On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience: Train By Day, by Night, All Day, Jordan Peterson joins the show to talk about his new two-tone suit, the new Tesla Model Y, and how Elon Musk is using AI to censor the internet. Plus, we talk about why we should all be worried about the future of the internet, and whether or not we should be worried that it s going to be controlled by robots. Also, we have a special guest on the show this week: comedian and podcaster Jordan Peterson! Thanks to Jordan for being on the pod, and for being kind enough to give us a sneak peek of what's in store for us in the coming weeks. Joe and Jordan also talk about the latest in the Trump/Russia scandal, and some other things that have been going on in the world. And, of course, there's a little bit of sports, too. Enjoy, and tweet me if you like what you heard! and don't forget to subscribe to the pod! to get notified when we deconstruct the latest episodes of the show! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - Jordan Peterson's Two Tone Suits 4:30 - What's in the Future of the Internet? 6:15 - Elon Musk's New Model Y? 7:00- What's Next? 8:00 | What's next for AI? 9:40 - What do you think of Elon Musk? 11:20 - Who's going to clean up the internet? 16: What are you worried about? 17:00 18: What's the worst thing you'd like to see? 19:30 | What would you want to see in the most effective way to control the internet in the future? 21:15 22:40 | What s the worst piece of technology you're going to get? 26:30 27:00 -- What's your favorite thing that you re going to do with AI in the next episode? 29: What s your biggest takeaway from this podcast? 32:30 -- How do you want? 33: What do I think of the new technology? 35:00 // 32: Is it a good idea? 36:00 + 33:00 & 35:40 -- What s next? 37:00 Is there a better way to make it better? 39:00 And so much more?
00:01:15.000It's a black suit with platinum wires in it, which is kind of cool, and inside it's got black and white images of, like, really sharp, harsh graphic images of you and Brett Weinstein, and Ben Shapiro and Russell Brand and,
00:01:52.000Yeah, well, there's plenty of that floating around.
00:01:54.000Well, you know, I think when you have, like, complex, fascinating brains, they go off in all kinds of different directions, don't you think?
00:02:02.000This is one of the dangers of being creative, right?
00:02:05.000Most creative ideas are wrong, and a good section of those wrong ones are fatal.
00:02:10.000But now and then you get one that's necessary, so...
00:02:13.000Yeah, we were talking about Twitter files before we got rolling and what the new stuff is.
00:02:19.000So the new stuff has something to do with AI and some sort of content moderation?
00:02:25.000Well, Tabby released some Twitter files today on Twitter, obviously, and they're going through the code.
00:02:33.000Now, I don't understand the technical details, You know, you don't exactly know when you see the output of a code-generated system exactly what rules it's using to sort the information.
00:02:45.000I suppose that's the equivalent of shadow banning.
00:03:47.000Like, they never suspected that someone like Elon was going to come along and buy Twitter and then, in an unheard-of tactic, have a bunch of journalists review everything in all their Slack meetings and all their emails, look under the code,
00:04:03.000look under the wiring under the machine and find out how it was actually running.
00:04:08.000I mean, the fact that anyone would ever think that any of this stuff is a good idea, that people don't understand the dangers of censorship.
00:04:17.000They don't understand where this leads to.
00:04:20.000Yeah, well, we're seeing a little bit of that emerge on the right now, you know, which is kind of frightening to me.
00:04:24.000So I'm an admirer in many ways of what's going on in Florida, you know, with DeSantis.
00:04:31.000Him and Rufo, who I also think has got a bit of a clue, are trying to, what would you say, limit or even ban critical race theory.
00:04:39.000And the problem with that is you can't define it, right?
00:04:42.000So how do you control something you can't define?
00:04:44.000And the answer is you battle it out on the battleground of ideas.
00:04:48.000Because as soon as you start to try to define it and then try to censor it, well, first of all, that's just going to grow because that's how those things work.
00:04:55.000You know, like, where does critical race theory shade into Marxism?
00:05:12.000And so, once you get to the point where the government has to step in and regulate, say, what education systems are doing, you're already in deep trouble.
00:05:20.000Because I don't see how it can really be done.
00:05:23.000Because I can't define critical race theory.
00:05:25.000You know, I mean, more or less, you can get some sense of the cloud of ideas that's associated with it.
00:05:32.000But trying to draw the lines, how are you going to do that?
00:05:38.000Inevitably, no matter what your goal is to begin with, you're going to control a certain form, let's say, of pathological communication, misinformation.
00:05:48.000That's just going to play into the hands of people who like to censor, and that's just as likely on the right as it is on the left.
00:06:03.000Yeah, well, it's often even hard, except in retrospect, to understand a lot of what these things actually are, you know, because new clouds of ideas emerge and they kind of have an animating spirit and they have a set of associated, what would you say, presumptions.
00:06:18.000And you can often only see what that is in retrospect.
00:06:21.000You know, it took me a long time to understand whatever existentialism was, enough to sort of define it, phenomenology, these different schools of thought that occupied the thoughts of psychological investigators over a couple of centuries, post-modernism,
00:06:38.000It's not an easy thing to extract out the gist of those and define them.
00:06:43.000Plus, as I said, they have very fuzzy boundaries.
00:06:46.000What I saw with DeSantis was he had a concern that it wasn't just black history that they were putting into this critical race theory, but that he saw that there was queer theory.
00:06:59.000Which was in this thing that they were teaching in school.
00:07:01.000How does that have anything to do with black history?
00:07:04.000Why is queer theory inserted into that?
00:07:07.000Yeah, well, I think the way those are linked is essentially through what you might regard as, well, it's an implicit Marxism, but it's even deeper than Marxism.
00:07:16.000So if you're a Marxist, you basically have a heuristic that simplifies the world, and that heuristic is that you can understand any social relationship from Well, from an intimate relationship all the way up to the state by just dividing the parties,
00:07:33.000let's call them the narrative partners in a discussion or an interaction into those who are oppressed and victimized and those who are taking advantage of them and profiting.
00:07:43.000That's basic Marxist theory of economics.
00:07:45.000And there's obviously some truth in that because when systems become corrupt, that's how they operate, right?
00:07:53.000And every system tends towards corruption, and if your eyes are open a little bit, or if you're, let's call it, if you've moved from naivety to cynicism, then you can see every interaction has a power dynamic.
00:08:07.000And then that drives, as soon as you have that established, that idea that the basic relationship is one of power, well then you can see, well, there's no difference between what's happened to queer people In relationship to those in power and what's happened to black people in relationship to those in power.
00:08:26.000That's why I always make a case for the domination of something like postmodernism and Marxism.
00:08:32.000You know, I've been criticized for that, but I think it's inaccurate.
00:08:36.000The postmodernists figured out, and they were right about this, that we see the world through a story.
00:08:41.000Now that turns out to be something unbelievably complicated, and I think all the top end neuroscientists like Carl Friston are, what would you call, converging on this presumption that you have to see the world through a story.
00:08:54.000And the postmodernists actually figured that out.
00:08:56.000The French postmodernists, you know, Foucault and Derrida and people like that.
00:09:00.000But then they did something that was a sleight of hand, and this all happened in the 1970s.
00:09:06.000They said, well, we have to see the world through a story, and even if you're a scientist, you're not exactly objective, because there's a narrative driving your work that you might be unaware of.
00:10:47.000A complete absence of love and trust and respect and...
00:10:51.000Yeah, well, it's also not really how people operate.
00:10:57.000So there's an anthropological literature on the formation of elders in, say, traditional societies, because you might ask yourself, you know, who becomes an elder?
00:11:09.000And if you were a Marxist cynic, you'd say, well, those who used exploitation to dominate, like the priestly class or something like that, and that goes along with the supposition that...
00:11:19.000You know, religion is the opiate of the masses.
00:11:22.000And some of that's obviously true, but a lot of it isn't.
00:11:26.000They're the people who others go to spontaneously to ask for counsel.
00:11:33.000And then you ask, well, who do people naturally gravitate towards for counsel?
00:11:38.000And the answer is, well, productive, generous people who've managed their interpersonal relationships well.
00:11:44.000Because who the hell else would you go ask for advice if you had any sense?
00:11:47.000Like you might go ask the local dictator and kowtow to him if you need a favor to take somebody out, but if you're actually asking for counsel, you're going to ask someone who's decent and who's generous and who plays a reciprocal game.
00:11:59.000It's also the case, this is worth knowing too, The problem with a power game is that it's not playable, not in the final analysis.
00:12:07.000So Frans de Waal, the Dutch primatologist, has showed even pretty clearly in chimpanzees, you know, you think the roughest, toughest chimpanzee rules the damn roost and he pounds everybody flat and he gets access to the females.
00:12:21.000And there's a little bit of truth to that because Female chimps aren't sexually choosy, but the male chimps will chase weaker males away from them.
00:12:30.000And so if you are more powerful physically as a male chimp, you do have preferential mating access.
00:12:36.000But the problem with being a brute, even if you're a chimp, is that you have an off day and two of the chimps that you oppressed band together and tear you into pieces.
00:12:45.000And so what De Waal found was that in chimp troops, the stable alpha can sometimes even be the smallest male of the troop.
00:12:54.000He'll ally himself with some of the dominant females and makes networks that are essentially friendships, reciprocal friendships.
00:13:00.000And that gives him a stable position, not of power but of authority.
00:13:04.000And that's definitely the case in functional human societies.
00:13:09.000Now, it's tricky because if it degenerates, then it degenerates into a relationship of power.
00:13:15.000You know, and so that means the critics who make the claim that everything's about power are right in some sense when they're talking about nothing but corruption, but they're really 100% seriously wrong about the idea that it's power relation that constitutes the basis for the organization of any social interaction.
00:13:34.000You know, it doesn't work in your marriage, doesn't work with your friends, doesn't work with your children, doesn't work with your business partners, doesn't work with your customers.
00:13:42.000It doesn't work with politicians, although Here's another twist that's complicated.
00:13:48.000So, imagine you have a population of people who basically cooperate reciprocally.
00:13:52.000So, you know, I do you a favor, you do me one, and maybe we figure out how to advance each other across time.
00:14:19.000He's just an instrumental manipulator.
00:14:21.000But he can get away with it because there's enough wealth generated by the cooperators, you know, the honest cooperators, so that there's a space for someone to exploit the system.
00:14:31.000And that stabilizes that 4% of the population.
00:14:35.000So across the world, 4% of people are close enough to clinically diagnosable psychopaths.
00:14:43.000And that's probably better than being paralyzed by fear and anxiety and just staying in your bed.
00:14:49.000It's better in terms of reproductive success, let's say, and maybe even success in general.
00:14:53.000But it's not a good game because in the real world, Most psychopaths get found out pretty quickly.
00:15:00.000So, you know, you can screw somebody once and maybe twice, but then they figure it out and then word gets around.
00:15:06.000And so in the real world, two things happen.
00:15:09.000Psychopaths have to be itinerant so they can find new people to exploit.
00:15:13.000And the other thing that happens is generally non-psychopathic males who are fairly aggressive keep the psychopaths under control.
00:15:21.000And so, part of the reason that women like men who have some capacity for aggression, but who are still productive and reciprocal, is that men who are productive and reciprocal, who have some capacity for aggression, can keep the real monsters at bay.
00:15:37.000Because they have to navigate that really thin line between productive generosity And the capacity for aggression, that's a really tough thing to navigate.
00:15:47.000That's basically the story of Beauty and the Beast, the Disney movie, right?
00:15:50.000Because Gaston is a narcissistic psychopath.
00:15:53.000And the Beast is someone capable of aggression, but he's not tamed into a reciprocal relationship.
00:15:59.000It's also the basis of the most fundamental female pornographic fantasy.
00:16:04.000And the Google guys figured that out, you know, 15 years ago when they analyzed billions of...
00:16:10.000Sex fantasy searches by men and women.
00:16:12.000Men go for visual imagery, but women go for story.
00:16:17.000It's, you know, innocent young woman with a lot to offer, but kind of hidden, find some male, five categories of men, vampire, werewolf, pirate, surgeon, billionaire.
00:16:30.000And he's, you know, kind of an aggressive guy, but he's capable of being tamed into an intimate relationship.
00:16:36.000That's the standard female pornographic fantasy.
00:16:39.000And it's pretty much the standard fantasy of romance.
00:16:41.000And so you can see, you know, what women are trying to do in that situation is they're trying to find some guy that's got the capacity for mayhem, but that's under control, but who can integrate that into a productive, generous, reciprocal relationship.
00:16:57.000It's fascinating because the capacity for violence and the capacity for aggression is one of the things that's been...
00:17:06.000Actively muted in our male population.
00:17:09.000Yeah, well, there's a bunch of reasons for that, and some of them turn into positive feedback loops, like they're sort of self-fulfilling prophecies.
00:17:20.000So there's a lot of women out there who've never had a positive relationship with any male in their life, right?
00:17:26.000And maybe not only not a positive relationship, but really a series of pretty negative relationships.
00:17:32.000And so women like that are very leery of any expression of male ability of any sort, because they can't distinguish productive competence from arbitrary power.
00:17:43.000And because they're trying to defend themselves because they've been hurt repeatedly, maybe they come from broken families and catastrophically arranged neighborhoods.
00:17:50.000You know, one of the tactics that can be used in that situation is just to try to do everything you can to distance yourself as much as you can from any display of male ability because it can't be distinguished from psychopathy.
00:18:03.000It can't be distinguished from the use of power.
00:18:05.000It takes a sophisticated woman to be able to make that distinction.
00:18:08.000So the other thing you see too is that young women are much more likely to be seduced by psychopaths than older women because the psychopaths mimic competence.
00:18:38.000Then you look competent and that works particularly well on naive young women.
00:18:42.000And of course they get exploited by people like that and they think, well that's what men are like.
00:18:46.000Then women like that, you know, they have boys and then they're afraid of the boys whenever they express anything looking like masculine competence.
00:19:19.000And that your clinical psychology license is in jeopardy because you have opinions about politics that they disagree with, which is a very dangerous and bizarre turn of events.
00:20:21.000All these complaints are someone online.
00:20:24.000None of them are my clients, although half of them claim to be, falsely, and the college didn't throw out their complaints despite that, which is really quite interesting.
00:21:26.000Casting the profession into disgrace and then they submitted one complainant from the U.S. Submitted the entire transcript of our last discussion.
00:21:38.000So, you know, I don't know how to defend myself against that because apparently everything I say and apparently everything you say too is bringing the profession of psychology into disgrace.
00:21:47.000And I think they're most upset in that case about my comments about the inadequacy of climate models.
00:21:53.000And so, you know, what that has to do with my clinical practice is questionable to say the least.
00:22:22.000I'm going to write about this to some degree, and I'm writing a new book, which will come out in November, called We Who Wrestle with God, and I'll cover that in this.
00:22:29.000But Alex Epstein, who wrote Fossil Fuel Future recently, comments about this bit.
00:22:35.000So the basic structure of the quasi-religious belief, and so this is the set of initial presumptions.
00:22:43.000You know, we were talking about how ideas are structured earlier.
00:22:46.000The Marxists believe that everything's about power.
00:22:48.000There's a narrative at the base of any belief system and the climate pseudo-religion is based on characterization of nature as something like a hapless, what would you call, hapless, defenseless,
00:23:05.000The industrial activity of mankind is characterized as something like a rapacious, power-mad demolisher of natural virginity and beauty,
00:23:21.000and then the human being The individual is characterized as nothing but a devouring mouth whose activity runs contrary to the untrammeled beauty of the planet and that supports the activity of the tyrannical patriarchy.
00:24:08.000So you have to have some sense of the value of nature.
00:24:12.000Now, you also have to have some sense of the fact that if you were dropped in the jungle naked in the Amazon, you'd be dead in about 48 hours.
00:24:20.000So you also need a figure to characterize the negative element of nature, and that's completely absent from the environmental myth.
00:24:26.000That's part of what makes it pathological.
00:24:28.000And then, with regard to the rapacious tyranny, let's say...
00:24:34.000You know, any industrial system or any human organization can exploit the natural world to the point where that's not sustainable and it can become oppressive and tyrannical.
00:24:46.000That's the evil king, ancient part of religious mythology going back as far back as we can chase it.
00:24:52.000So you need a representation of the negative aspect of society Because, you know, you send your kids to school and they kind of get turned into these cookie cutter kids and that crushes their innate, what would you say, difference and beauty and it's all the pain of having to be socialized and you have to understand that there is this oppressive element of culture.
00:25:13.000And so, but then, you know, you should also wake up and notice that you've got the wise king, too, and that means you plug in your damn toaster in the morning and the electricity works and you go out on the street and everyone isn't rioting and, you know, there's workmen who are knee-deep in the sludge trying to keep everything going and you're not starving to death like everybody on the planet was in 1860. And so,
00:25:37.000a little gratitude for the positive end of the patriarchy is in order, too.
00:25:42.000That's completely absent in the environmental view.
00:25:44.000And then with regard to the individual, it's like, well, of course you can be a selfish, impulsive, hedonistic consumer, and you can facilitate the rapacious tyranny as a consequence of that rape the planet.
00:25:57.000But by the same token, you know, we're not a cancer on the face of the earth.
00:26:00.000We're not a virus that's mutating and taking out the planet.
00:26:04.000You know, and we're not trapped in a Malthusian nightmare.
00:26:08.000Credit where it's due and, you know, there's an element of people, of everyone, that's noble and generous and kind and productive and capable of living in a well-ordered state in something like sustainable and productive harmony with nature.
00:26:26.000Now, if you have no Comprehensive underlying cultural narrative, which is increasingly the case in our society, and someone offers you, when you're a teenager, half the religious story, that'll just snap you up in a second,
00:26:42.000because it helps you order your relationship with the world.
00:26:45.000So, Jean Piaget, a great developmental psychologist, he called the last stage of adolescence the messianic period, the messianic stage.
00:26:56.000Now, most people don't talk much about that, I think, because they don't know what to make of Piaget's claim, but he was a real genius, Jean Piaget.
00:27:04.000And he said, you know, when you're making that transition from the group identity that you're chasing as a teenager to becoming an individual, and that's not a journey everyone takes because lots of people just get lost in group identity,
00:27:19.000you're going to be looking for a pathway that's essentially heroic.
00:27:25.000And what that pathway should be is that you identify with your culture deeply.
00:27:30.000You are socialized deeply into the traditions of your culture, but you're also capable of transcending it.
00:27:35.000You know, so then you become a culture creator as well as a disciplined member of culture.
00:27:41.000But young people need to be offered something like a, well, a vision of destiny in order to catalyze their identity.
00:28:55.000And, you know, Macron says to her, oh my God, Greta, you're absolutely right, and bows.
00:29:00.000It's like, what the hell is a girl to think?
00:29:02.000You know, because what she really wants is to freak out a bit and for someone calm and reasonable to say, hey, look, kid, you know, the apocalypse has always been on us.
00:29:12.000It's always the case that the future has the possibility of being dreadful.
00:29:16.000But, you know, we've conquered terrible things in the past and overcome massive obstacles, and there's no reason at all not to assume that we can do the same thing.
00:29:52.000Randall Carlson was saying there's been times in our distant past where the CO2 levels and the oxygen levels were so fucked up that we were close to losing all life on Earth.
00:30:34.000Well, this is why I really respect Bjorn Lomberg, you know, because Lomberg's hard to grasp because he forces you to think complexly.
00:30:42.000You know, he says, well, we don't have one problem, carbon dioxide, which is, you know, I don't even think it's clear that carbon dioxide is actually a problem, but we can leave that aside.
00:30:51.000That'll get me in trouble with the College of Psychologists again.
00:30:54.000But, you know, Lomberg says, look, you know...
00:30:56.000It's a factor, yeah, yeah, but there's lots of factors and God only knows what the most pressing problems that confront us truly are.
00:31:04.000When I wandered through the ecological sustainability literature about 10 years ago and, you know, I concluded a couple of things.
00:31:11.000One was that the best way forward to a sustainable planet...
00:31:16.000Is to make everyone who's poor rich as fast as you possibly can.
00:31:20.000Yeah, not to put limits to growth on because it turns out if you get people above about $5,000 a year in average GDP, they start taking long-term view of the future instead of scrabbling around in the dirt trying to get lunch, you know.
00:31:34.000You're going to burn everything up around you to stay alive if you have to.
00:31:37.000But if you got a bit of wealth and now you can think over, you know, maybe a 20-year period, which is quite the damn luxury, then you actually start being concerned about, you know, the quality, the aesthetic quality of the local environment.
00:31:50.000And so I was so excited when I found that data because I thought, oh, this is so cool.
00:31:55.000It means that we could have our cake and eat it too.
00:31:57.000Work really hard to provide cheap, reliable energy, you know, at the lowest cost possible to the widest number of people worldwide, and the emergent consequence of that would be the whole planet would clean itself up.
00:32:11.000Because we could make our goal The eradication of absolute poverty, which we've actually done pretty good at eliminating over the last 15 years, but we could really make that a goal.
00:32:20.000And then one of the consequences of that, inevitable consequences, would be a greener and healthier planet.
00:32:26.000And then you think, well, why aren't we doing that?
00:32:30.000And I think part of the reason is, I've been trying to understand the driving ideas underneath this Globalist utopian tyranny that seems to be developing from the top down, and I think it's driven at least in part by this religious vision that I already described,
00:32:46.000you know, that you have to construe culture itself, especially industrial culture, as the tyrannical father raping and pillaging everything in its way, which is an unbelievably dangerous way to think, too one-sided.
00:32:58.000And the idea that you have to impose limits to growth on people in order to have a sustainable planet.
00:33:05.000And that's allied with a view that probably stems all the way back to people like Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s, who really believe Really believe, truly, that maybe the planet should only have 500 million people on it or a billion,
00:33:21.000you know, in relative poverty or two billion barely scraping by because otherwise they're going to be wrecking everything and, you know, controlled by some top-down authority that makes bloody well sure that no one's consuming too much.
00:33:33.000And so when I look at ideas like that, that first assumption, you know, the planet has too many people on it, it's like, I don't like to hear people say that, because when I hear that, I think, okay, buddy, who exactly are you thinking about getting rid of?
00:33:53.000So, you know, it's easy to get all paranoid conspiracy theorists about the WEF, say, and maybe there's some utility in that, but...
00:34:01.000You know, I don't think anybody's sitting at Davos going, well, we've got to scrap 7 billion people.
00:34:07.000But if the underlying narrative is the one I just described, you know, virginal planet, tyrannical patriarchy, and rapacious individual, and you believe, well, we're overpopulated, like Paul Ehrlich has believed since, really, literally the mid-1960s,
00:34:23.000How is it not going to be that the policies that you craft, stemming from that narrative, are colored by the belief that there's far too many people?
00:34:32.000Like, I've really felt that I'd be at war for the last six months.
00:34:35.000And I would say it's war because what I observed happening in Europe when I was there last was that, well, you can see this, you don't have to be in Europe to see it, but it's more direct if you're there, is that it's pretty damn clear that the globalist utopians are willing to sacrifice the poor for the sake of the planet.
00:34:52.000You know, and they're doing that by cranking energy prices up through the roof, and that means that people die.
00:34:57.000Lomburg has estimated that maybe you have to turn your thermostat down by three degrees, right?
00:35:04.000We'll pay you not to use your electricity between five and six, which is what they're doing in the UK. You turn your damn thermostat down three degrees, that sounds like nothing.
00:35:45.000And then you move farther down the pyramid till you get down to the bottom where most of the people are and they're barely clinging on to the edge of reality, right?
00:35:53.000It doesn't take much of a crisis to tip them into, you know, death.
00:35:59.000Well, what happens is you just take a bunch of those people at the bottom of the distribution, the poor that the left is so, you know, hypothetically concerned with, and they're just done.
00:36:10.000They go from barely hanging on to not hanging on.
00:36:13.000And their kids go from having some ghost of a chance of opportunity to having none.
00:36:48.000That'd be fine with me if the consequence of your actions, raising energy prices, for example, actually produced an improvement in those things you wanted to improve.
00:37:00.000So, for example, energy is more expensive, but now the air is cleaner.
00:37:05.000But that isn't what's happened in Germany.
00:37:07.000What's happened in Germany is energy is like five times as expensive, and the coal plants are back on.
00:37:13.000So it's like, even by your own criteria for success, you failed, and you did it at the expense of the poor.
00:37:20.000And, you know, the World Bank estimated, I don't remember how many months ago, it was probably nine months ago, that we're putting 350 million people on the brink of starvation because we're cranking energy prices up.
00:37:32.000And so for me, it's like, that's 350 million people.
00:37:36.000That's three times as many as the communists killed, you know, in their six decades of trying.
00:37:41.000And if your cure for the planet is, well, you know, we've got to put 350 million poor people in jeopardy just so that things are hypothetically better in 100 years, I think.
00:37:54.000And also, it's a little bit too convenient for me that your prescriptions to save the planet are accompanied by this insistence that the only way forward to that is to give you all the power.
00:38:05.000It's like, there's a bit of a moral hazard in that, don't you think?
00:38:08.000It's like, I'm just saving the planet.
00:38:38.000I hear it from you and maybe a couple other people that I... I actively seek out.
00:38:42.000But you would think that when you're dealing with such a complex issue that you would want to see the most brilliant minds think out, how does this play out?
00:40:17.000And then someone, Lomburg, comes along and says, hold on there, guys, we got like 30 problems, not one.
00:40:24.000And we need to rank order the problems, and we need to do a differentiated analysis, and your idiot interventions are going to cause nothing but unintended consequences.
00:40:32.000And no one wants to hear that, because number one, it's complicated.
00:40:35.000You've got to read the damn book, and you've got to think through his arguments.
00:40:38.000And number two, well, now where are you going to get your cheap moral virtue?
00:40:42.000You can't just be the messiah by waving a banner that says, I don't like carbon dioxide.
00:40:48.000And so that runs against a very, very deep narcissism.
00:40:52.000And so that's part of what stands in opposition to people, especially people like Lombard.
00:40:57.000And that's accentuated by social media.
00:41:10.000I mean, it can be gamed, and it is gamed, and we also even know the nature of the people who game it.
00:41:16.000There's a whole emergent psychological literature concentrating on dark tetrad traits, so we could walk through that a little bit.
00:41:24.000So, the standard personality models that produced the big five, extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, they were derived sort of with a primitive AI, that's a way of thinking about it, that looked for patterns of description across huge corpuses of linguistic data.
00:41:43.000It turns out, they talk about each other differently.
00:41:46.000Using five dimensions, and those are the dimensions I just described.
00:41:50.000But the people who derived the Big Five didn't use evaluative descriptors.
00:41:54.000They threw anything out that looked like a value judgment.
00:41:57.000So, for example, you might say of someone, he's a good person, and you might say of someone else, he's a malevolent person.
00:42:03.000Those descriptors weren't included in the Big Five corpus because they were trying to derive a model of normative personality.
00:42:10.000Okay, so, but that meant that the pathological personality wasn't encapsulated or well-defined.
00:42:17.000Now, this guy Robert Hare, who worked at University of British Columbia, as world's leading authority on psychopathy, and he interviewed hundreds and hundreds of psychopaths, and was always fooled by them, by the way.
00:42:29.000And then he had a student, Dale Paulus, who works at UBC, and Paulus developed a model of personality that was based on pathology, like on the dark side.
00:42:44.000That means Machiavellian is someone who...
00:42:47.000So let's say, if I was Machiavellian in our discussions, what I would have done was think, before I came here, I thought, well, you know, what can Joe offer me?
00:42:55.000And then I think, well, how can I play Joe with my language so I'm most likely to get what I'm, you know, the narrow, impulsive, selfish thing that I'm aiming at right now?
00:43:05.000So that's how a Machiavellian operates.
00:43:07.000A narcissist, that's the next part of the dark triad, is someone who wants social status without doing any of the work.
00:43:16.000If you're dating a narcissist or in a relationship with a narcissist, they'll alienate all your family members and your friends so that they get all the attention.
00:43:24.000And that'll just be the first of the games they play with you.
00:43:27.000Then you have psychopathy, and the psychopaths are parasitical predators.
00:43:33.000And so the predator will take whatever you've got and the parasite will live off you.
00:43:38.000And then here's a parasitical ideological statement.
00:43:46.000Well, if I want to live off you, the way I'm going to justify that ethically is by claiming, well, you know, Joe, look how privileged you are.
00:43:55.000You just took that from the oppressed.
00:43:59.000And if I'm manipulating you so that I get some of your money, that's only just because, first of all, it's exactly what you did, and second of all, well, why not spread some of that wealth around?
00:44:08.000So that's Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, dark triad.
00:44:13.000They've expanded that recently to add another dimension that was missing, sadism.
00:44:19.000And the sadist takes positive delight in causing pain to others.
00:44:22.000And the lulz culture, L-U-L-Z, the lulz culture online is a culture of sadistic, Machiavellian, narcissistic psychopaths.
00:44:31.000Lulz meaning like people are joking around shitposting.
00:44:56.000You have to have like six or seven things going on before it's clear that you're manifesting this underlying tetrad of personality traits.
00:45:05.000Like if you use the odd acronym and you're throwing out a joke at someone, this is a habitual pattern of doing nothing but provoking people online.
00:45:16.000And using deception and lies to do it to attract attention to yourself.
00:45:19.000You know, it has to be a very consistent pattern.
00:45:22.000But Paulos, first of all, and his crew of researchers and people who've been influenced by him have laid out this four-dimensional structure of the dark side, let's say.
00:45:31.000And they've shown that Hyper users of social media Instagram for example and and people who do a lot of anonymous shit posting are Characterized by you know, what would you call it?
00:45:43.000Domination by those four traits and part of the reason for that this is very very dangerous to our whole society I think is that You gotta ask yourself what keeps the psychopaths under control in the normal population and the answer seems to be Especially on the male side,
00:46:01.000is that narcissistic aggressive men get put in their place by non-narcissistic aggressive men.
00:46:09.000And that usually has to do with something like the threat of physical intervention.
00:46:13.000You know how it is if you get a bunch of guys together.
00:47:34.000You know, I don't think there's an old person in North America who isn't being targeted by some gang of psychopaths who's, you know, documented all of their interests and their locale and who knows how much money is in their bank account and who's doing everything they possibly can at every second to leverage access to it.
00:47:53.000Well, that's certainly algorithms, right, for a lot of people that get trapped into these sort of situations where people are constantly throwing at them things that are opportunities for them to either make money or get this or avoid pain.
00:48:09.000You know, they get it in and some lonely old character who's not functioning cognitively quite like he used to, you know, he gets sucked in by someone pretending to be his friend and offered a great investment opportunity.
00:48:21.000And it's very, very, very difficult to track this sort of thing online.
00:48:25.000So you get the real enabling of the criminals because how the hell, if they're anonymous, how the hell do you keep them, you know, how do you hold them to account?
00:48:34.000And then a secondary derivation of that is something like trolling.
00:48:37.000And that's really not so good either because if the psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian sadists are dominating the political discourse, then ordinary people look at that and think, oh my god, Everything's going to hell.
00:48:54.000And so, you know, I can really see this in my own life, you know, because if you just looked at me virtually, you'd think like I was the world's most embattled person in some way, you know, maybe not the world's most, but I'm up in the top 10, maybe.
00:49:08.000But in my real life, I don't have any problems.
00:49:13.000I go around from town to town or from city to city and every interaction I have with people on the street is positive.
00:49:19.000They either don't know me, which is fine, or they do and then we have a positive interaction.
00:50:55.000So while I think one of the ways of handling that technically, what I'd like to see happen at Twitter, for example, you know, not that I'm in a position to know, because I know it's complicated, is I think the anonymous types should be separated from the real people.
00:51:08.000So you could go visit them and see what they have to say, but the verified people, you know, their comments are either at the top or in a different place.
00:51:16.000Because I don't think that you can, I don't think that we can set up a playable game online When the anonymous trolls have the same rights as the verified, responsible people.
00:51:27.000And I also think, and I don't know what you think about this, Joe, but, you know, let's say you want to be a whistleblower.
00:51:35.000You want to say something that's going to get you in trouble at work.
00:51:47.000Alternatively, but maybe you have a responsibility if you have something to say, to say it in your own voice and to put yourself behind it.
00:51:53.000You know, and maybe you're taking the easy way out by not doing that.
00:51:57.000And, you know, I don't want to say that about every single person who posts anonymously, but, you know...
00:52:03.000Tyranny emerges when normal, honest people are now afraid to say what they think.
00:52:09.000And when the tyranny is complete in a totalitarian state, no one ever says what they think about anything.
00:53:09.000Nurses who had contracted COVID during the pandemic and had developed natural immunity.
00:53:16.000There was already studies that showed that that natural immunity was superior to the immunity that was imparted by the vaccine, but yet they were being mandated to take this vaccine.
00:54:32.000But what we would always do in the therapeutic endeavor with someone in a situation like that was to situate themselves in their life so that they could afford to abide by their own truth.
00:54:43.000And so that might mean if you're in a job, let's say, where you don't have freedom of expression, you know, you get your resume or your CV polished up so that if necessary, you could make a lateral move relatively quickly.
00:54:55.000Maybe you send out some job applications just to test the market.
00:54:59.000And if you're not marketable, maybe you pop up your skills.
00:55:02.000And then maybe if you're in a position where you're vulnerable because someone else has got control over your tongue, maybe you work real hard to put some other ground under your feet so that you can't be taken out so easily.
00:55:13.000You know, like when I opposed the Bill C-16 in Canada, the mandatory pronoun bill, I knew, first of all, I knew that that would cause a psychological epidemic.
00:55:23.000I told the Senate that back in 2017. I said, you guys don't know what you're doing here.
00:55:29.000You're going to confuse a lot of adolescent young women and for every girl you hypothetically save who has body dysmorphia.
00:55:35.000And that'll be a vanishingly small number of people who are actually saved.
00:55:38.000You're going to doom like 300. Of course, that's exactly what's happened.
00:55:42.000That's why the Tavistock Clinic shut down in the UK. You know, and so there was that.
00:55:47.000But I also had set myself up, you know, because I had three streams of income.
00:55:53.000I had my university salary, I had a clinical practice, and I had a business.
00:55:59.000You know, I knew from my clinical practice that if you wanted to say what you had to say, you had to put yourself in a position where you couldn't be easily taken out by the mob or the tyrant.
00:56:09.000And then I would say, well, if you're not in a position where you can afford to say what you have to say, then that's an indication that you haven't positioned yourself optimally, existentially, you haven't positioned yourself optimally in life.
00:56:28.000And so, you know, maybe it'll take you three years to fix that, you know, so that now you're grounded firmly so that a casual objection from your boss or even being fired isn't going to take you out.
00:57:04.000Mostly we regard sins of commission as more egregious than sins of omission.
00:57:09.000You know, an outright lie is worse than just failure to say what you know to be the truth.
00:57:14.000But when enough people are silent about things they know they have something to say about, something to say something about, then you have a tyranny.
00:57:24.000And so, well, we haven't sorted through all this, you know, very well in our society, but I think it's morally incumbent on all of us to set up our lives so that we can afford to tell the truth.
00:57:37.000And if you can't, well, then you think, no, you haven't got the hatches battened down, right?
00:57:43.000The walls of your towers, your fort aren't high enough.
00:57:53.000And you bloody well better be prepared.
00:57:55.000And so I think if you're anonymous, you're depriving yourself of the necessity to put yourself in a position where you can tell the truth.
00:58:05.000Now, think about what happened to you.
00:58:07.000Now, you tell me what you think about this.
00:58:09.000I mean, I've been watching you for a long time and it's quite remarkable seeing the impact that you've had that keeps increasing across time.
00:58:40.000It honestly exposes your own ignorance as well.
00:58:43.000And, you know, you can take the audience along as a consequence of that.
00:58:46.000And for you, the consequence has been, you know, you've gone from just doing this podcast, sort of a side thing for you, at least when it started, to being, I don't know if there's anybody who has more impact as a single individual on the media environment worldwide than you do.
00:59:01.000That's all a consequence of actually truthfully admitting your own ignorance and saying what you had to say.
00:59:07.000And I know you were set up to do that because you had multiple streams of income, you know, and you couldn't easily be taken out.
00:59:13.000You'd already accomplished things in a multitude of spheres.
00:59:32.000But you deprive yourself of the great adventure of your life and you contribute by remaining silent to pathologization of the whole society.
00:59:44.000Well, that doesn't seem like a very good route to me.
00:59:47.000You're making sense, but it's a very, very complex situation for someone who has put all their eggs in one basket, like particularly someone who's a nurse who has to work long hours, doesn't have another stream of income, and isn't really making enough money to have a nest egg saved away.
01:00:07.000Well, there's a woman in Canada right now, a nurse, whose name, unfortunately, I forget, who's Being hauled over the coals by her college for, you know, making the radical claim that there are only two sexes.
01:00:19.000And, you know, part of the reason I'm pursuing this action with regard to the Ontario College of Psychologists, well, there's two reasons, really.
01:00:28.000One is, you know, leave me the hell alone, guys.
01:00:30.000You've been on my case nonstop for seven years.
01:00:33.000Not once before that, in 20 years of practice, there's no complaints ever levied against me.
01:00:39.000It wasn't until I started to become, you know, relatively well-known publicly that the college came after me.
01:00:44.000And seven years of that gets to be a bit much, especially now that there's 13 lawsuits compiled up and all of them are for political opinions and half of them have been put forward on false grounds.
01:00:55.000But even that's not enough for me to engage in the battle.
01:01:00.000The reason I'm engaging in the battle is, well, first of all, you want me to do social media retraining so I communicate better according to your experts?
01:01:09.000It's like, experts by what criteria exactly?
01:01:12.000What's a social media communication expert?
01:01:15.000You got any documentation that that even exists as a field?
01:01:18.000And how do you know that if you have that social media expert train me, that I'm going to be a better therapist?
01:01:24.000There's no body of data that suggests that in the least.
01:01:27.000So I'm not going down that route, that's for sure.
01:01:29.000We should explain that, because that is one of the things...
01:01:30.000Oh yeah, so I've already been sentenced, right?
01:01:35.000This is what the situation already is.
01:01:38.000I haven't been hauled in front of their disciplinary board yet, but they've already convicted me of disgracing the profession and sentenced me to an indefinite period of re-education.
01:01:51.000And that's the second most serious punishment that they can levy against a professional.
01:01:55.000The first is to take away the license.
01:01:57.000The second is to undergo this retraining and to publicly announce the necessity for that, which they've already done in my case.
01:02:05.000And so now I have to sit down with these experts at my expense for an indefinite period of time until I'm trained properly, whatever the hell that means, by the criteria of the so-called experts and the college.
01:02:19.000And that isn't pending an investigation.
01:02:25.000Retraining, just even the way they phrase it, it's so bizarre, so Orwellian.
01:02:31.000Yeah, well, like I said, it's your fault, you know, because it's the whole transcript of our last conversation.
01:02:36.000I don't imagine they'll be that happy with this one.
01:02:38.000But the other reason I'm pursuing it, and to the degree that I'm able to keep my head clear During this process because it definitely makes me angry and really made me angry over Christmas when I was spending Christmas going through the minutia of all these bloody lawsuits trying to figure out what the hell they were up to instead of you know taking a bit of a break and having some time with my family and so I was very upset about that but to the degree that I'm upset about it I'm not doing it right because this can't be personal can't be about me Part of the
01:03:08.000reason that I want to pursue this and part of the reason we're pursuing an objection to what they're doing on Charter of Rights grounds in Canada is because they're interfering with my freedom of conscience and speech.
01:03:19.000And again, it isn't even the case that the reason that that's a problem is because it's about me.
01:03:24.000The reason it's a problem is because the colleges in general, like the regulatory boards of professionals, are doing this to everyone.
01:03:32.000Lawyers, physicians, teachers, massage therapists, there's all these licensed professions.
01:03:38.000And if you're a licensed profession, the government establishes a board of your peers to regulate conduct of the professionals.
01:03:47.000Now, in a functional time, All that happens then is that generally the people who get in trouble, get in trouble with their own clients, right?
01:03:56.000With the people they've been dealing with directly.
01:03:58.000And then the board steps in on the side of the person who's been injured by a pathologically practicing professional.
01:04:09.000And it's been weaponized as a political tool too.
01:04:11.000And it's not like activists don't know that.
01:04:14.000You know, and it's so preposterous because I have 20 million people following me on social media, you know, and God only knows how many views of my videos, for example, or the interviews you and I have done.
01:05:02.000So what we have here is, we have 13 people who complained about me hypothetically doing harm to someone they didn't know, to someone who they didn't know, anyone who knew As a consequence of things I said on social media,
01:05:21.000and that all of them, not only were they fourth-hand claims of harm, which, you know, no psychologist would ever claim that a fourth-hand account of harm constituted a valid measurement, so the bloody college is violating its own measurement standards by even pursuing this.
01:05:38.000So not only are they based on fourth-hand information, and then an outright lie, which is, they were clients of mine, They're also predicated on the assumption that it's okay to go after a professional for expressing political criticism.
01:05:57.000Because, like, literally half of them are...
01:06:23.000And the second is, I have a friend in Canada, very well-known physician, international reputation, and a reasonably decent secondary income stream.
01:06:32.000And when this all hit, I reached out to him.
01:06:36.000He's done a lot of writing that could easily get him in trouble.
01:06:40.000I said, look, maybe I could get you and Bruce Pardy, this lawyer at Queen's University, who's gone after essentially the college that functions for lawyers.
01:06:49.000I said, we should do three letters, same time, saying, you know, that the colleges are chilling free speech in Canada with psychologists, with physicians and with lawyers.
01:06:59.000And he said he didn't have his house in order enough to dare to take on the college.
01:07:03.000And the problem with that is that I don't know anybody in Canada who's a physician that's more well situated than him or braver.
01:07:13.000And so here's the situation we're in for all you who are listening.
01:07:18.000If you go to see a professional when you have a crisis, psychologist or a physician or a lawyer, let's say, you bloody well better hope those people are telling you the truth.
01:07:29.000Let's say you got a 13-year-old girl, and she has body dysmorphia.
01:07:32.000That's very common among 13-year-old girls, especially if they hit puberty early, because when women hit puberty, their levels of negative emotion go up.
01:07:41.000That's a very well-established clinical finding.
01:07:43.000And the reason for that, likely, is that when women hit puberty, the world becomes more dangerous to them, right?
01:08:32.000So now, but that also translates into something very specific for women.
01:08:37.000So, anxiety and depression, shame, guilt, all those negative emotions, they make you self-conscious.
01:08:44.000And self-consciousness takes the form of bodily shame in women much more than in men.
01:08:50.000So if you're a girl and you hit puberty early, so you're dealing with the complexities of all that when you're still pretty immature, and your negative emotion goes up, the probability that you're going to negatively evaluate your body is virtually 100%.
01:09:06.000There's no difference, especially in women, between feeling...
01:09:11.000Bad about their bodies and being high in negative emotion.
01:09:16.000So, I just interviewed this Chloe Cole, who's detransitioning and suing her medical, so-called medical professionals, who rushed her into a double mastectomy at 15, and the wounds have never properly healed, by the way, so that's her life.
01:09:32.000You know, and I basically ran her through a clinical interview.
01:09:35.000I said, hey, kiddo, you know, when you were 12 and miserable about your body, what the hell was going on?
01:09:41.000She said, well, you know, I thought more like a boy.
01:09:46.000She's a little autistic, so she's more thing-oriented than people-oriented.
01:09:49.000And so she didn't get along with girls that well.
01:09:52.000And then she was dreaming that she'd turn out like Kim Kardashian, but she turned out to have kind of a boyish figure.
01:09:58.000And then she thought, well, I'll never really be a good, you know, full woman.
01:11:13.000If you bring your 13-year-old in to be evaluated by a physician or a psychologist, and maybe she has high levels of neuroticism, tilting towards depression and anxiety, and then that's making itself manifest in bodily discomfort, now that's being shaped by this cultural phenomenon Fad that insists that if you feel uncomfortable in your body,
01:11:35.000it's because you're of the opposite gender.
01:11:37.000That's the psychological epidemic part of it.
01:11:39.000And we can talk about that in a little bit more detail.
01:11:41.000But now you're duty-bound by law, if you're a professional, to say, oh, you think you're a boy?
01:12:31.000And so the first thing you do, if you have any sense, is you note that that's stemming out of an underlying more global proclivity to suffer from depression and anxiety.
01:12:41.000So that's the big elephant in the room.
01:12:44.000So, if the trans activist types say, well, the body dysmorphic types are more likely to have suicidal thoughts, it's not because they have body dysmorphia, it's because they're prone to depression and anxiety, and depressed and anxious people are more likely to have suicidal thoughts.
01:13:01.000And maybe body dysmorphia adds a bit to that, but nobody really knows.
01:13:05.000But the fundamental issue is one of depression and anxiety.
01:13:08.000So now you're suffering from, you know, unspecified self-consciousness, And the culture twists around to offer you a narrative.
01:13:15.000And the narrative is, oh well, you're in the wrong body.
01:13:18.000And then that carrot is, and this is part of it that gets extraordinarily pathological, a lot of these kids who are suffering from this alienation are unpopular.
01:13:31.000And so, and now they're being enticed, like, yeah, well, you're not unpopular.
01:13:39.000So if you just take this carrot, you know, you're the opposite sex, all of a sudden you're not a victim, you're a brave, what would you call, you're a brave seeker after your redemptive identity.
01:14:15.000Because, first of all, you're with your parents, and you're not yet a fully-fledged individual, so what you have to do is you have to become part of the group.
01:14:24.000And if you're not part of the group, well, maybe you're a stellar, you know, creative genius, and you're exceptional in that manner, but more likely, you're just a loser who couldn't fit in.
01:14:37.000So your job when you're a teenager is to fit in.
01:14:40.000As every teenager knows, you know, and maybe not just to fit in, but, you know, to fit in in a positive way that elevates the community, but we could just settle for fitting in.
01:14:51.000And so, teenagers are wired to go along with the crowd, and then if the crowd is offering something pathological, that happens all the time, you get a psychological epidemic.
01:15:43.000Anorexia was a psychological epidemic.
01:15:46.000The satanic daycare ritual abuse accusations that came out in the 1980s, that was a psychological epidemic.
01:15:53.000And the rule basically is that if you confuse people about a fundamental element of their identity, Then those who are already so confused they're barely hanging on are going to fall prey to that and all hell's going to break loose.
01:16:08.000And that's exactly what's happened in the trans situation.
01:16:13.000But the difference between this one as opposed to the other ones like multiple personality disorder is that this one is being reinforced culturally.
01:16:24.000Yeah, well, the multiple personality disorder, that happened there too, because you'd get a lot of attention from media, especially the early, the people who are the first, who display the first symptoms of multiple personality disorder.
01:16:37.000You know, you get a psychologist or a psychiatrist or an alienist, if you go back far enough, who reports this fascinating case of multiple personality.
01:16:46.000And, you know, there are people who are dissociative.
01:16:50.000So they kind of have multiple personalities.
01:17:16.000You combine that with high neuroticism, negative emotion, then you get people who are fluid in their identity, who are also prone to depression and anxiety.
01:18:22.000Yeah, because they knew that, they figured out in the UK that, wow, the rates of transgender transformation requests were skyrocketing.
01:18:31.000And even the people at the clinic knew that they were rushing people along the transformation pipeline way faster than they should have without proper clinical evaluation.
01:18:40.000There's a thousand lawsuits out against the Tavistock in the UK now.
01:18:44.000Yeah, out of I think 30,000 transition processes.
01:18:50.000So what is the difference between the way the UK is processing this versus the way we are?
01:18:54.000Well, we're still where the UK was three or four years ago.
01:18:58.000We haven't woken up to the fact that, you know, all hell's going to break loose on this front with people like Chloe Cole, you know, launching lawsuits.
01:19:05.000That's the only thing that's ever going to stop this.
01:19:14.000This is also part of the reason that I felt like I've been at war for like six months.
01:19:19.000It's so crazy that what you're saying here, although it's backed by the literature, it's obvious you have an expertise in this area, this is labeled as transphobic.
01:20:16.000So your typical gender non-conforming kid would be, this would be the perfect target for this, would be a feminine boy or a masculine girl who's high in trait openness, so has kind of a mutable identity, who's also high in neuroticism.
01:21:23.000You're dressing up in lingerie before your mirror at home, tucking your dick between your legs, imagining you have a vagina for sexual kick.
01:21:31.000Oh, there's nothing sexual about that.
01:21:41.000But with them, If you leave them alone, so do no harm, leave them alone, 90% of them accept their body, their sex, by age 18 or 19, and 80% of them are gay.
01:21:58.000So what that also means is, and the gay community is going to wake up to this sooner or later, is that Most of the kids being sterilized and mutilated are gay.
01:22:59.000And let's say the chance that you have a pansexual kid is the same, whatever pansexual means.
01:23:04.000I don't even know how to calculate those odds.
01:23:06.000But whatever that is, is rarer than trans, because no one ever even heard about it until five years ago.
01:23:13.000So the joint probability that you have a trans kid and a pansexual kid is one in nine million.
01:23:20.000The odds that you're a pathological narcissist sacrificing your own children to the glorification of your compassion is 8,999,999 to 1. So, like, do you have a trans kid and a pansexual kid?
01:23:48.000When he pointed to the fact that the devouring mother was one of the major impediments to proper human development, he knew that.
01:23:55.000Looking deep into the darkest families and seeing this proclivity of the overprotective mother to destroy the developing integrity of the child, to keep the child infantile, to cling to that relationship instead of developing life for herself and letting the child go flourish.
01:25:21.000Well, not if the feminine is just the oppressed virgin...
01:25:26.000Goddess who's nature, but how about we don't live in that fantasy world?
01:25:31.000And we know, yeah, there's female political pathology, the tendency to infantilize everyone, and the tendency to assume that everyone who doesn't go along with the infantilization is properly characterized as a predator.
01:25:44.000And so, you know, you wonder why are the universities turning into extended daycares?
01:25:49.000Well, a lot of the reason for that is that...
01:25:55.000Women who don't have anything better to do are turning the university students into the infants they never had.
01:26:03.000Yeah, I don't know when we'll be able to be mature enough to have that conversation, you know, 20 years from now.
01:26:10.000What is a path to bring this back to some sort of rational, logical way of discussing these problems?
01:26:19.000Okay, so I tweeted out, I don't know if you saw this, that I was going to make an announcement on your show today, and so I set up an international consortium based in London.
01:26:31.000But we're trying to put together something like an alternative vision of the future, say an alternative to that kind of apocalyptic narrative that's being put forward at least implicitly by organizations like the WEF,
01:26:46.000you know, and that's the virginal planet, rapacious tyrant, you know, all devouring consumer religion.
01:26:53.000And it's more like something like, well, we want to ask people six key questions.
01:27:44.000What are the major problems that are confronting us?
01:27:46.000How do we take a sophisticated multi-dimensional view of that?
01:27:49.000How do we prioritize our attempts to establish our states and our international relationships properly so that we prioritize human well-being?
01:27:58.000You know, in harmony with nature to the degree that's possible.
01:28:01.000But human-focused and not predicated on the idea that there are too many goddamn mouths on the planet to feed and that you're evil if you just think about having children.
01:28:10.000So then on the governance front, this is where it gets kind of more left-wing, I would say, is none of the people involved in this consortium so far are very thrilled with global corporate fascist government media and corporation collusion.
01:28:26.000You know, and we're seeing this at the high end.
01:28:32.000The powerful players in the world are increasingly collaborating to impose a top-down vision of the future on everyone.
01:28:39.000And that's a future that's predicated on a zero-growth model.
01:28:43.000And the idea that, well, we need five planets, really, to support everyone at the current standard of living that obtains in the West.
01:28:50.000So the best pathway forward is to deny loans by the World Bank to developing countries so they can't develop You know, energy sources, which all that'll mean is they're going to burn wood and coal, obviously.
01:29:02.000So that's the third question is, you know, how do we arrange systems of governance to stop The march of something like pathological gigantism.
01:29:13.000This is why I like people like Russell Brand and also you to some degree politically, you know, because you guys are very, what would you say, sensitive to the danger of that kind of corrupt collusion, that regulatory capture that occurs when corporate entities and media entities and governmental entities are all in bed together,
01:29:30.000like the FDA and the CDC and so forth and so on without end.
01:29:38.000The fourth question is, what do we put forward as a vision on the family policy front to facilitate the, what would you call it, the encouragement and the maintenance of long-term monogamous couples who are child-centered, and to make increasing the birth rate part of that policy,
01:29:55.000to put policies in place that would support long-term stable monogamous families, two-parent families, and child-centered.
01:30:04.000In the West, because we're very immature, we think that the purpose of a marriage is the happiness of the people who are involved in the marriage, the husband and the wife, and that's just not the purpose of marriage at all.
01:30:14.000The purpose is long-term facilitation of their psychological and spiritual development and the establishment of an environment that's beneficial to children.
01:30:24.000That's a responsible way of thinking about it, and so we need to have a serious conversation about what that means.
01:30:29.000You know, it's tricky because Like, I think the ideal has to be long-term, committed, monogamous, heterosexual relationships.
01:30:38.000And I had a big conversation about this with Dave Rubin.
01:30:41.000You know, Rubin's gay and he's married, and him and his partner now have two infants, and we talked through how that was.
01:30:48.000It was a very hard thing for them to arrange, obviously.
01:30:52.000So that poses a severe problem on the reproductive front, right?
01:30:56.000And so they manage that, they have two infants, but it's very complex and it isn't, it's obviously not a solution to the problem of relationship and reproduction that's duplicatable across large numbers of people.
01:31:59.000You're asking a lot, you know, for a woman to work 50 hours a week and then spend another 40 hours with her kids and to do both of those optimally with no help.
01:32:10.000You know, and we know perfectly well that when women get divorced, especially if they have kids, they tend to fall down the economic hierarchy.
01:33:11.000And so we're trying to work out what the story has to be.
01:33:14.000And on that front, I just finished a seminar in Miami, and the first eight parts of it were released on The Daily Wire three months ago, Exodus Seminar.
01:33:24.000We walked through the story of Exodus.
01:33:26.000Exodus means ex hodos, means the way forward.
01:33:29.000So it's the archetypal narrative of progression from tyranny and chaos into the future.
01:34:56.000The question is, what is the highest spirit that could guide you?
01:35:01.000So, in the Exodus story, The proposition of the story is the highest spirit that could guide you is the spirit that objects to tyranny and that calls the enslaved to freedom.
01:35:13.000And that's the representation of God in Exodus.
01:35:15.000So that's what God is in the Exodus story.
01:35:19.000Now that's not all that God is in the biblical stories.
01:35:24.000And so that is the God that If you abide by that God, then you believe that tyranny is implicitly wrong, even if you tyrannize yourself, and that there's something implicitly virtuous about striving for freedom,
01:36:44.000Everyone turns to the worship of false idols.
01:36:47.000Everyone wants the tyrant to reassert himself.
01:36:50.000That's the situation we're in, in the aftermath of the death of God in the West.
01:36:56.000And so, So that's really useful to know, because one of the things you might want to know in your life is why do people cling to their own tyrannical presuppositions?
01:37:06.000And the answer is, well, at least they're orienting structures, pathological as they might be.
01:37:12.000If you drop them, you're not redeemed, you're just lost.
01:37:16.000And the idea that being lost is freedom That's a preposterous idea.
01:37:25.000Okay, so what happens in the Exodus story is now the Israelites are out in the desert, wandering around for like generations, and they get all fractious and fight and bitch and complain and start worshipping false idols and...
01:39:38.000Judgments that are necessary rendered at the lowest level of the hierarchy possible.
01:39:44.000So, you know, if I'm arguing with you, first we go to our elder, and then if the elder can't figure it out, he gets the elders together, and maybe they render judgment.
01:39:53.000If they can't, it goes to the council of elder elders and all the way up.
01:39:57.000If it isn't mediated by the time you have the groupings of 10,000, then Moses gets to weigh in.
01:40:05.000And the idea is you have to produce a hierarchy of responsibility, distributed responsibility, as an antithesis to tyranny and to the desert.
01:40:12.000And that's the model for good governance.
01:40:14.000And that's symbolically equivalent to Mount Sinai.
01:40:17.000And it's also the model of the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle.
01:40:22.000So Jonathan Pajot did a lovely job of explaining that in this.
01:40:26.000And so part of the model that we're trying to put forward in this group that I'm describing is based on this principle of subsidiarity and the idea that we wanna encourage everyone to take as much responsibility as possible at the most local level possible,
01:42:49.000I've got all sorts of people on board in Australia and all through Europe and through the UK and all through the United States, South America.
01:42:56.000All sorts of people are interested in participating.
01:42:59.000And so we want to help put forward a vision that's enticing and inviting.
01:43:06.000It's like, imagine you could have the world you wanted.
01:43:10.000You know, none of this Malthusian limits to growth nonsense.
01:43:29.000There's also an idea in Exodus, and this is a very good idea, that if people organize themselves properly, so they're oriented on a transcendent axis, and they're oriented Towards their fellow man.
01:43:42.000So you serve what's highest and you also abide by the principle of reciprocity in relationship to other people.
01:43:51.000If we organize ourselves in that manner, there's no limit to the abundance the natural world can produce.
01:43:57.000That's the actual Generator of genuine wealth, sustainable wealth, you know, that balances order and chaos properly, that balances nature and culture properly.
01:44:07.000So the core idea is something like, you get the hierarchy of social organization right, it generates unlimited wealth.
01:44:18.000And we've already seen that to a large degree.
01:44:20.000We've lifted more people out of poverty in the last 15 years than really...
01:44:33.000The minimum they need or something exceeding that.
01:44:37.000And instead of, you know, starving to death by the billions, which is what everybody who was on the Malthusian side predicted back in the 1960s.
01:44:44.000And so, I've been working on this for a long time and I've got a good group of core people who seem to be, you know, reliable and not motivated, we hope and pray, by something approaching, you know, narcissistic egotism and everybody's sworn to.
01:45:02.000Try to make this as decentralized as possible on the principle that the more responsibility you can offload to people, the better everything will work.
01:45:10.000That's a fundamentally conservative principle, like a small-c conservative principle, right?
01:45:15.000So you need a hierarchy of responsibility, and you offload responsibility to the local where possible.
01:47:25.000Why do you think people are interested in that?
01:47:27.000Because what you're saying makes sense, and we also recognize that there's a real flaw in the way our society is constructed, and there's a real genuine threat in allowing these power structures to sort of maintain this narrative and create this narrative that's based upon them gaining control over resources,
01:48:12.000That's what people are terrified of when they see Klaus Schwab standing there with a Darth Vader outfit telling people that they're going to eat bugs.
01:48:18.000Okay, and you're using the technology of free communication as an antidote to that?
01:48:24.000Okay, so then I would say archetypally what you're doing is you're doing something like serving the divine word that makes habitable order out of chaos as an antidote to tyranny.
01:49:03.000And the reason we like stories is because it's actually pretty hard to see the world and it's really useful to see the world the way other people see it, just in case they know something you don't.
01:49:13.000And so we're telling each other stories all the time.
01:49:29.000It's the same narrative in some sense.
01:49:31.000It's, you know, it's a bit more stereotype, but Bond is, you know, this sophisticated, aggressive guy who's got his aggression under control, who's fighting the Hydra.
01:49:41.000And it's not the Hydra and James Bond.
01:49:43.000I don't remember the name of the underground organization there, but it's a Hydra for the Marvel heroes.
01:49:48.000The Hydra is an amalgam of tyranny and chaos, right?
01:50:20.000It's more than that, but that's one way of thinking about it.
01:50:23.000And so I constantly look to these old stories, these archetypal stories, you know, as a student of Jung, let's say, to find out what the proper orienting pathway is.
01:50:55.000They make you productive and generous.
01:50:57.000And when they're extended, they produce a structure that unites people and produces productive peace.
01:51:04.000You know, and it's not by fluke, for example, that America itself is founded in no small part on the motivational force of something like the Exodus narrative.
01:51:14.000That was certainly the case for the civil rights movement.
01:51:16.000It has to be that way because Exodus is an archetypal story about the establishment of proper order as an alternative to the tyrant and the desert.
01:51:26.000So everyone is always doing that in their life whether they know it or not.
01:51:31.000And you do it extremely well, if you don't mind the insult of a compliment.
01:51:35.000And I think the reason for that is that, for whatever reason, you are acutely aware of your own ignorance and always trying to rectify it.
01:51:44.000And I would say that's a reflection of a practice of humility.
01:51:48.000You know, I know you're a competent guy, and you're no pushover, and so calling you humble is kind of a weird thing to do, but one of the things that I've been very pleased about constantly when talking to you is it's a conversation, man.
01:53:52.000Now, to the degree that you're not at odds with everyone else, you know, in the chaotic state of nature where everyone's at everyone's throat, it's because there's a mode of perception and action that unites you socially.
01:54:06.000So you can be united psychologically, then you're not a house that's built on sand, and you can be united socially.
01:54:36.000It's a way of taking what you know to explain what you don't know.
01:54:40.000But metonymy is a technique where you take one story that seems to have one moral and you juxtapose it with another and maybe do that with sequence of stories and then there's an implication that There's a meta story that emerges across all the ordered stories.
01:54:56.000And that's what the biblical corpus is because no one wrote it, not in any real sense.
01:55:01.000And the processes by which it aggregated are mysterious.
01:55:04.000They extend over thousands and thousands of years.
01:58:26.000And so, then you have the story of Abraham, and God is presented in that story as the spirit that calls the overprotected and privileged, that's Abraham, to the catastrophic adventure of their life.
01:58:44.000Because that's what happens to Abraham.
01:58:47.000You know, he's 83, lives in his father's tent, eats peeled grapes.
01:59:08.000It's like starvation and tyranny and war and the Egyptian rulers conspire to steal his wife and, you know, it's brutal life, but it's life, it's adventure.
01:59:19.000And so then you think, well, all of this is an attempt to characterize Yahweh.
01:59:25.000And this is the Jewish God with whom the Jews have a relationship.
01:59:29.000All of these stories are an attempt to characterize that.
01:59:31.000And so you could say, well, what is the spirit that you walk with unselfconsciously in the well-tended garden and the spirit that calls you to adventure and the spirit that punishes tyranny?
01:59:47.000Well, that's Yahweh, whatever that is.
01:59:49.000And so then there's an attempt to characterize the nature of that spirit.
01:59:54.000And then there's a twist on that in the New Testament, which is an amazing twist.
01:59:59.000It's an amazing twist, because the conclusion is that the spirit of Yahweh, portrayed in all these different ways, is the same spirit that calls people to voluntarily bear the catastrophe of their life.
02:00:15.000And that that's the union of God and man.
02:01:01.000Because, you know, there's an open question.
02:01:03.000So imagine that there's a pattern of existence that, you know, Quells your anxiety and gives you hope and unites people.
02:01:13.000Well, then you have an open question is, well, how much does that reflect the structure of being itself?
02:01:18.000There's a Greek idea of the logos that's intrinsic in the world, that there's an order in the world, right, that we can discover, and that makes itself manifest from the bottom up.
02:01:29.000And that's the logos of the world, the logic of the world.
02:01:32.000And it's certainly possible that The logic of the world as expressed in human existence is the same as this spirit of Yahweh that's transmuted in the New Testament into the Logos.
02:01:48.000And, you know, what happened, I did a lecture about this at Ephesus in Turkey.
02:01:56.000Which was where the logos was discussed 3,000 years ago, the Greek logos.
02:02:00.000So what you have in Western culture is you have this Greek idea that there's an intrinsic order in the universe, bottom-up sort of, and then the Christians come along and say, well, there's also an intrinsic order in the psychological realm, and then Western culture is the juxtaposition of those two,
02:02:17.000the claim that those are the same thing.
02:02:19.000And so that would be the same claim as If you honestly and truthfully confront the tragic limitations of your life, you'll discover the truth of the implicit order and that will redeem you.
02:02:36.000And that's the fundamental claim of science, for example.
02:02:40.000So even science, insofar as it's a practice, is embedded in this tradition.
02:04:16.000They think the fundamental ethos of the U.S. is reliable.
02:04:20.000What is that fundamental ethos, you think?
02:04:23.000I think it's the logos, fundamentally.
02:04:26.000But, you know, if you differentiated that, one of the things that's really quite amazing about the U.S., and I think it's unique, really, is that Your society is fundamentally not envious.
02:04:40.000Now, there's plenty of envy in it, because that's hard to eradicate, but one thing about you Americans is you're actually capable of admiring success, and you're capable of trying to replicate it for yourselves and your children, and you actually celebrate that.
02:04:54.000Well, we think it's possible, but there's not a caste system here.
02:05:26.000Caverns all over Albania that the government dug out because the whole story there was Albania was the richest most desirable country in the world and they were absolutely surrounded by enemies it was like the ultimate paranoid paranoid totalitarian states you know and they're they're not very happy about the devastation that wreaked for 60 years and you know they look to the west to To the best part of the West and think,
02:05:59.000So I'm going through all these countries, and people are telling me this concern they have.
02:06:06.000And then they also say, well, we feel like we're voices crying in the wilderness, like we're concerned about the direction of the culture war, let's say.
02:06:15.000If we say anything about it, we get taken out by the mob.
02:06:19.000But then I went to like 14 countries and everyone said the same thing.
02:06:22.000And I thought, well, if the same thing is happening in 14 countries, You're not a voice growing in the wilderness.
02:06:29.000You're just people aren't communicating very well with each other.
02:06:31.000So I thought, well, why isn't there an international organization that's really centrist, you know, that would attract traditionalist small-c conservatives and classic liberals alike?
02:06:42.000You know, we don't want the ultra-nationalist types because they go off the deep end in one particular way.
02:06:47.000And, you know, the radical leftist globalist utopians who are under the The grip of the Marxist idea, that's a very small minority of people.
02:06:58.000There's a huge number of people in the reasonable middle, but they don't seem to...
02:07:03.000They've abdicated their responsibility.
02:07:06.000That's a good way of thinking about it.
02:07:08.000So then I started talking when I went through Europe.
02:07:10.000I said, well, you know, I'm thinking about organizing a convention where I could bring people together to talk about A different vision and also maybe to share specific policy ideas that worked.
02:07:35.000And that just happened in every country.
02:07:37.000And so I thought, well, that's weird because, you know, this is a preposterous idea.
02:07:41.000And what should happen is that people, you know, maybe they're pleased to meet me and they give some lip service to the idea and it just ends there.
02:08:01.000I talked to the Republican Study Committee about this and they make policy for the Republicans and the same thing happened.
02:08:07.000A whole bunch of Republicans came up and said, We'll change our schedule, make sure you have the conference at some time when the House isn't sitting so we can attend.
02:08:17.000And I realized then, you know, the conservative types, they're pretty good at implementing.
02:08:21.000They're pretty good incremental movers because they're conscientious, but they're not very good at vision.
02:08:25.000And so they get reactionary, you know, and what happens on the Republican side is they're always pointing to the left saying, you go too far, you go too far, but...
02:08:34.000There's no vision, so it's hard for them to attract young people.
02:08:38.000But it turns out if you put forward something that approximates an invitational vision, they're just all over that, like in no time flat.
02:08:49.000Well, we got together a group of people in London twice, a very diverse group of people, and we Hashed out these five questions that I presented to you, and everyone basically agreed, despite a wide range of political opinions in the room.
02:09:06.000Said, yeah, those seem to be the key questions.
02:09:08.000And then we figured out that we needed to put this forward as an invitation and not as a top-down, you know, compulsion-based, you have to do this or the planet's going to be doomed.
02:09:21.000And so, and now we're trying to work out the details.
02:09:24.000And, well, the first real question Move will be to open this up to public participation, to figure out how to do that, to get a dialogue going, but then also to have this conference October 31st, November 1st, and November 2nd in London.
02:09:39.000And I plan to do three lectures at night there, one on the crisis of the West, one on environmental stewardship, and one on metaphysics.
02:09:52.000Public lecture to kind of anchor the convention.
02:09:55.000We've got I think the Apollo in London already set up for that and You know and our goal God willing is that we develop a vision that people Everyone says yeah, I'm in I'm in what can I do instead of the vision being You're emitting too much carbon dioxide there buddy and enough cars and comedians for you Yeah So,
02:11:14.000There's too many people on the planet.
02:11:16.000We have to run around like frightened tyrants to clamp everything down.
02:11:20.000It's like all that's doing, it's demoralizing young men like mad.
02:11:24.000You know, young people aren't even having relationships anymore, because especially the men, if they're not bloody patriarchal tyrants, they're virgin raping planetary despoilers.
02:11:34.000You know, it's like, what kind of vision is that for young men?
02:11:38.000It just makes them sick, you know, and I've seen, believe me, I've seen plenty of that.
02:11:43.000People are so grateful if you provide them with an alternative that says, you know, that ambitious striving that you have within you, that's something that's making itself manifest in the optimal way as something that's the highest,
02:11:58.000not just a manifestation of your tyrannical, patriarchal, rapacious nature.
02:12:28.000And so we're hoping to put forward a vision that That's an invitation, you know, to the table.
02:12:35.000And with the idea that if we got our act together, especially given our technological power, God only knows what sort of world we could build.
02:12:44.000You know, but definitely one where there was enough for everybody.
02:12:47.000Enough of everything basic and enough opportunity, educational resources.
02:12:51.000I'm working with Bjorn Lomborg on this, so I'm very happy about that because Bjorn, like, he's the real thing, you know.
02:12:58.000He's done the work and so that's very good to have him on board and Yeah, I really enjoyed talking to him.
02:13:11.000You know, like I got a lot of people around me who are doing their work, you know.
02:13:18.000So if I don't micromanage and provide people with maximal autonomy and try to get committed people, can distribute the effort, which you have to.
02:13:31.000As much as possible, and then who knows what's possible, you know?
02:13:56.000It teaches you how to write while you use it.
02:13:59.000It's a word processor, but it teaches you how to write and to think because if you learn to write, you learn to think.
02:14:04.000And it teaches you how to edit, you know, to concentrate on each word, to evaluate every phrase, to evaluate every sentence, to evaluate the organization of sentences within paragraphs and paragraphs within sequenced properly within the essay and to think about how to produce A set of thoughts and then how to critically evaluate them.
02:14:26.000We have, like I said, about 8,000 subscribers now and about, I think it's about 80,000 users.
02:14:33.000And so that's a good project because we'd like to teach a million people to write.
02:14:38.000I think the ordinary person, if they used essay instead of a standard word processor, the first thing they wrote would be the best thing they ever wrote, right off the bat.
02:14:49.000Because we built the tools right into the software.
02:14:52.000It steps you through the process of writing.
02:16:48.000And I used that process for my students, earlier iterations of this, and by the third draft of the essays they wrote, there was the best essays they ever wrote in their life.
02:17:06.000And then with my daughter, Michaela, I've started this Peterson Academy, and our plan, this is a funny plan, we want to drive the cost of a bachelor's degree down to $4,000.
02:17:17.000And so we've got 30 professors on board so far.
02:17:20.000I've been able to identify stellar lecturers from all over the world.
02:18:26.000And then if you're in the developed world, we'd like to offer you the opportunity to pair yourself with a student in the developing world.
02:18:34.000Who couldn't afford it, and we'll give them the opportunity for free, but they'll be like your partner.
02:18:41.000So that should produce some interesting partnerships between people, you know, but also give people who don't have access to high-quality university-level education a real in.
02:18:53.000And we are talking to some different institutions, you know, mortar and brick institutions, about how accreditation might be Pursued and how we could partner with them to also offer people other elements of the university experience that you can't easily virtualize.
02:19:07.000And we've developed a good app that adds a social component to it so that people can discuss the lectures while they're watching them and, you know, can make social contacts and maybe have meetup groups in different cities.
02:19:20.000So we want to universalize higher education.
02:19:23.000And then we're going to set the grading system in stone.
02:19:28.000So the grade you'll get for this university will be your performance.
02:19:59.000One on the Sermon on the Mount, so that was really fun.
02:20:02.000One on It'll be a two-part one, but I did the first half of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, and I did an eight-hour summary of my book, Maps of Meaning.
02:20:12.000And so we have all sorts of other people who are, you know, from Cambridge and Oxford and Stanford and MIT, and then people from outside the academy, too, who are brilliant.
02:20:21.000Jonathan Paggio just did a series on symbolic thought.
02:21:30.000And my son's going to tour with us starting on the 30th.
02:21:33.000He's a musician, and I've had a musician.
02:21:36.000David Cotter opened my shows for the last 30 lectures, and he plays classical guitar.
02:21:41.000So he does a 20-minute set while everyone's coming in to sit down, you know, and so that kind of sets a nice tone for the lecture, and then we do this exploration of an idea, and I do a Q&A with my wife, and that's the lectures.
02:21:56.000It's an amazing amount of things you're doing.
02:23:24.000So I was doing a different lecture every night for about 70 minutes and then doing a Q&A and that was wearing me out because it was sort of like writing a whole book chapter every night, you know, because I really wanted to do something different.
02:23:38.000And, you know, I draw from stories that I've aggregated.
02:23:40.000It's not like 100% new content, but it's like variations on a theme.
02:25:02.000So, yeah, there's plenty of wandering around in the desert.
02:25:07.000But I'll tell you something else that's cool.
02:25:09.000You know, when I first did this back in 2018...
02:25:13.000Did a meet and greet after and I'd say a third of the people were in pretty bad emotional distress.
02:25:19.000You know often when they came to meet me after the lectures they were in tears or you know they had some pretty brutal story to relate and it's pretty emotionally grueling to see that night after night and now There's way more women who come,
02:25:35.000there's way more couples, and the guys are way more put together.
02:25:41.000You know, and lots of them, especially the ones that get the meet and greet tickets, they've been listening for five or six years, and they've really been trying to put their lives together.
02:25:49.000And so most of the stories I hear now are stories like, I was in a pretty rough place, but I started to put my life together, and now I have this girlfriend, and we're getting married, or we're just having our first child, and now I have a business, and here's what I'm doing that's really working, and they're all standing up,
02:26:04.000and half of them are in suits or three-piece suits, and that's something, man.
02:26:10.000I mean, that's partly why we keep doing it, Tammy and I, you know.
02:26:47.000Well, some of it's, what would you say, it's utterly unpredictable and it's utterly surreal and entirely predictable, both at the same time, because I knew that what I was dealing with when I was working at Harvard, when I was writing Maps of Meaning,
02:27:03.000I knew that there was something about that that was core.
02:30:36.000I mean, if you are a person that, you know, strives to work hard and accomplish things and you have grand ambitions, you will find so many people that try to destroy that.
02:30:48.000Yeah, but I mean, what's your life like when you go out in public?
02:31:50.000Is that people are different depending upon the circumstances.
02:31:52.000And I think most of the people that you would even interact with negatively online, if you choose to interact with them at all, But most of the people that will post things negatively about you online, if you could be alone with them and have a conversation with them, just a one-on-one conversation where you could find common ground.
02:32:08.000Yeah, like most student activists, if you went to their parents' house for dinner with them, you'd think, well, that kid's like 85% like every other kid.
02:32:19.000That's a good way of thinking about it, too, you know, because if you don't understand this, you get conspiratorial.
02:36:01.000And hopefully, you know, you and I, we've been talking all day, and hopefully the consequence of that is that we both come away from this discussion somewhat less stupid and blind than we were.
02:36:13.000And the reason that that happened is because each of us have let go of some presumptions that were tyrannical.
02:36:20.000You know, not enough to, you know, if you lose your whole system of belief, it just takes you out.
02:38:24.000I think the closest thing to what I do on stage is probably what stand-up comedians do.
02:38:29.000You know, although you guys usually run through a prepared set, but you have a universe of potential jokes, right?
02:38:35.000And my suspicions are that you're watching how the audience is reacting and crafting what you're selecting to, you know, to bring everybody on board.
02:38:45.000And you want to tell a story that has a narrative arc.
02:38:49.000Have you noticed in your podcast that if you're really paying attention to the dialogue that the podcast has a narrative arc all by itself?
02:39:13.000Yeah, it's a very fascinating way to explore life publicly.
02:39:21.000It's a very fascinating way to explore life publicly and allow other people to take in some of these thoughts and form their own.
02:39:31.000Because that's what a lot of people are doing.
02:39:33.000They're listening to this and they're actually thinking about various aspects that resonate with their own life and then applying their own unique view of the world to that.
02:39:46.000And, you know, and seeing how they could maybe use it to enhance them or whatever they disagree on, why they disagree on it, and solidify that position in their mind as well.
02:39:56.000Yeah, well, and a good podcast does two things at least.
02:40:01.000It presents people with some new information, which is part of why I love doing podcasts.
02:40:05.000It's such a privilege, and you know this perfectly well, to call anybody in the world up and say, I'm pretty curious about this, and you look like you know more about that than anyone else in the world.
02:41:36.000But what happens if you tell them is they just don't do it.
02:41:39.000So what you want to do is you want to ask them a bunch of questions about the problem and about what they might view as a hypothetical solution.
02:41:46.000And then they develop the intermediary steps along the way to the conclusion.
02:41:52.000Then they're actually likely to act it out.
02:43:48.000So something catches your interest and glimmers, then that's the gold beckoning in the distance.
02:43:54.000It captures your interest and then if you pursue that, it leads you into the depths.
02:43:59.000I don't know if we've talked about this before, but what do you think about those scholars in Israel that believe that the burning bush was some sort of a psychedelic experience?
02:44:10.000Oh, well, I think we have no idea how psychedelic experience shaped religious presumption.
02:44:40.000And the shamanic tradition is definitely a psychedelic tradition.
02:44:47.000And one of the things Morescu did was show quite clearly that all of Greek culture was Embedded in what looks like a collective psychedelic experience and so Yeah, I think that I think the evidence like Mircea Eliade a great religious scholar studied shamanism and he thought that the use of psychedelics was a Degeneration of the original tradition,
02:45:09.000but I don't think that's true at all I think that the psychedelic tradition is part and parcel of the universal religious heritage of mankind and like I don't know what that means You know, I've talked to people like Robin Carhart-Harris, who studies the neurology of psychedelic experience,
02:45:25.000and he said that what it does is produce something akin to a hyper stress experience.
02:45:33.000So imagine you're extremely stressed, like your life's in danger.
02:45:36.000And so you have to open yourself up to the possibility of radically new ideas.
02:45:40.000Well, a psychedelic substance puts you in that state of mind.
02:45:43.000And so that can be hellish, because you can collapse into, like, a catastrophic fight-or-flight defensive response and magnified by the hallucinogen, and you're just in hell.
02:45:54.000But that isn't the only necessary outcome.
02:45:57.000And so the psychedelic experience definitely mimics something like radical learning.
02:49:05.000Especially the ones that are espousing it to other people.
02:49:06.000Yeah, if you're lucky, you can come out of an experience like that knowing that, you know, like Socrates, and Socrates may have learned this from psychedelic experience.
02:49:13.000Seems quite probable because he participated in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
02:49:33.000That's the first lesson you learn is you don't know shit.
02:49:36.000And also just the overwhelming understanding that this is available, that this experience is available, and it's so alien to modern experience, just an average everyday experience.
02:49:56.000Yeah, well, maybe this time, you know, there are wise people working on that front, like Roland Griffiths, who unfortunately is very sick at the moment.
02:50:04.000And, you know, he's approached this with a lot more reverence and respect than more casual experimenters like Leary.
02:50:13.000And maybe this time, you know, God willing, we'll get it right and introduce these strange ancient chemicals back into our culture without blowing the lid right off it.
02:50:23.000And I think one of the best gateways to that is dealing with people who have trauma.
02:50:29.000Soldiers with PTSD where they're doing MDMA therapy and also other people that have had violent experiences in their life with MDMA. It's helped them to overcome that.
02:50:41.000Deal with, you know, paralyzing death, anxiety, consequential to cancer diagnosis.
02:50:46.000You know, and those studies, they're very dry.
02:50:49.000You know, we gave psilocybin to a group of people who were suffering from cancer and their relationship with death radically transformed.
02:50:57.000You know, the implication is somehow that's a chemical transformation.
02:51:00.000And of course, to some degree it is because it was induced by a chemical.
02:51:16.000During the most profound psychedelic experiences, are you actually in the presence of God?
02:51:21.000I mean, are there moments during those things where you kind of see it, you know, that the veil does get lifted and you do briefly for a moment?
02:51:32.000Well, I think the same thing happens to you to some degree when you fall in love.
02:51:36.000You know, like when you're in love with your kids, well...
02:51:40.000You see them better than you've ever seen anyone.
02:51:44.000You see deeper into them than you've ever seen into anyone.
02:51:46.000So love is the partial lifting of that veil of ignorance.
02:51:51.000And I think that's true of romantic love too.
02:51:53.000You see into the soul of the other person, so to speak.
02:52:15.000But approaching people in that way, even people that have wronged you, even people that are lost, apply...
02:52:23.000Yeah, it's really good to remember that.
02:52:25.000You know, one of the things I try to do with my family when we get, you know, sporadically attacked often by people who really would like to, let's say, take me out and along with me, my family, we sit and talk until we find a pathway forward that is characterized by the least amount of,
02:52:43.000you know, desire for revenge and anger possible.
02:52:47.000After contemplating the anger and the revenge quite deeply, Because you have to let that voice have its say, too.
02:54:04.000And when people have wrongly attacked you and then realize it, they have to realize in themselves this flaw that they have in their personality.
02:54:15.000That's another thing that's so cool about the Exodus story, isn't it?
02:54:18.000You know, even when God himself reveals himself to the Pharaoh, essentially, all he does is double down.
02:54:25.000And you might say, well, that's what tyrants do.
02:54:28.000It's like, no, no, that's what people do.
02:54:31.000When we're talking about groups like the World Economic Forum, don't you think there's also a draw to that point?
02:54:40.000I don't know if it's people like Trudeau or people that go there.
02:54:44.000You're with the people that are the big decision makers that are going to be in power.
02:54:52.000You're with the people that know where the bunker is if the nuclear bombs drop.
02:54:56.000You're with the people that are making the decisions that are shaping Politics behind the scenes that are manipulating the relationships between corporations and politicians and lawmakers and across the board.
02:55:12.000And so there's this desire that people always have to be a part of the in-crowd or the part of the secret group that's running things, which is why groups that are running things are so dangerous.
02:55:41.000And it's a tricky problem because there has to be some degree of international communication and consensus, right?
02:55:50.000We all do live on the same planet and we're pretty integrated now and so there has to be something approximating, well, like I said, an international conversation.
02:56:00.000And the danger is that even engaging in that conversation, let alone leading it, leading it, you know, just ends up producing exactly the same outcome.
02:56:10.000And that's, hopefully, we have people who are wise enough To, first of all, not want that for themselves because they know about the danger.
02:56:20.000You know, the danger is you lose yourself in a real sense.
02:56:23.000And also who are humble enough with regard to their conception of their own ignorance that they actually do genuinely want to hear what other people have to say.
02:56:39.000So you need extraordinary people to be a part of this.
02:56:43.000Then you get looped right back into that problem.
02:56:46.000You're surrounded by the extraordinary people.
02:56:48.000I think what you partly want to do is remind yourself that part of the endeavor is to Help everyone reveal what's extraordinary within them.
02:56:59.000That's there in everyone's job is to call it out.
02:57:02.000And I've seen extraordinary people in the worst possible circumstances.
02:57:09.000People who are laboring under lives that were so bloody dreadful that it would take you a year just to describe it, who were still doing everything they could to aim up.
02:57:20.000Poor people, psychotic people, alcoholic relatives, devastated community, ill, brutalized, horrible childhood, no friends, and still looking around to see if they can find something good to do.
02:57:38.000And you would never wish those circumstances upon anyone because most people don't survive them.
02:57:44.000But a few people get through those with incredible character.
02:57:54.000Like her childhood, her life experience in North Korea is one of the most horrific stories I've ever heard in my life.
02:58:00.000But because of that, because of the horrific nature of the experiences that she had, she came out of this with this extraordinary character.
02:58:08.000I had a friend, Charles Joseph, a native carver from the West Coast.
02:58:12.000He was in a residential school in Canada and it was one of the ones that were genuinely bad and it was like, it was bad.
02:58:33.000You know, he was on the street for a while, quit drinking, quit mucking about, started carving, like turned himself into quite the stellar creature, you know, amazing.
02:58:43.000Again, you would never wish that on anyone.
02:58:45.000But it's incredible how through that adversity you create this extraordinary person.
02:58:51.000And that extraordinary person could be a great light to so many other people that are going through terrible times and define themselves by the terrible circumstances that they find themselves in, which is a real problem with people.
02:59:02.000Yeah, well, that's part of that victim narrative.
02:59:05.000You know, and one of the things that's so comical about the Exodus narrative is that that's really what happens to the Israelites when they're in the desert, is they turn into whiny, backbiting victims.
02:59:34.000And this constant quest for meeting and understanding and fulfillment and a life worth living.
02:59:42.000I think the thing that's really been catalyzed for me You know, over the course of my life, but particularly in the last five or six years, is that I don't think there is anything more real than that meaningful story.
02:59:57.000I mean real as a manifestation of the central structure of the material world, real metaphysically, real psychedelically, real practically, like real.
03:00:09.000And I think that instinct that orients you towards meaning That's the deepest connection you have to what is most real.
03:00:18.000You know, because people say, well, life isn't meaningful in its essence.
03:00:21.000That just means you're a reductionist, materialist atheist in your initial presuppositions.
03:00:27.000It's easy to flip that and say, no, no, the instinct that orients you towards engagement and meaning, that is the most real thing there is.
03:01:03.000And we are, I mean, the thing that we have in common is we're all just human.
03:01:08.000And if we're all human, there's always going to be this weirdness to existence and trying to figure out why and what it is.
03:01:16.000And also recognizing that some of the people that have defined why are so inherently flawed and they're very selfish in their definitions.
03:01:23.000And, you know, you have to kind of sort that out and parse through it.
03:01:28.000And one of the things that's been amazing about having a podcast is to present people with these different minds that have found their own way through it.
03:01:42.000That's what I loved about being a clinician, too, is to see how different and crazy and strange and interesting people really are if you listen to them.
03:01:51.000It's like, you know, I had lots of clients in my practice who were pretty They weren't people who would ever be put on a pedestal.
03:02:03.000You know, they were people who were in the dirt suffering away.
03:02:06.000But man, if you listen to them, they were so interesting that you just could hardly stand it.
03:02:26.000Yeah, well, and how much people could still strive towards what was good, even if they had every reason to be...
03:02:33.000You know, I had clients whose lives were so terrible, you'd think no matter what they did, you'd think, yeah, it's no wonder you did that, because look what you went through.
03:02:56.000Thank you very much for the invitation, man.
03:02:58.000It's always a pleasure to come see you.
03:02:59.000The moment that that was happening, I had to reach out to you because I'm like, this is just so bizarre and crazy and it just needs to be discussed.