hard and fast rule, but I don't really see any way around it. And here's another little twist that is worth adding.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
I think most people who are popular and attractive get five chances to establish a permanent relationship, and that's about it. That's fascinating. Right? Well, you know, well, figure it's a year to kind of get to know someone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
and then assume that you're fortunate enough so that people are lining up, which is not that likely and probably not the position that most people are in. And so maybe it's two years, including the failure, and five is a 10 year span. I mean, I'm not trying to be overwhelmingly pessimistic, but I wouldn't say it gets easier as you get older, you get more different from other people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
It isn't easier to establish a relationship when you're older, I wouldn't say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Well, there's that. That's a big problem. You know, who's left? And the other issue I would say, too, that's germane is... Why wouldn't you want to spend your young years with the person that you want to be with? You know, you're going to, what, forestall that? For what reason? You know, I got married to Tammy when I was 27, I think. And one of our regrets is that we didn't do that earlier.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And polls show pretty consistently that since the 1960s, the average self-reported happiness of young women in particular has declined and quite precipitously. So let's start with that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Now, there were reasons for that. Maybe they were valid. Probably they weren't. But I'm not happy that that time was missed. it would have been better to have spent it together. So I'd like your thoughts on that. I mean, the timeline, just that general layout.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Yeah, well, you know, our culture is so youth-obsessed, and I suppose that came out of consumer culture in the 1960s when, for the first time in human history, young people had excess money to spend and could be, you know, marketed at. We tend to construe, especially in popular culture, life as if you're old by the time you're 30. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
That turned out to be wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, but that's why it's so useful to start a discussion, let's say, about the actual span of life. I mean, you said that one of your regrets, your potential regrets, is that, you know, you're... you've truncated the time that you'll have as a grandmother, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And you took advantage of that when you were young, and there was some utility in that for you. But that is a price that is lurking. And, you know, it's very difficult to tell how it will play out. But as a pattern, it's something for people to give some consideration to. You know, optimally, you want to be a grandparent when you're still youthful enough to be
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
active and engaged, and then you get to have the pleasures of having children again. And that's a pretty good deal. And it is something, we're not good at conceptualizing the entire span of life consciously. That's what roles were for. So you didn't actually have to think about that. But we have to think about it now. There's another perversity in this that I really have a hard time
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
figuring out, because I would say that by and large, the feminist movement that's at the bottom of some of the things we're talking about has been a left-wing movement. And I do not understand for the life of me how in the world it can be logically coherent that the left can be anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, and pro-career. Like, I don't, I just can't. Yeah, so there's that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
So we could talk about that for a bit. It's like, okay, corporations are evil and there isn't any higher purpose you can serve as a woman than to serve one. It's like, okay, I'm not exactly sure what to make of that. Then I want to tell you a weird little story too. I was looking at the Brothers Grimm book
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Snow White version recently because I went and saw the Disney Snow White version which you know was exactly the sort of mistake that you'd think it would be both to attend and to produce and so I want to just tell you a snippet of that story. So Snow White is young and beautiful and The Evil Queen wants that, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
So she's an older woman who is competing with the younger woman for the younger woman's advantages. That's the Evil Queen, okay? Now Snow White has to run away from the Evil Queen. Right. And where does she go? Well, she goes out into the forest, which is the unknown, but she goes to where the dwarfs are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Now, in the Grimm's Brother fairy tale, the dwarfs don't have names, so they're kind of generic. But they keep an orderly house, and they work very hard. So the Grimm Brothers dwarfs, now we don't know how old these fairy tales are, by the way. There have been some folklorologists, folklorists, folklorists, who've traced some fairy tales back like 10,000 years. They're very old.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Okay, so it's wisdom speaking, you could say. So Snow White goes to... To what? To serve the dwarves. Okay, so what does that mean? It means that to escape the evil queen, she has to make a pact with ordinary masculinity, right? She has to serve the dwarves. Now, why? Because they protect her from the evil queen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Now, among primates, there is a phenomenon called fertility suppression, which is where women compete, the females compete, to suppress the fertility of other females. And it's a very widespread phenomenon that's well known among primatologists and biologists, and it definitely characterizes human beings. And so the evil queen in the Snow White story is suppressing the fertility of Snow White.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Now, she runs away from that and takes shelter among the ordinary men, the dwarves, let's say, who are the positive side of the patriarchy, you might say it that way. When the evil queen comes back, she shows up again, right? And she offers Snow White three gifts. The first is a bodice that's too tight and just about strangles her.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
So that's a narcissistic exaggeration of sexuality as a temptation. The second is a poisoned comb. Right, same thing in slightly different guise, right? She's tempting Snow White to be poisoned by the worship of her own beauty. That's a good way of thinking about it. That's what the Evil Queen does. The third gift is the poisoned apple. Now, of course, that hearkens back to the Genesis story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Anything you incorporate is something that changes you. It's like you incorporate knowledge. And so it's poisoned knowledge And the dwarfs can't save her from that. And that's the situation young women are in in the modern world because the evil queen feeds them poison knowledge. And the deep question is why?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And the real skeptic would say, well, the older, jealous, childless women are doing absolutely everything they can to destroy the fertility of young women. Now, there's a corollary to that, which is this happened to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for example. It's often the women in these brutally patriarchal societies who enforce the worst impositions on young women.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Like female genital mutilation, for example, is often a practice conducted by grandmothers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Yeah, that's for sure. And so there's a brutality in this, you know, a brutality in that. And I think you see it taken to its logical conclusion, by the way, with this trans phenomena. Because I told the bloody Senate in Canada in 2016 when they crammed through that idiot pronoun bill that was a compelled speech bill, I told them that they would produce a psychogenic epidemic among young women.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Because what happens when you confuse people about something basic, like their sex, you confuse the most confused the most. And so, for example, a 1% increase in unemployment produces a 5% increase in psychiatric hospitalizations because you put a little pressure on the people who are barely hanging in there and they're done.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Well, if you take, you know, the swath of girls or boys, but girls are more prone to psychogenic epidemics, you take the swath of them that are confused for 15 reasons and you add six more reasons and they're like, they're done. And so we've, you know, we can see the full, what? The full...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
horror show that's the surgical mutilation and sterilization as the ultimate exemplar of this evil queen phenomenon.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Well, here's a way of thinking about it. Every time you make a decision, you're conscious of it, but you make a lot of micro decisions and you don't remember them, right? Like you don't remember all the decisions you made yesterday or certainly not a week ago, but that doesn't mean you weren't conscious when you made the decision.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Okay, now if you make thousand little decisions in the wrong direction, you are conscious at each of those decision points, you might not be cognizant of where you've ended up. And that's the tale of many a society's disintegration into what blind totalitarianism. Look, when people fail to speak up in a totalitarian, in a state that's tilting towards totalitarianism,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Every time they know they should say something and they don't, they're conscious. Now, they might not be conscious of where they're going to get to if they keep that up, because that's the road to hell for sure. But they're conscious every step of the way. And so they're culpable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Now, if you're talking to someone who's made a lot of bad decisions in therapy, for example, and trying to help them identify where they took, you know, where they met the devil at the crossroads and made the wrong choice, you're going to have to do a lot of reviewing. And to some degree, that's the what, representation of all that to conscious, consciousness, because it's become implicit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
It's become part of the way that you look at the world, but it's conscious when you do it or don't do it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Well, here's another weird data point. So psychologists have known for a long while that, sociologists as well, that people become more conservative as they get older. So that's how the data is explained. As people age, they become more conservative. But you can take exactly that same data and you can put another twist on it. It's exactly as explanatory and I think it's more accurate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
The reason this isn't happened is because academics, including the researchers, are radically biased in the direction of the liberals. It isn't that you become more conservative as you get older.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
It's that conservatism is the political expression of maturity, and liberalism, progressivism, and the hedonism that goes along with it, that self-centered hedonism that is part and parcel, let's say, of the pride movement, that is the political expression of immaturity. And so here's something else this explains, because this is a perverse fact.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
There has been no economic and conceptual doctrine that's been more radically discredited than let's say the radical leftism, the Marxist brands of leftism, but it doesn't go away. So it's not leftism, it's not Marxism, it's Marxism is the most radical expression of hedonistic immaturity. And the reason it doesn't go away is because hedonistic immaturity doesn't go away. It battles with maturity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And as you become more mature, you become more conservative because conservatives are community-oriented and not self-oriented. Now, interestingly as well on the psychological side, there is no distinction between thinking about yourself and being unhappy. Those things are so tightly aligned that you can't dissociate them statistically, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
So as you become more conservative, but truly more mature, the way you orient your life is toward the future and towards other people. And that turns out not exactly to make you happy, and you pointed this out. You said happiness was a fraught word, and I agree because happiness is a hedonistic goal, but
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
secure in your identity, free from chaotic anxiety, goal-directed, purpose-driven, and in service to others, right? Well, that's not bad. That's a good substitute for happiness. In fact, if you were wise and mature, that's what you would substitute for happiness, right? That's why Pinocchio discovers nothing but slavery on Pleasure Island, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
So, right, because, you know, if you're a slave to your hedonic whims, that doesn't make you happy. It just makes you a slave. Right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Okay, okay, let's delve into that a little bit. First of all, I think it's happening to young men. I think that the podcast crowd has had a fair bit to do with that. And I think the reason for that is that that's the only place that young men find encouragement. And that encouragement, I've been struck to the core
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
in my travels and my encounters with thousands of people, or tens of thousands of people, many of them young men, how little encouragement is enough. None is not enough. Some is enough. And they've got some encouragement from the podcast sphere world, and that's enough. Now, why not young women? Well, Megan, one of the mistakes that pollsters make is
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
We do potentially have a major societal issue in that men have their pathologies that are expressed socially, aggression, antisocial behavior, drug and alcohol abuse, but there's no reason to assume whatsoever that women wouldn't bring their own pathologies to the workplace.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
assuming that 16-year-old boys or 18-year-old boys, let's say, and 18-year-old girls inhabit the same world. They don't. Because worldwide, women prefer men who are about four years older. And I would say that proclivity is even more pronounced in early, you know, in the teen years and in the early 20s. So I think we should be
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
matching young men against girls who are four years younger, not the same age. So we'll see how that plays out in the upcoming years. So that would be the first thing. It is also not obvious to me that the conservative types have done a particularly good job of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
communicating with young women now there's a bunch of reasons for that you know like the 18 to 34 year old female crowd gravitates not towards youtube and the longer form content that at least at once was the hallmark of youtube but to these more pathological sub um social worlds you know tumblr was one of them wherever you get a large aggregation of young women um
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
who are unsupervised, let's say, or unmentored, that's a better way of thinking about it. Look the hell out, because that's a breeding ground for social pathology. And young women get a lot of their information, I think it's 60 to 70% from TikTok.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
TikTok is a complete bloody snake pit, and the Chinese and the Iranians and the Russians have a major hand in that. And so that's not good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Relief. Yeah, yeah. Well, could you imagine a four-year term of Kamala Harris and the LGBTQ crowd?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Well, as I said, my experience has been that the best pathway out for those young men is encouragement. Say, you know, you're not who you could be. You could get your act together. There could be a lot more to you if you were willing to develop it. And, you know, don't accept the line that you're intrinsically pathological.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
You know, I had a friend who committed suicide because of that, fundamentally. when he was about 40, you know, he had bought the sort of nihilistic Buddhist line that You know, the patriarch was evil and male ambition was part of the force that was destroying the world. And he was a guilty colonialist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
He lived up in Northern Alberta where there was a lot of native Canadians and there was a fair bit of tension there. And he wouldn't even defend himself in a physical fight if it came to that because he was so guilty. And some of that was irresponsibility on his part, let's say, and unwillingness to grow up and take on the challenges of productive life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
You know, I'm not trying to lay it all at the feet of the social world, but I saw that in him, and it did him in by the time he was 40. You know, and he was a very smart, attractive, talented person. He had his problems for sure, but... That betrayal that you describe, it strikes right to the core.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
There's nothing moral about demoralizing young people, young men, in the name of defending Mother Nature against the patriarchy. That is immoral. It's an ancient form of nature worship violation. It always ends in child sacrifice, which is exactly the situation today. It's pathological to the core. And as you said, the Democrats, all they can do is ape respect for masculinity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
I mean, they tried to trot out Tim Waltz as a man. You know, I mean, really, I mean, you know, there are worse examples of men than Tim Walsh, admittedly, but we might also point out... No one's coming to mind, but I'm sure theoretically... Well, if you're looking for archetype of admirable masculinity, I wouldn't start with him. I mean, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And well, the fact that that was even an idea, I'm not trying to denigrate walls specifically, but that was just say on the same front.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
But they put those in the military bathrooms in Canada, you know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Yeah, well, that's the same ethos that underlies the insistence in so many schools, for example, that there can only be cooperative games, right? There's no winners and losers because we're all winners and there can only be. And it's so pathological, Megan, because first of all, competitive games are cooperative games. because everybody plays by the rules.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
So they're founded on cooperation, right? The rules of the game are the constitution of the playing field, and everyone accepts that. And then if you're a fair player, you abide by the rules in practice and spirit, and that's cooperation. And so what it actually is is civilized combat within a container of cooperation. So it's unbelievably sophisticated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And then the victory and the loss issue is, well, how about you learn to be a good winner? And how about you learn to have some resilience in the face of loss and take some responsibility for it? And all that does is strengthen you in every possible way. And our education systems, K through 12, are so pathological and so miseducated that they don't even understand those basics about games, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And games are the, they're a microcosm of society, and we get all that wrong. And so that ambitious striving forward towards victory, you might say that's the hallmark of stereotypical masculinity, has become demonized, even though it's a hallmark of the civilized conduct that's also protective and resilient.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
That's a good question, Megan. Like, well, you know, men... What's the old joke? You know what happened never? 20 women got together and built a boat and traveled to a distant land. Right? I mean, well, we don't actually... Right, right, right. Well, we don't actually know... I would say a tremendous amount about those closed sex dynamics.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
You know, men are pretty good at sorting themselves out on the basis of competence when they're thrown together in a group. And I think the reason for that, think about it this way, evolutionarily, you know, Well, why would you ally yourself with the best hunter? Because maybe the best hunter is the highest status guy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
It's like, well, you don't die, that's a start, and you get to eat and so does your family, and maybe proximity to the top dog confers status, not the highest status, but, you know, do you want to be the quarterback on the winning football team? Yes, but being even the water boy is better than not playing at all. And men are pretty good at that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
You know, if they're thrown together in a group and there's a task, they sort themselves out pretty quickly in relationship to competence at the task. Now, that can get perverted by power and tyranny and, you know, aggression. But all things considered, that's the way men conduct themselves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Well, it's also the case, Megan, that women on the birth control pill are less attracted to masculine men.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we have absolutely no idea whatsoever the political consequences of the birth control pill. We have no idea. It could be catastrophic for all we know because we don't know what it means that women find masculine men less attractive. on the pill then off. Like we don't know what the political ramifications of that are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
They don't have to be that great to be determining given the small margins of victory that constitute the typical political campaign. So these sorts of questions that you're raising, like they're open-ended, we don't know. And the same thing applies with regards to hormonal alteration in the environment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Yeah, well, I guess that's what we hope will transpire as a consequence of this tilt spearheaded by the U.S. towards productive conservatism. Hopefully, we'll see that spread. Well, not to Canada, by all appearances, but perhaps... Our evil top hat, as Michael Knowles calls it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, look, we should bring this to a close.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
I know that your time is constrained today. We're going to go over to the Daily Wire side. I think what we'll do there is I think we'll continue a discussion on motherhood per se, because I'm curious about how you managed that and also about the manner in which having children shifted the way you looked at the world and also in what...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
you would tell young women about that shift in perspective that's attendant on having your own child, which is a very different thing than looking at someone else's child. So I think we'll delve into that. Yeah, I did a lot of management consulting with women
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
as part of my clinical practice and watched a number of them have children at, you know, in their 30s and later and watched how that, what the transformation was like and also the pain that women had when that didn't work. That's not fun. That's not fun. So we'll delve into that on the Daily Wire side. Thank you very much for talking to me today. Much appreciated. Pleasure's mine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Yeah, well, it's not surprising, I suppose, that boys are turning in that direction. You know, I met a young man in a restaurant a while back. He wasn't looking too bad when he approached me. He was a waiter, and he said that he had started listening to first Ben Shapiro and then me six years ago, something like that, and that prior to that,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Appreciate your insights on this thorniest of all problems. And, you know, maybe we'll make some headway with it. You know, it's certainly the case that your work on TikTok is extremely useful because young women are dying for guidance in the same way that young men were 10 years ago.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
They need some women who aren't evil queens to guide them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
It was his proclivity and his friends to compete with one another with regard to their victim status, let's say, and to present themselves as radically feminized to the young women that, in principle, they were with. He said that was necessary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
with the girl he had dated at one point because she was very radically liberal and that was a job requirement, you might say, and he shook all that off and told me and my wife, who was sitting with me, that he was much happier for it. But it doesn't really surprise me, Megan, because Boys are not well served in the education system at all, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Their play preferences, I was just reviewing some stats on ADHD over medication among young boys with one of my producers and what, The original hypothesis, such as it was with regards to hypothetically hyperactive boys, was that stimulants, which is what Ritalin is, have a paradoxical effect on hyperactive young boys, calming them down.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And that's complete bloody biochemical nonsense, and it's a lie psychologically. What stimulants do is focus people intently on whatever they happen to be focused on. And they have exactly the same effect on ordinary boys as they do on hyperactive boys, not least because 90% or 95% of hyperactive boys are actually normal. Stimulants suppress play behavior in animals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
So he gives stimulants to young juvenile rats, for example, who are very playful. Then they stop playing. And that's exactly why they're administered to young boys in schools. And so their play proclivity is punished quite severely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Any attempt they make to be competitive in a world of cooperative games— and there's really no such thing as a cooperative game, although all games that are rule-governed are cooperative— Any sign of ambition they have is pilloried. They're associated constantly with the destructive patriarchy and presented to the world as enemies of the planet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And so it's not surprising that they tilt in a, let's say, feminized direction, especially to appease the angrier women. And there's a deeper problem here that I'd like your thoughts on, you know. The most woke disciplines in the universities, and that's really saying something, are the female-dominated. The more female-dominated they are, there's another contributing factor, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
So the less cognitive power the discipline requires, the more woke it tends to be. so physics is about the least woke discipline whereas social work well you know enough the less said about social work the better but so we have an issue here too because i have a suspicion you tell me what you think about this because i'm very curious that the default female ethos let's say is
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Nurture, this isn't really a radical idea, I don't think, is nurturer to infant. And in the absence of managerial training, let's say, or rigorous mentoring in the operation of large-scale organizations, every person, situation turns into an infantilized family. I mean, it's become absolutely preposterous in universities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
I mean, the faculty, to their own discredit, have been infantilized by the administrators. You know, we have never seen a large-scale incursion of women into large organizations prior to the last 40 years. That's never happened in human history. And we have no idea what the social psychopathology that would be associated with that, as well as the positive benefits.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
We have no idea what the social psychopathology might be, but the infantilization of everyone and everything might well be it. And so I'm curious about what you think about that. You know, there is data, for example, that women prefer male supervisors. So that's one, you know, it's not overwhelming. It's not overwhelming data, but it's suggestive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
And obviously that doesn't mean there are no good female managers. We're talking about broad trends here. But we do potentially have a major societal issue in that men have their pathologies that are expressed socially.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
aggression, antisocial behavior, drug and alcohol abuse, a tilt towards a kind of self-serving narcissism in some cases, but there's no reason to assume whatsoever that women wouldn't bring their own pathologies to the workplace. And it is the female-dominated institutions that seem to be the most woke. I mean, and that's how the 18 to 34-year-olds vote as well, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
They're radically out of phase with the entire rest of the culture. So, what do you think about that? How would you reflect on that, like, in your personal experience with the organizations that you've worked with and the managerial situations that you've been in?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
It's become mandatory in our culture to assume that the feminist movement has elevated women to the status that they now enjoy. I'm not so sure about that. I think that technological transformation and plumbing has had a lot more to do with that than ideological movement, let's say, especially one based on resentment. But in any case, it is the case that women occupy...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Well, you know, the question is, you know, did we tilt in that direction? There's certainly a strain of feminism that developed particularly in the 1960s, although it was there long before that, that really did in some ways aim at that kind of women. And let me ask you something as well that's deeper. You know, I've studied malevolence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
as deeply as I can for a very long time, and the philosophical representations of malevolence and the theological representations of malevolence. And the deepest representation is Luciferian,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And so one of the, because of the displays of meat and one of the things that I did was bring them to a store that was closer and closer to an actual butcher store and have them look, because that's what you do. You have people look at what it is that they're terrified of. And if they do that voluntarily, their anxiety levels decrease.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Actually, they become braver, but fundamentally, you could say as well that their anxiety levels decrease. And so... The revulsion that young people would feel for violent acts is, especially on the sexual side, is going to be reduced as a consequence of that kind of voluntary exposure. And God only knows what that does. I mean, I can't imagine... And it's an unbelievably powerful force, too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
You know, we're in a situation now where a 13-year-old boy, because it's going to be boys mostly, men using these sites because men are much more sensitive to visual stimuli. Women seem to prefer literary pornography.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Do you know what the proportion is by any chance?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Yeah, well, curiosity is going to drive that to some degree. There's a great book by the Google engineers called A Billion Wicked Thoughts. Do you know that book? No, I don't. And so, yeah, and so, you know, we're in a situation right now where the typical 13-year-old boy can see more beautiful nude woman than any man ever saw in history, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Incredibly powerful, possibly irresistible stimulus package. And we also don't know exactly what that's doing to the relationships between young men and young women. sexually and otherwise, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
There is increasing evidence, especially in countries like Japan and South Korea, although the curves, the transformation curves seem to be playing out the same way in the rest of the West, except delayed. There's a tremendously high rate of virginity now in Japan. I think it's something like 30% of Japanese young people, 30 and under, have never had any sexual encounter whatsoever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And that part of the conversation was also extremely interesting. She was tangled up and attracted by the Hollywood fame machine and came to understand its essential soul-devouring shallowness, that pursuit of narcissistic self-gratification. And we talked about how her personal experiences tied into her sociological and political pursuits.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
The relationship scene is fragmenting in those countries. The birth rate has absolutely plummeted. And we have no idea what the connection is between that and the very straightforward and simple sexual gratification that's available online. We also have no idea how it is that young people's sexual preferences are trained as a consequence of their exposure to online pornography.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And so is it cataclysmic? Probably, probably. It's an insanely powerful technology. And I've been thinking about this too, you know, is that we misapprehend what's happening because it's easy to think that the women on Pornhub, for example, who are participating, the men as well, are participating. just women, but they're not women in a way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
They're women machine hybrids because no woman can be in a million rooms at the same time. And you can think about that also with regard to sites like OnlyFans, is the women have been transformed into images that can be propagated everywhere. And that's an insane technological revolution. And it's also very possible for young women to monetize their beauty.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And tempting for them to do that because, well, a small proportion of them can make a very large amount of money and in a manner that appears easy and also that draws a lot of attention. And so if you have a narcissistic tilt or if you've been isolated and are lonely and need attention, then that's a hell of a way to get it. So it's really a bad scene.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Now, you said you think that these people can be held accountable. So why don't you tell me about that? Because I'm very curious to see if that's actually the case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
It was a very interesting live conversation up here in Fairview, Alberta, my hometown. So join us for a voyage to the heart of darkness. Laila, nice to meet you. I've been following your work online for quite a while. My wife has been following you as well, and I believe my daughter, and we understand what you're up to, at least to some degree.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Why do they need more content if there's 169 years? I mean, this is one of the things that I find mysterious about the porn business as a whole. I don't understand how it can be monetized because... the internet is absolutely flooded with porn and it's free. So like, where's, what's the business?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Machine-human hybrid. issue popping up because it's far more than- For victims.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
So I had the great privilege today of doing a live discussion with Lila Micklewaite, who is one of the most compelling and the bravest people I've ever met. And I don't say that lightly. Lila has been waging a one-woman war against
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
You've taken on the biggest porn network in the world, the so-called... Pornhub community, it's all sweetness and light on the Pornhub community. There's people sharing their hobbies and interests, I suppose. And so why don't you explain to everybody just exactly what you're doing, I guess how long you've been doing it, why you're doing it, and what exactly is transpiring?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Was that your doing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And how did you get the credit card companies on board?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
That seems unlikely, given that you've devoted your life to it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
So how are they being funded now?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Okay, so let's delve into what accountable means. So, so far you've made the case that the accountability, so far what you've described is something like financial accountability, right? Your organization, your work, and the work of others has accountability. radically decrease the number of files that they're able to utilize, you said about 90%.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And it's made it more difficult for them to monetize their content. And I know that there are states in the US that have instituted more rigorous age check rules, and Pornhub vociferously objected to that, but that wasn't helpful. And so, but I presume that the money is still pouring in like mad, although perhaps not as much.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
So how effective have you and your organization been at publicizing the identities of the people, the executives, for example, who are behind this? And to what degree can you do that? Like, can you name people today?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Anybody being criminally charged in the executive suite?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
I think maybe it's because people, you know, I'll tell you a little story. So I was ill for a long time. The first podcast I did when I sort of came back, I was still in pretty rough shape, was with Abigail Schreier, who wrote a book called Irreversible Damage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And Michael Schellenberger, who's a pretty good journalist in the U.S., and Schellenberger broke the files on X that exposed this group for what they were. And then I interviewed him, and he said something very interesting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
He said that he had been aware, for example, of the interview I did with Schreier, because that was one of the first interviews, along with her book, that really brought this to, say, public attention. And he said he just couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe this was happening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
If you look into the details of that kind of surgery, it's so absolutely barbaric and brutal that you can't imagine it. The only thing I can compare it to is the accounts that I've read of what happened in Unit 731 in...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
China, which I would not recommend investigating unless you want to be traumatized for the rest of your life, and the sorts of things that were going on in the death camps in Germany. It's brutal beyond comprehension. And Schellenberger basically said he simply couldn't believe it. And I think there are just places that people don't want to look.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And why would we look at our culture and understand that 40% of internet traffic is sadistic, criminal, hedonistic pornography? And what does that say about the culture at large? It's a massive problem. And so who the hell wants to poke their nose into that? And so... What do we do? We swallow a camel and strain it a gnat, right? To use the biblical illusion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And we won't look and see what's actually happening. We won't see what's happening to our kids. We won't see what's happening to the people who are victimized by this kind of pathology. It's too much. And so people turn a blind eye and focus on comparative trivialities. That's how it looks to me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And then, of course, people are morally complicit, too, because pornography use is extremely widespread. And so if you start to make an issue of it, then you have to examine your own behavior, let's say, in all of its aspects. And that's also the kind of dark thing that people are very inclined to avoid. And so... It's nod, nod, wink, wink. This is all cool and fun.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
That's why I think it has to come by force, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Well, we have another problem, too, is that it's really easy for people to be invisible and pathologically anonymous online. And so, it looks to me like this is actually, this technological revolution has an element to it that is likely Is it civilization destroying? It might be. Because there's always a percentage of people who fall into the psychopathic, sadistic, histrionic category.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
It's about 5% of people worldwide. You can think about it as an evolutionary niche. You know, if you're depressed and anxious and you just stay at home and you never do anything and you're completely useless, then... That's not a very effective reproductive strategy from a biological perspective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
But if you're an exploitative psychopath, you can actually find your victims and you can propagate yourself with some degree of effectiveness. And that seems to stabilize at about 5% of the population worldwide. And so these are people who are classically without conscience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And you could think about them as temperamentally aggressive people who haven't progressed beyond the moral standards of a two-year-old. And there's nothing wrong with two-year-olds. But when you're 50 and you're a two-year-old, there's something seriously wrong with you. And it's almost impossible to describe how dangerous these people are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And I'm afraid, and I think with good reason, that the anonymity of the net and its international nature makes it impossible to hold the psychopathic sadists who are completely 100%, not only self-interested, but delight in the unnecessary suffering of others. That's a good definition of sadism. We're not holding them to account. In fact, they're being monetized and promoted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit, because I've thought about that. So I've fulminated against... cowardly online anonymity for a long time, because I've read tens of thousands of comments online on X and on YouTube. And I'm very familiar with the machinations of the dark tetrad types, Machiavellian, psychopathic, narcissistic, and sadistic. We know what they're like.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And they're particularly active as anonymous trolls online. And people have taken me to task for threatening anonymity. Because while people point out, for example, well, how can you be an anonymous whistleblower if you have to verify your ID? That anonymity is necessary. My response to that is something like for every one person.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
whistle-blowing anonymous hero, there's 9,999 pathological, demented, sadistic trolls. And so that's a pretty bad ratio. But let's say that people have to verify their ID. Okay, so what do you mean verify exactly? Do you mean To take an image of your driver's license and upload that? Hang on, let me just finish this because there's an ugly element to this too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And so any kid with Photoshop can do that in 20 seconds. And so that's just not helpful. So let's say we have something like a reliable digital ID. Then we have digital ID. Yeah, and that hasn't worked out so well in China, right, at all, because they have a totalitarian state there because of digital ID that's so bloody all-seeing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
It's like the eye of Sauron, right, because that's actually a symbol of a totalitarian state, an all-seeing totalitarian state. And so... You know, I don't see in some way how this problem is tractable because the solution that you're proposing, and I can understand why, is to insist upon verification, but we actually don't know how to verify.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
How would you verify that would work?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
So is that for the people who upload and the people in the videos?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
So you think the technology and the legal solutions are already in place.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Well, they're also going to have to take a look at their own behavior.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
How come you're still alive? I'm serious, because you've taken on some pretty vicious people. So, like, what's that like for you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Okay, so tell me how you started getting involved in this. You said that 18 years ago, you started working on the problem specifically of child trafficking?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Okay, so tell us the story. Tell us the story. Sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Went off track in what way?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Why did that work out?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Yeah, what was that like for you, to be there?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Right, so you would think that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And so why did you stop thinking that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Sorry, but it's important because it's, I'm curious, it's necessary to know why you're doing this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Right. The shadow side of cool hedonism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
How old were you when this happened?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
What was the picture like?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Yeah, well, a flower is a symbol of the soul because it sort of expands. You've seen slow motion pictures of flowers blooming. That's like a lotus in the Buddhist tradition, right? Because the lotus comes up from the darkness and then it blooms and then the Buddha sits in the middle. And there are rose images, for example, in stained glass. And the rose is a symbol of the Holy Ghost.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And so flowers are a very common symbol of the unfolding of the soul, right? And you said that The flower you drew was in a pit. Well, that's a pit, a bottomless pit. That's hell, right? And then the water, that's the return. That's like Noah's flood. That's the return of pre-cosmogonic chaos in the history of religious ideas. And so, that's what happens when there's so much uncertainty around...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And what would you say, lack of any stability and hope, any upward orientation, that produces an unbearable state of chaos, which is partly anxiety and partly hopelessness. And that can be deadly. And so that image, you said it was a hole with a flower in it and water pouring down.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Right, right. Well, you see, in the story of Noah's flood, what happens, of course, is that It's the descendants of Cain who are the sinners who bring about the flood because of their terrible behavior. And that's profligate, hedonistic, self-centered, immature, exploitative, authoritarian, power-based behavior, right? Resentful, envious, vicious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And the consequence of that when it propagates is that chaos returns, right? And chaos is very frequently symbolized as water, right? Because water is a place of possibility, but also a place where you can drown. A little water is good, but too much is pretty hard on you. Okay, so you had that image come to mind. That's like a dream that intrudes in your life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Okay, yes, sorry, of course.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Why do you think you were inclined to open the... Bible at that point. Had you had anything to do with that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
You know, that happens in the story of Jonah, too. So Jonah runs away from his conscience, right? That's what happens to him, because he's told by God to preach the redeeming words to the city of his enemy. And he thinks, I'm not doing that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
There's one of me and 150,000 of them, and I hate them anyways, and there's no bloody way I'm going to the city of the toxic hedonists and saying what needs to be said. So he runs away. And then he ends up in a boat and the boat encounters a storm and that threatens the boat to founder. And so he convinces the sailors to throw him overboard because he's on the outs with God.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And then a terrible beast from the abyss swallows him up and brings him down into the darkness where he spends three days and repents. And then he's visited by the same thing that visited you and the fish or the whale spits him out and he goes to Nineveh and preaches the words that redeem. Right? A very old prophetic story. So you're a prophet. yeah, too bad for you. Maybe, maybe, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
I mean, it's probably better than being face down on a carpet. Yeah, right. Is it better? It is so much better.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
What did you understand?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
You can group words together to see if they're replaceable in their meaning, right? So anxious and fearful, for example, they're synonyms. They're quite similar. You could replace them. Miserable and self-consciousness. Miserable and self-conscious are replaceable. There's no difference statistically between thinking about yourself, being anxious and hopeless. Those are the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
They're so tight that you can't distinguish them. You can't distinguish them statistically or conceptually. And so if you focus on yourself, well, that's what very immature people do is they focus on themselves, right? That's what two-year-olds do. And as people mature, they're taught to, well, focus on their friends, to focus on their family.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
to focus on the broader community and to focus on the future, right? That's like the definition of maturity. And along with that goes a sense of higher purpose and an orientation that isn't chaotic and what would you say, intimidating to the point of drowning and that also produces hope. So you figured that out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
I would say, although she has plenty of allies now, against the Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic purveyors of online porn, particularly at the site known as the Pornhub community. I'm not a big fan of pornography in general, and certainly not a fan of Pornhub, and I've been sharing Lila's tweets in particular for years,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Yeah, well, that's the very antithesis of pornography, right? Disposable sexuality and immediate gratification. And, you know, there's some whim-based satisfaction in that, but there's not a lot of meaning. While all the meaning is nihilistic and pathological, as you discovered when you were very young. Why do you think you had enough sense to quit? You said it was your dad, eh?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
That's got to be a big part of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Yeah, there's a lot of fatherless girls out there, you know. They don't have that. Do you know that girls without a father hit puberty one year earlier?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
That's how profound the biological effect of not having a father is. Because that helps them attract men. And that's quite a high price to pay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Why do you think that caught your attention, that particular documentary and that particular type of crime? Why do you think that grabbed you? Because this is an important thing, because you're telling a story about how your conscience and your calling changed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
interacted to lift you out of a pit okay so you had a moment of conscience that you described when you were on the carpet for example and then you had a vision and investigated that but now you found something that really compelled you why do you think that crime in particular attracted your attention do you have any idea you know
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
kind of worst... Yeah, it's the heart of darkness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Of course, the worst thing is, this is the core of sadism, the worst possible thing is to sully the most innocent possible victim, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Well, there's a rule, eh? There's a rule that... This is an alchemical rule that underlies the, what would you say, it's emblematic of the process of psychological transformation. It's a Latin, insterquillinus inventur, what you most need will be found where you least want to look. Right, and that's the same as the dragon treasure myth, right, is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
The largest possible treasure is to be found where the worst possible serpent lurks, right? That's the whole story of mankind. And so you stumbled. That makes sense in terms of the progression of your vision. You stumbled across a crime that you couldn't conceive of a worse crime.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Right. So why in the world did you have enough? Usually it's rare for people to actually look once they've seen something. Right? And so, why do you think that you were willing and able? It must have something to do with your realization of the loss of your own innocence. That would be my guess. Right? The fact that you woke up and realized that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Why were you attracted by the Hollywood lifestyle, do you think? You know, you had your father's influence. In principle, you might have been more sensible than that. I mean, that's not a personal insult. Young people do all sorts of stupid things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Getting involved in that scene, that's kind of what happens. The circus is the fringe of the counterculture, right? That's why circuses are very often places of horror, right? Because people go to the amusement park to be casually amused, unaware of the dark forces that lurk behind the scenes, right? That's a Stephen King plot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
That's the plot of Pinocchio when he ends up on Pleasure Island and all the slavers are working in the back rooms as he pursues his juvenile delinquent pursuit of pleasure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
It's the highest quality possible circus.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
but all right so i'm going to switch gears a bit because we're tight for time and so i i want to ask you we're going to do another half an hour on the daily wire side for everybody watching and listening you guys all know that we'll delve deeper into the issues that we're discussing today and try to continue the discussion of the interpenetration of the personal and the social here um
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Let me, maybe we can wrap our discussion up, although prematurely, unfortunately. What do you think, I got two questions for you, I guess. The first is, do you believe that the laws governing what's definable as legal pornography need to be altered? And second, what can people do to facilitate your work?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
So at least to begin with, to begin with, we could enforce the laws that we already have.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Okay, and what can people do who are watching and listening to aid in this endeavor? Is there anything specifically?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Right. And tell us about the petition again.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
We'll put all those links in the description of the video, definitely. All right, everybody. So, for those of you who are watching and listening, we're going to continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side. And so, please do join us there. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Yeah, you're quite the creature, all right? That's for sure. So, congratulations on cluing in. Thank you. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Well, who can vet 169 years of content? Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Any idea how much... How much money is being generated by this site?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
ILO. And that's the rebrand?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Why do you think they're not more careful in drawing a line between what's legal and acceptable, at least legally, and what's illegal and sadistic and criminal? Is there something about... Okay, so here's part of the reason I'm asking this question. So I spent a lot of time studying the perceptions and actions of very, very pathological people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And one of the things that is interesting about serial sexual killers, for example, is that their behavior tends to accelerate across time. And there's a very specific reason for this. So... Sex has an intrinsically rewarding nature, but that the nature of anything that's rewarding can be heightened by novelty.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
So because novelty itself, if it's in the right dose, is also gives you a dopaminergic kick, sexual anticipation and sexual pleasure increases. produce a dopaminergic kick, but novelty heightens that. Okay, so what that tends to mean, especially if you're overdoing it, let's say, is that you want to stay on the novelty edge, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
for about as long as she's been making them, I believe, about four years. Anyways, she's mounted a very effective campaign. And so we took a little voyage to the heart of darkness today, partly sociologically, and technologically investigating the rampant spread of the pornography that's perhaps destroying our culture. That might be the case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
So what you see with serial killers, for example, who have a sexually sadistic twist is that the sadistic element in their crime accelerates across time as they search for that edge to stay where things are maximally gratifying. And so
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
There's reasonable evidence that the same thing applies to pornography use online, is that maybe it starts out with relatively vanilla displays, but then it progresses to more and more graphic displays, and then past graphic, there's kinky and past kinky. There's violent and past violent. There's violent and kinky, and that's not as far as it goes. And so you can also see this culturally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
You know, Theodore Dalrymple, who's a very interesting British essayist, made a lot of this when he was talking about how porn invaded our culture, that the borders were, what would you say, moved bit by bit, really starting in the 1920s. He identified a famous case. who was the novelist, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was banned as a pornographic novel in Great Britain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And it was quite sexually graphic, especially for the time. And that ban was overthrown. And he thought of that as a, although Dale Rimple is a free speech advocate, he thought of that, the victory of, I can't remember who the author was, actually quite a renowned author, the victory of, for his novel as the entry point of the pornographication of the culture, okay, but
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Over the course of my life, I've seen in our culture the same thing that happens to people who become increasingly sexually perverse as they chase the novelty edge. Because when I was very young, very young, let's say, the most, it was Playboy that broke the barrier fundamentally, right? That was Hugh Hefner. And Playboy was a relatively sophisticated magazine for a porn magazine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Most of the images of women were nudes, but not sexually explicit nudes, merely nudes. And there was a lot of journalism in Playboy and some very good writing. And Hefner kind of marketed that as, Bohemian 1950s, freedom and equality between men and women, the cool single person who was willing to explore their sexuality in a creative manner. And that was Playboy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
And of course, that empire lasted for quite a long time. But then after Playboy came Penthouse, and Penthouse was much more sexually graphic. a lot more explicit and after penthouse came hustler and hustler started to move into the well you might call it into the domain of severely bad taste and that was certainly the case and then well by the time
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Then Hustler metamorphosed into dozens and dozens of magazines that concentrated on every fetish you could possibly imagine. And then the Internet came along, and it was the case that the Internet, expansion of the Internet, was actually facilitated in a major way by the desire of... isolated, and socially incompetent men to share sexually graphic images. I mean, the whole internet was driven.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
We know what, a third to 40% of the traffic on the internet is pornographic still. And so it was an incredible... The sexual element was an incredible motivating factor for the development of the worldwide net, and there's a lot of criminal activity on the net, maybe 50% of it, right? And it's very hard to hold people accountable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
So what we're seeing is our whole culture chasing that novelty edge, and that's all driven by in the worst cases, narcissistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian, sadistic criminals, and we can't hold them accountable. It's really bad. It's really bad.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Certainly the facilitation of the behavior of the psychopathic criminals who generate and distribute that content is a civilization-threatening phenomenon. occurrence and enterprise. We also talked a lot personally because I was very curious about why Lila became interested in this and why she decided to devote herself to it so effectively.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
Well, exposure also desensitizes people. Right. So if you're a therapist and you want to reduce the anxiety that someone feels, well, I can give you an example. I had a client one time who was a vegetarian, but this person was a vegetarian because they were vegetarian. really terrified of life and of death and couldn't go into a grocery store.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
It's very distressing to see people whose families are fragmented because it just curdles your soul. How far should I go for someone who I care about but who refuses to get professional help?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Find your purpose, sharpen your wit, and bring to bear on your own life the knowledge being offered to you by the best in the world. Go to petersonacademy.com for the details. Enroll and change your life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Well, the first thing I would say that might be useful for everybody listening is that you deviate from the norm
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
much less the ideal, at your extreme peril. You know, when people came to see me who were unhappy and unfulfilled and often didn't know what to do with their lives, one of the guidelines that I used to help me and them navigate was, you should do what everyone else does unless you have a really good reason not to. Now, polyamory. Well, first of all, what the hell is that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Just because some dim-witted leftist hedonists came up with a new word doesn't mean that anything like that exists. It's already very, very difficult to negotiate a relationship over the long run. Let's call it a marriage. If you stay... religiously within the normative parameters. Now you want to Extend that, beyond that. That's your theory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
You think you're going to be sophisticated enough to negotiate the jealousies, the split of time, the perilous risks of intimacy with more than one person. And you think you're going to do that well, and that everyone else around you is going to know how to deal with that. Well, every single bit of that's delusional. Monogamy is a universal norm and ideal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Not because people don't have proclivities in other directions, but because the human race hasn't found a solution that's stable, all things considered, balancing the needs of children, men and women and society, there's no solution to that problem other than monogamy. And I would also say, you're doing something that's bad by entering into a polyamorous relationship.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
You're destabilizing the social norm. And for what? For your own benefit? For your own hypothetical benefit? First of all, that's a little on the selfish side, I might say. The guardrails are there for a reason. And you hope that your parents can somehow adapt to that. And that what? They're supposed to just say it's all right? That's what they're going to do if they love you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
They're not going to raise any objections to your strange experiment, right? And it's not like they knew the rules. Like, what are the rules? Oh, my son has two wives. Well, no one knows what to do with that. And so what that generally means, if you're exceptional, is that people aren't going to have much to do with you because you're too damn much trouble.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Well, I think I would have fought with you until I knew what the hell was going on. That's my general proclivity. The woman who asked this question, there's not a lot of detail in the question, so I don't know exactly why they're alienated. And it's a terrible thing to be alienated from your children.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Well, you see, Michaela, my suspicions are, look, if you stay within the boundaries of the norm, everybody knows what to do. There's a script. You know how to have Thanksgiving dinner together. You know how to have Christmas together. You know how to treat your son's wife's children. Everyone knows that. All right, now, if you throw a left curve into that, well, what are the rules exactly?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And the answer to that is you have to negotiate them from scratch for everything. Well, people are terrible at negotiating. And so the probability that they're going to come up with a solution for that inside a family is extremely low. You're basically negotiating a whole new social contract. And so... Part of the advantage to marriage is like a serious reduction in complexity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
You know, you have someone that you can rely on for the long run, you can make practical and contractual relationships with them, you can chart your course, you don't have to manage the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
cascading consequences of multiple relationships and what all of a sudden people are they're not going to have sexual jealousy that's just going to disappear somehow and everyone's going to love each other equally that's going to happen that never happens that's never happened anywhere ever even once to anyone it's it's preposterous now what would i do if that situation arose with my own kids
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
First of all, that's generally a situation with a younger woman and an older man. I'm not going to comment on the reverse situation because it's very rare.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
I don't know if I'd be the one in our family that would put down the boundary. That might be your mom, you know, because she's probably more capable than me of saying, I'm not going to stand by you while you walk off the edge of a cliff. Now, I would like to think that I would fight it out because I don't want to have anything between us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And if you were doing something seriously ill-advised, I'd like to hope that the warning signs of that would have been there early and that we would have worked on it before it became an unmanageable mess. I think for the woman who asked this question, I think probably the problem is that the... Issue is too vague.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
You see, now these people in this situation, they have to think through everything. Okay, how many times a year are we going to meet? Once, twice, three times, four times, five times? How long are we going to meet? Who's going to come? What are the rules for engagement? How should we treat everyone?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Like I'd probably counsel them to try one dinner together and have a pretty decent discussion about one dinner, Beforehand. Who's coming? How long is it going to last? How are we going to treat each other? What would I recommend? Let's be polite like we would be to strangers that we were trying not to offend. Right? Because nobody knows what the hell's going on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Everything at the table is anomalous and strange. And so maybe you meet at a restaurant because that's kind of neutral territory. And maybe you meet for an hour or maybe half an hour or 45 minutes, something like that. And you hope that it doesn't go horribly. And then if that worked, well, if that didn't work, then scale down.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
If it did work, well, then maybe you could try something a little bit more Personal. You know, the problem is, is that something terribly anomalous has occurred and no one knows what to do about it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
It violates the social norm again. Like women cross-culturally prefer men who are about four years older. And there's a variety of reasons for that. The major reason is that a wise woman isn't looking for another child. She's looking for someone who she can rely on to be productive, generous, loving when she's incapacitated or more incapacitated in pregnancy and with young children.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Okay, I have one more thing to say about this. People like false adventures. Yeah. And false adventures are excitement without responsibility. And what you want to do within the confines of your marriage is find adventure in the marriage responsibly. I mean, there isn't anything better than a sexual relationship with someone you actually love. There's nothing better than that, period, the end.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And so if you're not getting that excitement and adventure within your relationship, that's what you should be working on. And that's going to be hard. Like, in order for that to happen, there has to be nothing between you. You won't trust each other. You won't let each other go. You won't let yourself go if there's anything between you and your wife, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And you're going to reduplicate every single bloody problem that you had with your wife, with this new person, in all likelihood. People are indefinitely complex. And if you have put your wife in a pumpkin shell and she's not very exciting, then... So you have to find someone new. Maybe you could try being a little more sophisticated and using a bit more encouragement.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
A little more daring, a little more dreaming. Some lingerie. You know, clue in. Seriously. All this nonsense. The New Yorker does this all the time. The magazine. Polyamory is the new in thing. It's like... There's no punishment severe enough for people that stupid except the consequences of their own idiocy. And this is what these parents are afraid of.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
They're afraid of it and their children involved. This is not going to work out well. It's never worked out well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Rules consistently applied with minimal force and plenty of patience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
There are all sorts of markers that you can use to determine whether you're on a productive path. And one is that the goals that you have envisioned for yourself are sufficiently motivating so that you're inclined to work voluntarily or even enthusiastic about it, that would be best. And so that the direction that those goals provide protects you from undue directionless anxiety.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And so you have to negotiate with yourself to see if what you're aiming at satisfies you and fills you with hope. But then you don't have to do this alone. You know, corporations have boards so that people can discuss vision and strategy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And so I would say that it sounds to me like part of what you need is some people around you to bounce your ideas of the future and your strategies against so that you can stress test them and address your doubts. Number one, negotiate with yourself to see if you believe that your plan gives you direction and hope and constrains direction sufficiently so you're not too stressed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Well, what are you doing when you're talking to someone? You're thinking. Why would you think? To specify a problem and to solve it. You know, it sounds to me like you're setting yourself up as someone who could be maybe an excellent husband and father.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And test that against the world. And against the judgments of other people. Understanding as well that even if you have a good plan, there's going to be some variability that's temperamentally determined in whether you're still anxious. You know, if you're higher in trait neuroticism, you're going to be more variable in your response to your goals and more prone to doubt.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And so women, even the scorecard by looking for men who are mature and no wonder. And young men have to understand that. A 17-year-old male is not a very marketable creature. Now, there are exceptions to that. You know, spectacularly attractive people who are outstanding in some manner can leapfrog the game. But basically, men gain advantage as they age. There are women who I've met who
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
That's also partly why you bring other people on board to further your investigation. I would also say you could give some thought to doing the future authoring program at selfauthoring.com.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Yeah, and just why were you going to say that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Right, right. Okay. So, you know, is where you're going good? Yeah. Is it leading away from somewhere bad? Those are two initial questions. And that's how the future authoring is structured. But then this is a way of assessing your aim. Well, what should your aim encompass? Well, we tried to break this down in the future authoring program. You want a meaningful life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Well, let's differentiate that. Well, do you have a plan for marriage? Do you have a plan for children? Do you have a plan to educate yourself? Do you have some sense of how you would or could take care of yourself mentally and physically? How you could be of service to your community?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
That could be volunteering or it could be political at all the different levels of political involvement that exist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Then good. Two birds, one stone. It's just another place... where meaning can be derived, right? And mentoring people is good for that, for example. It's extremely fulfilling for people. How are you going to protect yourself against temptation, drug and alcohol abuse, and sexual misbehavior? Like, the advantage to the future authoring program is that it... provides a differentiated vision.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And so this is what I would recommend to the gentleman who asked the question. It's like, go do that and do a bad job. Just sketch it out. Do a good first draft. Because you're not going to get it perfect and you're going to learn along the way. You can substitute a better plan if you come up with one. Now, I wouldn't do that every week.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And that's the danger of someone who might be emotionally unstable, high in neuroticism, or really high in openness, or worse, both. But make the best plan you can. discuss it with other people, implement it. Then you'll learn.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Then you can take what you learn and, you know, maybe every four months, every six months, every year, you can return to your plan and see if it needs some tweaking or some foundation work. It's a very good idea to move forward with a bad plan. It's a very good idea to do that compared to not moving forward and waiting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
The problem with waiting is you get disenchanted and discouraged and you don't learn anything. If you implement a plan that isn't perfect, you'll learn exactly why it isn't perfect as you implement it and then you'll be able to make a better plan. And that is how...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
cybernetic self-correction works that's how complex systems that rely on feedback true their aim across time they start out with a fuzzy goal this is even how large language models are trained the aim is fuzzy to begin with and then it tightens as it iterates that that's how that's the definition of learning and so
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
with regard to the plan you have now, if you're not fully confident in it, well, flesh it out more, as I said, talk to other people about it, but then also understand that That's your plan, unless you have a better one. And so stick to it, right? And if you stick to it and you learn as a consequence of your persistence, you will gather the information that will enable you to make a better plan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
For sure. New opportunities will come your way. And sometimes that'll mean a radical shift when it's time. And that's fine. But you're not going to do that without... a bad plan even. And so if you don't think your plan is perfect, well, that doesn't mean that you're making a mistake.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And then if you're really fortunate and you watch, and this is sort of how you cooperate with your plan and with the divine, so to speak, without becoming hidebound and insistent that your way is the right way, is you have a plan and then you search to see if there's open doors on the way to the goal, right? And if it's a good plan, people will spontaneously line up to cooperate with you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
That's exactly right. That's exactly what manifesting is. And you got that right. There's two parts to it. There's the scam part and the other part, which is doors. You know, it's like you're standing somewhere and there's 30 hallways in front of you. And down each of those hallways, there are sets of doors. And so... You choose a hallway and then you test the doors.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And if you stay at the beginning of that, if you stay on the landing, you go nowhere and no doors open. If you pick a pathway, you forego the other ones, at least temporarily, but then you start to see the doors. And then you can push and see, are they opening? And I would also say, generally with the plan, generally...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
are looking for someone who's quite substantially more mature. And there are advantages to that, I think, for a woman. Because as men establish themselves, they know more, they have broader social connections, they're more competent, and they have more resources. And the other thing, you know, is by the time you're 25... You're about as old as everyone else until they're like 70.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
The amount of your plan you're going to change should be proportionate to the magnitude of the opportunity, which means you can make a radical shift in your life now and then if the benefits are clear and overwhelming, right? Or the risk is worth taking in this adventurous way. But other than that, you should tilt towards conservatism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Don't change anything in your plan that you don't have to change, right? It's a tight balance to manage because you need to be able to pivot when circumstances have genuinely changed. But you don't want to upset yourself too badly by... Becoming a new person every 15 minutes, which is the curse of someone who's very high in openness. And not very high in conscientiousness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Well, that's... Yes, right, right, right. Yep.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
You look at where you're headed. I mean, this is literally how perception works. You look at where you're headed, okay? You need to be headed somewhere. That also works in abstraction, okay? Now that you're headed somewhere, the world divides itself into pathways forward, right? Things that help you along your way, things that get in your way, and irrelevant things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Most things are irrelevant once you've specified a pathway. That also controls anxiety, right? There's lots of things you don't have to look at when you're going that way. Definitely. Things that help you, things that get in your way. That works socially, right? Friends and foes. So pathways, tools, obstacles, friends, foes, and then agents of magical transformation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And agents of magical transformation change your aim. Right, and that's the role they play in fiction. For example, wizards and magical beings change the game. And that's the world. Really, that's how you see the world. That's how your vision works. That's how you hear things. That's how the world presents itself to you. So no goal, no doorways. No goal, no pathway, right? Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
It's very hard to deal with a partner that lies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Yeah, yeah. That's... Now, if they're lying and that's improving... I don't know. Well, look, people don't start out 100% trustworthy, you know. The more lies there are, the harder it is by a lot. But you can see a trajectory of improvement. That's really important. Can the person negotiate? Do they negotiate in good faith? And do they implement the consequences of the negotiation?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
You can take a relationship that's got quite a number of kinks in it and straighten it out across time if people will commit to the process and tell you the truth. If it's a downhill slope continually, no improvement whatsoever, then... then you're playing a game that you probably can't win.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
You know, you hit that period of maturity where roughly people are the same age. And so if you're attracted and you're both willing, then I don't see that as a problem that's any more insurmountable than personality differences or the other things. idiosyncrasies that couples have to contend with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
It also makes you question your own sanity. That's, yes. You know, if you're with someone who... insists that the way you see things when you're trying to see them as accurately as you can is a delusion or faulty. It's insanity making.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
A lot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Well, I don't really think there is any difference between personality psychopathology in its most disruptive guise and the proclivity lie. You know, all of the psychotherapeutic schools are predicated on the assumption that truth is The collaborative empiricism I was talking about before, it's like, put it to the test, watch what happens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
That assumes truth in relationship to the analysis of the outcome and iterate. Psychoanalytic free association, that's just truth. Say whatever comes to your mind. Well, that's what you do when you're telling the truth. You just say, you can become a master at that. Like, I try. Am I a master at that? I'm not perfect. But I do say what comes to mind. That's the manner in which I direct my words.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
I'm not trying to... Well, I have an aim. Hopefully the aim is to make things better. No, it's more differentiated than that, but that's the overall aim. Do I want to make things worse? No. I'd rather make them better. For how many people? Well, for the people that I'm primarily responsible for, first and foremost, but then everyone else that can be managed, and then...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
I try to say what aids that. I'm not manipulating towards some determined end.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
We have this understand myself personality questionnaire. Yeah. Right. And it has a couples component.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
All of the traits I would say is the wider you are apart on a given trait, the harder it is to bridge the gap. Now, there can be some advantages. Like if your grandmother, your mom's mom, was pretty introverted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And your grandfather was really extroverted. Yeah. And she valued that in him. And it helped her a lot because it opened up the social space. So... That's on the extroverted side. Conscientiousness, that's a rough one. If there's a huge split in conscientiousness, I suppose it's all to the advantage of the unconscientious person.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Yeah. Yeah. Openness is another tough one.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
You know, if one of you is very, very open, interested in ideas, interested in aesthetic experience, and the other is very low in openness, it's like you're speaking different languages.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Yeah, well, I was fortunate with your mother, too, because she's a lot like me, but not quite so much so. You know, your mom would be in the upper echelons of extroversion among 100 people, right? She'd be more extroverted than, say, 75 of those people or 80 even. But I'm like more extroverted than 10,000 people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
So I've always been that way, right? I talk ever since I could talk. I never stopped. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Got any concluding thoughts? I don't know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
That was fun. We started by talking about conservatism in this non-political sense. If your life is a mess, you should think hard about doing what other people have always done. And What does that mean? Well, we kind of outlined that with the Future Authoring Program. You know, get married. Have some friends that you value. And think about what that means. Sort your family out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Get your career together. Educate yourself. Figure out how to resist temptation. Serve your community. Do all those things. See what your life's like. If it's not still what you want, well, maybe you're some open lunatic and you have to do something really different. But even then, binding that within the confines of all those other things, that's a good idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Take a small step in the direction that you want things to go and build from that. And that's always a good exploratory technique. Something minimal in the right direction, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Well, thank you for setting it up and for agreeing to do it and for finding the questions and for paying attention.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Yeah, yeah, and I definitely enjoy this sort of thing, which is why I'm a psychologist, not a politician. Seriously. It's the right level of analysis for me, and it's a more fundamental level anyways, because the fundamental way people put the world together is by putting themselves together and working to fortify and improve the relationships they have at hand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
I don't know if there are experiments of this sort, but they'd be easy enough to run. If you're after a one-night stand, then why not have a 22-year-old? No, that totally understands. Well, no, but that's it. That's the whole story. But if it's a relationship... for anyone who has any sense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
You know, you've evaluated your life and you've come to some new conclusions and you've developed some new daring and you're becoming more educated. It's like, share that with someone. Do you like my Jordan Peterson bust? Ha ha ha. I really don't know what to think of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Highly likely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Yeah, well, the predatory tilt. Look, Mick, we know The personality characteristics of men who tilt towards one-night stands, that's already been delineated. They tilt in the dark tetrad direction. And so, the 35-year-old men who won't date anyone who's over 23, they're not dating. They're looking for sex with no strings attached.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And, you know, if there was such a thing as sex with no strings attached, then, hey, have at her. But the problem is that that never happens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well... There is a relationship between youth and casual sexual attractiveness the same way there is between maybe overuse of makeup and casual sexual attractiveness. Like, if you're shallow, I'm not exactly saying that attraction to youth and beauty is shallow, but... You know, there are 15, 16-year-old models. They're not uncommon at all. They're usually quite made up.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And that makeup gives them a sexual patina. And it's very easy if you're male to be attracted sexually by surface. It's a sign of lack of maturity and wisdom. And I'm not trying to make a case against beauty, but... There are plenty of beautiful women who are 30. There are plenty of beautiful women who are 50. It gets harder as you get older to maintain that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
I think it's weird also that you own it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Your mother has done that extraordinarily well. They're not seeing the whole person.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And that's convenient if what you want to do is have responsibility-free sex, but there's no such thing as responsibility-free sex. That's a complete lie. And so then it's immature. And so those men are immature. It's as simple as that. They're immature. And they're not having a relationship. They're not tying themselves together with someone for the long run.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And that makes that cripples them because life is very hard. It's not something you should undertake alone. You will become, you can't be sane alone. I think with regards to the age difference, maybe the one thing you want to ask if you're a young woman with an older man is, you know, are there, are you looking for a father?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
But then, if you didn't have a father and you're a very young woman, maybe you need that more mature guidance. Maybe that's valuable to you. Why wouldn't it be?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
That's a perfectly reasonable summation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Your story implies that you made less of yourself for some substantial amount of time because of doubt. And that you've shed that and that that's improved your life substantially. Enough so that you expressed gratitude for that. My first pass take on what you said is that the same problem is plaguing you in relationship to children.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
It's always, there isn't a more uncertain thing you can do than to have children. And so it's always been the case throughout human history that you were bringing children into an uncertain world. you're coping with the uncertainty in life by picking a challenging and responsibility-laden pathway forward in your private life. Don't stop. I would say the same with regards to marriage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Find someone and take the risk. And then the same with children. And Figure it out as you move forward. I think that there's a diverse enough range of opportunity and risk in the future so that a generic notion like things are too unstable is not the right level of resolution to address the issue. The question is,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
would you take on the responsibility and the adventure of producing a microenvironment within your own family that enables you to marry and to have children and to produce something for the future in a way that best enables your children to move forward with security and daring into the future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And you already know you can do this in principle because you've already taken radical steps in the last few years to put your life on a new course. Because you could say the same thing about the judiciary becoming corrupt and law schools becoming woke and everything shaking to its foundations. And you could use that as a justification for your refusal to move forward in faith and with courage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
But you're not. And you said yourself that things are way better because of your new attitude. Well, so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
continue with the risk you know it sounds to me like you're setting yourself up as someone who could be maybe an excellent husband and father and you know you've evaluated your life and you've come to some new conclusions and you've developed some new daring and you're becoming more educated it's like share that with someone and pass on the benefits to your children who will love you which is a there's no better deal than that by the way too you know
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
There's no better deal than a family and people who love you. And that's worth the risk, and it's worth the risk for them. There's no better pathway forward than to maintain your faith in yourself and in the spirit of life itself. And if you lose that, or let it waver, then it makes even catastrophe worse. So... Consider it a moral obligation to have faith in be fruitful and multiply.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
It's a pro-existence stance. And if you're opposed to your own existence, then who can save you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And find opportunity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
Yeah. Yeah, well, and there's not that much difference between between a problem and an opportunity. Like a world full of problems is, well, you could solve those problems. And if there's a problem and you solve it, then you have an opportunity. And so a world where everything was taken care of would actually be a world without opportunity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
That would be she's my daughter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
So don't underestimate the utility of your children's competence and your role in encouraging that development. I like that. And good luck. And congratulations also. Seriously. I want to tell you all why my team and I founded Peterson Academy. First, it's because the technology is there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
And a perfectly fine person in her own right as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
It's now possible to identify and gather the greatest lecturers and thinkers alive today and to put them in a position where they can offer their best to all who are interested. Second, advanced education is far more expensive than necessary. Students who complete a four-year degree risk crippling themselves with debt just when they're starting their lives and their careers. Third reason,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
548. Jordan Peterson Takes Your Call: Advice, Mental Health, Family Dynamics | Mikhaila Fuller
because of ideological and institutional corruption. I watched that process painfully unfold for 40 years at McGill, at Harvard, at the University of Toronto. What's the alternative at Peterson Academy? Well, we have 40 stellar professors on board. We have 34 eight-hour courses taught at the highest level of quality with maximum efficiency. And there's much more to come.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Hello, everybody.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And it culminates, of course, with the potential sacrifice of Isaac. And so this is the pattern. And I think it's the patriarchal pattern. So as the biblical stories progress, The prophets that are after Abraham describe God, the Father, as the God of Abraham and Isaac. So we know that we're talking about the same spirit. And it seems to me that it is the spirit of the encouraging Father.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And that can be made manifest in any particular Father, but it's that spirit as such. And it... beckons forward, calls out of security, establishes the social contract, establishes the pattern of psychological transformation, and indicates that there are sacrifices at each, what would you say, point of crisis that have to be rectified for the personality transformation to occur. Yes?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
That seems reasonable to you? Well, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
meaning of the story of Abraham, which is a archetypal story of individual development and the emergence of the spirit of the benevolent father in that story and the parallels between that and his own life and his own quest and his own ministry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And then we talked about the broader significance of the longing for a grounding meaning that characterized the 1970s and that also characterizes young people, especially young men, but not only young men now. And so we weaved that all together quite successfully. And that's what you're in store for if you participate in this podcast. So I think, Mr. Lurie, I think we'll talk today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
How old are you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
52, right. So you were 18 in 1970.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Right, okay, okay. I'm just trying to place you with regard to the hippie movement. So you were 16 and 16. 17 in 1970.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So let me tangle some of the things we talked about together then, and correct me if I'm wrong. Okay, so we started out talking about why there might be a movement more towards traditional faith among young men, right? And then I told the story of Abraham, and then you started to talk about your childhood.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So I want to elaborate on that a little bit because there's a theme emerging here that's particularly relevant. And you compared her to Marilyn Monroe. Now, Marilyn Monroe, of course, died an unpleasant death and in many ways had an unpleasant life. But she was definitely an archetypal figure. And so I want to delve into that a little bit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Now, if your mother was comparable to Marilyn Monroe, then she had a tremendous sensual cachet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Right? And that is an immense power. And Marilyn Monroe could wield that better than anyone else. in the last century, let's say, that we know of. She said she could turn that on and off. I heard an interview with her and she said she could walk down the street as, was Norma Rae, was that her?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Norma Jean. And no one would pay any attention to her. She could walk down the street as Marilyn Monroe and then she was just magnetic. And so she had learned how to turn that on and off. So there's a tremendous sexual power there. Yeah. But Marilyn Monroe and your mother both got caught up in the shadow side of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Yes, call me Greg, it's good. Greg is good. I think we'll start today with this description, a discussion of a recent New York Times article. And you know something's going on in the religious side of the world if the New York Times deigns to report on it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And I think the shadow side of that is the fact that sexuality, like any primordial motivational state, is very short term and hedonistic in its orientation. And that means that if it's the ruler, then things are going to devolve very badly. It doesn't have a long term vision. And so it's pursuing its short term ends.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
anything that only pursues short-term ends isn't going to survive in the medium to the long run. It has to be integrated in something that's broader. Now, you as a child, again, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm going on very slim evidence here, you as a child saw the power of that and also the dark side of it. So the power of it was the fact that your mother was capable of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
attracting men and pursuing sequential relationships. She had that ability, but the downside was, well, the alcoholism and drug use that's often associated with hedonism and the fact that she was abandoned and alone. So those are terrible dark sides. Now, you could imagine that in you, Because this has to happen. There's going to be the emergence of a deep longing for the corrective to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So then you might ask, well, what's the corrective to hedonistic sensuality? And it is something like ordered patriarchy. So let me give you an example of that, a reverse example. So I wrote this paper with Jonathan Pajot. on the imagery of the scarlet beast and the Babylon. So the scarlet beast is a multi-headed monster that's blood-colored, and it represents the degenerate patriarchal state.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So when God dies, so to speak, and that unity disappears, the state turns into a multiplicity, and the heads war with one another, and that's like bloodshed. And so there's the scarlet beast, the degenerate masculinity. Okay, on the back of that is degenerate femininity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And the message seems to be that when the masculine state deteriorates, the feminine state deteriorates, which is exactly what you'd expect, unless you propose that one sex could go astray without the other going astray. That's not going to happen. Yeah. When the state degenerates, feminine sexuality commoditizes. That's a good way of thinking about it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And then you get the tension between the two. And in that story, the Scarlet Beast ends up killing the whore. So the degenerate state will offer hedonistic gratification as an attractant, but in the final analysis will demolish all of that. which is, you know, married religious couples have the most sex, which is like one of the funniest statistics ever as far as I'm concerned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
It's like unbridled hedonism destroys sex itself. That's another way of thinking about it. Right, so that's... Okay, so in you, obviously, and to some degree you were a child of your times, in you is going to emerge a longing for whatever would rectify whatever you saw your mother go through, right? Now, so you could imagine that that would...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
They're reporting something that I've been tracking for a couple of years, which is the return of young men to churches, particularly more traditional, not only, but particularly more traditional churches. But I'm wondering, well, first of all, I guess I'm wondering what you think about that. Is this something that you've seen, again, accelerating more recently?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
manifest itself as a desire for the presence of something paternal, but also But underneath that, there would be a religious longing as well, which would be something like a longing for the spirit of the benevolent patriarchal. Okay, so now you're watching these kids, the Jesus freaks, and you're having ambivalence about that. Okay, what's the basis of the ambivalence?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
What is it about what they're doing? Because this kind of strikes to the heart of the atheistic conundrum too. You know, I mean, there can be something... The enemies of Christ in the gospels, the primary enemies are the Pharisees, right? They're religious pretenders. Right, so that's a very interesting thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So you're watching the Jesus freaks, and you said that that wasn't a laudatory term, and you're wrestling with their attractiveness, you know, on the one hand. You think there's something to it. On the other hand, you find, what is it that you weren't happy about that you were seeing? Do you think? What was it that was pushing you away?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Okay, so things would have been a little more fragmented there than in many places, but most people at that time would have come from intact families. Did you have any male figures in your life? that helped you orient yourself along that axis?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
taste of that. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And what you think might be accounting for it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Yes, yes, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Yeah, well, there's a longing. There's an innate longing for the realization of certain patterns. The longing is vague. It's deeply instantiated. The longing is vague and there's various ways that it could be catalyzed. But my sense as a developmental psychologist is that a neurologically intact child needs one good example. Zero is too few. That's fatal, so to speak.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
But if you're neurologically intact, one example will do the trick. And so you had the gentleman that you described. It's also for people who are more aesthetically oriented or intellectually oriented, they can often derive some of that from books and from abstracted representations. You can pull it in that way too, but you definitely need it. So now these Jesus freaks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So when I was a kid, you see, I was struck by a moral conundrum. And I think it has something to do with religious pretension. And so I'd be interested in your opinion on this, is that the more religious people that I grew up with, So I grew up in what was essentially a frontier town. Fairview had only been settled about 50 years before, scraped out of the prairie 50 years before.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
We were in the northernmost reaches of the North American prairie. And it was a relatively rough working class town. And most of my friends were relatively rough working class kids. And I hung around with, I wouldn't exactly call them delinquents because there were some seriously bad kids. And my friends weren't in that group, but they were,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Most of them dropped out of high school, you know, in grade 10 or so, worked on the rigs. They were tough kids. And there was the odd evangelical. They weren't exactly Jesus freaks because we weren't a hippie community, really. But I was leery of them because I, and I think there was a Nietzschean reason for that, is that, you know, Nietzsche said that most morality is cowardice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Now, he didn't mean that morality was cowardice because he wasn't a simple-minded character, but what he meant often was that people who were afraid justified their fear by giving it a facade of the moral. And what I noticed about the moral Christian perspective teenagers that I knew is that they were timid and afraid and obedient, and they justified that by reference to their religious morality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And I didn't like that. I liked the more, I liked one of my best friends, for example, he got kicked out of school when he was in grade 10 for picking a fight with the, with the phys ed instructor. And you think, well, that's pretty bad. It's like, well, he was only 15 and this phys ed instructor could do an iron cross. He was tough, muscular, tough guy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And the fact that my friend picked a fight with him, you know, I'm not trying to whitewash that, but it was also extremely brave. He was not a coward. It was a foolish thing to do because he hadn't progressed to any great distance. He would have been pounded flat. But he was a tough kid. And I admired that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And when I watched the more religious types, so to speak, they were too afraid to engage in life. And then I learned later, you know, as a psychologist, there's a literature on misbehavior in adolescence. Okay, so you imagine a normal distribution of misbehavior. Over here are the kids who, like, they steal and they drink and they take too many drugs and they engage in early sexual promiscuity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And they don't do well. That's like pathway to life course criminality. Then there's the kids over here who never break any rules. They don't do well either. They end up dependent and depressed and anxious. Then there's the kids in the middle who... break enough rules when they're teenagers to explore, but basically take a straight path, they're the ones that do well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And so I saw the religious type, so to speak, fall into that timid camp that was dependent. that turned me away from that. So I don't know if that experience rings any bells for you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
What do you think that was?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
How old were you when you met her?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Okay, now you said, okay, so two things I want to delve into. So I was curious, you were watching the Jesus Freaks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
you're helping well it's very interesting to see how themes develop and to see what they imply right and it is I mean you also revealed something that's quite remarkable just in the last thing that you said because you know You came from a broken home, but you had a marriage that lasted 50 years, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So, you know, one of the things that foolishly psychological people, psychologically minded people assume is that the past determines the future. And the thing is, is that like many people who don't drink had alcoholic fathers. Now, many people who drink also had alcoholic fathers, but the reality of the matter is that there's a variety of lessons that you can learn from any teaching trial.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And if you're bullied, you can learn to bully, but you can also learn to never bully. And one of the things that you apparently learned, both to desire and to enact, from the example of your mother was a counterexample, because you've had a 50-year relationship, was also something that you wanted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And so there was part of you that was searching for stability and purpose, and part of you that actually believed that that was possible as well, which is also interesting, because it begs the question why you would even think that was possible. Okay, so now back to the Jesus freaks. Now you were watching them as a relatively young teenager, and you thought there was maybe something there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And so you got curious about that, but you were also skeptical, and you said something about praying, and that that was something that changed your life. So can you relate that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So that's a sacrificial gesture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So your thoughts do make themselves manifest to you in keeping with the spirit of your aim. So you can think about this. So there's a long history since the early 1960s of study into a phenomenon known as the orienting response. And the orienting response is a collection of psychophysiological responses that orient you towards a goal. Well, so imagine that when you envision a goal,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
you see a landscape appear in front of you in relationship to that goal. And it's quite straightforward to understand. I mean, if I want to walk across the room through an open door, the first thing I do is look at the door, right? So now I've oriented my aim towards the door. Now I can see a pathway to the door and I can see obstacles and pathways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
I can see things that'll move me forward and things that'll get in my way. And that is the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
landscape of perception there's an aim and a pathway yeah and there's obstacles and facilitators that and you're always in that yeah okay your thoughts work that way too so once you orient yourself towards an aim the thoughts that come to you will be will have the voice of the spirit of that aim like this is technically how thought works so if i'm angry with you
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
and I want to have a fight, the thoughts that will come to me will be in keeping with that motivation and the perceptions as well. Like I'm going to transform your face even into a target, right? I'm going to allow the voice of anger to make itself manifest within me. So now imagine that I reconfigure my aim
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
so that I'm aiming, however imperfectly, for the highest thing I can conceive of, however imperfectly. Well, that's the voice that's going to respond to the inquiries. Like, that's technically true. Now, I'm not sure exactly what that means metaphysically, but it does imply that this is a terrifying thing to realize, is that every aim is a prayer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And every spirit that responds to your aim responds in the voice of the spirit of that aim. And this is a terrible thing because it means, for example, if you're possessed by resentment, it's the eternal spirit of vengefulness that will make itself manifest in your heart. That's exactly what happens. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Well, there's no reason to assume at all that that wouldn't have happened on the positive side. Okay, so now you made a gesture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
You know, you had decided somehow that the hedonistic pathway that you were pursuing, even if there was some search for enlightenment in it, say with the... Yeah. You weren't going to go down that route. And you can imagine that, you know, you'd learned your lesson to some degree by watching your mother and her... Yes. And her boyfriends, that there was some real danger in that. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
The Timothy Leary danger, right? Yeah. enlightenment without wisdom, let's say. So you made a gesture, you cast that aside, and then you opened yourself up, and the opening would be, well, I'm operating under the presumption that something better could appear, whatever that might be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Okay, so now you said the first time you did that in the schoolyard, there was no real response, but you believe in retrospect that something nonetheless changed, and then the next part of the story was this. Yeah. So you're out with your friends, and you decide to do something different. Okay, so now that's a prayer. That's a humble prayer. You're on your knees saying there's got to be more.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Okay, so then what happens?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Did you have friends outside that circle?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
where I came to know about him. And so I reached out to Mr. Lorry to find out more about the underlying story. So he started a ministry as a reluctant convert, let's say in the hangover decade of the 1970s, ministering to disaffected young people and himself in a manner that had quite a revolutionary impact.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So I look back in retrospect and I think... So you transferred to this new school so that you could get away from the preppy image and hang around with the more drug-oriented? And that isn't what happened. You ended up in the clutches of the Christians instead.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
I don't know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Right, the scales change. Yes. Well, so let's walk through that story, and maybe you can tie it in for people who are listening to the movie, The Jesus Revolution. Okay, so this church that you attended and this pastor, flesh that out a bit, if you would.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
I don't know when you were a kid, but all the stoners when I was a kid, they all played Frisbee. Frisbee. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Right. I think that was one of those games that you could still understand when you were stoned. Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
There was a— Oh, you know, a lot of these—a lot of the claim that's popped up among young women and young men— I think I'll concentrate on young women for a moment, is that the patriarchy is nothing but authoritarian power. That is what you think if you've never had a good relationship with anybody in a position of authority.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
A lot of young women who are trapped in progressive hell are trapped there, not least because they've never had a good relationship with anyone male. Not a brother, not a father, not a friend. Yeah, so all they see is, and then it's a worse conundrum too because imagine that you regard the opposite sex as a power-mad enemy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Well, then the ones that are better at that are going to be more frightening. So what you want is, if someone's your enemy, you want them to be weak.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Right, okay. So now, so these young women who are confused like this are in a terrible conundrum because if they ever meet a competent man, But their history, you know, tilts them towards interpreting any manifestation of competence as power. They're going to be anti-competence because they're going to assume that that's nothing but a manifestation of power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So then they're in an absolutely brutal position because nobody who's competent, they're going to be maximally distrustful of anyone who's competent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Okay, so you were kind of in the same situation because all the people of authority, so to speak, in your life had, well, you just saw the hedonistic and exploitative side of that. Right. Right. Well, you could also imagine that even your misbehavior, such as it was, would be, that's a limit-testing approach because what you're kind of hoping for is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
You know, you'll push and you'll hit a wall that actually is there. Right. And not one that's arbitrary, not one that's just based on power, but one that comes along and says, you know, no, that's actually enough. Enough of that. Not least because it's not good for you. Right. And the way people search for that isn't merely by asking. They search for that by misbehaving and watching what happens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
That's limit testing. It has to happen that way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Well, the thing, you know, the more disagreeable a child is, you know, and that would be associated with that tendency limit test, the higher the walls have to be to hem them in. You know, and there's advantages and disadvantages to that. I mean, the disadvantage is if you're a disagreeable kid and you're let run... while you're kind of like an attack dog that isn't trained.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And that's just not good. But an attack dog that is trained, that's a really useful dog. Right. But it takes some, you know, some real work to socialize. The more aggressive a child is, the harder it is to socialize them. But if you can socialize them, they're hyper-useful. Right, right. So it's a high-risk, high-return strategy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Okay, so you went to this church, and you were first attracted, and the other kids around you, by Frisbee, who was kind of charismatic and young. And there was an older gentleman. This is also all laid out in the movie, right? It is, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So. Searching for a cause. I don't think there's any difference between searching for a cause, let's say, and searching for an identity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Wow, that's a terrible conundrum to be in too because you'd be longing for that and also the distrust would build in proportion to the longing. You know, you see people who are really hurt sometimes. It's a terrible thing to watch because what they'll do when they meet someone, they're hoping they can trust them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
They're so afraid of opening themselves up to betrayal one more time that they'll ramp up the misbehavior. And some of them, these are the borderline types, some of them will ramp up the misbehavior past the point where anyone can tolerate it. And then they get rejected. And then they think, oh, well, that's what I expected.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
But they get in this terrible loop so that they misbehave so badly that it's beyond the ken of anyone human to tolerate it. Yeah, then they're in a permanent betrayal trap. It's really bad. But you still had enough residual trust, apparently, so that you could... allow this connection to occur. You had that guy that was your father.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
I'm remembering pieces of the movie now as you tell the story. Right, right. So you established your own. How old were you when that happened? I was 21. Right, so, well, young by today's standards. Yeah. There were battle commanders who were 21 not so long ago. That's true. Okay, so you established your own church, and what sort of people came to begin with?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And of course, you see a lot of clamor in the modern world about identity, a tremendous amount of misconception about what constitutes identity, a tremendous insistence that identity is to be defined only subjectively, which is really, I think, technically equivalent to the claim of a spoiled two-year-old who wants exactly what he or she wants right now regardless of the consequences.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And I really do mean that technically because as you mature, the focus of your attention moves beyond your immediate self-gratification. And it doesn't only do that because you're more controlled then in a sort of patriarchal manner. It does that because as you become more sophisticated, you can play larger and larger scale games that last longer and longer with more and more people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
That's a nice completion for that story. Yeah, it was.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Because he was a maker, and he was a builder of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Like the gentleman who started the church. Yes. You said when he was— On break, he'd just like to build things. And so that kind of takes up the Christ as carpenter motif.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And so Geppetto is a craftsman. Yes. But he's also a craftsman who serves the adventurous spirit in children because he makes children's toys. Right. And he makes this boy as well as he can. Right. And the next thing to do, that sacrifices him to the world. Never thought of it that way. It's exactly it. And, you know, we can return to that. Now I understand. Well, the thing is, is that,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
God is the voice that calls Abraham to sacrifice himself to the world. He says, leave your comfort and have the terrible adventure of your life, right? But then that's echoed with the son. And you might say, well, why would God call upon you to do that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And it's really amplified in the Abrahamic story because Isaac is not only Abraham's son, but in a sense, his only son and his only unlikely son, right? Promised after decades. So not only son, but like special son. But If you're a good father, you do sacrifice your child to the highest possible goal. And in doing that, you get him back, right? That's the moral of the story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And of course, it's the case because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
if you're a father and you encourage your son to go out in the world, to leave you, let's say, to go out into the world, even the prodigal, to go out in the world and to suffer the consequences, which is also what a mother has to do when she encourages her child, then the child will be grateful for the support and the faith and maintain a real relationship, say, between adults in adulthood.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And that's a form of maturation. It's completely appropriate anthropologically and psychologically for young people to be searching for a cause or for identity because, well, neurologically what happens, for example, there are two periods of mass neuronal die-off that characterize human development. So when you're first born, you have more neural connections than at any point in your life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And so I really figured this out by, by concentrating on Michelangelo's Pieta, you know, which is also in St. Peter's. And I've always thought about it as the female equivalent of the crucifix because it's a portrayal of Mary and she's holding the broken body of her son, right? And she's offered him to the world, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Which is what a mother has to do if she's actually performing the role of being a mother. She can't protect, you know? And women have to struggle with this. This is part of the reason that we're having an antenatal crisis. Women think, well, could I bring a child into a world such as this?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And the question is, could I bring a child into the world given all the pain and suffering that that child will have to undergo? And it's the mark of the faith of Mary the archetypal faith of Mary, because she's rewarded, so to speak, with the knowledge of her son's destiny and says yes to God. Anyways, that is the spirit of the courageous mother. And that's a sacrificial spirit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And you think, well, why would God call upon a mother to make that kind of sacrifice or a father or yourself for that matter? And the answer is, well, you have to, Christ says this, you have to deliver everything up to God, family, friends, Community, wealth, everything has to be subordinate to the highest unity. And that's a sacrifice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
It's like, well, of course that's the case because the lesser has to serve the greater or the lesser becomes greater. Well, a satanic usurper, essentially, something like that. And so, well, in the Pinocchio story, of course, Pinocchio disappears and is lost. But then Geppetto's lost because he no longer has his son. And so Geppetto goes on a search to reestablish a relationship with his son.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And in doing that, plumbs the depths, that's down into the abyss. and reestablishes the relationship with his son, and then they're both united with the absolute in consequence of that. That's exactly what happens in your story. It's so interesting because he tried to get custody of you and that failed, and you went and had your catastrophic adventure in the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And then a lot of what happens is early infancy is that many of those neural connections die the ones that aren't performing a Rewarded and socialized function all disappear that pruning takes place again in late adolescence and so there's a call for the catalyzation of identity in late adolescence is probably something like the the transformation from that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
But I do know— I think it's partly because we're made in the image of God. Yes. So—and we have a— Adam is... granted the right and the responsibility to subdue and to name and to put everything in its proper place, right? And Eve to bring to Adam's attention the things that remain outside his purview. And those are real things. So human beings have something real to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And so then you might say, real and important. And you might say, well, what makes something real? Now, this is a hard question. You know, and the materialist answer is, well, let's say, sensory evidence. But I don't think that's right. I think what makes things real is death and limitation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Like if you're playing a game, if you're playing a video game, a first person shooter game, it's a game because when you get killed, you're not dead.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
It's not a game when death is in the offings. And what we're doing as human beings is real. And the price we pay for reality, it looks to me like the price we pay for reality is death. And it's real. And so that's going to have these consequences. And I think you highlighted the most, at least arguably, the most painful of those consequences. People think there's nothing worse than death.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
I think, well... You have a limited imagination, first of all, because there are many things worse than death. And one of the things that might well be worse than death is the death of a child. I think it's a very rare parent who wouldn't happily substitute themselves in a contest of death with their child. you know, in a heartbeat even. And so now why does God demand that price of reality?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
I think it has something to do with the fact that we do actually have something important to do. You know, we're supposed to be establishing the kingdom of heaven of God on earth. And that's hard, like actually hard. And the eternal enemies of that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
are sin and death and those are real and fighting them is real and when you're in a real battle there's real death and there's real evil and that's brutal but that's the price of reality now then the question is well under what conditions is that price worth paying and i think that's what the biblical stories actually attempt to explicate you know the offering to abraham It isn't a life of ease.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
It's not a life of comfort. And it's not a life of hedonistic gratification. It's something like a life of adventure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And I would also say there's probably no adventure without death.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
You know, if you think about the movies that people watch, people will go watch super ages, secret agent movies and superhero movies. The secret agent movies in some ways work better because the person is mortal and they the depth of their commitment is measured by their willingness to put their life on the line.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So I don't know, it looks to me like without, this is a very weird thing, but it looks to me like without death, there's no reality. And then you might say, well, that's a price not worth paying. That's an understandable argument, especially that's the sort of thing you ask yourself when a child dies. But then you think you said something also that bears on that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Well, you said the depth of your grief is proportionate to the magnitude of your love. And so you might say, well, how could God constitute a world made such that a child could die? And then you think, well, if you have a child and the child dies and you grieve, the grief is an indication of the magnitude of the loss.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
group-centered identity of early adolescence that substitutes for the parent is probably something like the transformation of that into independent adulthood. And so, of course, young people are going to be searching for an identity because that's exactly what they should be doing at that time. The question is, you know, what should the identity be?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And so the fact that you grieve, that's a testament to the value of the life, even though it was truncated. So your grief is the proof of the value of the life. And so what that means, as far as I can tell, is that grief itself is the justification of life in the face of death.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
What do you think that means? So let's delve into that. That's such a hard question. topic. Let's delve into that a little bit. So Christ tells his followers to be perfect like His Father in heaven is perfect. And there's continuous injunctions in the Gospels to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth. That's central to the Lord's Prayer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And the idea, there's an idea that lurks in the opening chapters of Genesis about the reestablishment of the eternal Eden. And so it looks like, to me, it looks like there's an insistence that the goal of the true religious striver is to establish paradise on earth, something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And I mean, that can take some vicious utopian spins that are very counterproductive, but that's the underlying idea. Now, I don't know how to reconcile that with the idea of, so that's heaven. That's the heaven that people are striving to bring about when they aim upward properly and walk up Jacob's Ladder. And I don't know how to reconcile that with notions of the afterlife with regard to death.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
We have the strange insistence on the part of Christianity too that Christ defeated death and evil. Yeah. in spite of the evidence that death and evil continue in this world unabated. And so there's a paradox there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Like, how do you reconcile in your own mind the insistence that part of the Christian moral pattern is to perfect the world and to raise the material up to the heavenly with the notion of the... the afterlife and immortality? I know that's a terrible question, but I'd like to know your thoughts on it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So let's talk about some of the markers of success. Money, fame, power. Fame in and of itself is not a bad marker for success. Not everyone who's famous is useful and not everyone who isn't famous is useless. Why is there a small percentage of hyper successful men who are willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of that success?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Well, it's clear that when you have those great experiences that they're, first of all, the fact that we can have a category that's Great experiences indicates that there's some commonality between those experiences, right? The peak moments of your life when you're at the apex, right? It's all the same symbolic language.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And that obviously is emblematic of something that unites all of those episodes, right? And you could call that heavenly and you could think about it as an echo of a place. I mean, I still don't understand the relationship between that. And I think that's all true, by the way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And I mean, I've seen, too, that Jacob's Ladder, God is the ineffable pinnacle of this endless upward spiral that's Jacob's Ladder. And he's ineffable in part because maybe you have an ideal and you take 10 steps toward it and now you're
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
near it but then you see that the true ideal is yet farther than that and so you reconstruct your vision of the ideal and you progress towards that and then when you get there you see that that's only a shadow of the true ideal i don't think like i don't think there's any bottom to the abyss so to speak on the malevolent side i don't think there's any pinnacle to upward and there is a vision of heaven in that but i still i still struggle to understand the relationship between that and the the moral requirement of people to aim towards
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
You know, one of the things my wife and I have been practicing, we got much better at this. She just about died three years ago and so did I. And like close enough so that as far as we were both concerned, we were either dead or wanted to be. Like it was... and for a very long time. And anyways, that didn't happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And so we were pretty happy about the fact that each other were around before that, but much happier afterwards. And that's, we've really never forgotten that, even moment to moment. And one of the things that we've decided to practice is to notice when we're interacting with one another in a manner that's optimal. And it's interesting because it's also, I've known her since she was eight.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So we were childhood friends and we were good friends. And I can remember what she was like when she was a little kid and she was an excellent little kid and she was very popular and very much fun to be around. And I can see in her that spirit coming back to life, like very frequently. And so one of the things we've learned to do is to notice when that's happening, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And first of all, to notice, second, to appreciate it, but then to see if we could practice extending the amount of time that we're in that state. And you can get much better at that if you practice, just like you get better at everything that you practice. And that is something like I used to counsel my clients as well to do this is if they were depressed is, you know, to monitor their mood.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And then to see times when they were less depressed, because even someone who's even quite depressed still varies. So you say, well, sometimes you're going to be like on the brink of suicide, but other times you're going to forget that you're depressed. You got to see what you're doing when things are better. And then you have to start doing those things more, right? So you can practice that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And so you can take these little visions of paradise that you get in life and you can expand them with practice. And then I think as you do that, inside that window, then another window opens up, or another door, that's the door you knock on, right? Another door opens, and then you can expand that. And I don't think that is a paradisal vision. I don't think there is any end to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
It's like if you intervene at the right time, you don't need to use power. Success is not a place you get to and stay. It also integrates the idea of the journey and the idea of the destination. And so there now you have a definition of success. Here's a thought. Tell me what you think about this. So I have this new book coming out called We Who Wrestle With God.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
But I still don't understand the relationship between that, even theologically, and the idea of life after death. I can see... that it means life eternal. Because what happens in those moments of transcendence is that you do get a sense of the value of life that's eternal, right? So you're living in eternity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
But as I said, I still don't understand the relationship between that and post-death existence. And I haven't found anything biblically that's helped me Help me clarify that. It's still a mystery to me. It has something to do with heaven descending and the material world ascending and some vision of the ultimate unity of those things, but I can't make any more heads or tails of it than that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
How did that become clearer to you, say, in the aftermath of your son's death?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
I've been doing that with my mother because she died in May and my father like two weeks ago. Wow, I'm sorry. So I can still phone home and have her voice. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And I will- Why do you believe that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Yep. I was thinking of Job when you said that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And one of the stories that I deal with in that book is the story of Abraham. So I want to just delve into that a bit in relationship to identity. And I want you to tell me what you think about this. Okay. So what happens in the Old Testament and the New, this book concentrates mostly on the Old Testament, is that you see dramatic characterizations of God.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
That's a good place to stop. I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side, as all of you watching, many of you watching and listening know, I follow up these conversations with an additional half an hour for Daily Wire subscribers. I think what we'll do is I'd like to walk through the growth of your movement. Okay. I'm interested in it. Maybe we can draw us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So one of the things I've written about in this new book is is that Abraham is the archetypal individual. And so the Abrahamic pattern is the pattern of the adventure of the individual. Moses is the pattern of the leader. Abraham is the individual. And it's an expansive pattern of adventure, right? That really never ends. Well, it ends with death in Abraham's case. But, you know, your life,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
expanded as you followed the golden thread. And I'd like to lay out some of the practicalities of that. So I think that's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side. And so join us there. And to the film crew here in Nashville, thank you guys all for helping us out with this. It's much appreciated. Great, very much. Thank you very much for coming. And it's so nice to be able to do this in person.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Great to be with you. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for asking me. You bet. Yeah, my pleasure, my pleasure. And to everybody watching.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That bears endless explanation. I write about why he's in a whale, too, in We Who Wrestle With God. Well, because that's a mystery, right? It's like the movie's going on and all of a sudden Geppetto is in a whale and everybody goes, well, that's no problem. It makes perfect sense. It makes no sense, right? He's looking for a puppet and he ends up in a whale, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And the characterizations are, there's a multiplicity of characterizations, and each of them highlight a different aspect or trait. There's an underlying presumption that all of these this multiplicity of characterization has a fundamental unity. So it's all the same thing, but you're seeing it from different angles. So whatever the ultimate is, is very complex.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
He started with a very small church of about 30 people and grew that into a massive organization in a short time, which meant that he hit the target squarely in some relatively mysterious manner. And so I wanted to find out how he did that. I wanted to hear the background story. And so we talked about the development of his interest in
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
It can't be reduced to a simple unidimensional characterization. So you have to see pictures of it, dramatic pictures. So in Abraham, there's a very specific kind of picture. So first of all, these are all definitions of the highest, let's say. So God comes to Abraham in the guise of the spirit of adventure. Okay, now there's something paternal about that, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
You could think about the role of a father in a family as if the role of a mother is totalizing acceptance, the role of a father is something like discriminating encouragement. And one encloses and the other thrusts out into the world. Now, both parents can play that role, but one is more typically masculine and one is more typically feminine. So God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And he says to Abraham, you have to leave your comfort. Now, Abraham is wealthy. He has wealthy parents. And so all of his needs are already met insofar as needs can be met materially, Abraham's got that covered. It's a very interesting starting place because it implies that whatever the highest has in mind for human beings, it transcends mere satiation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
You could also think of that as a maternal role to satiate, to take care of needs. But Abraham, he's got all that covered. But God shows up nonetheless, and he says, you have to take yourself out of your zone of comfort, and you have to leave everything you love, and you have to go into the terrible world. And then he makes him a deal, and this is the covenant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And this is very interesting, because the relationship with God is portrayed, particularly in this story, as a contractual arrangement with something like the spirit of the potential future. So God says, if you hearken to the voice of adventure, you'll become a blessing to yourself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So that's a good deal because people often aren't blessings to themselves. They have miserable, self-conscious, neurotic, painful lives. So God says, this is the way out of that. Take the path of adventure. If you do that, your name will become known among the people, among your people, and it will be, and your reputation will be valid. So that's a good deal because people want to be...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
They want to, that's what the search for fame is. It can corrupt into just the search for fame, but it can be genuinely predicated on the desire to do something that's worthy of recognition. Okay, so that's deal number two. Deal number three is you'll simultaneously establish something of permanent value. So that's the dynasty of Abraham. He'll be the father of nations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Now he's the spirit of the father as well, right? He's the veritable spirit of the father. And then the final deal is, You'll do that in a way that will be beneficial to everyone. So that's a pretty good deal. And so you think about what that story is doing. It's remarkable. It's remarkably sophisticated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
the religious which had made itself manifest in a variety of ways including some experimentation with hallucinogens. We talked about his fragmented family background that probably partly gave him the craving for something authoritative and genuine. We talked about the the state of the world of youth in the 1970s after the hedonistic utopianism of the 1960s had collapsed. We talked about the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
It says that the same impetus or spirit that thrusts you out beyond your zone of comfort is the call to a pattern of behavior that would make you a blessing to yourself, capable of establishing something permanent, capable of generating a name for yourself, and capable of doing all that in a way that's maximally beneficial for the community. Okay, so that's a good deal. That's the covenant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
Now, I've been thinking about this biologically. So you imagine that psychologists have been wrestling with this idea for quite a while that there's a... very sophisticated motivational system that's operating in human beings that's something like a unifying force. So it's not sex, and it's not thirst, and it's not hunger, and it's not power. It's none of these particular drives, you might say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
It's a force that integrates all of them and integrates that integration with social integration. And it's an instinct as well. It's the instinct to develop. Now that's what seems to be highlighted in the Abrahamic story, is to follow that. And so the biblical insistence is that the call of the spirit of adventure, which is a divinely unifying voice,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
is aligned with the pattern of being that would make you a blessing to yourself, good for everyone else, establish something. But it makes sense to me because the alternative hypothesis is that the voice that calls you forward would be antithetical to developing relationships or antithetical to developing anything permanent or to living in a manner that would be a benefit to you and others.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
And that would mean that our deepest instinct to develop would be set at odds with the sociological surround. And that doesn't make any sense at all, right? They have to be integrated. Okay, so one more thing. And we're talking about why this might be particularly attractive to young men at the moment. So one more thing, which is that the ascent of Abraham, once he starts this adventure,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
So he decides he's going to go along with this. He's going to throw himself into it wholeheartedly and pursue it wherever he goes. So that's his adventure. And then what happens is that he undergoes a series of transformations that are upward. And with each transformation, there's a sacrifice. That's the rekindling of the covenant. So he has to remember what he's up to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
But the sacrifice seems to me to be something like the necessity of Of Abraham abandoning everything that's no longer appropriate as he climbs up Jacob's ladder, right? And he does that so thoroughly and in such a devoted manner that the adventures expand as he moves and become greater and the... demand for sacrifice also becomes greater, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
President Trump has proclaimed that my country should become the 51st state.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right. So the revolution occurred, but it didn't have any follow-up consequences for the reconceptualization of Canada's economy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
So let's delve into that a little bit because it's so important and it's been difficult for me to understand this. So I'm sure it's difficult for our political leaders and for Canadians as a whole. So why were these new arrangements radical? So that first, but equally importantly, or more importantly, why did they not... work to Canada's advantage? Like, what did we do wrong? What are they?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
What did we misunderstand? And what did we fail to apply moving forward?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
What did we do wrong? What did we misunderstand? And what did we fail to apply moving forward?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
I'm speaking with Jim Balsley, and Jim was co-CEO of Research in Motion, the inventors of the BlackBerry. And so Jim is responsible, for better or worse, for... transitioning that terrible word, the entire world into the smartphone age. And he was spectacularly successful as a businessman and an innovator and a Canadian businessman and innovator.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, so in the 1990s, and I think this should be clear to everybody, it's pretty obvious in retrospect that the world virtualized in the 1990s when the net burst onto the scene. I guess one of the early things that happened there, and this is kind of relevant to this, was... what was the early music underground sharing?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Napster, that's right. Because all of a sudden, music became virtualized. And then it was everywhere. And the people who owned the physical artifacts, like records, for example, Well, records ceased to exist. The physical artifacts no longer signified ownership of the information. And so, well, Napster obviously eventually morphed into Spotify, but that completely transformed that industry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
So the essential issue here is that in the 1990s and since then, the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
goods themselves virtualized and Canada signed agreements pertaining to that but for some reason this is also what I'd like to understand for some reason we didn't really understand what had changed or what we'd signed so so how deep is this problem what have been the consequences and why the hell didn't we play the game well other countries did so let's delve into that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
We see the same thing happening right now with the AI companies fighting over the right to scrape data, for example, and derive the patterns that are underneath.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, so that's a very crucial point as far as I'm concerned, because one of the things that you and I have discussed constantly and that I'm still trying to wrap my mind around is the... interplay between the social contract that you just described, which is the legal framework that guarantees and governs ownership, and the operation of the free market economy. And we'll return to this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
One of the things that you've pointed out to me, and I think maybe I've even learned, is that the libertarian types who insist that if we pull the regulatory framework back and just let the free market operate, that riches will emerge automatically, that presupposition is
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
not as valid as we might hope in an information age because there's a contract underneath defining what constitutes ownership that has to be worked out before the free market can even operate. And that's, from what I've understood from you in our discussions, that's exactly where Canada went wrong. We signed these agreements. Okay, now, so was there something...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
What did we miss with the agreements? Well, what did the agreements specify and why did we not notice what we were doing and what did we miss?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, and he's a favorite of the libertarian free market type.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
But I've known Jim for 15 years and he resigned from BlackBerry a good while ago and he's been equally successful as an entrepreneur and innovator since then, so it wasn't a one-shot wonder, large as that wonder was. Jim is one of the most reliable and good-natured and yet incisive and critically-minded thinkers that I've met, very well-connected, very competent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, which we didn't understand and didn't do well at, and still are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Yeah, okay, well, let's delve into that. Was there something, did we miss the boat with regards to the agreements as such? Like, were we out-negotiated?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, so is that a failure... with regard to our political leadership? Is it a failure with our business leaders? Is it a failure in the education system? You pointed out to me, let me list off some countries. So the United States did this well. China did this well. Switzerland did this well. The Nordic states did this well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
The countries that are thriving around the world, the developed countries that are thriving around the world, seem to understand this and move forward. And what's Canada's comparative situation over the last 30 years?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Is that in GDP increase?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Of the 50 developed countries.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, so I want to take that apart because I want everybody who's listening to understand. So let's start with GDP per capita. Okay, so GDP, gross domestic product, is an index, and make sure I get the words right here, is an index of overall economic productivity for the country as a whole. And then you can divide that by the number of people and calculate how much each person is producing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And then you can compare countries by that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, right. It's the quality of your paycheck.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, so actually an index of your productivity and your wealth and an index of what you have in your pocket. Right. Okay, so... 10 years, 15 years ago, Canada was at parity, equal with the US or even slightly ahead. And now we're- The divergence is- 60 cents to the American dollar.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, and the direction is downward. So the Americans are going to get richer and the Canadians are going to get poorer. And we could be in a situation in five years where we're what? We're half as wealthy as the Americans. We're already 60% as wealthy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
It could happen this year. Okay, so what do you think, if we don't wake up and we look out 10 years, what's the difference between Canada and the U.S. economically?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, okay, so our housing is prohibitively expensive, not only in absolute sense, but also in comparison to the Americans. Our healthcare system is under terrible stress. The same can be said for the education system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
A very good man, all things considered. And I'm not saying that lightly, given the importance of this discussion. I wanted to find someone I could bring to Canadians to discuss the perilous situation that we find ourselves in. And so we started the conversation really with an analysis of Canada's economic performance, which, to put it mildly, over the last 30 years, has not been good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Where else do you see, well, even Ontario now, which was Canada's richest province, is poorer in terms of per capita GDP than Mississippi, which is the American's most poverty-stricken state. And we're on a downhill trend.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, now, so what did Canada do wrong in the aftermath of these agreements that other countries did right? You related an anecdote to me earlier this week. Some gentleman you were talking to talked about his international experience with committees dealing with IP ownership.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, so that's dealing with ownership of intellectual property.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right. So the Americans have a council of businessmen and intellectual property specialists. I presume that's tech people and lawyers who do nothing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right. And all they do is concentrate on analyzing the ownership structure of abstracted property.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, informing the government and legislating and negotiating so that that works in the favor of the U.S.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, and that's trumpeted often as, so to speak, as a free trade agreement. But you say in a million words, there's no reference to free trade. And what you're pointing out is that it's not a free trade agreement as conceptualized by people who are thinking about a resource-based economy. It's a protracted argument about who owns what virtual property to whose advantage.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And we're losing that now. We don't even know the battle exists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Tell me what that means, regulatory remote control.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
So it's a form of legislative control over the entire Canadian economy?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
What do you mean you were trying to explain that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
We rank at the bottom of the pack with regards to the developed nations, and we're now making 60 cents for every dollar that the Americans make in terms of our production. That's not good, and the trend is downhill. And the prognosis by financial analysts is that we'll continue that downhill trend for the next 40 years. So that's not good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Tell me, yeah, well, that's why I'm talking to you. Because we can benefit from the fact that you do that. So I'm going to take a concrete example because I think those are helpful for explaining. I know that you tell me if this is a relevant one. And if it isn't, we'll bring up one that's relevant. I want you to explain to people exactly
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
using an example in a given corporate domain of how the American advantage in control of such things has worked Canada's detriment. Now, one of the battles you fought, I know, was with the smart city folks. Is that a good example of... Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right. And that was trumpeted as a triumph of negotiation for Canada and an immense economic opportunity. By the prime minister's office, yeah. Right. You weren't happy with that, and it didn't happen. And so it's not obvious why you weren't happy with that. I mean, because it came packaged in a pretty nice shiny box, right? We'll have smart cities. We'll have much more effective information flow.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
We're leaping into the 21st century. Canada will be at the forefront of this. Your objection, as I understood it, was, yeah, but Google will own all the data pertaining to all the behavior of everyone who lives in a city like that. And that there's immense economic value in that, but also the danger of a kind of totalizing legislative and monitoring control.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right. And so that's, you could think about that as the... libertarian dream, but also the libertarian abdication of responsibility, both at the same time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And maybe there was some value in that orthodoxy when we were fundamentally a resource and leg one economy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay. Even with regard to that leg. Yeah, no. But certainly not sufficient in a knowledge economy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And we face terribly high housing prices and a future that looks increasingly unstable and narrow, especially in comparison to the Americans. Not good. So I spent time with Jim analyzing why that's the case. And part of the reason is, is that we brought a resource... and classic production economy mentality to the realities of the last 30 years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, and these are smart, dedicated, patriotic people, and they're pushing their country's interest.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, so the people- with knowledge on the ground, and that would be people like you who could have informed our political leaders with regard to the policies necessary to protect intellectual property, for example, virtualized property. There's no council to do that now. There's no communication network set up to focus on that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, so even worse, there's no mechanisms- It's we know everything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right. Okay. So let's talk about, well, if it's still relevant, let's talk about what happened, why that Google proposal was dangerous. And the other two things that you mentioned to me recently that I thought were relevant was the fact, for example, that the Google executives themselves have claimed that the intellectual property they utilized to produce
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
a company that was for a while the largest company in the world and is still unbelievably dominant. Much of that came from Canada.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right. So using a branch plant mentality when you're dealing with tech companies is a very bad idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Because they also take, even if they do hire people in Canada, let's say, and add to the local economy in that way, they take the intellectual property generated by their employees and pull it back to their...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
We've made this digital transformation and the rules of the new world are not the same as the rules of the old world. And we're not playing well in that new set of rules. First of all, partly because we're not actually helping formulate the rules to our benefit and we need to do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, so now I think we're getting a little closer to understanding at least some of the reasons why Canada came up short since the 1990s. Now, there's more to the story than this, but one of the things that you intimated was that maybe the Mulroney I'm not blaming him, but I'll just use him as an example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Mulroney believed, like a good libertarian conservative, even a classic liberal, that eliminating trade barriers would have economic advantage for Canada. And that's a credible argument. For leg one. For leg one, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, exactly. But the downside of that is that You can rely on an outdated and implausible, shallow, free-market libertarian ideology as a political leader to say, all that we have to do is shrink government and get the hell out of the way, and we'll get rich. But that's a problem when the reality that you're dealing with is no longer a concrete, material reality. resource economy problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
So you have to read the million word agreement and you have to understand it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, and so that there's been an abdication of responsibility on the political front and the justification for that has been something like, well, the free market will take care of it. And so that means even the conservatives so far haven't, none of the political parties have addressed this problem in essentially in 30 years. That's the, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
So now that, are there other, like we've still got the situation where other countries have done this better than we have. And it's not like there aren't libertarian free marketers in the United States and especially in the US. So I still don't, is that the only reason? Okay, we're stuck in a resource economy mindset.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
When we were looking to move ourselves ahead economically, we slipped into a free market and irresponsible libertarianism when that was no longer appropriate in the new markets. Are there other reasons? We disbanded all our councils. So we're not consulting the people with on the ground expertise. And so now we're playing a backwards role.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
We look like rubes when we go down to DC and that's definitely the case because we're negotiating with people whose knowledge about these things is first of all, they know that they exist. when we don't. And second of all, they have like serious, high-powered experts who are, well, eating our lunch, like literally. And so are there other reasons that we are failing or have failed?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And so we talked about the shortcomings of a purely free market, hands-off libertarian approach to the new economy. And then we talked about Trump and what he's up to and why, what he's maneuvering towards and why we set ourself up to be susceptible to that. And then we talked, and this is equally relevant,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Or is that... No.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And paychecks that can afford a house.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Well, and we've also foregone – the analysis I've looked at also suggested in the last 10 years under Trudeau, we've foregone $650 million worth of potential, like, leg one investment as well. Because one of the other things that's happened in Canada – $650 billion. Yeah, billion. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Do you suppose, is it possible that this is also another manifestation of what economists call the resource curse? So, like if you look across the world,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
People like to think that countries with plentiful natural resources are naturally rich, but the relationship between natural resource ownership and positioning and wealth, it's flat, and there is even some indication that it's negative, which is rather paradoxical. And you have the counter example of countries like Japan, which have virtually no natural resources, which are very, very wealthy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
about the leadership options that Canada faces, which are very much akin to the leadership options faced by voters all around the world. On the one hand, the Liberal Party in Canada that's currently ruling and generally does in Canada, headed until recently by Justin Trudeau, has now had a replacement of leadership, that's pending tomorrow, and Mark Carney has stepped in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And so is it also the case that because Canada has been blessed with this immense geographic landscape and endless natural resources that we've allowed ourselves to sit on our haunches, so to speak?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, they've managed both. Yeah, so does the Germans. Yeah, but has Canada allowed its reliance on natural resources to justify not delving into these more- But that's not a resource curse.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right. So this is the curse of being lackadaisical in the face of resource plenty.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, let's move... Okay, good. I think we fleshed that out recently.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Well, I think the next thing to do likely is to talk about what's happened since Trump has been elected and the fact that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
As mentioned earlier, he's rampaging around like a bull in a china shop and suggests that Canada is such a weak country now and such a weak and useless country, all things considered, that for all intents and purposes, it might as well be, as a totality, the 51st state because it has no... use in existing on its own, and it's parasitical on the U.S.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And then on top of that, which is already quite something, he's added these immense tariffs. It's clear that he's not particularly happy with the manner in which Canada is governed. It's not exactly obvious what his endgame is, but it's obvious. Okay, well, tell us what you think Trump is doing and why you think we've
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
elaborate on how we've set ourself up to be the recipient of his peculiar largesse.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And so... Like to the realities of the new ownership doctrines in the knowledge economy, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
He used to be the governor of the Bank of England, as well as the Bank of Canada, has a fair bit of international experience, appears on the surface to be a highly credible individual, and we assessed Carney's ideas, as put forward in his book, Values, for better or worse, and I would say mostly for worse. If you like Trudeau,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Yeah. So I can offer you my best and you can offer me your best. And in consequence, even if my best isn't as good as yours, we're both going to get wealthier.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
You know, we actually have the opportunity to make this country roar if we choose wisely. What do you think needs to be done? Hello, everybody. This is a podcast that you might think of as primarily for Canadians, but it's really for anybody who's trying to understand the world economy. where Trump looms large.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And everything that's transpired under him, you're going to love Carney because he's basically Trudeau on steroids. And so, well, you can evaluate for yourself as a consequence of this discussion if you're a Canadian or anyone else who has to deal with Canada, whether or not that's a good idea. We talked about Pierre Polyev, who leads the Conservatives and the positive signs of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And what happened was... And we still don't really understand that. And that's part of the reason we've been so susceptible to Trump's maneuvers in the last two months.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, so detail out for me and for the Canadians and everyone who's listening, what you think exactly, what the hell is Trump up to? I mean, he's put a knot in Canadians' tail.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And the upside of that is that for the first time, certainly in the Trudeau era, even the liberals are pretending that they're patriots and that Canada has a self-evident reason for existing, which is something that Trudeau has formally denied for decades.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
well, for the whole bulk of his political career, that we were a post-national state with no real identity, that our strength was our diversity, that leg one, where we had some advantage, was also, what, an untenable basis for movement into the future, that we were going to enter into a green economy that was going to magically make us rich.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And one of the things you're pointing out is, yeah, good economy, There is a virtualized economy, but we don't own any of it. And, you know, when I looked at Carney's book recently, Values, and he talks about this magical economy, which I suppose at least in part is a knowledge economy that's somehow going to emerge if we leave 80% of our fossil fuels in the ground.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
But you might say that it's a little short on detailed plan. So, okay, so what's Trump exactly? What do you think Trump is up to?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
within his budding administration of a, of what there's evidence accruing that he's beginning to grapple with the complexities of the new digital age and provides a real alternative, a beckoning alternative. We hope for Canadians perplexed by the new world and their position in it. And so all of that with Jim Balsley and it's, it's a very important podcast and,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
But you pointed out that it... may well have a paradoxical effect. So let's go into that. I mean, one of the things I've noticed, because I'm very ambivalent about Trump's maneuvers, because, well, he is a bull.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
at minimum for Canadians, but also for anyone who wants to understand the realities of the new world order. So a lot has changed, well, in the world in recent years, but a lot for the world in Canada since Mr. Trump was elected. And he's been rampaging around for better or worse, like a bull in the China shop. And a fair bit of that has come Canada's way. And so I've been thinking through that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
I would like to know partly, for example, why you are a proud Canadian, why you've stayed here, because you didn't have to, and why you think this country's worth fighting for. And then I also want to know what you think about the fact that Trump's
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
trump uh tromping around has actually seemed to wake canadians up a bit to help them understand once again that they do in fact have a country that it might be worth preserving that we should pay attention not only to the resource economy which we've done everything to scuttle but that we should maybe wake up with regard to while these more sophisticated issues that you've been bringing to light okay so let's start with your feelings about canada
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
But you have chosen to stay here and keep your operations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And so I think- Yeah, Juan, you've poured your efforts into developing the- the tech economy in the Waterloo area. My brother-in-law, who's like a tech maven, he thinks that the graduate, engineer graduates from this institute in particular are like world top rate. And so, like, you've put your money where your mouth is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, so now let's look forward. Let's look now and forward a little bit. And so as we speak virtually, the Liberal Party, which is... So we were talking about Trump, his miscalculations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
from a variety of angles and for a variety of reasons. And one of the things I wanted to do was to reach out to the people I know who have a clue and invite them to discuss with me what the current situation is. And I don't know anyone in Canada who's best situated to do that than Jim Balsley. Man, I've known for about 15 years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Well, let's turn to that. So we're at the dawn of a transformation in the Canadian political scene, at least in principle. We have the spectacle of new leadership arising after Trudeau on the Liberal side. It looks it's the day before the leadership race for the Liberals finalizes, and the heir presumptive is clearly Mark Carney. And...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Well, I finished reading and analyzing rather deeply, I would say, Mark Carney's value books and value book, which Canadians should know about and read even, especially the first couple and last couple of chapters. And I've got some questions about that that maybe you can help me sort through.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
So one of the things that Mr. Carney says in his book, after outlining what he thinks Canadians' shared values are, which is a very dubious, What would you say? He makes a very dubious set of arguments, which for reasons that I'll go into, but one of his more remarkable claims is relevant to our discussion of these two legs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, so we haven't done too badly on the resource and manufacturing side, even though that's dated. We need to maintain what we have there, and we need to develop this other attitude.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
But one of the things Carney says very forthrightly is that all of our financial institutions are going to have to be retooled in relationship to the catastrophe of climate change, and that 80% of the fossil fuels that are part of what fuels Canada's economy are going to have to stay in the ground.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And so Carney is planning to continue the terrible pressure that Trudeau has put on Canada's traditional economy and to magnify that because he's a much more effective administrator and manager than Trudeau. And there's nothing, there's not anything in his book, not one word that deals with any of the things that you've discussed today.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And so what we have in the spectacle of Carney is someone who thinks that The economy that we already have has to be replaced by some magical new economy that will somehow be both productive and clean. And who says, who doesn't seem to be aware at all of any of the problems that you've described, conceptually or practically. He doesn't address the fact of Canada's failing productivity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
We've worked on a variety of projects together, got to know each other, and that's been a real privilege. And so it's
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
It's as hollow and empty a book as I've ever had the misfortune to read. And so that seems to be, but the problem is, and this is, maybe somewhat contrary to your proclamation that Trump's maneuvering has been counterproductive is Canadians seem to be rallying behind the liberals. They were cataclysmically low in the polls, and now they're at something approaching parity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And so, well, that's the spectacle on the Carney side. And then, well, we have as the primary alternative to that, Pierre Poliev and the conservatives. And so, well, enough of a rant on Carney from me. I'm curious as to, you're not a particularly partisan person from what I've observed. You are more comfortable in the realm of concept and idea and practicalities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
First thing I thought I might do for all of you desperate Canadians who are watching with your mouths opened exactly what's happening to your country is to grill Jim a little bit about his background or ask him politely even about his background so that you understand why I'm talking to him and why it might be useful to follow along with the conversation and learn along with me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And so I'm very curious about how you see the current situation with regard to Canadian leadership.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
It's going to change the white-collar economy completely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Our weakest terms- Energy defined primarily on the fossil fuel side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, we're not talking about the renewable side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right. So we have a fossil fuel economy in large part.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Yes. Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And so, Jim, you're best known for... Blackberry. Yeah. So you want to tell us a little bit about that, but put that in a broader context. Like you've had a lot of experience on the economic side, business side, political side in Canada, but also in the United States and internationally. And you've chosen to stay in Canada and you're a staunch patriot for reasons that we'll go into.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, so let me take that apart because you say things so calmly when they're actually cataclysmic that it's hard to get the right emotional impact. This is not normative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Yeah, okay, okay. So the claim that you're making is that the best... the best performance that Canada has managed economically is on the hydrocarbon side. Correct. Now, Carney's not very happy about the hydrocarbon side because of what he describes as externalities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, okay. But the transition is going to be fostered in principle by... Making what we're good at far more expensive and making what we're bad at cheaper.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, so how we're going to ensure, for example, that we own the consequences of all this innovation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, right. So we need to drive that point home, because what I also think this is true... with regards to Carney's positioning internationally as well. Like Trudeau has been pushing a green agenda, let's say, along with Guilbault for 10 years. And he's doing that in the same way that the Europeans are doing that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And he's doing that in the same way that the World Economic Forum types, the Davos intellectuals, quasi-intellectuals are promoting. But my sense of Trudeau, and I think this is valid, is that He is nothing but a follower of those ideas. But that's not the case with Carney. Carney is a major architect and initiator of such ideas. And then what's... Well, could be, but...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
but you also understand, and I think uniquely, what Canada faces and how that's come about. So, well, I think we should start by talking about your experience first.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Yes. So even if he's right, it's not going to work. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
So even on the resource side, the IP ownership and tech element is increasingly predominant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, so the consequence of virtualization is total.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
So that's actually kind of a variation of the libertarian argument.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
So his expertise doesn't transfer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Yeah, well, that was one of my impressions in reading the book.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
On a much broader scale with much better international connections.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Faster and faster in the wrong direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Yeah, well, Canadians, you know, I can understand the conundrum because Carney has an, he has international imprimatur because he was governor of the Bank of England and it's very easy and I can understand it for people to think, well, he's been successful in two complex jobs and one of them was outside of Canada. It's the same job. It's the same job. Yeah, fair enough, fair enough.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
But it's easy for people to presume that that makes him a master of financial strategy in all dimensions when they don't know the nuances.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
All right, let's turn our attention, as we're exhausting our time on the YouTube side, let's turn our attention to the person who's the major contender for the position of prime minister at the moment, and that would be Polyev. Now, you already said, and the Conservatives, you already said that you're...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
stringently and consciously nonpartisan, not only in your attitudes, but also in your financing. And so we're presuming that you're attempting to evaluate both of these men and their ideas at the realm of competence and idea. So tell me about Polyev. You've had some interaction with him. You've talked to some of his advisors about the issues that we've been describing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Tell me what you're concluding, what you're seeing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And then he has... Well, and you see this as somewhat of a radical departure from Canadian political maneuvering on both sides of the aisle over the last 30 years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Yeah, we do. Like values is a rather thorough book for all its failings. And people tend to do what they say they're going to do. So that's laid out. You see the emergence of something approximating a poly of doctrine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, so let's talk about that a little bit, because I'd like to get a bit more concrete about that. So what you've said was,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
and I'll paraphrase, you tell me if I've got this right, that independent of Carney's diagnosis of the need for transformation in our economy, your assessment of the strategies that he's put forth so far are first, let's say, that he hasn't fleshed out anything indicating any understanding whatsoever of the problems that you've described in the second leg of this race.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, right. And the second problem is that the plan that he is going to implement is going to make what we do do well more expensive and less productive and exacerbate our problems on the side of the things that we don't do well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, okay. Now, on the Polyev front, well, we've talked a little bit about the shortcomings of a strictly libertarian free market view in light of the realities of the new economy. But you're saying that, and you've discussed a number of the people that's working with him, and these are people that you've had some contact with. You're following them in discussions?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, and you're seeing the emergence of something that you think has some promise. Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit more. At the beginning of our conversation, you pointed out, for example, that the Americans have developed these councils that Canada scrapped 30 years ago that enabled... 33 years ago, but who's counting? Right, right, that enabled them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Well, those were pretty remarkable three decades, right? It's definitely not 1970 anymore, right? It's probably not even 2010 anymore. Oh, dear. Right, right. Okay, and so what do you think needs to be done by either of these leaders, for that matter, to...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
provide Canadian politicians, the political system, the civil service, with the expertise necessary to develop the policies that would make us competitive with the cutthroat Americans, for example, who are definitely charging, rampaging down this road at a rate that's really quite miraculous.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
So what else would you like to see emerging on the political front that's going to help us deal with our inadequacies in the second leg of this crisis?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, so now we have an opportunity on the Canadian side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
So we need to find people, for example, who have been successful in the new digital realms, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And you've stayed active as a businessman and in all sorts of other realms since then as well. So it's not like your involvement on the economic side practically or conceptually ended when you retired. And so I've been watching that over the last 15 years too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, so let me summarize and tell me if I've got it right. Well... your diagnosis is What? It's dire in that the problems that Canadians face are of sufficient magnitude to be felt. The fact that we make 60 cents for the American's dollar is making itself manifest in the lives of ordinary Canadians in dreadful ways. One in four in food banks. And getting worse. And getting worse, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
The trajectory is downhill. And we missed the boat 30 years ago. And like...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right. Okay. Okay. Now- That could have been followed by a conclusion that we're so far behind that it's hopeless. But that isn't the conclusion that you've drawn.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
The conclusion that you've drawn is that Canada is, in fact, intrinsically a wealthy country with regard to the first leg, resource, manufacturing, finance, the traditional Canadian economy, but also with regard to the second, is that we do have the expertise here, technically,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
We, in principle, have even the expertise with regards to legislation and governance and negotiation, but that because we've had a narrow focus on something like 1970s pre-Reformation Friedman free market rhetoric, we haven't taken advantage of any of that. Quite the contrary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
You have developed expertise in a broad variety of areas and you set up political think tank as well at Waterloo, which is where we are today. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, so we have great potential upside and pretty dire potential downside. Yeah. Right, and it's time at the moment for a choice at that fork in the road that we should take.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Great. Well, that's a very, very good place to end, Jim. And so for those of you who are watching and listening, I'm going to turn, as you know, to a continued discussion on the Daily Wire side. And we're going to change pace there. I went down with Jim last, oh, well, a couple of times in the last year or so to talk about identity in the digital age.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And that's not something we covered at all today in this side of the podcast. What The nature of your existence and identity in a digital age has become mysterious, partly because the behavioral traces that you leave as a consequence of your actions, your interactions online, define you in ways that you can barely begin to even understand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
There's a virtual clone of you in the abstract world, and you have absolutely no right to that reality. part of your existence. And it's terrible. It's terribly dangerous. And it's being capitalized on in a variety of ways that aren't good by legal and illegal actors alike.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And Jim and I have started to, with other people, have started to think through, hopefully at somewhat of a deep level, the problems of ownership of your own being in a digital age. And we flesh some of our ideas out when we've gone down to Washington. And so I think we'll spend... 20 minutes to half an hour talking about that on the Daily Wire side. So join us there. Jim, thank you very much.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Pleasure, my friend. I really appreciate it. Hopefully everybody, you sad Canucks that have been listening to this interchange, have a little bit better understanding, as I do now, about what we have done wrong, foolishly, blindly, presumptively. The opportunity that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
bull in the china shop trump has presented this with and the fact that you know we actually have the opportunity to make this country roar if we if we choose wisely and so that seems to be the appropriate thing to do so um good luck to us on that front thanks again sir pleasure you
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Right, right. You're right. Well, and I've seen you branch out, I suppose, or pursue the development of your ideas on the conceptual side in parallel to your continuing as a businessman over, let's say, the last 15 years. And you and I have gone to D.C. a couple of times. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
began to work with relatively distinguished political leaders in Congress and in the Senate there on a variety of issues like digital rights and rights in a digital age. Yeah, so we have some joint understanding of how things work in Washington as well, which is also useful when considering Canada in relationship to the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
We thought we'd start by talking about, I want you to take the floor here and lay out for Canadian listeners and for the international audience as well, exactly the nature of Canada's, we'll say specifically economic situation now and even over the last 30 years. And so let's start with an analysis of the reality on the ground and then a causal analysis of how we got there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
It's been a particularly of the last 10 years that Canadian politics has become interesting internationally, not least because the things that are happening everywhere in the West effect everywhere else in the West. And so this is a good case in point.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Now, Canada is in a particularly strange position at the moment because President Trump has, first of all, proclaimed that my country should become the 51st state, and also lambasted us with some very heavy duty economic measures in the form of tariffs. And this has really put the cat among the canaries in Canada. And so the timing of this interview with my guest today could hardly be better.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Okay, let me summarize that, okay, so that I can make sure I got it so that everybody is clear about what happened and when. And so if I get any of it wrong, tell me. So after World War II, Canada's been one of the world's wealthiest countries, and a lot of that's emerged after World War II.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And we've certainly competed with the Americans, well, up till the 1990s, let's say, in terms of our ability to amass wealth. And we did that... in three ways. We were very productive in the natural resource economy, on the manufacturing side, and in finance. Canada was outstanding. And so then, in the 1990s, I was in Boston.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And I can remember the weeks at Harvard when Netscape emerged and the internet started to become the dominant force that it is. And I could feel the excitement in the US at that time. I was there from like 92 to 98. And that place was just optimistic beyond belief and just bursting at the seams. That was in the Clinton era, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
And that's exactly the time that you're pointing to where the shift occurred. So the ground that Canada had been occupying resources, manufacturing, and finance, was based on a certain understanding of the economy and a certain set of rules. And what you're telling everyone, trying to tell everyone in Canada, that the ground rules shifted radically in 1994, and we stayed there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Is that approximately right? 100%.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
There are preconditions for liberalism to work in the classic sense, and those preconditions are conservative. When they vanish, then the liberal project doesn't work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And the idea that poverty is a consequence merely of lack of money is an unbelievably foolish presumption. And your upper middle class status, as you already pointed out, wasn't a consequence of absolute wealth, although relatively you were doing okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
It was a consequence of the fact that your family was so educated and so aspirational that it was an unspoken reality that you could and would succeed Right, that's wealth to have that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Yeah, well, we know, for example, the literature on fatherlessness, for example, is that there's almost nothing that puts a child at higher risk for poor long-term life outcome than fatherlessness, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Yeah, so there's effects of fatherlessness that are not only behavioral in the way that you just described, so more dysregulated aggression among men, but even more fundamental physiological alterations. So boys who are fatherless have shorter telomeres by the age of 12, which means that their life expectancy is shorter. Really? Yes, absolutely. 12% to 15% shorter. It's remarkable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And girls who lack a father hit puberty one year earlier. That's a major change. And so that just shows you how, what would you say, pronounced and fundamental that disintegration of family below the nuclear level actually is. And that's certainly not merely an economic problem, although it's also an economic problem. Okay, so you moved when you were 16. And so you were already...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
You already had been doing well enough academically to get a scholarship offer from Stanford. So how was it that you were doing well enough academically at 16 to be offered a scholarship from Stanford?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
because they have to deal with the realities of the real physical world. And her legal training has given her deep insight into the legal structure of not only the UK, but the Western world in general, because so many of the institutions that we rely on in the West were originated in the UK. I got a chance to talk to her about her
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Right, right. And so you also point there to the importance of peer selection, especially when you're making important life decisions. Yeah, well, it's one of the things that was a real relief to me when I went off to college, and I was about the same age you were when I left my hometown, was that my high school compatriots in northern Alberta, most of them stayed in our hometown.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Their ambitions didn't really extend. Their vision didn't really extend past the boundaries of the town. I left with a couple of my friends, but it was a very small minority of people. And when I got to college, my new peer group was much more ambitious and outward looking. And that was formative and also a great relief because it was something that was, well, something that I was striving for.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
childhood, her educational background, her rise to predominance in the Conservative Party, her forthright stance on issues such as net zero, which the Conservatives move towards in a fit of, you have to say, foolishness, egotism, and cowardice. We talked about that in some detail as well. We discussed why she believes
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
It is. it is it's partly because our definition of mental health in in the west is it's too individualistic and we should return to that when we talk about we will talk about the overlap and the distinctions between classic liberalism and conservatism because i've rethought that to some fair degree over the last five years um well partly well partly because
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
People kept telling me I was conservative, and I had never really thought that. As you pointed out earlier, you know, I'd thought about myself like you had as more of a classic liberal. But I understand there are preconditions for liberalism to work in the classic sense, and those preconditions are conservative. And so when they vanish, then the liberal project doesn't work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Okay, so now you studied systems engineering, but then you went to law.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Okay, so how did you become political and why did you decide that you weren't going to be a lawyer? Well, I think, yeah, do you know the term, the quarter life crisis?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
that she became leader of the Conservative Party, but why she's also an extremely effective alternative, let's say, to Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, which is a right-wing party in the UK as well that's on the up and up and that has, you know, things going for it. I believe we'll be speaking with Mr. Farage. I interviewed him yesterday.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Okay, well, we're definitely going to return to that. And so you're at law school now. You're doing that at night. What are you doing as a job during the day?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Right. And so you went to law school part-time and you found that compelling intellectually, but you also, is that where you ran across your leftist nemesis? and first started to understand what the pathologies of postmodernism, that kind of sly Marxism that's a part of that, and why did that strike you so intensely?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Last year, we're going to do that again relatively soon on the podcast. We got a chance to speak about the West in general, and that's part of the reason this podcast should be relevant to everyone in the Western world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Like, you tangled that together a little bit in your self-description with that bigotry of low expectations that you encountered with the more leftist teachers, and so that's all percolating, but it sounds to me like there were some actual striking experiences that perhaps you had in law school that,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
politicized you and it also sounds like your politicization in part was at least initially I definitely don't want that Yes, very much. Very, very much so. Well, so let's walk through that because I'd like to disentangle that. There's the bigotry of low expectations that you described and that deviation that you had in your academic striving and consequence. And now you're at law school.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And what are you seeing among the leftist students there? And why is that raising your hackles?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
The UK is a pillar of Western society, and it would be lovely to have a leader in place who understands and appreciates exactly what that culture is and what it's offered to the world. And it seems to me that... Ms. Badenoch comported herself highly successfully in the interview, and I think its fundamental shortcoming was that it wasn't long enough.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And it's very good to see a leader emerge on the international stage who's brave enough to bear the... threat of long-term format interview that's unscripted. She had no questions provided to her before this interview. And then to have concluded at the end of it that the best thing that could have happened with the interview, it would have been better if it was twice as long.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Well, there isn't a bigger lie than a man can be a woman. I don't think there's a bigger, there's not a bigger perceptual falsehood that's even possible than that. It's more fundamental than up versus down or night versus day. So, even creatures without nervous systems can distinguish between the sexes. And so, yeah, there's something very pathological going on there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
So, let's delve into some concepts now, because you're moving in that direction. And so, I want to throw something out for you, and you tell me what you think about this. When I... regarded myself, let's say, more as a classic liberal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
The fundamental reason for that, as far as I'm concerned, was that I believe that societies function better when the individual is the essential unit of analysis or identity. But then, and I do believe that's true, and so I don't like ethnic categorizations or racial categorizations or sexual categorizations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
I think merit itself and ability are independent of those fundamentally, but even more particularly, if you start identifying people in terms of their group membership, you get pathological attributions like group guilt or group privilege, for that matter, and that doesn't go anywhere good. But what I've come to understand more recently is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
that liberal project, which really originated in many ways in the UK. I know the Americans like to take credit for it, but really they just... But it was us, really. That's right. Really it was. Really it was. And in a very serious way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And that's why it's so terrible to see the UK lose faith in itself because, well, of its common law tradition and its immense contribution philosophically in terms of sketching out liberalism. But then you might say... Well, what are the preconditions for being able to use the individual as the fundamental unit of analysis, like perceptual analysis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And it seems to me it's like it has something to do with Christianity. And I say that partly because every Protestant and Catholic majority country outside of Africa is a functional democracy. And so that's a very striking fact. It has something to do with the presumption of intact family.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
So imagine, liberalism works, individual liberalism works, if there's an underlying unitary ethos, and that would be the antithesis of the multiculturalism that you described, that's predicated on belief in the intrinsic value of every individual as a fundamental axiom, and also the fundamental equality between men and women. and at the level of ultimate value. And so those are preconditions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And then the sanctity of the family and the stability of the family, and that would be the long-term committed child focused monogamous family, which is a very particular type of family arrangement. And then once you have that, then the liberal project will work, but it stops working if that under structure starts to disintegrate. And that seems to me to be where modern conservatism
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
So join us for a vision of the new Conservative Party in the UK. So, Ms. Bednock, I think what we'll do to begin with is... Just walk through your life biographically and let people get a chance to situate you. You've emerged into a very influential position on the international scene relatively recently.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
can play its most salutary role, is to remind us, well, no, we need a unity of culture. That's a tricky thing, and that's something that you referred to. It's like, when you think about unity of culture, and you made some reference to the relationship between that and religion, when you think about the unity of culture that brings people together, what is it that you think is... irreplaceable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Now you're kind of looking at the UK as an outsider in a sense, right? And an appreciative outsider. You're kind of like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in that regard, right? Because you can really see the advantages and you had to come at that understanding of that advantage is really in an intellectual manner and as an anthropologist almost.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
So what do you see as the necessary preconditions for the kind of unity that brings a country together and that is a barrier to multicultural disintegration, nihilism and conflict.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And so everyone who's watching and listening is going to be curious about where you came from and who you are. Maybe take us back to your childhood to begin with, and let's start there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
So what do you think? So I'm curious about your thoughts, because I would organize the hierarchy. It sounds like slightly different than you do, but I see why you're doing it. I think about the religious presuppositions as being the deepest presuppositions, and then the cultural presuppositions nested inside those.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Now, you just pointed to a situation where the cultural framework supersedes the religious and alters it. And so, you know, you can see that there could be a shift in that. But having said that, I'm very curious about your comments on a high-trust society, because it's been my understanding that there actually isn't any natural resource except trust.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
If you have trust, then everything can become a resource because you can now cooperate or even compete in a civilized manner that's sustainable and productive over the long run. But it does require this intrinsic trust. And then the question would be, what are the characteristics of a high-trust society? And you pointed to some. Well, there's... Everyone thinks violence is wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
That would be one. Nobody steals, no matter what, right? And this is something that's particularly characteristic right now, let's say, of Japan, that's starting to disintegrate in the West. And we've seen a lot of that in the United States, for example. The problem with low-trust societies is you have to be suspicious of In a low trust society, everyone's a potential enemy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
In a high trust society, everyone's a potential friend and collaborator. Well, you're rich in a society like that. And that Japanese are another good example of that. Japanese have no natural resources, but they're rich. And their richness, their wealth is their ethos, their moral ethos. The fact that the default Japanese citizen is wealthy. Unbelievably law-abiding. Unbelievably law-abiding.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Now, your sense, your intuition is that you fragment high-trust societies with a careless attitude. immigration policy, say, a careless multiculturalism. And there's Robert Putnam, the Harvard professor, has shown that quite clearly, that more homogenous societies, let's say, tend to be higher trust. And I guess it's partly because there are just fewer differences to take into account, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
There's a shared set of presumptions about the nature of proper behavior and of reality itself. And if you diversify that to greater degree, nobody knows which way is up. Nobody can tell the difference between a man and a woman, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
But what do you think's dissolved in, what do you think's dissolved or is dissolving in the West, in the UK more particularly, that is undermining that high trust reality that was part and parcel of UK culture? I mean, the queuing is a good example of that even.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
I mean, it's something that people always point to when they go to the UK, but it really matters that people will spontaneously organize themselves without duress in a civilized manner, right? It speaks volumes about the nature of the culture itself. What do you think has undermined that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
We still queue. That's good. Civilized looters.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Okay, so let's lay out the political landscape then. Let's turn to the political. We haven't talked about how you moved from your burgeoning political interest to leadership of the Conservative Party in the UK, because that's quite a story. But I think we'll just put that aside for the time being and focus on the political.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
The first thing you might want to do for people, since it's an international audience as well that's listening to this, is...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Why don't you outline what you see as the differences between the three major political parties in the UK, Conservative, Reform, Labour, and describe the relationships as you see them presently, and maybe the relative strengths and weaknesses of each position, assuming there are any strengths at all on the Labour side, which I doubt, by the way. I might as well put my... Well, seriously.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
I mean, seriously. But, okay, so let's go through the party structure, and... I'd like to hear your thoughts about the current situation in relationship to the political parties in the UK. Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
It's hard to have vivid memories of Omaha. Yeah. Do you? So, and where was your family from? What's the country of origin?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
That's a good summary. Well, I guess one of the things I'm curious about is why the Liberal Democrats are so invisible. I mean, they get no coverage at all on the international side, for example, like really none.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Are they distinguishable? They are known in... Are they distinguishable ideologically from the Labour Party?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Okay, so let's delve in a little bit into the fragmentation of the right, broadly speaking, in the UK. It's analogous to something that happened in Canada, because our Conservative Party split about 20 years ago into Reform and Conservative, before reuniting eventually. And I know that the inspiration for the Reform Party in the UK actually
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Now, you're kind of looking at the UK as an outsider when you think about the unity of culture that brings people together.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
strangely enough, came from Western Canada and the Reform Party. But I want to, if you don't mind, I'm going to speak in some ways on behalf of the Reform Party and let you respond to that, if you would. Well, when I look at the situation in the UK, and it's analogous to the situation in Canada, by the way, and the US, the same things are happening all across the West.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
I look at what happened with the conservatives who you now head, and I think two things fundamentally. The first thing I think is, what the hell were you thinking with regards to net zero? Because I can't imagine a set of policies simultaneously less conservative
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
more destructive, more woke, more elitist, more globalist than the net zero policies, which, by the way, the presumptive new leader of the Liberal Party in Canada, Mark Carney, is a net zero advocate of the highest order. And a man who's... He used to be head of the Bank of England. Yes, exactly, exactly. And he's not a follower of the... Yes, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
He's not a follower of the WEF like Justin Trudeau was. He's a leader. And in any case, the net zero debacle has left England, left the UK, deindustrializing like Germany, which is a complete bloody catastrophe because it's a terrible thing to see Europe falter and disintegrate. And it's a real danger. It's left you guys with unconscionably high standards
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
energy prices, you won't frack, even though you could, and produce another economic boom. I mean, and Trump just announced drill, baby, drill, and the Americans have been pursuing fracking technology like madmen. That was the basis of the economy of the province that I grew up in in Canada, by the way. We've been fracking there for like 60 years. It's a very long time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And so there's the net zero debacle, and then there's the Weakness, I would say, on the conservative side in the face of this pathological woke ideology, especially with regards to gender and gender identity. And then to top it all off, there's the immigration debacle. And so two things, you know. How do you account for that emerging within the Conservative Party?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
What are you going to do about it? And how do you distinguish, like, how do you attract, once again, truly Conservative voters who are, as you said, annoyed and irritated and have drifted off into the clutches of the Reform Party?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And we had some other...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Well, I want to delve into that some more because it's a huge catastrophe. And let me reflect your argument back to you, and then we'll elaborate on it a little bit, and I'm going to push things a little bit farther. So you pointed to two causal factors, two primary causal factors, three really. One was that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
The Conservative government believed that the environmental movement was a place where cross-party cooperation could be had, and that, I imagine, too, the Conservatives believed that taking a pro-environmental stance, especially in relationship to climate change, might broaden the appeal of the Conservative Party outside of its standard, what would you say, standard realm of acceptability.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Okay, so there's... And that's not a bad thing to want. Fair enough, fair enough. I'm trying to give the devil his due here, you know. And then the next thing you said, which is much more unforgivable, I would say, not because you said it, but because it exists, is the desire of preening narcissistic politicians to…
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
rise above even their national prominence and strut about the international stage as undeserving planetary saviors. And that's a form of narcissism that's, I mean, Jesus, really, if being prime minister isn't enough for you, now you have to make your name on the international stage. It's like, is there any limits whatsoever to your hubris? And the answer to that is no.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And someone like Justin Trudeau is an absolutely stellar example of exactly that pathology. And I think it was Keir Starmer himself who said, if I remember correctly, that Westminster... in some ways, was beneath him, that the real action was at places like Davos.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
They have the highest quality call girls there, for example, which is one of the indications of just how stellar an organization it is, right? And so there's that hubris, and that's really not good. Like, it's seriously not good. And then that's allied with this... fear of cancellation. Now, that fear of cancellation is actually real.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
I mean, one of the reasons that my license as a clinical psychologist is under assault in Canada, this is literally, this is the literal truth. One of the reasons is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
somebody who wasn't even a Canadian, submitted the entire transcript of a conversation I had with Joe Rogan to my licensing board, and I was complaining about climate change policy, pointing out that we're stacking unbelievably unstable economic models that purport to project out 100 years, which is completely preposterous, on top of climate models that are really no more stable than the economic models.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And that all of that is preposterous. And that was enough as far as my governing board was concerned to make me unfit to be a clinical psychologist. And that's been a real problem. It scared the hell out of psychologists and professionals all across Canada, including MDs. That is extraordinary. That should not be happening. That should not be happening. It's 100% happening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And the reason that I'm bringing it up is to point out that that fear is of something real. That doesn't mean it's justifiable, but it is of something real.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Okay, so let's talk about that seriousness, because this is obviously with Trump pulling out of the Paris Accords as well. This is about to become—there's renewed seriousness in this regard. So I'm a scientist. I've published 100 scientific papers, and I'm not a climate scientist, but I can read research. And I'm pretty good at— striking to the core of the topic at hand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And so I've spent a lot of time reviewing the carbon debate, and this is what it looks like to me. And I'd like your opinion about this. The first thing that I think is incontrovertible is that carbon dioxide levels are at a historic low when... calculated over a 500 million year period. That's a very long time, 500 million years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And we're low enough so that Patrick Moore, who was one of the people who founded Greenpeace, believed that had we not started burning fossil fuels and cranking up carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, that plants would have started to die en masse within 100 or 200 years. So we're really at historic lows. Now,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
There is evidence that the planet has greened quite substantively in the last 20 years because of increased carbon dioxide levels. Whether that's human caused or not is not exactly fixed, but there's some possibility of it. But not only has the planet greened 20%, which is an immense amount, an immense amount. It is the cardinal piece of data on the carbon dioxide front, that greening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
It's also greened most spectacularly in semi-arid and desert areas because plants with more carbon dioxide can tolerate more... arid conditions. And so the planet is greener and crop yields are up. And so as far as I can tell, and I'm going to push the envelope here, not only are the carbon dioxide fearmongers wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
They're telling the opposite of the truth, is that it looks to me like there's some reason to believe that increased carbon dioxide is, I think, incontrovertibly a net good. And I can say that. You don't have to agree, and I don't even expect you to agree, but it's a topic that needs to be broached. And Especially, and then let's add a couple of dimensions to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
So we have a situation in Australia, for example, where the Australians will sell coal to the Chinese who are building these plants that you described at a rate that's just beyond comprehension, but they won't build coal plants in their own country, even though the air we breathe, as the environmentalists keep pointing out, is pretty much the same everywhere.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And so we're de-industrializing Germany, we're de-industrializing the UK, We're deindustrializing Australia. Mark Carney, who wants to run Canada, thinks 85% of fossil fuels need to stay in the ground. And we're doing this while China is having an absolute bloody field day. And we're doing all of it to virtue signal? at the international level and to protect us from cancellation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Okay, so let me... We're running out of time, which is really unfortunate, because there's many other things that we didn't discuss that are necessary to discuss. Immigration, for example, the relationship between the Islamic world and the Western world, that's like a hot potato, to say the least. And we can't delve into those rabbit holes, but I would like to summarize, I think, why...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Because one of the questions I had that you obviously need to address is, why should people trust you, and why should they prefer you, let's say, to Nigel Farage on the reform side? And I'm going to summarize, I think, what you've said about that, and then I'll ask you if you'll add to that. You know, you said, for example, that you're in a unique position to evaluate the strengths of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
UK culture because you've benefited from it so indirectly and directly, and you're conscious of its value. And I compared you in that regard to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, which I think is a good comparison. And so, you know, that's really worth thinking about, is that you have reason to be grateful for... what UK culture has brought to the world, and you know what those reasons are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And so, you know, that's a big deal. And then you said as well, and maybe we can make a bit more of this, that you were one of the people who had expressed skepticism and doubt about the rampage to a trillion dollar expense on the net zero side. Now, interestingly enough, isn't it fascinating that we talked about the notion that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
it was fear of cancellation that would stop people from doing what you did. But the consequence for you, indirect though it may be, is that you're now the leader of the Conservative Party, which is, you know, that wasn't exactly an obvious outcome, and yet it happened. And, you know, one of the things we haven't talked about, so let's close with this. Like, why in the world are you the leader?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
How the hell did that happen? And why do you think it's, why do you think that that happened? Why is that a good thing? Why do you think you're a good leader? But also, why are you a leader that's good in comparison, let's say, as a choice, if the choice is Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, why should people who feel that they've been burned by the Conservative Party trust you and the party now?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Yeah, well, I think one of the things that I really learned about you today that's striking is that combination of engineering and legal education. Now, I've worked with a lot of engineers, well, and a lot of lawyers for that matter. But one of the things that's very interesting about engineers, two things. First of all, they tend to be pretty truthful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
I think that's partly their autistic proclivity, let's say. They don't have the social skills. to lie. But it's also the fact that they actually have to build things that work and they have to build them from the bottom up.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And so the engineers I've worked with are very painstaking and very detail-oriented and less flashy and entrepreneurial than you might want if you want to be with someone truly exciting. But they do have to build systems that work. And if they make mistakes, the systems don't work. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And so the fact that you're an engineer by education and a lawyer, that's a really interesting combination.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
I went to law school. Sorry, sorry, that you went to law school. Right, right, right. That you have legal, extensive legal training. Right, okay, okay. And so, all right. And so, well, I guess we could close. We're going to see each other at ARC, at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Convention. And yeah, I'm looking forward to that. We'll get about 4,000 people there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And, you know, we're trying to outline a visionary vision classic liberal conservative policy set on the cultural side in particular. And so we'll have a chance to speak again.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
All right, well, that's a good place to end, I would say. For everybody watching and listening, we're going to continue our conversation on the Daily Wire side. And I think what I'll do there is tilt towards UK-US relationships and talk to Ms.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Badenoch about her response to the Trump election victory and her vision of, well, UK relationship with the US, certainly, but also UK relationship with China.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
europe given the new dynamic that's emerging because of the electoral transformation on the american side perils and opportunities in the era of trump let's say and we can cover that on the daily wire side so everybody could join us there and thank you very much it'd be lovely to sit down with you again at some point if you're inclined we can we can see how this does and whether it um
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
whether it's been of some benefit to the listeners and to you, because it would be really good to delve into the immigration issue in some detail, and also the issue of coexistence
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
on the religious side between the Islamic world and the Western world, which is a conversation that seriously needs to be had and which many people on the Muslim side are keen to have, especially in places like the United Arab Emirates and increasingly in places like Saudi Arabia. So there's sparks of hope there, all the signatories of the Abraham Accords. So thank you very much.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Yes, we must talk about Abraham Accords too. There's a lot more to discuss. Absolutely. that there certainly isn't so yes yes it was a pleasure by the way and thank you very much for agreeing to do this and we'll see you in a well we'll see you on the daily wire side but we'll also see you in a couple of weeks in london at the arc conference
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
16. And you said your studies were going well in Nigeria. What were you interested in and what did you study? Now, you have a background in engineering and law, which are very disparate fields. So, I'm very curious about that. So, what were you oriented to academically when you were 16? And did you have political... aspirations or ambitions that early?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
I had the privilege today because it was a privilege to speak to the new leader of the Conservative Party in the UK. And the Conservative Party is likely the most successful political party that has ever existed in the West as a whole. And its leadership is, well, a position of cardinal importance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Well, Nigerians do particularly well when they immigrate, let's say, to the United States. And so there doesn't seem to be a culture of low expectation that's pervasive in Nigeria. I mean, I don't know how to account for the differential success of Nigerians. Maybe you can shed some light on that, or maybe you just did.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
And I'm also curious about your statement that your family was relatively wealthy in Nigeria, because you might want to clarify that, too, because there's a difference between relatively wealthy and wealthy. And so a little bit more about, like, you were obviously upper middle class, let's say, in terms of educational background, your family and aspiration.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
But economically, from what I understand, it was still relatively tough going at times in Nigeria.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Say that last part again. I want to just make sure I followed your argumentation there about competitiveness. I think, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Kemi Bednok, the new leader, is a relatively young woman who's come to the UK from another country, who is grateful for the intellectual and cultural heritage of the UK and who understands it deeply. She's an engineer and has extensive legal training. And that's a very interesting combination because engineers are very practical and task-oriented and they know how to build things that work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
Right, right. Well, and that's not even precisely class in the Marxist economic sense. It's more like level of intrinsic aspiration. And the determinants of that are actually relatively difficult to specify. You know, what makes someone...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
See, the funny thing about you, so to speak, and this is how I felt when I lived in Montreal because I didn't have a lot of money as a graduate student and I lived among relatively poor people by Montreal standards, which, you know, they were still doing fine. I wasn't poor because of my level of aspiration and possibility.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And that in around 1600, 1650, let's say to 1750, there was an influx of Bantu-speaking people who were larger from the north, and there was an influx of Europeans.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, in the same century. And so the Bushmen were starting field pressure from an invasion, so to speak, from the north, and also an influx from the south. Yes. Okay, so that's a more accurate... And none of this was agricultural to begin with. Yes. Right. Now, were the Bantu also interested in agricultural settlement?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, so we're also seeing an anthropological struggle in the broader sense between the archaic mode of human existence, which was nomadic hunter-gatherer, and the developing agricultural and settled communities. Some of them were black in Africa and some of them were white. And so now we've got at least a three-way conflict going on, not counting the conflicts inside the groups. Yes. Okay, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so by... Mid 1700s, what's the status of the white settlements in South Africa?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, so that's while the Brits are really expanding their empire. Yes. And so now they come into what's now a European settlement in South Africa, and the battle for dominion is between Europeans. Now, you see the same kind of thing, in a sense, play out in North America, right, because well, it was New Amsterdam before it was New York.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And of course, much of the United States was settled by Germany and a huge chunk, well, that was eventually the Louisiana Purchase was French. And of course, Quebec remained French. And so who the colonizers were, it's not like they were a monolithic group and there was plenty of fighting between them. So what motivated the English to show up in South Africa per se in the 1800s?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
You said it was in the aftermath of Napoleonic Wars, but It was part of the colonial expansion, no doubt. It's a trade issue as well, I presume.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Was gold discovered by then? No, not yet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
He made a film called Tainted Heroes, which is about the apartheid era. in 2016 and another one called Disrupted Land. And I hoped to talk to Dr. Roots about South Africa, about its history and about, well, about its current situation and about hopes and concerns for the future. And that's exactly what we did. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
So there was evidence that there was good reason and possibility to get the hell away from the English and move the British and to move farther north and into the central parts of South Africa. What sort of size geographical area are we talking about?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, right, okay. So there was plenty of northward geographical area to move towards. Yes. And how many boars, what year was the trek? The 1830s. 1830s. And how many boars participated in the trek?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, right, right. And they used wagons and moved like that? Wagons, yes, ox wagons. Right, so it's kind of like the settlement of the American West in that way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, so... there was plenty of vacant land in the Western US when the pioneers went westward. There was occupied land as well. There's still plenty of vacant land in the Western US, like plenty, although a lot of it's desert. And so I suspect that, although I don't know this for sure, but I expect that there was more habitation in North America than there was in South Africa at that time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
I guess I really don't know, because I don't know how extensive the Bantu settlements might have been. But you said that was also complicated by the fact that there was a genocide and that many, many people were wiped out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Of course, the situation in North America was complicated by the fact of the mass deaths that were a consequence of the illnesses that spread across North America, like a plague, actually like three plagues. And so... Well, all that to just say how complicated these things are. Okay, so these 2,000 people spread north, and then what was the consequence of that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
The first thing I wanted to do was to delve a little bit into the history of the origin of South Africa, because there's a narrative in the West that the evil white Europeans came to a land dominated by black Africans and colonized it in their brutal and murderous fashion. And, well, any...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
So he was a rebel in the Bantu.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
The big... Right, and from what I understand, too, the victory of the Europeans over the Zulus, the Bantus, let's say, was by no means a foregone conclusion. That they were very formidable fighters. And there was a difference in weaponry, as you just pointed out. But it wasn't like the Boers had machine guns.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
territorial dispute has its bloody edge, let's say, but the truth of the matter is that the settlement of South Africa is a hell of a lot more complex than that, and that the two primary racial groups that exist there today weren't the original inhabitants of the land, whether they're black or white, and so just knowing that is useful, and we spent the first
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, now since then, let's skip ahead a little bit. Since then, the Bantu people have multiplied and the Europeans have multiplied. I don't know the population ratios or the absolute numbers, so maybe you can fill me in on that. And I'm curious about... where the bulk of the population growth has come from. Like how much more European influx from Europe directly has there been to South Africa?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
How much of it is multiplication of the Afrikaner stock? And I'm curious about the same thing with regards to the Central Africans who came down and also invaded the Bushmen territory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, and so now you said 60 million people in South Africa as a whole, and 5 million are of European descent, and 2.7 million of them are Afrikaner? And the rest, what about Indians and Asians and so forth?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
half, really, of the podcast talking about the history of the settlement of South Africa. The original people there were Bushmen who aren't particularly related genetically to the Bantu, the black people who live there now, and obviously not to the So the situation with regards to ethnicity and race in South Africa is a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, right. Well, in a false narrative that can be usefully repurposed. Okay, so now my suspicions are, and we'll get back to this as we proceed in our discussion, that the history that you briefly outlined, which puts things in context quite nicely, would be criticized by leftist and radical historians. Okay, so what would be the counter story for...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
I don't know a lot about South Africa, but what I do know is in accordance with what you just described. I knew that the land was basically sparsely occupied before the Europeans came, and that most of the people who live there now who aren't European came from Central Africa and weren't there originally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so it's actually a story of, well, a sparsely inhabited hunter-gatherer society that was mobile.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Being pressured from the South and from the North by two competing, you could say, two competing diverse racial groups. And... And that produced a population explosion over the last 300 years. The transformation of a hunter-gatherer society into an agricultural and industrial society. And that's roughly the story that you told. But that isn't the story that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
the typical Westerner who isn't South African, if you guys are Westerners, which I guess, you know, sure, you know, whatever that, yes. And so that's not the story that is on everyone's, like at the tip of everyone's tongue, and everyone being people who are absolutely 100% ignorant about South African history, like they are about their own history.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so, but if we were giving the devil his due, what's the strongest European... colonial narrative. I mean, I guess that would probably more involve even the English or the British.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Well, it also begs the question of which black people. For example, is it the San, the Bushmen, or the Bantu, let's say? And it's not like that's the only kind of black people that are in Africa.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
That's a particularly tricky argument when you're talking about people like the Bushmen. Because my suspicions are, from what I understand about them anthropologically, first of all, they conceptualize themselves as belonging to the land rather than the reverse, which is a much more typical attitude of hunter-gatherers, because they're nomadic. They don't own land. There's no ownership notion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so, I mean, what did the Bushmen own? They definitely owned their bows and arrows and the things they could carry with them, which were very lightweight, and I don't believe they had domesticated animals. I don't believe so.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, yeah, but that was the same in the Americas. Like the Indians, the Indians, I'm going to use that phrase because it's not politically correct, let's say. They didn't have horses until the Spaniards showed up. Yeah, exactly. So there were, now, there were some domesticated animals in South America, llamas, for example, and... It's not that easy to domesticate animals, as it turns out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so, well, that's what we're trying to puzzle out in this podcast. So join me and my guest, Dr. Ernst Roots, for that discussion. So this is likely to be an unsettling conversation, so we might as well dive right in. The first thing I think that people who are watching and listening should know is that a somewhat more detailed history of the settlement patterns in South Africa.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
So, I don't know what the Bushmen would have owned. Like, I'm not even sure, especially ownership of land. I think that's a conception that you develop once you become... You have herds, and you have agriculture before that, and a permanent settlement. Like, how do you own land when you don't have a permanent settlement? That's not your relationship to the land.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And in Canada, for that matter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, and so it looks self-evident.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Well, and there's also a really complicated question here too, which is there was a very small population in South Africa in consequence of the Bushman's lifestyle. So then you ask yourself, well, is there any net good, absolutely speaking, in generating a technological revolution that radically increases the carrying power of the land? Because that's the question about agriculture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
That's the question about domesticated animals. It's certainly the question about industrial civilization. And I guess the answer would be something like you'd hope that if there were hunter-gatherers and then agricultural people came along or industrial people came along, that in optimal circumstances there would be a series of treaties and the treaties would hold.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
and everybody could have their cake and eat it too. There's going to be conflict because there's always conflict between, well, herders. There's certainly conflict between hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, herders, and industrialists, right? So those conflicts are going to emerge. You could imagine a series of treaties that would mediate that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
I mean, complicated to establish and to maintain, especially given the unbelievably vast cultural differences. But I guess that's what you'd hope for, for a non-warlike solution. And some of that did happen in North America and in Africa. But I want to add- It's still happening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Just that one thing. Like the stirrups that allowed mounted, armored Europeans to become knights. Right. And then to go to South America and... wreak absolute havoc because they were basically the equivalent of tanks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
That and throwing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, right. So these things, from our perspective as industrialized people, these look like trivial technological transformations. But, you know, what's trivial is not obvious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Because the presumption, first of all, what most people in the West know about South Africa, you could put in a very small thimble with enough room left over for another thimble, and that includes me. And so it's not like I studied that in high school, for example. And so people know nothing about South Africa, like really nothing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
So, you know, I read, for example, that when the Europeans went, especially into the Pacific, especially the Pacific Islands, this happened to many, certainly Stone Age people that they came across, that they were prone to distribute steel axes like they were nothing. Well, these are people who, if you were the big man in the kingdom, you had a really nice stone axe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And those bloody Europeans came along and were giving away steel axes like they were nothing. It was a little on the demoralizing side, you might say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, okay. So... So you said that the antithetical history would be, well, the black people owned the land. And so that's like all black people are the same people. And they had a concept of ownership. And ownership applied despite the fact that these were widely dispersed nomadic tribesmen. Ownership applied to all. All the land, like over what district?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
I mean, that's something that's sort of ambivalent. You said when the scouts went north, they found huge tracts of land that were unoccupied. I mean, even in European, say British, English, British common law now, if you leave a tract of land uninhabited,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
if there is an tract of land that's uninhabited and someone comes along and improves it and builds a domicile, at some point they obtain rights over it. Because there's a deep principle that if you're not using the land, it doesn't belong to you. Certainly not intrinsically and even under a contract. Because you can end up with, and squatters rights can obviously be taken too far.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
But we should note that there is a principle that if you're not using it, you don't own it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Well, then that begs the question, and now we can, let's turn from the historical to the more political, and then we'll start talking about the current day in South Africa, because I think we laid the groundwork quite nicely. So, the typical...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
observer of south africa pretty much buys the the land was inhabited by the black people and then the white people came and stole it they buy that narrative right so given the complexities of the situation and the fact that as you just pointed out most historians worth their salt
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
tell a story that's somewhat approximately akin to the story you just described, why is it that that isn't the story that's widespread in the West as such? Why do you think that is?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And they certainly don't know anything about its settlement patterns. And so I suppose people use the analog of the European settlement of the Americas, which is also a very complex story. I mean, by the time the Pilgrims got to the eastern coast of the United States, there are estimates that 95% of the Native Americans had already died there. from measles, smallpox, mumps, etc.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Is there any of that in South Africa among the Bantu? No, no. Like literally none? Is there any streams of black thought, let's say in South Africa, where there's guilt being manifested for what happened to the Bushmen?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, so that's one example of remorse for expansionist overreach, let's say. Yes. Because I'm curious about why this would be particularly a European malaise, right? Because it seems to be particularly a European malaise. Does that have something to do with the intrinsic peacefulness of Christianity? Maybe?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
I mean, we don't have to wander down that rabbit hole, but it is an interesting thing to speculate about. Why has this become... Does self-hating become a Western obsession?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah. Okay, is that part of the reason that you noted earlier that the enlightenment skipped? Yes. Okay, develop that a little bit then.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, so that's interesting. That could be actually an indication of something that I think was part of the reason for the destruction of Rome. And Nietzsche wrote about this a fair bit. So imagine you have a relatively homogenous local community. Let's call it Christendom. Okay, well, there's a lot of fractionation inside Christendom, a lot of factions fighting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
But roughly speaking, there's an overarching ethos, which is Christian in its essence. And even the warring parties agree on many things. Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
But now you expand and you expand and you encounter, well, the Chinese, let's say, and you encounter the Indians, the actual India Indians, these sophisticated alternative societies, the Buddhists, the Muslims, who have cultural traditions as sophisticated and rich as your own. Well, so Nietzsche's take on that was twofold.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
He said, well, first of all, you think you're right to begin with, but part of the reason you think you're right is because you don't know any other ideas. It's like 14th century Christians didn't believe Christian things. They weren't like enlightenment rationalists who adopted Christian superstition. I mean, they looked at the universe through a Christian lens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
There wasn't another viewpoint, apart from a couple of secular people and some heretics. It was like, The world was Christian.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
That's everything about it. You know, you see... There's no contrary philosophy. Okay, now you expand. Well, and you're also doing this with regards to the Enlightenment discoveries and scientific. And now there's like eight competing viewpoints, each of which has the same depth, let's say. And so... At some point, you have a terrible case of indigestion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And then Nietzsche says something even more subtle than that. He says, well, you know, first of all, there's a monolithic worldview, and so you're pretty secure about that, because that's just the way things are. Then you encounter these competing belief systems, and they're pretty compelling, and competing ethical systems as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And then it starts to become a question, when it never was, who's right? Well, good luck sorting that out. That's what wars are for, right? It's really hard to sort that out. But then Nietzsche says something even more interesting. He said, well, you have belief system one, and then you encounter belief system two, and you see there's a conflict, and it isn't obvious who's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so the settlement story is extremely complex, but it's even more complex in South Africa, and they're not the same. So could you enlighten everyone who's watching and listening about the settlement patterns, the relationship between the land and the Europeans and the Black Africans? And let's just lay that out so we know where we stand first.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Then you add belief system three in there, and you think, uh-oh, it's not just that there's a conflict in belief systems. It's that the idea that there's an absolute truth itself or even truth itself now becomes questionable. That's when moral relativism makes its ugly appearance and nihilism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so not only do you lose faith in your initial unquestioned presuppositions, but you lose faith in the idea of certainty itself. And then you have no strength. I mean, I think part of the reason the Romans couldn't withstand the barbarians, let's say, is because they died of indigestion. Like, there was no unity of purpose anymore because they had bitten off more than they can chew.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And you could certainly, I think, part of the reason the UK is in the dreadful situation that it's in now is exactly because of that. It's like, when you go to India... and you're a little island and there's hardly any of you, and you go invade India, it's a real toss-up who's invaded who.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Like you might have the upper hand for 50 years, but when you're outnumbered by a factor of, what is it, 100 at least, who's going to win that contact is by no means obvious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, yeah. Then you get a kind of ethno-fascism that can develop out of that. Yes, and that doesn't work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Because we also believe in individuals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, but even that presumes that there's something like boundaries, right? Like, so that you can each have your space, so to speak. And so there's a metaphysic under that even, which is, well, there can be treaties and the treaties are made between sovereign, what, individuals or at least sovereign peoples.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And even that can be, as pointed out, say, in the massacre, there was a treaty there, well, you know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Well, the fact that there's eternal war between different tribes is an indication of the complexities of negotiating such things, right? But it is the case as well that there's two streams in human history, and one stream is kill the foreigner, and the other stream is no. We've got our differences, but they have something to offer and we have something to offer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And if we can get the trade arrangements right, we could both be better off, right? And, you know, well, that's the battle. It's like, can you get the trade arrangements right? That's really hard. And if you don't, well, then it's capitulation or mayhem, right? So we're trying to figure out how to get the trade arrangements right. And you guys are right on the cutting edge of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Let's flip to the modern time. What was the relationship between the apartheid state per se and this notion of separate homelands?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, now this book of yours, Kill the Boar, let's flip to the modern times. Yep. Now, you know, I can remember in the 1980s going to McGill, and at that time, apartheid was a major issue. And we should let everybody listening and watching know what the apartheid state was exactly, so we get that clear. But there was immense pressure, especially from the more radical end of the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
political belief spectrum to divest any investment in South Africa, to put pressure on the government to dispense with apartheid.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And I watched that and I thought, well, apartheid's a pretty brutal regime and it has its marked catastrophic disadvantages, but you bloody radicals, you're messing with things you don't understand and you're virtue signaling like mad and you're not gonna have to bear the consequences of your idiot interference. Because I figured, and I still do, that the most likely outcome
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
for South Africa is that because of the vast disparities in population size and distribution of wealth, is that the white South Africans are gonna find themselves in serious trouble. Now that already happened in Zimbabwe, right? That already happened in Rhodesia. And we haven't talked about the relationship between those states and South Africa at all yet, but we might.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Interested in and terrified by.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
But like the most likely pathway forward is the one that requires the least intelligence and effort, right? Because there's way more ways for things to deteriorate than for them to improve. There's like one way for them to improve it, a million ways for them to go wrong. And the wealth disparity in South Africa is a major, major problem, like a massive problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And that has to do with land ownership as well. And so it seems to me that... There's great danger, at least, in that as an outcome. And now I've watched, especially in the last few years, because let's say for the 35 years since the 1980s, I don't remember exactly when the apartheid state disintegrated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so things maintained a somewhat stable... equilibrium until five years ago.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
What was the relationship between the apartheid state per se and this notion of separate homelands? Exactly. So there were nations or states set up like a federation, essentially. And they were... Racially or ethnically or both? Like how are the states configured?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, well, we've seen where that goes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, well, this whole suppressing communism thing is a very complex rabbit hole as well. Exactly. The communists turn out to be quite a lot of trouble, especially in places where there's a lot of wealth disparity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
That's certainly... It's hard to exaggerate the threat of communism. Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. Especially in... in parallel with wealth disparity, because it's a revolutionary ethos. Exactly. And one that results in nothing but bloody brutal murder and mayhem, starvation. Like as a solution to the problem of disparity of wealth, it's not a good one.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Tell people what the townships were and are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
things went not too bad. As apartheid fell apart, it could have been like the fall of the Soviet Union. It could have been a lot worse. It's quite the miracle that it wasn't just absolute bloody mayhem immediately. And there were a lot of remarkable people who took leadership at that point to make sure that it did go
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, well, walk through that. Tell everybody what... what has unfolded and what the current situation is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, well, let's rephrase that a bit. There's a difference between rich and productive, right? Yes. Productive people have something for themselves, but they produce a lot for other people. And from what I understand about, well, I think this is true in Zimbabwe, Rhodesia, and South Africa, it's like, well, the South African farmers... They feed the country. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
So if you do what was done in Zimbabwe and you confiscate the land because the rich people own it, the oppressors, you confiscate the land. Well, then what happens? Well, everyone starves to death. That doesn't... Then everyone's equal because they're all six feet underground. Exactly. Yeah. So like the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Part of the problem we have in the West is that language has been captured so completely by the left that it's almost impossible to have a discussion like this without using their terms. Like most pro-free market people in the West talk about capitalism. That's a really bad idea. It's like, it's not capitalism. It's free market.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
It's not the rich versus the poor exactly in South Africa, as if the rich only have what they have because they took it from the poor. It's like, no, the South African farmers, most of whom are white, actually know how to farm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
So one way they did this, which is- They were Dutch, a lot of them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
They are. That's their status in the European West. Right. So go Dutch farmers. They're rich because they make stuff.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
You know, there's actually an anthropological theory about human beings that's relevant to that. So, you know, we evolved in our genetically modern form 350,000 years ago. Okay, so one question is, well, what the hell were we doing for the 330,000 years before the Ice Age, say? And the answer is, well, we were engaging in non-stop intertribal warfare.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And then within our own tribes, every time anybody got something that everyone else didn't have immediately, we just killed them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
We had to figure out how to let some people have more than other people some of the time. Because the alternative solution is like, imagine a new product comes along, like a flat screen TV. Well, the first people to get the flat screen TV are the billionaires.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
But if you wait five years, then everybody gets a flat screen TV. You have to wait. And so if the socialist idea is something like, well, if a new innovation comes along that makes people wealthy, it can't be implemented until every single person can have exactly the same amount all at once. Well, so it looks to me like the cost of innovation is inequality. Because things have to start somewhere.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Now, you know in the West that if you're rich, what does it mean if you're really rich compared to just like middle class? It means your house has exactly the same amenities, but three times the square footage. It's like, or your car is... more luxurious while you're stuck in the same traffic, right? The incremental difference is truly it's trivial between middle-class and ultra wealthy, you know?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And I mean, people might say, well, you know, that's easy for you to say because you're rich. It's like, if you're middle-class, you're rich. And if you're too stupid to realize that, you know nothing about the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so in South Africa, but we know one of the things that promotes violence, like this is absolutely crystal clear from the anthropological, sociological, and psychological literature, extreme inequality breeds male violence, like mad, because low status... poor men have nothing to lose by engaging in mayhem, right? You see this in gang warfare.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
You see it, you know, so for example, if you look in North America, this is true across the world, places where everyone's poor, there isn't much violence. And places where everyone's rich, there isn't much violence. But places where some people are poor and some people are rich, look the hell out. And South Africa has got that in spades.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so the easiest solution for a politician, especially unscrupulous one, is to say, Well, you see those people over there in that house? They took it from you. That's what the bloody Bolsheviks said to the peasants. And that worked very effectively. It's like soon there were no people who were rich. Right. None. And then everyone was dead. Yeah. So, okay. So you guys have this problem in spades.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And the communist influence, it's stronger now than it was 40 years ago?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, tell us what that looks like. Like, can we start with the stability of the power grid? What's the difference between South Africa now as a modern industrialized state and South Africa, say, 10 years ago? What are you seeing fraying? What does it look like in the streets?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
With a massive population increase.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
People can adapt like unbelievably well. And the new normal becomes normal so fast. It's just like, I just remember during COVID, it's like, Six months in, it was like, oh, this is how life is. And you just forget about what it was like before. And part of that's a testament to human adaptability, but it's also an indication of the fragility of even our fundamental expectations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, so there's a level of collapse that is slow enough so people won't rise up.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
That's everywhere. People have their own diesel generators? How do you deal with that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Well, look, as soon as your infrastructure starts to deteriorate, the poor people... like people die from the bottom up, right? Literally. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And so water is an example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
That's right. Well, that's like failure as indication of our moral virtue. That's what the degrowth people would be doing in the West too. We're not economic failures. We're aiming at degrowth and man, we're hitting the target.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, yeah, when the water would be even a more crucial issue than power. Exactly. They're integral. What else do you see?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
They're a very ethnic and genetically separate group, right? There's a lot of genetic and ethnic diversity in Africa, more than in the rest of the world by a lot. And the Bushmen, those people are very distinct. In fact, I've read that genetically they're more akin to Asians than they are to black Africans.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
So that's really a reversion to something like it's quasi-feudal society at that point.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Whether it's electricity generation, whether it's water, whether it's private security, whether it's private education, those are the areas that are... So, okay, so your metaphor was not only is the ship going in the wrong direction, so that's in... We're going to do more stupid things faster, but the additional complication is that all the evidence is that the whole thing is fraying at the seams and sinking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yep. Right. And that that's the most, well, of course, the most likely trajectory always is the disintegration of a complex and sophisticated industrial society, because those bloody things are impossible to produce and very difficult to maintain. And so now that one of the terrifying things that, you know, you brought up earlier is that, you know, whither goes South Africa, there goes the West.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
It's just like delayed. And, you know, that's partly why I'm interested in South Africa. It's like, hmm, okay. Let's not be thinking that couldn't happen here, because that is here for all intents and purposes. It's just on the cutting edge of here. Okay, now your book is entitled Kill the Boar. There's a reason for that. So why don't we delve into that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, yeah. So I'm just laying that out not to make any genetic claim of any sort, just so everybody's clear about that. But just to know that these things are extremely complicated and all so-called black people aren't the same by any stretch of the imagination. They're probably less similar from a cultural and genetic perspective than Europeans are to one another. I think you're right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
We've got about 20 minutes left, something like that, on this side of the podcast. Let's switch to the... cutting edge, let's say, of the revolutionary inclination in South Africa. Because I've really noticed, especially in the last two years, like things have been heating up like mad.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
You know, I watch X a lot and I follow a lot of South Africans and I'm starting to see, well, I'm starting to see some evidence of the worst of possible outcomes increasingly becoming likely. And so you're obviously concerned about something approximating that. So Let's delve into this particular phrase and illustrate for people where that came from and what it means.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
People do what they say they'll do. That's my view. You want to know what Hitler was going to do? Read Mein Kampf. You know, when you think people hide their motives, it's like, no, most people aren't sophisticated enough to have two personalities, the well-developed lie and the actual plan. People more or less do what they say they're going to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so when they're chanting Kill the Boar or singing about it, even if none of the individuals in that chanting mob would take the next step, the spirit that infuses the mob. The climate. It's already there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, right. Bullshit. No, seriously, that's not a metaphor. Well, come on, there's metaphors. And kill the X, that's not a metaphor. That's not a cover for some benign,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
for some benign revolutionary idea no it's like it's it's the it's the call to blood of the psychopaths wielding the sword and maybe there's some good thinkers around the edge you think oh they don't really mean it it's just a metaphor it's like make no mistake about it the worst of them mean it it doesn't take very many people to mean things three percent of the population
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, it doesn't need to be the majority of the population. Oh, God, no. The majority of Russians weren't Bolsheviks. Tiny percentage. Three to five percent, maybe. So, you know, you don't need that many organized psychopaths to wreak bloody blue murder. That's for sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Let's name a politician. Who's the guy who's been pushing this most?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they fight for economic freedom.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Now, has he been pushing the metaphor camouflage?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Well, it's over when they all die.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, I think you can make that case pretty bluntly. So there's a lot of diversity in Africa.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
That's standard Bolshevik nonsense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, that's the utilization of disgust. So disgust is a very, very dangerous emotion. Like people have this misapprehension that the German Nazis were afraid of the Jews. It's not fear, it's disgust. The thing about fear, fear freezes you and fear, if you're afraid of something, you also respect it. If it's disgust, you want to eradicate it, you burn it, you eliminate it, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
It's a disease, like mold. There's no quarter given. So any appeal to disgust. Oh, they would say it's fulth. They would say the white fulth. Yeah, blood purity, all those metaphors, they're all disgust, not fear. And so anybody who's making an appeal to disgust, boy, you better be thinking there's murder on their mind.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Only the thieves own it now. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, that's exactly what the bloody Bolsheviks did with the kulaks in the Ukraine before they starved six million people to death. Exactly the same place. Well, and you can see why it's effective, you know. You talk to people and you say, well, look at how miserable your life is. It's like, yeah, it's pretty damn miserable. Yeah. Look at those people over there. They have everything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Because all those black people are the same.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Why do they have everything and you don't have anything? Well, it's because they're evil people and they took it from you. Well, it kind of looks like that, especially you don't know any better. Yeah, the moral thing to do is to kill the cockroaches. Right. Well, then you think, well, where does our food come from? It's like, well, you know, we'll deal with that. Exactly. We'll deal with that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
when the Edenic landscape that we're promising makes itself manifest, which of course never happens, right? But you can see why it's so effective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah. Yeah, because it became a free speech case, didn't it? Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Well, the Jews in Nazi Germany, you know, they brought it on themselves. Yeah, it's their fault. Oh, no, that's the standard claim. Of course it is. Of course that's the claim. You know, that's the claim that's analogous to the claim is, well, they're conspiring against us. We better act before they do. You know, that's a genuine precursor to genocide.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Like when that kind of rhetoric starts, that's what happened in Rwanda. It's like those people, they're preparing to attack you. You better get ready. Then you add the disgust and you add the economic inequality and you heighten that with some ethnic tension. And you give people the excuse to go. Plus, they're so angry. And you can see why. People who are like...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
young and absolutely poverty-stricken with no hope, they're so angry. And if they have the opportunity to turn that anger into vengeance, even for a day, especially the worst of them, it's like, oh my God, all mayhem breaks loose. And then there's nothing for anyone. Well, oh well, that's tomorrow. You know, yeah, yeah, brutal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, well, that way you can make the racial story, the racial oppression story, for example, a lot simpler than it actually is. Yes. Okay, so is there any estimates for the number of people, of Bushmen people that were there, say, in the 1600s? Like, how densely populated was South Africa? And what part of Africa exactly are we talking about?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, kill the farmer. There, that's a slogan aimed at death.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Kill the farmer. Okay. Well, what are we going to eat? That doesn't matter. Well, that's what happened in Ukraine because they descended into cannibalism. Venezuela as well. Yeah, right. Yeah. I think this may be still true, but at one point in the not too distant past, so I mean in the last decade, it was illegal for doctors to list starvation as the cause of death.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
That's how the communists dealt with hunger. It's illegal to die of starvation. Oh, problem solved. Problem solved. Problem solved. Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, oppression Olympics.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, it's like the suffering of the Jews. That's a rough one because the radicals who play the oppression Olympics game won't let the Jews play because they're successful, right? So you don't get to play. You don't get to be in the oppression Olympics, even if you have reason to be terrified out of your skulls, say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, well, it's a counter. It goes against the narrative in a terrible way. The victimization narrative. Exactly. Right, right. So yes, that's definitely playing out in South Africa. There's no doubt about that. Yeah, yeah, because the rule is, the fundamental rule of that narrative is, if you're poor and dispossessed, you're moral and oppressed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And, you know, some people who are poor and dispossessed are moral and oppressed, and some aren't. And look out for the ones that aren't, because some of them are vicious, psychopathic, murderous criminals, and you don't need that many of them. And they're generally about 3% to 4% of the population. So heaven help you when they organize, right? And people are so naive about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Like, Africa's a wallopingly big continent, despite the Mercator projection. And so, and the people who... Americans think of as black. They occupy, mostly they occupy Africa south of the Sahara Desert, but north of, fundamentally north of where South Africa is. Like how far down, how far up were the Bushmen, how far to the north were the Bushmen, the predominant
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
You see that especially on the left. You saw this again in the Soviet Union because the rule was, well, if you're a criminal, then you're a part of the victim class, which is why the bloody Russians let the criminals run the gulag camps. You're a socially friendly element. Well, why are you a criminal? Well, it's because you were oppressed by the landowner. It's like, no, I'm a murderous thug.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
No such thing. Yeah. Just victims.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
The criminal. And the worse the criminal, the more the evidence for the victimization. And it's partly because, like, to give the devil his due, a lot of the radical progressive leftists, especially the sheltered middle class type, they're very agreeable. By temperament. They're empathic. They're maternal. They have no idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
There's no space in their worldview for the sort of person you don't want to have hiding under your bed at three in the morning when you come home from a party. It's like, those people don't exist. They're just victims. It's like, you wait till you run across one. You'll change your tune. But if you're protected enough, you never have to deal with that reality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
You know, because you're Jean-Jacques Rousseau and everybody's a noble savage. It's like, well, most people, most people are peaceful, even if provoked. Some people aren't. Right. And you better be able to draw the distinction between those kinds of people because otherwise you're at the mercy of the worst of them. Right. And this is a lesson that's very hard for people to learn.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Well, you guys are going to be facing this at no time flat while you all are already.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Fear-mongering.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so- Well, plus the entire country descends into like lawlessness, chaos, and everyone dies. Yep. Right, because if all the white South African farmers leave, That's 100% what will happen, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
It looks to me like the cost of innovation is inequality. Okay, now your book is entitled Kill the Boar. There's a reason for that. Hello, everybody. I've watched over a very long period of time the political and economic situation in South Africa both heat up and destabilize, and that's... taken somewhat of an accelerating turn in the last few years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, well, we've got five minutes left on this side. One of the things I would... So for everybody watching and listening, most of you know that we do another half an hour behind the daily wire paywall. And I think I'm going to concentrate mostly on what South Africa...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
what the Boers, let's say, the Boers who were concerned about this, what they would want to see from the West, politically and sociologically. So I'd like to do that on this side. We're only going to be able to do about five minutes here. But you can come and join us on the Daily Wire side for an additional half an hour if this is a topic of particular interest. That's what we'll talk about there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, so let's at least... lay out the outlines of that. Like, what do you see? What can the West, the rest of the West, offer under these circumstances to everyone in South Africa? Because this is an impending catastrophe for everyone. Like, it might be the white farmers that are first on the chopping block, and that's highly likely. But as soon as they're gone, everyone else dies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
the predominant human population in the 1600s.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
So this is not good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
So that turns South Africa into something more like Europe, let's say, where there are a multitude of nations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Well, you see the same thing playing out with the European Union at the moment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, the problem is, is that as the size of government mounds, the proclivity for society to become tyrant and slaves magnifies, right? You need those intermediary structures, which are something like, well, families, towns, cities, states, you know, maybe separate countries in some sort of federation with serious limitations on the top-down power, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
That's a subsidiary structure, the classic alternative to tyranny and slavery. And...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, well, that enlightenment emphasis on the atomized individual leaves no place for the... town, the city, the family, the state. We haven't sorted that out well in the West at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We missed the idea of subsidiarity. We don't know what to do with the complexities of... structured social identity, right? We figure the autonomous individual is the only unit of analysis. And that's true under very limited conditions, right? One of the conditions might be something like first approximation to cultural homogeneity and a Judeo-Christian metaphysic, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And so where that doesn't apply, you don't have atomized sovereign individuals
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Well, and America's got that right with its 50 state experiments. Yes. Because Americans are always doing something intelligent somewhere, no matter how many stupid things they're doing other places. Well, they keep renewing because of that. It's a miracle to see. Okay, we should stop on this side. And so everyone, join us on the Daily Wire side. We're going to talk more about solutions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
We're going to talk about, well, what the Boers, for example, in South Africa, need to see from the West. And Well, the pathway forward, well, really, what are we trying to avoid in South Africa? Mass murder and starvation, which is by far the most likely outcome, as far as I can see at the moment. So join us on the Daily Wire side to continue the discussion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale today for facilitating that and the Daily Wire for making this distribution of this podcast widely possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Like that's typical anthropologically. Most tribes refer to themselves as the humans, as opposed to everyone else who aren't the humans.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Okay, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right. Now, also the Bushmen, from what I understand, and like I don't know lots about the Bushmen either, although what I do know about them is that they were basically hunters and gatherers and trackers and that they were very sophisticated. Very nomadic. They had those little lightweight bows and arrows and the poison darts. Yes. And they're very good at running down prey, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And they can live where no one else can live. But also they weren't agriculturalists from my understanding. there were no places where the Bushmen produced like cities or dense population centers. Correct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, and very, yes, yes, well-armed comparatively speaking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right, right. The Bushmen... have those little bows and arrows with their poison darts, but those don't make very effective weapons of war, partly because the poison is long-acting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
For all those people who think, by the way, that the Bushmen were like peaceful agrarian communists and that there was no conflict amongst them, let's say, prior to the Bantu or the Europeans, the most common, if I remember correctly, the most common pathway to death for a Bushman man is through murder. So you can use those darts on other people quite effectively if there's a feud.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
I also know that the Bushmen, because they lived in small tribal groups, they didn't evolve a real judicial system, and often their disputes would turn murderous. And so in some of these areas where the Bantus, for example, came down, the Bushmen would use the Bantu judicial system, which was more advanced, as a means of mediating their own disputes. So I just...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
want to bring that up to put to rest any suspicions that the Bushmen, for example, were Rousseau noble savages and that everything was peaceful before civilization came along. It's like, that's not how the world works, even a little bit. Okay, so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
In the 1650s, the Europeans came to the very southern tip of Africa, and that was primarily a consequence of the trading routes, because people had to sail around the Horn. And they set up this settlement as a refreshment station, you said, for the sailors. And that would be the European sailors who were starting to trade in India and so forth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And in Asia.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right. So that's similar to what happened in North America. Yeah. Like there were lots of it. There was lots of allied cooperation. there were lots of peaceful and productive interactions between the natives and the Europeans. And it also depended on which Europeans. So the Cree in Canada were much more likely to ally with the English, for example, than with the French.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
So when did the Bantus start moving south? And why hadn't they done that before?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Yes. It's still surprising, isn't it, that so much of Africa was essentially unsettled. I mean, I know the Bushmen were there, but there weren't very many of them. And it's also a lifestyle that can't support that huge a population, it's a pre-agricultural lifestyle. Yep. So, I mean, there weren't very many human beings 100,000 years ago. So, okay. And so, all right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
So, the Europeans start settling in the southernmost part of Africa. It's the Dutch East India Company. It's primarily for trade. The employees of that company get acclimated to Africa. They realize that there's immense... productive farmland there. I read, for example, I know Uganda's farther north, but Uganda has enough arable land to feed all of Africa with no problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And a water table that's 200 feet below the surface of the country that's virtually everywhere in the country. Right, so Africa's, God only knows how many people Africa could support if it was well managed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
And because of that, I've become increasingly interested in delving more deeply into the history of South Africa to understand the context and then also the political situation on the ground in that country now. And I came across the work of Dr. Ernst Rutz, who wrote this book called Kill the Boer, this book, which was published in 2018. Now, he's also a filmmaker.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
That was probably a better use of time than reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau anyways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Should outline a little bit, probably, too, the conflict between the Dutch, the Boers, and the English. Yes, I want to get to that now. Okay, so we've got the setup now. So really what happened in South Africa was that there was a relatively small population of pre-agricultural tribesmen, the Bushmen, who were very ethnically distinct from the, let's call them Central Africans for the time being.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
There's much more practical things that we can do to keep people safe from climate change, let's say, than making everybody poor by making fossil fuels impossible to access.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
the big tech companies in the United States returned to their own narrow self-interest and made the right bloody decisions. Yes, really, it's really something to see.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Well, one of the scandalous elements of that is that there's no single town on the planet that runs entirely on renewables. There's no micro-projects, proof of concept.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, well, right. But they don't really run.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
They more die. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the fact that electricity prices spike toward the infinite as the wind stops blowing and it's nighttime, which turns out to be a real problem if you happen to be, like, in the winter. Yeah, yeah. You know, so, yeah, yeah. And then you need the parallel. The thing that's so bloody peculiar about that is that because these renewable...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
sources are sporadic and unreliable, you have to have a backup system that has the same capacity as the renewable system when it falls to zero. And so what you have is a new system built on top of the old system, being particularly catastrophic in Germany, right, where they shut off their nuclear plants and now use lignite-fired coal plants to augment their Unreliable renewable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I mean, it's complete insanity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
and simultaneously increasing our dependency on, let's say, dictatorial governments, is not really very wise policy, all things considered. And Alex has been an icebreaker in that regard, pointing out to everyone who will listen and listen carefully that...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And do you think there's any utility in the renewable energy sources? I mean— Yeah. You do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
fossil fuels all things considered are obviously and overwhelmingly a net good and that if we want to move forward into a future of abundance that it's necessary to get that straight in our minds and stop playing foolish games and we had an opportunity to continue that conversation today and to deepen it because alex has spent the last several years
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, well, the fundamental question under that has got to be something like, well, why would we take... off the table any potential source of innovation that would make energy more plentiful and more reliable. Right. Because we need it. We wouldn't.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Okay, so we talked at the beginning here when we were trying to structure this conversation. I noted, remembered that, you know, you had written these two books, A Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and then Fossil Future. And I asked you if you were writing another book. And you said, you kind of, you sort of said kind of, but you're not. You're focusing on energy policy per se.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And you wanted to step through the, you have five points. Yeah, five kind of big objectives. Well, so let's. I'd like you to go through those. And one of the things I want to return to at some point, because I don't want to forget about it, is how you view the role of nuclear power in this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
making his knowledge about the energy environment nexus more and more detailed at the practical level in a manner that enables policymakers to move towards an energy-rich, abundant, pro-human future. And so he laid out those ideas today in our podcast in a manner that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Way more plants, as a matter of fact. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah. Well, just get rid of the bears. Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yes, yes, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
is at least illustrative of the wealth of knowledge that he has that could be brought to bear for policymakers who are interested in developing exactly that kind of policy framework. And so join us for that. Well, I thought we might as well begin this by briefly evaluating the change in the conceptual landscape since 2022. I mean, I would say two years ago,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, and God only knows how much that'll be augmented by this electricity demanding AI.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right, well, there's a good practical lesson embedded in what you just said that everyone should listen to very carefully when they're considering negotiating. Like, if you want things to move in a particular direction, make it very easy for people to move in that direction. You want to do a lot of the work A priority that would be necessary to help them move in that direction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
If you go to your boss with a problem, it's very useful to accompany that with a solution that's thought through and already ready to implement. It's much more likely to occur.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Well, and if you have some idea about what a solution might be desirable for you, coming armed with the strategy that would make that simply implementable and some indication that you've thought through the consequences radically improves your chances of success. Otherwise, you're just a pain, the kind of messenger that gets shot at.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Well, why would we take off the table any potential source of innovation that would make energy more plentiful and more reliable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
the stance that you had been promoting, like a positive stance towards fossil fuel, was not only, what would you say, controversial, but could we say fringe? And I don't think that's the case now. And I think that has a fair bit to do with you, actually, which is quite cool. And so... That's my sense, broadly speaking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Well, I really like your emphasis on the nexus between... energy provision and human flourishing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I mean, partly, you can make a pretty blunt case for that from an environmental perspective, even if you're rather radically environmentally oriented, in that if you realize that you impoverish, if you impoverish people, which you certainly will do if you make energy expensive, if you impoverish people, you make them desperate. And desperate people are not investing in a green future.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
That's for sure. They're going to rampage through whatever resources are available to them in very short order. And so I got convinced of this. well, probably 15, 20 years ago, when I started to understand the statistical data indicating that if you got people's GDP up, average GDP up above $5,000 a year in US dollars, that they started taking a long-term view of the future ecologically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's like, Well, of course that's the case. And then I thought, that's so cool. That means that you could work really hard to make energy inexpensive and people rich. And one of the consequences of that would be that people would be much more attendant to genuine ecological concerns locally and over time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yes, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Correction gratefully accepted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's not like there still isn't all sorts of work to do to make the case for fossil fuels. But how are you feeling about, you know, if you evaluate the landscape over the last two years, how are you feeling about it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And that's also a concern that is in many ways importantly separate from the issue of nuclear power anyways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like a lot of these politicians want to do... Well, someone might just come along and capitalize politically on your ideas. That's certainly a possibility. But they need to be
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But we had this thing— Well, you've definitely broken the ice for those arguments. Yeah. At minimum, right? At bare minimum. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yep.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And then just ask questions and interrupts. Absolutely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right, right, right. In the world of- Because of IT.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Well, what you see in Canada, as far as I can tell, to the degree that there's anything remotely like logic driving this, is that, well, Canada has a responsibility to set the kind of moral example that other countries like China could follow, and do not, in the least, follow.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And the same with India and their economies that are of such a scale compared to, say, the Canadian economy, that that example is essentially irrelevant. Now, you know, you could argue that the Canadian fossil fuel industry is comparatively clean in its approach, and maybe there's some benefit in that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But the idea that if Canada sets a moral standard, China is going to fall suit is, it's egotistical beyond belief, and it's utterly preposterous. Plus, there's no evidence that it's happening. So that's a major problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
That's only valid if you take that pro-human perspective that you described to begin with. Yes, yes. There's much more practical things that we can do to keep people safe from climate change, let's say, than making everybody poor by making fossil fuels impossible to access.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Oh, I think we might as well just go through them in order. I think they're all extremely interesting, and you can go into them in as much detail as you see fit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Are the AI systems helping you? Yes. No?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So it's preposterous economically. And that's on top of the fact that the... what would you say, a detached analysis of the cost benefits in relationship to carbon emission has not been conducted properly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
One of the things I just can't figure out, and then we'll get back to these five points, is like, I've spent a lot of time looking at scientific data, and there's a pattern to doing that that works to some degree across disciplines. It's hard to know the details of the discipline if you're not an expert in it, but the pattern of evaluation is similar.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
When I look at the carbon dioxide data as a whole, and I think, well, what stands out to me in this mess of consequences of carbon dioxide? I would say the thing that stands out to me most is the magnitude of global greening. It's overwhelming. And then I think, and it's not only overwhelming in terms of its magnitude, right? So immense areas have greened.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's also the case that the areas that have greened tend to be semi-arid areas. And so when I look at that, I think, well, if you were looking at this neutrally, at least the question of whether or not that's a net good should arise. Yeah, the CO2 on its own, leaving aside the energy that's coupled with it. Yeah, just the CO2, right, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And that's being accompanied by about a 13% increase in crop productivity in consequence of the additional CO2 emissions. Right. Well, that's just an example of the preposterousness of the claim that carbon dioxide sequestration is something that makes sense. It's like, well, actually, that stuff might be useful. Plus, it's really, really expensive to sequester it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like, you already made the economic case. That's devastating by any reasonable standard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right, of course.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I think you're pointing to the fact that there isn't a better medium to long-term strategy than the truth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I don't endorse anybody. It's very important because what you did was you focused on addressing the problem. Yes. Right. And that was the focus and not the consequences of that. And you're pointing out that the medium to long-term consequences of that really couldn't have possibly been more positive. It took a long time. It's a long-term investment strategy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But yeah, I found exactly the same thing. It's exactly the same.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It doesn't even mean that you're right. But it does mean you can be trusted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yes. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Oh yeah, well, let's return to that for one second before we go back through. So a point you made very early is that energy transformed into work has substituted for labor. And so we trade energy for labor. And now we're trading energy for intelligence. And intelligence itself is a labor multiplier. Yeah, exactly. So the question is, well, is trading energy for intelligence a good trade?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's like, well, that's what we do. That's what human beings do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Well, it's a good thing for every individual who buys it, so in the aggregate, it's probably going to be pretty good. Yes, yes. Well, and it's what you want to do when you hire someone to do a complex job. You're going to pay for intelligence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Although not the people who are demanding more energy so that they can make faster artificial intelligence systems. They're not underestimating it. And that's what they're driven to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Poor ones do, they run on wood and metal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It helped me a lot when I was writing my last book. Oh, interesting. I used the AI systems a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To sketch out research domains, you have to check the references, you have to make sure it's not lying to you. Yeah, yeah. But you can do that. You have to be careful with it and you have to, you know, interact with it intelligently.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But yeah, and we've built specialized AI systems too that some of them based on my work that I consult because, well, that's an extension of my thinking and that's been extremely helpful. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
That's alexepstein.ai.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Oh, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So it'll question the premise. Yes, exactly. That's very funny. Yeah, but that's one thing we had to change. That means it accurately reflects you. Yes, yes, exactly. It's just as annoying in some circumstances.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
If you had put your five points here into one of these AI systems, could you ask it, for example, if we were moving in this conceptual direction, what policy changes should be implemented, prioritized by their benefit to cost?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Before people mucked around with them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, yeah. Because it's a Pareto distribution issue, right? There's going to be a couple of things you could change. They're going to have a disproportionately positive effect.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, that's exactly my point. Yes, definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Okay, I'm going to guide you through these one at a time. So I think what we should do is let's go through them one at a time, and you can hit the highest point that you can think of for each. And then we can go back if we still have additional time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right, so that's a red tape reduction process.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, okay, okay, okay. Got it. Because it produces this infinite, exponentially expanding network of litigation in the aftermath of the review. Right, so activist groups can weaponize it. Yeah, have. It's their weapon, yeah. Right, okay, great. The renewal subsidy issue.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
and secondarily cost. That's a real conceptual switch.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
that I think it's related to the point that you made earlier is that there's going to be criteria for acceptable sources of power. And one of the fundamental criteria is going to be reliability.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Assuming it's reliability.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And compromise the reliability of the grid across time in a degenerating way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's a terrible thing for an Albertan to think about.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
You just can't support any industry, which means your country becomes more... Especially the kinds of industries that depend on being on 100% of the time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Environmental quality cost-benefit analysis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
What would you replace that with? Can you tie that back to the energy issue that we're focusing on? You're making the case that the basic cost-benefit assumptions underneath many of the current policies are radically wrong and counterproductive. Yeah, so what would you replace it with?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Serious risks, not like the risk of having- Like driving to work, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yes, exactly. The storage is just so prohibitive. Norway's having a fit at the moment, right? Because they're having to export their electricity because of the treaties they've signed. And their power supply is so unreliable that they're having spot price hikes of up to $1,000 per kilowatt hour, something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
To give you a sense, there's a really— So you're basically making the claim, if I understand it properly, that the— The thorny problem of how to calculate the value of a life in economic terms is just to turn to productivity. What you basically say is, well, the typical person has a productivity level of this amount, and that's how we're going to value their life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
That doesn't mean that's what their life is worth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's the same issue. It's their life-sustaining ability. Yeah, well, you can't translate that into economics.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
That's the economics. That's the economist's repose to the Malthusian biologist. It's not a zero-sum game because if you free up time for innovation, you transform the territory that would otherwise be zero-sum.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yes, right. Yes, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, well, you can see why the approach that you're taking is difficult because as you cascade down the levels of abstraction to the detail, the details multiply. Yeah. And the complexity multiplies, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I really like your emphasis on the nexus between energy provision and human flourishing. So I had the good fortune to speak again today with Alex Epstein, who I spoke with two years ago, almost to the day. Alex is the author of two influential books. One, the first one, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and the second one, Fossil Future. And Alex has been beating the pro-human era.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right, right, that's a big flaw.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So we don't want to program an AI with the Clean Air Act.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, right, no kidding.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's a desert. Yeah. And it's really nice to live there because there's water.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Or endless sunshine in the desert for solar panels.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
We learned that in Canada when Jasper, the town of Jasper, burnt to the ground. Because people ignored the federal government. They ignored the fuel load that was gathering around the town, despite repeated warnings.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Well, or even to the forest itself. I mean, one of the problems as far as I've been able to tell is that if
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
forests are managed in such a way that that undergrowth builds up and builds up when they do burn which they will they can burn so hot that they burn the topsoil out yeah right so that's obviously not good for the long-term viability of the of the forest itself yeah i mean this question but when you're thinking like what exactly does that mean like who's the forest is just a collection of things so it's not like the forest is like one little right it's like not a forest being but yeah in terms of the forest for any purpose you would want it for
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's a purity violation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
If they were in it, they would die, too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, quickly. Okay, so let's close with comments on nuclear.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like exposure to immunological... agents in childhood.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Oh, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So... So what's interesting about talking to you? Well, I think, first of all, it's a sense of relief, I would say, because it's quite remarkable watching you delve into the details. You know, you differentiated the energy problem into five major tranches. And then you've developed this very detailed knowledge of each of those tranches.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And it was obvious that we were just scraping the surface there. And it's like, you can understand, it's easy to understand and consequently, of talking to someone who's developed the kind of detailed knowledge that you've developed, just exactly why it is that so much public policy fails, right? There's a lot of work to be done at the level of detail.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's very, very difficult to understand exactly what the obstacles are. And it's very, attractive intellectually and morally to hand wave at the highest level of abstraction possible, right? And that hand waving is part of the problem that causes all the impediments, that produces all the impediments that you've been describing. So now, you're hoping... Just one quick comment on this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And Apple gets credit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I see, I see.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, well, you're straddling this weird divide between public notoriety, which is one skill set, and your ability to delve into the details of policy at a micro level. That's a very rare combination of interest and ability.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right. They don't have the public face.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Why do they pay it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right, right. Okay, so let's review it for the people who are just going to be listening on audio. Tell me again the right places of contact, your email address, and then the other proper places of further investigation online.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So, okay, so for everybody who's watching and listening, we're going to switch over to the Daily Wire side now. As most of you know, that's going to happen. That's another 30 minutes. I'm going to talk to Alex about some things that are more personal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I want to talk to him about how he learned to be an effective public speaker, because when he started doing this and started envisioning it, he was absolutely terrified by that proposition. And so I'm very interested in how he... how and why he overcame those initial hesitancies and inadequacies, let's say, or inabilities. We want to talk about how to improve your information diet.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So I suppose that's something that Alex introduced to me, that idea, just before we started the podcast, and I presume that's a way of strategically approaching the problem of what sources of information you expose yourself to online and elsewhere.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And we're going to talk about parenthood as well, and how maybe you balance that with a productive career, because Alex has recently become a new father. So if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side for that, we've got another half an hour to spend with Alex Epstein. And in the meantime, Thank you, sir. Thank you. It was a lot more fun to do it in person. Yes, definitely, definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It was, yeah. Well, I'm also struck, you know, like I really enjoyed talking to you the last time we talked, and I've enjoyed talking to you every time we've met, but, you know, you seem to be operating at a... another plane of analysis at the moment, and it's really quite something to see.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I mean, you're a wealth of information that's not only very well thought through from the perspective of first principles on the philosophical side, But all of that's integrated with all this wealth of detailed information that you have at hand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And that should be an invaluable resource for public policy makers who actually want to make a difference in this pro-human direction that you've described, which is crucially important to everyone, crucially important to everyone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Behavioral psychotherapy in particular.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, well, there's something to be said for clarifying things conceptually, and there's something else to be said for differentiating the conceptual into the behavioral. Here's something you could actually do that will serve these ends. Yes. Yeah, that's kind of an optimized approach, isn't it? Because you clear up the conceptual and you lay the groundwork for a practical movement.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
That's the shit. So can you walk everybody through what's at the base of the demand for the IT? I know it's associated with artificial intelligence and these massive banks of computational banks they're producing, but I'm unclear about the details. What is it that's drawing such immense resources of power?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, right, which is meaningful action. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good to see you, man. Likewise. Yeah, yeah, great talking to you. Yeah, and great listening, for sure. Yeah. Anyways, thank you, everybody, for your time and attention today. And check out the web resources that Alex described.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
You can, especially if you're politically minded and in a position of political authority, because there's a tremendous amount of work to be done in the domain that Alex is describing that could have nothing but, you know, an endless stream of positive benefits. So we want to get right on that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
energy slash environment drum for some 17 years. And with increasing effectiveness, I would say he's one of the people at the forefront of the dawning realization that impoverishing humanity and destroying the industrial infrastructure of the West while making energy spectacularly expensive and unreliable
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Yes, it's definitely the case. Let's delve a little bit deeper into what happened. I want to lay some propositions before you. When October 7th made its presence known, The first thing that occurred to me, and correct me if I'm wrong about this, if I have some misapprehension, the terrible hand of Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Iran has absolutely no compunctions about sacrificing every single Palestinian to the cause in as brutal a fashion as possible to capitalize on the public relations scandal that can be made of that. They've got no feeling whatsoever for the Palestinians. They're pure cannon fodder in the eternal war against the great Satan and Israel, right? The US and Israel. That seems appropriate? Absolutely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Okay, so what the hell... I went to Oxford, you know, and the first bloody thing that those halfwits asked me when I was on stage was if I was happy about this tweet I made on October 8th, which was, give them hell, Netanyahu, which I paid quite the price for, let me tell you. And although not so much a price as many people have paid, put it that way. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
What's Israel to do when they're faced with a disposable people, so to speak, that will be sacrificed at a moment's notice by their own leadership, by their own corrupt philosophy, and by the mullahs of Iran? What possible response could Israel have except to roll over and what, submit?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
The disconnect, the fact that the propaganda exercise and what would you say, the zeitgeist of the West was such so that Israel was demonized almost immediately after the attack for daring to defend itself. And then Douglas's conclusion from defeat into victory. Well, that's where the conversation got a little bit more,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
One of the things that's striking about your book is your continued explication of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, psychopaths, their willingness to exploit every element of human decency to wage the most destructive possible of wars, right? So the tunnels, let's go into that for a minute. So Gaza is 11 by 11 miles, approximately 140 square miles, 350 miles of tunnels, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Longer than the London Underground, which is a stunning fact, stunning fact.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
6,000 entrances, many of them in the bedrooms of children.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Theological, possibly, and inevitability when talking about the existence of good and evil.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
sufficiently victimized perpetrators have no reason to abide by any standards.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
The terrible hand of Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran has absolutely no compunctions about sacrificing every single Palestinian to the cause. What possible response could Israel have except to roll over and, what, submit?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Or a hospital or a place of worship. None of those words have the same meaning in Gaza that they do in the West.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
We discussed Douglas's observations that the Israelis have been very successful at pushing forward a truly pro-life, pro-abundance ethos, and the consequence for their thriving, for their resilience in the face of really insuperable opposition, and the meaning of that for hope, not only in Israel, but in the West in general, and a hope we most desperately need in these strangest of all times.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Right, right. Well, that's just testament to the fact that the Palestinians are essentially cannon fodder for the eternal war against Israel and the United States.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And believes Hamas reports.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Which, why would anyone ever believe Hamas reports?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Suffering and death.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Possessed by the spirit of Cain. Yes. And that accounts for some of the anti-Semitism too. So let me run something by you. I want to flip to how the world turned. So it is the case that when people develop post-traumatic stress disorder, they relatively rarely develop it in response to a tragedy, even if it's a painful tragedy. They tend to develop it, one risk factor is being naive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Join us for that. So, Mr. Murray, I read your book on democracies and death cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization. Yeah, it's a pretty rough read in like five different dimensions. It's brutal and unnerving and like terribly relevant and not merely relevant. merely because of the situation in Israel. So I think what we should do first is, I'm going to ask you questions about each chapter.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, let's say, assuming goodwill on everyone's part, including your own, and then encountering a situation, sometimes a situation that you're deeply involved in where malevolence raises its head. The West is very sheltered, and I would say blind to malevolence, blind to its existence. In the academic realm, there's no discussion of good and evil.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Evil is an archaic term, and malevolence is a consequence of trauma, right? A consequence of privation. And that's simply not the case. Now, I read a book a while back, and I don't remember which one it was, unfortunately, but it described... the erasure of the Byzantine Empire from the Western imagination.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
I was a relatively old person before I really had any sense at all of the extent of the Byzantine Empire or the catastrophe of its demolition. And the author of this particular book believed that the defeat of the Byzantine Empire by the Islamic world and maybe by the psychopaths of the Islamic world was so traumatic to the West that we just erased it from our historical memory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And then it seems to me, Douglas, that something like that is going on right now. I mean, let's talk about the universities for a moment. Now, there's a fair bit of pathology in the universities, a fair bit. It's like top to bottom. They're absolutely incorrigible as far as I'm concerned, especially the Ivy Leagues. They should be ashamed of themselves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
They should be deprived of all funding, as far as I'm concerned. In any case, the protests that emerged there and all across the world, you detail out with some great sadness and amazement. But I think part of it is that it's not within the purview of the people who are protesting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
to replace their theory that the victims are uprising with the notion that a malevolent cult of death that worships sadistic suffering and annihilation exists. It's too far outside their worldview. Now there's more to it than that,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Iran is, you saw that the Ayatollah, this is the most amazing thing, the Ayatollah himself congratulated the American universities, or the universities of the UK for that matter too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Yes, it's an ignorable detail, clearly. Then there's another issue that seems to be operating at the universities. A disproportionate number of the protesters, or the protester puppets, you might say, are young women, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And so there's something to that too, because it's in the nature of young women, I would say, to adopt the mien of sympathy towards victimization and fail to see the predators lurking underneath the... underneath the rocks, let's say. Women haven't traditionally fought wars. They're not necessarily equipped to identify actual enemies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Their proclivity is sympathy, and that's exacerbated in the case of naivety. And there's a great intermixture of pride in that too, in that female sympathy can, what would you say, overcome overcome the pathology of victimization. That's Eve, as far as I'm concerned, clutching the serpent to her breast. And the universities have become feminized to a great degree.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And then there's this incredibly deep, and people overall, I think, in the West have no idea how pathological the universities have become. The social sciences, the humanities, run on an oppressor-victim narrative, and everything is seen through that light, and you can learn the tenets of the oppressor-victimizer narrative in five minutes, and then you can explain the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
It's a short book. There's five chapters. It starts with what happened. And there's questions everyone has. How did the Israeli security forces miss this? How could something like this happen? What did happen? Who was responsible? So let's start by laying that out. What happened on October 7th?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
I mean, what eyes would you... Especially without giving some due credit to the fact of Western eyes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Those Western eyes who defined ancient artifacts as treasures to begin with. Right. Then it becomes self-evident.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Let me put a twist on that. Tell me what you think. So it seems to me that the pride story is slightly perhaps more complicated than the tale that you laid out. So there's this initial presumption of Western centrality, let's say, that you pointed to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
But see, one of the things I saw at the University of Toronto shortly before it became impossible for me to work there was this insistence by my colleagues that there was no moral pathway, no more productive and moral pathway that a student could be invited to take than the pathway of protest.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Right, okay, so now the protest, see, it's not only that the students are characterized by this overweening certainty in Western... What would you say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Yes, yes. It's that by... See, they posit this malevolent force that's centered in the West, but then they position themselves as adversaries to that force. And that's the prideful twist. It's like, we're so horrible here in the West, but I'm so good that even though I'm part of the West, I'll do everything I can to oppose that. And then they're egged on by their... by their idiot professors.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
It was only the fastest growing empire in the history of the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
We'll get back to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
You can see the protests as a manifestation of that attempt to expiate. Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
But they themselves- Well, they see Israel as the vanguard of Western colonialism. Exactly. It's the whole story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And no wonder that people rebel against that, because how the hell else are they going to expiate the guilt?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Culpability with no virtue. That's one of the most striking examples of that, I believe, is, you know, I was probably 40 bloody years old before I knew who Wilberforce was. You know, to my eternal shame. It's all part and parcel of the message that what the Western colonial powers were responsible for slavery when the truth of the matter is that the Great Britain in particular waged war for what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
175 years on the high seas to eradicate slavery for the first time in history?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Canada leading the pack, perhaps.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
There's an assortment of weak and appalling ideologies, most particularly the idea that the world can be explained in consequence of the oppressor-victim narrative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Yeah, proletariat-bourgeoisie, it's the same bloody story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
The facade is banal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
So when did you decide, when did you come to that conclusion? Like what, and is that a theological conclusion? I mean, when you start talking about the landscape of good and evil, you're perilously close to the religious world or you're in it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
You know, when I dealt with my clinical clients that were severely hurt by malevolent actors, the language became religious because there was no other way of discussing it. And that had nothing to do with my machinations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
There was no language they could use to describe what happened to them that wasn't profound enough to touch on the religious because the depth of horror was so great that no other language suffice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And that's one of the things. There's a level underneath that. It's doing it knowingly and gleefully to spite God And you don't understand evil. I don't think you understand evil if you don't understand it as the ultimate in rebellion against the fact of existence itself, the spirit of existence. Well, hence death cult.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Or serial killing pathology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Worshippers of death and suffering, right? Sadism taken to its extreme.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Then the university celebrated it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Well, hell is a bottomless pit, you know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
You need a cover story for your Sadism, Douglas. And the most effective cover story for the worst acts of sadism is precisely the use of God's name in vain, right? Because then you combine the worst possible sin, which is demeaning of what's most high with the worst possible action with a gleeful delight in the suffering of others. And what do you get?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
You get two for one if you're on the side of the sadists. You know, when psychologists started to study non, what would you say, the manifestation of psychopathy in the normative population. They identified three cardinal traits to begin with. Machiavellianism, use of language for instrumental purposes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
If I'm a Machiavellian, the only reason I'm communicating with you is to gain something only for me now, right? No communicative intent other than that, right? So it's a false offering. Psychopathy, so that's parasitical predation, right? And narcissism, the desire for unearned status.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Okay, well, that was the dark triad, but they had to add sadism to it because those three things in combination appear to inevitably lead to sadism, which is exactly that gleeful delight. And then once you've compiled those four demonic traits within you, once you've turned yourself over to that spirit, why wouldn't you claim that you were doing it in the name of what's highest?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
How the hell else would you live with yourself? How would you not stop your soul from shredding? Well, and it is part of that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
You're enjoying it because it's wrong. Right, that's part of that pride.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Yeah, and you're pretty damn willing to learn it too, because boy, that gives you absolute license to do whatever the hell, whatever possesses you, wants you to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
That's how you demonstrate that the suffering is irrelevant. With that casual consumerist gesture, right? And that, what would you say? That perversion of hospitality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
There's an immaturity and self-centeredness about psychopathy that's probably intrinsic. So, and it does vary to some degree with temperament. Like there are violent two-year-olds. Most of them are socialized by the time they're four. And the ones who aren't are never socialized. They burn out in their twenties. But immaturity itself is egocentric and pleasure-seeking and power-dominant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And there's no reason to assume that you couldn't maximize that with the proper training. I mean, we train people. I know it's a rough... realization if your soul is Rousseauian and you believe that there's nothing but good in the heart even of children. And it's not that I have anything against children and I think they're delightful, but before they're socialized, they're not social.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And so it's not that hard to maintain not being social. And then the consequence of not being social is you're alienated, you trust no one. So then you live in a society where, what's it like to live in a society where you can trust no one, where there's no social groupings, where everyone's hell bent on destruction? Well, it's gonna turn you against the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And that's a temptation to begin with. You know, in the Cain and Abel story, Cain's temptation is to nurse resentment in consequence of the failure of his second-rate offerings, instead of to learn. And he kills Abel, and he fathers the genocidal masses.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
The Abraham Accords signatories deign to notice that and thank God for some small mercy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
There's no land except desert. There's no water except the sea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
They're all victims of the colonial enterprise, right? They bear no responsibility for their own misery.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And boy, the worst of your people can really delight in that. And you just have to let them loose and encourage them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Well, Cain's descendants are genocidal, and then comes the flood. Right. That's the progression of the story, and it's causal. It goes from the failure of the individual, the willingness to turn to resentment and bitterness, and then murderous sadism, and then to be the father of the genocidal masses.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
That's the problem with looking at evil.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Yeah, right. Well, that's the next question that arises, right? That's exactly what, what would you say, the sequence of thoughts that occurred to me after I spent 20 years studying Auschwitz and the death camps and the Soviet Union and Maoist China. It's like, well, there's hell. There's some way out of that. There's some place that's not that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
There's a place that's as far away from that as you could imagine. And there's a pathway to that. Yeah, well, the mythological landscape is the world of good and evil. No doubt about it. So let's turn to the end of your book. Two parts, the disconnect, we've covered that to some degree, from defeat into victory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
So, one of the things that struck me about your book, and I believe this to be the case, is that as Israel goes, so goes the West. The reason that we're all obsessed with that part of the world, when there's many wars we could be talking about, is because... What is it? That's where the tire hits the road.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And it's not exactly 80 years old.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
It's a microcosm of the world. Right. Because the civilized so-called countries of the world are a tiny fraction of the countries of the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And so Israel, in its existential condition, replicates the condition of the West in a microcosm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Life more abundant, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Absolutely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
But one of the things... Like they're women to be covered from head to toe so they can only see out one eye and never talk. Maybe they want that. Maybe they want that. Since they're pursuing that... And...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
There's envy. We could talk about envy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
You talk about Hezbollah breaking apart and everyone fleeing after the leadership is taken out, right? Well, that's why the 100 men possessed of the proper spirit can defeat 12,000 enemies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Because the enemies aren't united by anything transcendent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And one that's manipulated as well very profoundly by the actors behind the scenes. And all the things that we talked about play into this. The refusal of the West to admit to the existence of malevolence, our inability to understand the difference between a just and an unjust war, our willingness to hide in the shibboleth that war is bad, which is hardly a moral claim at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Right, right, right. War, yep. Well, and you think about how easy it is to make the moral claim, for example. I've heard many people make this claim. I'm against the death of women and children. As if that's some sort of moral claim. As if that's not the basis of common humanity. No one can capitalize on that. Yes. On that what? On that profession of the morality?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Well, and that's that last-ditch attempt to, what would you say, to salvage the oppressor-victim narrative. That's the core, that's the staff in the center of the belief system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Now, your book ends, and we should wrap with this because we're coming near the end. Your book ends, I guess, on a quasi-theological note, right? It seems to me that the underlying conclusion that you drew, having admitted to the existence of evil, let's say, in a theological sense, at least technically, right? Because it's a language that expresses that landscape. It's at least that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And it is a pointer to the opposite, right? That's the thing, to say it again, about contending with evil, is once you admit to its existence, especially in its lowest forms. You're forced to grapple with the fact that the opposite exists. And then that points you towards heaven, so to speak.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Now, you structured your book so that your conclusion, which is actually somewhat optimistic, is that despite being faced down by a death cult that outnumbers them geometrically, The Israelis are still there. And they're thriving. And there are forces within the Islamic world that have recognized that and that are doing their best to what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Not even so much reconcile themselves to that fact, but perhaps even to welcome it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
yes and that that's held after october 7th which was a complete bloody miracle that was the abraham accords and that's what i want to talk to you on the daily about on the daily wire side because i would like to talk to you we didn't get into the issue of islam versus christianity and exactly how that might be conceptualized and mediated but i'd like to do that on the daily wire side for all of you who are watching and listening that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
that worship of life, right? It's the axiomatic presupposition that it's no different than the presupposition, I think, that people are made in the image of God. It's just different language. And that points to a transcendent good that's encapsulated in the Jewish scriptures and in Christianity as God. God's the spirit that demands that life be... Valued above all, really. Above all. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Not above God, perhaps. And that's more like a definition, you know? Yes. And then the question is, and I thought about this... for a long time. Well, what if you abandon your belief in the goodness of life? Job refuses to do that. The antinatalists abandon their belief in the goodness of life. The cascading consequences of that are genocidal. That's where it ends, always.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
And that's what's happening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Israel has the only positive birth rate in the Western world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
The Israelis have pulled that off and the Hungarians haven't even been able to manage it even though they're trying very hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Why is it that... So there's an anti-Marxist thing to say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
All right, sir. For those of you who are going to follow us over to the Daily Wireside, I'm going to talk to Douglas with equal seriousness about the interplay between religious fundamentalism and psychopathy with particular attention to the Islamic world. Why? Because there are signs of hope
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
for a rapprochement between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, mostly in the form of the Abraham Accords, perhaps in the actions of the United Arab Emirate, and perhaps the Saudis. Now, there are many things to untangle before that becomes a reality, and I would like to discuss some of those thorny issues with Douglas. If you want to join us on The Daily Wire side, that's where we're headed next.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Thank you, Mr. Murray. Thank you. Yes, that was a hell of a read, and it's quite a remarkable thing to have managed, and I'm amazed you're still in one piece, both physically and psychologically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Hey, everybody. So I'm talking today to Douglas Murray, who just wrote this book on democracies and death cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization. That's this. We basically walk through the book chapter by chapter. It's a relatively short book, although it doesn't lack in intensity. What happened October 7th when Hamas invaded Israel?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
It didn't really surprise me, I suppose, that there were security lapses. I mean, if you're dealing with an enemy that's absolutely committed, the probability that over some long span of time, they're going to find a way through your defenses. How is that not 100% if everything isn't locked down and there's any semblance of freedom whatsoever? So the explanation you offered about the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
what the mythical status of Israeli invulnerability seems to me to be the most effective explanation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Yes, fully for us, seriously.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Corrupt was sufficient.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Right. Hedonistic materialism trumps fanatical malevolence. That's quite the theory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Why not have both?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
He was the one who had such a remarkable obituary in the New York Times, if I remember correctly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
What I saw, Douglas' account of his sojourn through Israel in the aftermath of the catastrophe. How the world turned. We discussed the protests primarily originating on university campuses, much to their eternal shame.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
It's very common for people who are extremely malevolent to tell you exactly what they're going to do and then do it. Far more common than people think. And the fact that people are blind to that, that reality, points to something that we'll have to discuss in more detail. This insistence by naive people in the West that no such thing as malevolence exists, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
All perpetrators are victims until proven otherwise, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
546. The West Is Too Weak For Radical Islam | Douglas Murray
Well, no doubt they did. But there's plenty of people who had bad childhoods who don't turn into malevolent psychopaths.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, it's the rats.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
I taught at Harvard, let's say, in 1995. I was there from 92 to 98. And it was the most effective and admirable institution I'd ever been associated with by a lot. It was the students were super bright. A third of them were so smart, they'd catch on to anything you told them on first exposure. And the bottom third, who probably were geniuses at some other subject,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
they'd catch on with a little work. The senior faculty were great. The junior faculty were top rate and hardworking. It was really a good place. And it had a well-deserved reputation, which it had built up over decades by strenuously selecting only virtually only on the basis of merit.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
There was also some selection in terms of family history, but that didn't overall that didn't produce a decrement in student quality. And since 2010, There were some signs of rot in the 1990s because some of the departments, like English, had already become pretty politically correct. And I had my run-ins with the Department of... of English when I was at Harvard, minor things, but helling.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
But by about 2010, that whole reality, it just doesn't exist anymore. That's partly why we built Peterson Academy, because my sense, I've also been involved with Ralston College in Georgia, we are attempting there to build another bricks and mortar institution. And that's been quite successful. We've graduated three top rate master's classes at Ralston college.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
So, but it's, it's very, it's a very expensive enterprise. Whereas online, the price is well for Peterson Academy, the tuition is $600 a year. And so it's, Now we're not accredited yet. And that's partly because the accreditation agencies are also captured by the woke mob.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And so part of what your parents have to do is they have to understand that it's not 1995 and that you're not doing your children a service by sending them to Especially the boys. Well, I wouldn't even say that. It might even be worse for the girls now. And we could get into that if you'd like. Because I didn't purposely focus my attention on boys.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
It's just that when I started my YouTube channel, 80% of YouTube viewers and listeners are male. And so I picked up a big male audience. But it's not like the girls are in better shape. I would say arguably... on the psychological side, they're in worse shape.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
It's more than 50% of young women 18 to 34 who profess liberal political proclivity also self-report at least one diagnosed mental illness and rates of depression and anxiety In that population, 18 to 34-year-old young women have skyrocketed.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And we should also point out that the entire progressive enterprise would collapse if young women weren't being propagandized in a massive manner, not only by the universities, but by bad actors at the international level on platforms like TikTok, which what's happening to young women on TikTok is absolutely reprehensible. I've documented that with some of the people I'm working with.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And yeah, it's, and it's been terrible. Well, obviously, you can't demoralize young men without simultaneously terribly affecting young women, because what's harmful to one sex is going to be immediately harmful to the other. And so all this hand-waving on the part of the Democrats, it's too little too late.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And it's also, I'm certain that they don't have the wherewithal to do this properly because virtually everything they've set their foundations on is rotten to the core. As you can tell, everyone knows. That's why, what are the Democrats running at now in terms of popularity in the U.S.? Something like 27%.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
It's really good to see you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Yeah, well, that's more indication of just how deep the rot goes. I seriously can't see, and I don't say this with any satisfaction. You know, I really like McGill University in Montreal. I had a great graduate education there. I had a great advisor and I love teaching at Harvard.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And I really enjoyed the University of Toronto for the 20 years I was there before everything fell apart in about 2017. And I'm not the least bit happy to be pointing my finger at these institutions and say that they've not only lost their way, but that they're perverting and all of our young people and all of our institutions and that they're clearly not salvageable.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And I know why they're not salvageable. So the first reason is that they became absurdly administratively top heavy. And that happened pretty much from the 60s onward, where all the extra money that was devoted to education essentially went not to students and certainly not to professors or researchers, but to an ever expanding administration.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And that probably peaked around in terms of just administration. That probably peaked around 2010. And then the woke mob took over the administration. And so now that's who runs the universities. And you can get them to forego their DEI and equity terminology, but all they'll do is camouflage their same machinations under different headings. They already think this way.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Those are fundamental differences. They're not surface. They're not going to retool their epistemological commitments. They're not going to become different philosophically. They're not going to learn their lesson. And then on the faculty side, especially in the last 10 years, say, when you literally couldn't get hired at a university.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, first of all, if you were male and Caucasian, you could just take that off the table. But also if you didn't write a diversity statement that indicated your submission to or fervent advocacy of the radical progressive ideology. I swear allegiance to it. Absolutely.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, the goal was to bring university education into the 21st century and more specifically to find the best professors in the world and to bring them to everyone at the lowest possible price. And I'm in a fortunate position because I have interviewed and met thousands of people and I have a very large connection among academics and thinkers in general. and a reasonable reputation among them.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
In the University of California system, which was a great system for a long time, especially on the scientific side, 80% of candidates were knocked out of the running for beginning positions as assistant professors in the scientific realms because their diversity statements were inadequate. This was before their research dossiers were evaluated.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Now, you just can't imagine, unless you're a scientist, can't imagine what that means.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
The only thing that matters with regards to the prediction of your ability as a researcher, and this is statistically speaking, the best predictor of your future success as a researcher is the number of publications you had as a graduate student, because that's actually a direct index of how well you did your job.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And so to take that off the table in favor of racial categories and political belief means that the scientific endeavor is just dead in the water at the universities.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Yeah, well, so the reason the Ivy League diploma became so valuable is that from about 1960 onward, the universities made a concerted effort to select essentially on the basis of intellectual capacity, general cognitive ability. And that's a measure that differs widely between people, as everyone who's ever gone to school knows.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
you know perfectly well that in the average class of 30 kids, there's three kids that are outstanding academic performers. And there's three kids who just can't be taught even the basics without a tremendous amount of extra effort. Everyone knows that. And what the universities as a whole did, especially after World War II,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
but it really got going in the sixties was radically select on the basis of intelligence. And what that meant was that an Ivy league degree was a stamp of extreme intellectual competence. And that's why the brand value went through the roof. Now the effective intelligence on performance, isn't linear. It's exponential.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And so if you can select selectively for extremely intelligent people, you get a non-linear return in terms of enhanced productivity in consequence of doing that. And so the universities did that, especially with the SATs and the GREs and the LSATs and the MCATs, which, although there's a lot of noise around this, are fundamentally intelligence tests.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And so now if you can stamp your graduates with the assurance that they're in the 99th percentile for intelligence, then it makes perfect sense for every employer worth his salt to line up to hire them. Okay, but now what happened was the universities produced a brand that was of unbelievable economic value because of their selection technologies.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And then that got gamed by the progressives and the radicals. So they can destroy the universities by filling them with progressives, let's say, who are selected for reasons other than their intellectual prowess, to put it mildly. And there'll be some lag before everybody figures out that the degrees have lost their value. Now that's already starting to happen.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And so if I talk to them about Peterson Academy and invite them to lecture about whatever they would love to lecture about, they're very likely to do that. And we have an extremely efficient team. So we like to joke that we're 10 times the quality at 120th the price. And I actually think that's about right because at the typical large university, regardless of its reputation,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
A lot of the tech companies are moving toward their own selection because the universities are no longer viable as screening institutions. But these parents you talk about, like I said, especially in places like New York that are still democratic to the core, they still think it's 1995 and it's not even 2000 anymore. Like it's seriously not 1995.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Things have changed a lot and they're going to change more. We hope with Peterson Academy that we can keep our students on the cutting edge of learning and that we'll leverage all the new learning technologies to make that possible and be able to do that, as I said, radically, radically less expensively. We already have 50,000 students who've taken us up on the offer. And so...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
I can't, I really can't see, Megan, I'm really dead serious about this. You know, like I said, I was involved, am involved with Ralston College. I've had conversations with the University of Austin folks. If the universities were salvageable, that would be a lovely thing. But here's a thought. The universities are rotting everywhere, everywhere.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Okay, so one diagnosis is the reason they're rotting is because they're dead. Like their time is over.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, I've watched companies fail. big companies, tech companies, research institutions, all sorts of different large organizations. And it's very hard to stem the tide once it turns, very hard. And if your organization is only making one mistake, That might be fatal, but I think the universities are making – like I made a list once. I think they're making 10 mistakes.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Yeah, well, you know, there are schools that have managed to teach non-selected inner city kids extraordinarily effectively. There's a school in the UK called the Michaela School run by Catherine Birbelsingh, which has done a job that's so good, you just can't believe it. And so there are educational initiatives that can work and can work for minorities.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Catherine Birbelsingh School is minority dominated, The students are selected from low tiers in the economic hierarchy. And she graduates more students into Russell Group universities. That includes Oxford and Cambridge. Well, let's stick with Oxford and Cambridge to begin with.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
She graduates a higher percentage of her students into Russell Group universities than any other school in the UK, including Eton. And so the kinds of initiatives that are being proposed can work. But one of the comical things about Catherine Burbles saying is that Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
the bulk of the lectures are not top great, top rate. I'd say maybe 10% of them are, and all of ours are top 1%. And so you can learn a tremendous amount. We have a very good social network there too. free of bots and trolls and the sorts of people who make normal social media interaction quite the insanity-provoking ordeal.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And our social media site, The Quad, is very positive and upward-aiming, and people seem to enjoy it a lot.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. ,, young women need to make finding a husband and having a child a priority in their 20s, probably their early 20s. And then they can concentrate on their career if they're inclined to for the next 30 years of their life, just plenty to be a slave to a corporate entity.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
You know, I don't make clips like that and put them online, but people clip my lectures and Maybe they'll make a little three-minute piece where I'll say something like that. And it's inevitably the case that the comments fill up with comments from young women that are so vitriolic that they just make your hair curl.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
about this horrible old white man who's telling them what to do with their bodies, which is so idiotic because I'm trying to warn them. I had lots of women in my clinical practice who ended up alone and childless in their 30s and then got desperate about it, you know, because you get desperate about it. And let me tell you, that's not fun.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, that's a topic well worth delving into, partly because it would also enable us to talk a little bit about what's happening hypothetically on what is hypothetically described as the right. So I guess you might, there's a number of people who have influenced young men in a more conservative direction, and I'm one of them, and Ben Shapiro is another, and Andrew Tate is a third.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And I warned people back in 2016 that if they kept making men weak, that there would be a consequence of that because weak men do very terrible things. They turn, for example, for their models to people like Andrew Tate. Now, the reason I'm bringing that up in relationship to the clips that you showed me is because you put together three clips that
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
are predicated on the assumption that masculinity has this kind of brisk, pushy, I don't give a damn if I swear on national TV, because I'm so tough, kind of men to it. And it's very easy for weak men to assume that power, is the defining characteristic of a respectable man, like an actually masculine man. And that's what Andrew Tate, at least in part, purports to sell his audience.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
So now Andrew Tate is a very bad actor, to say the least. He's a pimp, an electronic pimp. And I think pimps are possibly the lowest form of male life because they are parasitic on women. And that's about as bad as you can get if you're a man. Maybe you can get lower because you could be parasitic on children. But being parasitic on women, that's pretty bad.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And he's taught his followers how to be this, you know, playboy Lothario type of love them and leave them, do it my way or hit the goddamn highway sort of attitude. And you know, if you've been demoralized your entire life,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
and you haven't been attractive to women and you're not doing well in your career and you're very disoriented and you've had no role models at all, then someone who has all the trappings of surface success like Andrew Tate, and who's very good at flaunting it, can look like just the medicine you need.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And to give the devil his due, I can understand why men who have nothing would at least want to have something. And I can see that Andrew Tate offers that to them. And that is not any advocacy for Andrew Tate, as I've already made my view of him very clear. Now, the left likes to think that Andrew Tate and me, for example, are gateways to the alt-right, and that somehow we're the same.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And we're not the same at all. And what I'm offering young men is a pathway to adulthood through responsibility, not through the exercise of power. Now, if you're powerful and you're strong and you're forthright and you're articulate, then you can harness all that power into your responsibility. And that can make you an even better man. But if you weaken men, they will 100%.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
they'll become nihilistic, they'll become hedonistic, and they'll worship power. And Andrew Tate is exactly the face of power worship. And you can bloody well expect to see a lot more of that coming down the pipes. And if the Democrats are daft enough to turn to a power representation of masculinity,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
because they're too foolish to understand the relationship, let's say, between responsibility and proper masculinity, then they deserve exactly what's coming to them. And what will come to them is no increase whatsoever in their approval rating among young men, because anyone with a clue can see through what they're doing in 15 seconds flat.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
But they'll also do nothing but promote people like Andrew Tate, and then we'll have serious trouble. That's for sure.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, it's partly because the left doesn't have a vision of responsible masculinity. So it's either, you know, soy boy or bully. That's their whole theory of masculinity. And if you're, you shouldn't be a bully because that's the worst. And actually that's not the worst. If you think bully is the worst, you know, very little about worst. There's way there's,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
abysses of hell that make bully look like paradise. And the Democrats, the progressives are very naive in their conceptualization of malevolence and evil. Like they tend to think that bad people are victims. It's like, that's because they, in their world, bad people don't exist. And in my world, bad people exist. And I know what they're like. And bully is
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
a pretty desirable form of bad person compared to the real monsters. And the Democrats just have no clue of that at all. And so they don't know. what sort of man a boy would admire if he was set on the right path. Because, well, for example, they think marriage is a patriarchal oppressive institution.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And so a man who's willing to offer himself as a husband and a father, well, he's just another bloody oppressor, isn't he?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, it is one of the paradoxical things about Elon, too. He's a very weird conservative, so he's not a conservative, and neither is Trump, obviously. Neither is Trump. No, and also, by the way, the divide in our society is no longer between left and right. Those categories don't even make any sense anymore as far as I'm concerned.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
I mean, one of the Democrats whose video you posted earlier pointed out that increasingly the Democrats are the party of women. And that's part of what's happening is actually we're actually seeing a sex divide in terms of political affiliation. But it's not because the women are becoming left and the men becoming right. It's because the left is now feminine and the right is now masculine.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And the political distinctions have become virtually undetectable and irrelevant. The old categories don't work. Now... And it isn't only that the left has become feminine and the right has become masculine, but that's a big part of what's driving the strangeness of today's political discourse. Because it's also the case that the Democrats have become pathologically feminine.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And that's not the same thing as becoming feminine. No, I get it. Democrats will say, well, the... The Republicans have become pathologically masculine and there is a danger of that, like Andrew Tate's the face of pathological masculinity, and you can see that to some degree in Trump, because he likes to throw his weight around and he's actually very good at it, but
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
fundamentally, like, first of all, you can look at his family. I mean, they're a pretty high functioning bunch. There's no Hunter Biden in the Trump tribe, you know, and he seems to get along pretty well with his wife. And she seems to be a pretty classy character. And she stays in her lane. And I don't mean that in any misogynist way.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Yeah, yeah. Well, and she's got enough humility to play her role well and to be apparently satisfied and grateful for that by all appearances. And so, you know, Trump is a blustery character and he's definitely got that kind of
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
throw your shoulders around masculinity that is attractive to people who confuse power with masculinity but he's also there's a lot more to trump than that i mean he's got a vicious vicious sense of humor he's got a tremendous amount of energy and he's been successful at like five impossible things just like musk and you can throw that away and
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
as you would if you felt that all forms of capitalist success are just another manifestation of oppressive patriarchy. But, you know, that's a pretty idiot theory unless you're a progressive leftist.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Sure, why not? You know, people have been after me for a long time because I've been speaking to disaffected young men. You know, what a terrible thing to do that is. I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, God, you know. It's very difficult to understand how demoralized people are. And certainly many young men are in that category.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, I'd like to say something in defense of Chris Pine momentarily. I heard through the grapevine, by the way, that he had no idea that that character was based on me until after he finished the movie and he started paying some attention to what I was saying and actually... I found out that he agreed with my stance.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
So now I'm not absolutely certain that's true, but I heard it from a very reliable source. So if I've got that wrong, my apologies, but I'd like to set the record clear if I do have it right. Well, that clip's very interesting because it indicates the, misapprehension of, first of all, what I think.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
It was interesting that the screenplay focused on chaos, for example, because it is the case that chaos and possibility tend to be symbolized with the feminine. And that's not my doing. That's the basis of literary symbolism and psychological symbolism for thousands and thousands of years. And it's partly because
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
The feminine is a useful symbolic marker for possibility because females bring new life forms into the world. And so chaos isn't the enemy of order. It's the dance partner of order in the transformation that leads to progress across time. So... She just didn't get that right at all, like not even a bit. And that's indicative of the shallowness of her analysis.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
You know, there is an element to me that's like a 1950s preacher, you know, and that's fair enough. I mean, I've been teaching people religious stories for 40 years. And I gather large audiences and the lectures are emotional and they're motivational. And so I can see why... People who think they're my enemy are set back on their heels by that because they don't know what to make of it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And that's not surprising because isn't it really quite remarkable that young men will come and listen to lectures about the Bible, for example? Like, what the hell? There's no logic to having that be a market or that they're happy to be lectured to about responsibility. Like, it really is a mystery. And it's not surprising that...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
artistic types on the left would try to figure out what the hell's going on. But the sad thing is, is they just got it so cataclysmically wrong. So, you know, it isn't, it isn't me or the soy boys, boys and girls, it's me or Andrew Tate. So you can take your pick. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend the worshipers of power. If you want to see toxic masculinity, like you ain't seen nothing yet.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And if you think it's married men who are like working that are toxically masculine, then look, here's an example. So, you know, Disney just nose planted remarkably with Snow White. And so in the original Grimm's fairy tale, which is a very, very old story, right? Because Grimm gathered these stories. We have no idea how old they are.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
There's indication that some of our folktales are 15,000 years old. They're really old, and you can't mess with them because they have a logic. Okay, so now you might ask yourself, well, why does Snow White have to run away from the evil queen? Who's the evil queen? Well, in the Grimm's fairy tale, the evil queen puts Snow White in a bodice that's so tight she can't breathe.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
So that pathologizes her sexuality. And then she gives her a comb that poisons her because that's the temptation towards narcissism. And then she feeds her a poisoned apple, which is exactly what the harpy ideologues are doing to young women to destabilize their identity and to push them off the reproductive tract. And so track. Both of those interpretations work, by the way.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, it's a little late in the game to be concerned about the sorts of things that I would say the progressives have actually produced. I mean, we've had four generations, say 60 years at least, of targeted demoralization of young men and, well, men in general. Boys, young men, and men in general. Because boys' play preferences are...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And so that's the Evil Queen. Okay, now, when Snow White runs away from the Evil Queen, where does she go to get her act together? Well, she goes to live among the dwarfs. And who are the dwarfs? They're hard-working, orderly, responsible, ordinary men who keep a clean house. And she learns to be appreciative of their ability to protect her from the evil queen.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And so she grows up and then she can find a prince. Right. And like these are the sorts of stories that I'm telling people. And when I tell them, they understand because the stories make sense. Like everything I said there is immediately comprehensible. Right. You think, oh, yes, obviously. Right. Well, it's not so obvious.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Not well, apparently controversial enough so that Disney would rewrite the entire story and spend a quarter of a billion dollars plus 150 billion on marketing to make a dull mess, right? And sink their damn company. And that's, well, that's just an indication, one indication of how absolutely messed up we are. You know, now that movie, I went and saw it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
It could have been a lot worse than it was. You know, they reverted back to the dwarfs and not exactly accurately, but it was still basically a feminist revolutionary screed. And even that could have been interesting, although it wasn't. And the evil queen wasn't particularly evil, but the evil queen that's teaching women right now is particularly evil. And she's already made one quarter of them
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
She's already knocked one quarter of them off the reproductive pathway. One in four. One in four. And so that's a complete catastrophe. And so, you know, Olivia Wilde, she's you know, you can understand it to some degree. She's trying to figure out, I imagine, how to balance career and public presence with family and more classic femininity, and that's a hard thing to get right.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
It isn't clear that we have figured that out exactly. We certainly don't teach young women well, and she's trying to figure out, you know, what the hell, why I'm attractive, and am I the same sort of creature as Andrew Tate, and am I like Trump or the worst of Trump? These are hard things to sort out, but but the way they were sorted out wasn't helpful.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And her movie wasn't successful because it was wrong. Like she didn't get the story right. The real story is a lot more interesting. You know, because one of the mysteries she could have delved into is like, Why the hell are people, young men, letting me tell them stories about the Old Testament? Like, how the hell did that happen?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And why is there a religious revival sweeping across the West in partial consequence? Like, that's a mystery. And you can say, well, that's because Peterson is a power-hungry misogynist. But I'm actually not power-hungry, and I'm not a misogynist. So that's a stupid story. And anybody who listens to me, who actually listens for more than like 10 minutes, figures that out immediately.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
So she just didn't... She wasn't guided by curiosity. She was guided by ideological pre-commitment, just like Disney. And that doesn't work when you're telling stories. They're dull.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
verboten in schools, which is why so many of them are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, which as far as I'm concerned is a category that rarely even exists and is radically overprescribed. Boys on average are more active than girls and they're less agreeable. So they're more of a, you could say they're more of a discipline problem. Depends on what you're trying to discipline them to do.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Yeah. Well, with regard to page, you know, like I think what's up to her, is it just an absolute bloody catastrophe? Like I, I think it's terrible, like seriously terrible. And I would regard her as a victim and accept that she paraded it. And the problem with that is that once you parade your self-destructive proclivity as a virtue, you're no longer a victim, you're a perpetrator.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And so that was the dividing line for me. Like she must've been stunningly, unbelievably, unimaginably unhappy to have gone through what she went through. And I can only imagine how she got there. And I think that the physicians and the counselors who enabled her in that, I believe they should be put in prison for the rest of their life. And I think it's absolutely unconscionable.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
So that's really sad. I used to watch Paige when she was a young woman on the Trailer Park Boys in Canada, which is this like off-color, hilarious Canadian sitcom. And she was so charming and so lovely.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Oh, yeah, yeah. She's such an attractive person. And I can't imagine how much pain... She must have had to do that. But you don't get to tell young women to do it. You don't, sorry, that's just not acceptable. And then with regards to the swimsuit model, like it has nothing to do with what I find attractive.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
It does insofar as what people find attractive has a universal element, which has been well documented by biologists, symmetry, for example. But the thing is, everything about that photo was a lie. It was a lie to manipulate the consumer because it was so radical. It was a lie because it's sports illustrated. And to be an athlete, you have to be physically fit.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And so they're, discriminated against as boys in the education system. And then as young men, they're taught that all of their ambition, their competitiveness, let's say, is nothing but a
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And morbidly obese and physically fit are opposites. And beautiful? Well, you could argue that Sports Illustrated should have never gone into the swimsuit model business, but they did. And it means that to accept that photograph as a valid model, statement of the truth you have to dispense with the idea of beauty and athleticism.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And I'm not doing that because beauty has value and so does athleticism. Now that doesn't mean that someone who's obese, who's eaten way too many carbohydrates because they've been diluted by their government for 40 years is not worthy of a certain degree of sympathy. I certainly regard obesity as a disease. I don't think it's a problem of willpower. I think that's a big mistake.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
I think that the Department of Agriculture gerrymandering of the food pyramid for marketing purposes, pathologized the whole society in an absolutely appalling manner. But that doesn't mean that obese women on Sports Illustrated get to be regarded as beautiful. No.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, we talked earlier a little bit about the shift in the political world to the toxically feminine. And the toxically feminine has a definition. It's uncritical acceptance. Right now, we can take that apart and we should. So it's really complicated because when you're the mother of a newborn, the right ethos for you to adopt is uncritical acceptance.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Because for the first nine months of a child's life, before the child can crawl, let's say now, you know, can get around by its own on its own. The right attitude to have to that child is that everything it wants, it should be given. And everything it needs is not only good, not only fine, and acceptable, but good. So it's complete uncritical acceptance. And so women have to have that capacity.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And it is a core part of what's admirable about femininity. But that doesn't mean that it's the sine qua non of morality. Like, you also need judgment. And, like, it's been known forever that the highest divinity, let's say, God, for all intents and purposes, rules with two hands. Mercy and Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
are contributing to the industrial desecration of the planet, that marriage is a patriarchal oppressive institution, and that what propagating the human race in general as a responsible man is the worst thing you can do for the future.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
I don't really see that a few scattered half-wit DEI programs aimed at rectifying the consequences of this idiot propagandizing are going to have the least bit of difference. They're certainly not going to get more men in the teaching system. That ship has sailed long ago. There is no faculty more corrupt than the faculties of education.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I didn't answer it the first night. There was something about the question I didn't like. And then it came up two more nights in a row and was voted up by the audience. And the third night, I thought, oh, I know why. I tried stumbling through an answer and it didn't work.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And conservatives have been asleep, unconscionably asleep, for 60 years while the faculties of education promoted the worst of all possible idiot academic doctrines, whole-word learning, social-emotional learning, self-esteem training, you name it. There's a stupid idea.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Oh, multiple intelligences, practical intelligence, all these complete travesties of psychological theory, all adopted by the faculties of education. The worst students generally become teachers. They have the worst professors. They are awarded for their pathological efforts, 50% of the state budgets, right?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And then the third night, I thought, oh, I know what the problem is here. That's the wrong question. Because the right question is, how do I make myself into the sort of person that's so attractive to other people that potential mates are lining up for me? That's a way different question than how do I find the person that's right for me? Like, first of all, Who are you? I like that.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
And what's so special about you that what the, how do you know that the right person wouldn't take one look at you and run away screaming if they had any sense? Like seriously, you know, you're settling. Are you, you know, um,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
If you use that language even, the first thing you might ask yourself is, why do you start with such a high opinion of yourself and such a low opinion of the people who are pursuing you? Now, look, I understand that it's necessary to be attracted to a potential partner, you know, and that women have the right and the duty to be picky.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
They should find a man who's gonna be not a child and who's gonna be very helpful to them In all ways, particularly when they have children, who's going to be a good father? And so, hooray to women for being picky. But that's not the same thing as starting out narcissistic. You know, we talked about Snow White. Before she could find a prince, she had to learn to be of service to the dwarves.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
That's worth thinking about. Now, you might think, well, why should we pay attention to a fairy tale? It's like, well, how about because people remembered it for 15,000 years and that Disney just spent a quarter of a billion dollars trying to retell it and failed. And so and then with regards to the order of affairs in a woman's life.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Look, I calculated recently that even an attractive woman, like radically attractive woman, let's say, who often has her own problems, by the way, because she tends to scare men away, right? A lucky woman has five potential partners in her life. Five. You get five chances. That's it. Now think about this. Let's just think that through, right? Because it's a terrifying way to think.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
So imagine that you're primarily looking, say, from the time you're 16 at the lowest end to, say, 30. Because after that, it's starting to get harder because the clock is ticking so desperately. One in three couples at 30 already have fertility problems, by the way, which is defined as difficulty conceiving within a year, even though the attempts are being made.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Okay, so let's say you got 14 years, something like that. Now, how long does it take to find someone and then figure out who they are, especially if they're strangers? Before you're going to decide to marry someone, likely you're going to want to know them for a year, something like that. And so that's five years right there with five people.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
But that also assumes that you go from one relationship to another with no intervening space. So you're not suffering too much, for example, when a potentially promising relationship collapses or you don't get sick or something doesn't waylay you in your professional career.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
I don't know if you know that figure, but K through 12 education eats up 50% of the state's budgets. And it all goes to teachers who come through the faculties of education because they have a hammerlock on certification, which the Republicans and the conservatives are still not paying any attention to. And so- You're not going to fix that problem.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
so imagine two years per relationship that's ten years for five that's assuming that people want to be around you so I don't know if you're settling it's I get the picture. You don't want to lie to someone and tell them that you find them attractive in all possible ways when you don't, but maybe you could start the bloody process with a little more humility.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, it's really nice to see you again. And thank you very much for the opportunity to talk again. I've been watching what you've been doing for, well, for a very long time. And you seem to be very useful and very successful. And what you're doing is very difficult. And it seems very helpful. So, you know, hooray for you. Thank you. Yeah, it was a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, first of all, the Democrats aren't interested in fixing it at all, because to call them in bed with the teachers unions and the faculties of education is to say almost nothing about how deeply in bed they are. Now, the Democrats know perfectly well that they've lost.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
The male vote, and certainly the young male vote, young men are more conservative than any generation has been in the memorable past, in living memory, let's say. And that's going to happen with young women eventually, too, because... Young women lag young men, right? Because young women like men, they're about five years older, four years older on average.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
So comparing young men and young women at any given time with regards to their political beliefs isn't reasonable from a psychological perspective. So... Yeah, keep going. Wow, it's terrible. What's being done to young men is terrible. And we're seeing the results of that. Well, that's partly why they're turning so... radically all across the world, by the way.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Young men are becoming more conservative and more religious, interestingly enough.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, post George Floyd, the big corporations decided that they were going to go all in on the DEI front and they just stopped hiring or promoting young men, Caucasian men in particular. And so why your sons, for example, or my son for that matter, should be paying the price for whatever hypothetical sins his ancestors hypothetically committed is, well, that's all part of the leftist notion that
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
people should be categorized by group and that the way you attain equity in the equity you know equality of outcome in the current milieu is by being prejudiced against people by in consequence of their race and gender yeah well thankfully a lot of that's coming to an end although let's make no mistake about it it's not come to an end in the universities i mean you know that or k through 12th
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, yeah, well, that's just done. And again, I put a fair bit of responsibility for this at the feet of the Republicans. It's like, have you guys been, you guys, I don't mean you specifically, Megan, obviously, but they've been asleep at the wheel for four generations. And even now, the Trump administration is taking aim at the Department of Education federally.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
But, you know, that's a tiny proportion of the actual trouble. The real trouble is at the state level. I can't see how the school system could be set up any worse. It's unbelievably expensive. It does a terrible job at making kids literate and numerate. It's radically propagandistic in the most insane possible ways.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
I mean, the idea that we should be teaching our children to be confused about their sexual and gender identities, period, but let alone in elementary and junior high schools, you couldn't do anything. You literally can't do anything to confuse children more deeply than to confuse them about whether or not they're male or female.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Well, you see, your story just highlights how deep the problem is because you're in private school and it's a high-end private school and still the same thing is happening. And so that's indicative of how deep the rod is. And the problem that the parents that you described still have is they think it's 1995. And that Harvard and the other Ivy League schools are what they were.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Canada NDP Leader STRIKES BACK at Trump’s THREATS
So the socialist policies that provide goods and services to Canadians, let's say, or denizens of other countries, by printing money, actually punish the poor brutally. Oh, absolutely. In consequence of the inflation that they generate.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump’s Attack on Canada Backfires in His Face
So thank you. Well, thank you, sir. It's been a privilege far more than a price, definitely. And it continues to be that way.
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump’s Attack on Canada Backfires in His Face
Carney showed up just in the nick of time to save the burning damsel from the train tracks or whatever the hell it is. The rhetoric. And then Trump, he just timed it so badly. And he didn't know. He didn't know. What would it would do? He didn't know. But that's also... How do you not know that people have national pride?
The MeidasTouch Podcast
Trump’s Attack on Canada Backfires in His Face
Yeah, he knew that, but he didn't know what the electoral consequences would be. He didn't know that that would shift them to the liberals so radically. And he's going to pay for that because once Carney is elected, if that happens, Trump will not have a more seasoned enemy in the West.