Stay Free - Russel Brand - Jordan Peterson & Russell Brand On Politics, Censorship & Religion - Stay Free #184

00:00:00.000 So, I'm going to go ahead and get started.

00:00:25.000 In this video, we're going to see the future.

00:00:50.000 Oh In this video, you're going to see the future.

00:01:00.000 Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!

00:01:01.000 We've got an incredibly special show for you today.

00:01:04.000 In Here's the News, we're going to be asking about Trump's charges and corruption more broadly, but we've got a very special guest.

00:01:11.000 Jordan Peterson, the world-renowned clinical psychologist and best-selling author, is here with us today.

00:01:17.000 It's going to be an incredible conversation.

00:01:19.000 I'm going to ask Jordan Peterson about Trump, of course about the culture wars, about the success of Sound of Freedom.

00:01:25.000 I'm going to talk to him about censorship.

00:01:27.000 Jordan Peterson, thanks for joining us.

00:01:30.000 It's good to see you, Russell.

00:01:32.000 We're in a maelstrom.

00:01:33.000 I see that you have adorned yourself in the accoutrements of the Harlequin.

00:01:38.000 Is the role of the trickster necessary and integral at a time where authority appears to be melting, authenticity seems to be in decline, and people appear to be demanding new systems, and their faith in the old answers and systems appears to be Are you unconsciously indicating something to us or very deliberately indicating something to us?

00:02:04.000 Well, I don't know.

00:02:05.000 How much is play conscious and how much is it just something that automatically happens if you're conducting yourself properly?

00:02:13.000 These crazy people at LGFG have made me all sorts of suits.

00:02:18.000 And this one has a wooden tie, by the way, just so you know.

00:02:22.000 And it's supposed to be symbolic of the Native American art that I've been collecting.

00:02:27.000 JP, it's very curious that you have become, over the last 5-10 years, one of the most, it appears, divisive figures in our culture.

00:02:34.000 these crazy suits, Russell, and it turns out I like them, so I wear them and it's fun and

00:02:38.000 that's a good thing, you know?

00:02:40.000 JP, it's very curious that you have become over the last 5-10 years one of the most,

00:02:46.000 it appears, divisive figures in our culture. Certainly that's how your icon and image is

00:02:52.000 utilised. And yet it appears to me that in the numerous communities you are regarded

00:02:58.000 I feel like I've seen you talk about being called a rabbi.

00:03:01.000 I know that you have interesting relationships with indigenous Canadian folk, or in the territory now known as Canada.

00:03:08.000 Do you think that what we're striving for is a kind of morality, a set of principles that is transcendent of the current cultural divisions that appear to be defining our time?

00:03:18.000 Do we need to find something akin to universalism to reorganise and reorientate our cultural conversations?

00:03:28.000 Are we in danger of arriving at a time of such enormous fragmentation and divisiveness But it almost makes it impossible to establish systems of governance and consensus even.

00:03:40.000 Well, the alternative to unity is conflict.

00:03:46.000 Now, unity can become so tight that it turns into tyranny, and obviously that's not acceptable.

00:03:53.000 But the problem with the continual emphasis on diversity that we hear is that it isn't accompanied by the obvious fact that if people aren't united by a vision, let's say, which is how you unite people properly, then they're divided.

00:04:07.000 And divided people can't cooperate or compete peacefully, and their interests run afoul of one another.

00:04:15.000 Now, what's happening on the Unity front, as far as I can tell, is that There is a clamor for unity, particularly on the side of the people who are fear-mongering with the apocalypse, and they're trying to compel a unity with terror.

00:04:34.000 And to me, that's a hallmark of tyranny.

00:04:36.000 I think tyrants always use fear to compel unity.

00:04:39.000 What you need to do instead is to provide a unifying vision that people can adopt voluntarily.

00:04:45.000 You know, when you said, when you posed that question, that I'm a divisive figure, but I actually don't think that's true, Russell.

00:04:53.000 I'm a divisive figure online, but it doesn't seem to be the case in the actual world, because all the interactions I have with people in my actual life, in public, they're uniformly highly positive.

00:05:07.000 And so I don't think the online world is a very accurate simulacrum of the real world.

00:05:12.000 In fact, I think it's dangerously demented in many ways, and it's giving us a false sense of reality.

00:05:19.000 You know, it's a new sensory system, right?

00:05:21.000 The whole net and our new means of communication.

00:05:25.000 It's a whole new sensory and social system.

00:05:27.000 And there's no reason to assume that it's actually providing a valid representation of the actual world, especially because it also seems to be highly gameable by narcissists and psychopaths.

00:05:39.000 And that's not good.

00:05:41.000 That's not good.

00:05:43.000 Plainly, it is being used to leverage, engineer and amplify division.

00:05:50.000 There's no reason to imagine that part of the natural course of a free internet would be new confederacies, decentralization of power, an end to the kind of gargantuan and centralist institutions, both state and corporate, that dominate our systems of power currently.

00:06:13.000 I wonder, before we delve into this subject, which I know is extremely significant and important to you, if you might for a moment comment on the current attempts to indict Donald Trump and what he continues to represent for, you might say, marginalised people, but he's an incredibly popular and populist figure.

00:06:32.000 And those of you watching this on YouTube now, we'll be on for about another five minutes and then we'll be exclusively available on Rumble.

00:06:38.000 Click the link on the description.

00:06:39.000 If you're watching this on Rumble, click the red button now and you can join us over on Locals.

00:06:44.000 And again, Dr. Peterson, what do you think is the significance of Trump and his ongoing persecution?

00:06:48.000 Do you think he legitimately is an insurrectionist and a criminal in the numerous ways that have been alleged?

00:06:53.000 Or do you consider this to be a kind of distraction and an attempt to foreclose on the possibility of a legitimate and a powerful opponent facing Biden in

00:07:02.000 2024?

00:07:03.000 Well, I read Victor Davis Hanson's book, The Case for Trump, which I would highly recommend

00:07:10.000 to anyone who's interested in Trump as a phenomenon.

00:07:14.000 And he pointed out, and I think quite rightly, and this is something for those who are sensible on the left to give some consideration to, that the Democrats, especially under Clinton, but it started with Obama, abandoned the American working class, regarded them essentially as deplorables, which is exactly the same thing that happened in Canada under Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh.

00:07:35.000 And they turn to Trump.

00:07:37.000 And it's not as if people don't understand that Trump is a bull in a china shop. 0.60

00:07:41.000 And I think Robert F. Kennedy is in some ways the same sort of character.

00:07:45.000 But they're actually calling for a bull in the china shop because increasingly people don't trust the centralized, the overarching centralized Institutions that have become too gigantic.

00:08:00.000 You made reference earlier to the fact that there's no necessary reason for us to assume that the internet communication system and information exchange system that we've set up would necessarily tilt towards decentralization and universalization.

00:08:16.000 I think that's absolutely true.

00:08:17.000 It's very difficult to stop A political system from becoming tyrannical, that's the Tower of Babel situation, let's say, or degenerating into chaos.

00:08:28.000 You know, we've seen that with online games.

00:08:31.000 You know, some of those massive online games degenerated into absolute chaos because the rules by which they were constituted turned out not to engender a playable game.

00:08:41.000 And we have no idea if the Internet communication system we've set up is actually a playable game.

00:08:47.000 We have no idea.

00:08:48.000 Like, look, already we do know some things.

00:08:51.000 About 35% of internet traffic is pornographic. 1.00

00:08:55.000 And if you don't think that that's under the control of psychopathic criminals, you're a fool. 0.99

00:08:59.000 And then there's absolute, what would you say, lawless West activity on the criminal financial fraud front. 0.99

00:09:08.000 I don't think there's an older person in the Western world who isn't targeted once a week by criminals trying to steal their bank accounts.

00:09:16.000 And then, so that's direct criminal activity of the obvious type.

00:09:21.000 Then there's all the online trolls who do nothing but cause trouble and sow divisiveness in their cowardly manner and with their LOL culture, trying to do nothing but cause trouble.

00:09:32.000 And we know from the psychological research that those people are much likely to have dark tetrad characteristics. 0.90

00:09:39.000 They're Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and, because that wasn't good enough, sadistic.

00:09:46.000 And we have no control mechanisms for their proliferation online, right? 0.69

00:09:51.000 Face-to-face, people like that get shut down right away, but they have absolutely free reign on the net.

00:09:57.000 And I think not only does that poison the public square in a terrible manner, but it also indicates to people falsely that we're much more divided than we are.

00:10:11.000 Yes, it appears to me sometimes, Jordan, that anthropology and ethnographics suggest that we all live in manageable communities where the kind of narcissism and sadism that you describe cannot thrive because of the way that relationships break down when you encounter personalities of that type.

00:10:37.000 There is no ability to regulate a culture at this kind of scale.

00:10:42.000 And I know that what you believe in, it seems at least to me, that you believe in new ways of decentralising power, both corporate and state.

00:10:52.000 I wonder, are you saying something as significant as the Nation Project has had its half demi-millennia and that it's time to review even the findings and the treasures of the Westphalian Treaty.

00:11:09.000 Is this a time where we review the way that we organise cultures and society?

00:11:13.000 Because it appears to me that the reason that we have these great gargoyles and demons occupying the public stage, vivid caricatures, A vile, lurid, and pornographic language, even outside of the erotic, is precisely because we are living in some outgrowth, in some exaggeration, in some unbearable amplification of the type of systems that we might live by.

00:11:40.000 Industrialization, it seems, ultimately introduced a great deal of tyranny, as well as the miracles it delivered.

00:11:46.000 Agriculture, perhaps the same could be said, but we have no contingency for the problems of scale that have been created by this new type of technology.

00:11:54.000 And it seems to me that unless we introduce real measures, as you say, control mechanisms, that tyranny now is appearing to be inevitable without significant and organized opposition.

00:12:06.000 So one of the things you said at the beginning of that was that when you extract relationships out of their local environment, You lose a regulatory function.

00:12:18.000 You lose an implicit regulatory function.

00:12:20.000 So imagine that, you know, you and I have had multiple opportunities to communicate.

00:12:25.000 And one of the things, and we want to sustain that, so one of the things that we do while we're communicating, we might be trying to make our individual points for our own particular purposes.

00:12:35.000 Hopefully we're trying to do something like investigate the truth, you know, mutually.

00:12:40.000 But in any case, even if our own personal interests did creep into that, If we had any sense, our exchanges would be bounded by the realization that we're going to interact repeatedly for an indefinite amount of time into the future, right?

00:12:54.000 And so that makes us instantly, the dyad that we form, that makes us instantly into an interacting and iterative community.

00:13:02.000 Now, I believe that it's out of iterative interactions that fundamental morality emerges, and there's plenty of game theory that indicates precisely that.

00:13:11.000 Now, see, what happens to psychopaths and predators and parasites is that they sacrifice the possibility of a long-term relationship for immediate gratification.

00:13:22.000 And that's not good for them, by the way, because they tend to be very unsuccessful people, and they have to move from victim to victim very rapidly because people caught on to their games. 0.63

00:13:31.000 But they're not bounded by that necessity of responsible, iterated interaction.

00:13:35.000 You know, the same necessity that would govern you if you were in a long-term committed relationship, or the relationship that you have with your children.

00:13:42.000 And it's out of that that morality springs. 0.96

00:13:44.000 Now, if you eradicate that necessity, you disinhibit the psychopaths, and the predators, and the parasites. 0.90

00:13:52.000 Now, here's why this is such a major problem, and it might be a deadly problem.

00:14:01.000 The biological struggle is an arms race between parasites and hosts, and always has been, and it's such a profound race that that's why sex evolved.

00:14:11.000 Sex evolved because there are creatures that that replicate, even some lizards, that can replicate essentially by cloning themselves.

00:14:19.000 So they produce identical duplicates of themselves.

00:14:21.000 But what happens is the parasites can optimize for their physiology and take them out.

00:14:26.000 So sex mixes genes. 1.00

00:14:28.000 Okay, so the reason I'm saying that is because the parasite problem is so deep and so profound that sex itself evolved as the method of replication to deal with it.

00:14:39.000 Now, the online communication systems facilitate the parasites, and you don't need that many of them to take a society down, you know?

00:14:49.000 Like, the real radical types who would rather dance around in the chaos and who are in it only for their immediate self-gratification, they're a very small percentage of the population.

00:14:59.000 Clinical data indicates about 3%.

00:15:02.000 But the problem with that is that if they have free reign, they can take everything down.

00:15:06.000 Like they did that in the Russian Revolution, for example.

00:15:09.000 This happens.

00:15:11.000 That is pretty powerful stuff, Jordan Peterson.

00:15:14.000 Sex emerges as a solution to parasitic entities that introduce a new level of complexity that can outrun this parasitic mentality.

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00:16:24.000 I have a question for you, sir, and it is this.

00:16:26.000 What if more than enabling that 3% of the population that is psychopathic, we enable an archetype?

00:16:33.000 A deep psychopathy, latent in our species, unable to access the mainframe because of the way that our societies have previously functioned.

00:16:41.000 I know as a Jungian you will be aware of these potent lurking psychological archetypes that for which we are just utility for which we are just vessels and it has been said when you merge with an archetype you merge with an archetype the same way you merge with a tiger there's only going to be one winner but to hear Jordan Peterson's response to this deep Jungian question that we're flinging about just on Rumble you have to click the link in the description if you're watching this on YouTube because we're going to get deep in a minute we're going to talk about the left We're going to be talking about identity politics and the potential war against nature.

00:17:14.000 We're going to be talking about new systems.

00:17:16.000 We're going to be talking about JP's ARC project, as well as his new university, and so much more.

00:17:21.000 I've got so many questions, so click on the link, join us over on Rumble.

00:17:24.000 If you're watching us on Rumble, join us on Locals.

00:17:26.000 You can ask us questions there, although we did pre-record this earlier, and if you'd known that, you could have joined us on Locals for it Live, like Joe's dog is talking about parasites, even in computers.

00:17:36.000 Fantastic stuff.

00:17:37.000 So, what do you think, Jordan? 0.52

00:17:38.000 Perhaps the problem is even larger than enabling narcissistic, predatory and parasitic individuals.

00:17:44.000 Perhaps it somehow enables an archetype to function.

00:17:47.000 For example, the rather hacky analysis that a corporation behaves like a psychopath because it doesn't have individual culpability or the kind of morality that would evolve in an individual.

00:17:56.000 What happens if that is further charged by the type of technology that we're discussing?

00:18:01.000 What if it unlocks something even more powerful than individual psychopathy?

00:18:07.000 Well, you always ask the hardest questions, Russell, I would say, and that's very interesting.

00:18:11.000 I mean, look, one of the things that's characteristic of the biblical corpus, and the biblical corpus is the narrative that lies at the bottom of all our narratives, one of the things it insists upon is an archetypal battle between what's known in this symbolic world, let's say, as the hostile brothers.

00:18:31.000 And the original Hostile Brothers are Cain and Abel, and they're magnified up into Christ and Satan as the symbolic narrative progresses.

00:18:40.000 And you see this reflected in all sorts of popular culture tropes.

00:18:43.000 You know, every superhero has his associated supervillain.

00:18:47.000 And those are all, you see that with Thor and Loki, and of course their gods as well.

00:18:51.000 And you see this reflected constantly, you say, with Batman and the Joker and Superman and Lex Luthor.

00:18:56.000 It's a constant trope, everyone knows it.

00:18:59.000 James Bond always fights some supervillain, and often nested in a whole pit of supervillains.

00:19:04.000 And there is a notion that's relevant to what you described, that there's a battle on the spiritual level, so you could think of that as the level of abstraction, between the spirit of Cain and the spirit of Abel.

00:19:16.000 And the spirit of Cain, Cain is the man whose sacrifices are rejected.

00:19:22.000 And there's an implication in the text that they're rejected because they're of second-rate quality.

00:19:27.000 It's never made quite clear, but you know, everybody's sacrifices are rejected from time to time.

00:19:32.000 You work hard, you do what you think you have to do, and fate doesn't deliver to you what you think you deserve.

00:19:39.000 Now, you have two choices under those conditions, and one choice is to take a good look at yourself, check your presuppositions, reformulate yourself, allow part of yourself to die and be reborn, regenerate yourself and try again, or To shake your fist at the sky and curse God and become bitter and resentful and then murderous and then genocidal.

00:20:03.000 And that's the temptation.

00:20:05.000 That's the dual pathways that have laid themselves forward to human beings since the beginning of time.

00:20:10.000 Now you asked if There's something archetypal going on under the surface that we're seeing the reflection of.

00:20:17.000 And I would say, well, there's always been something archetypal going on.

00:20:20.000 That's in the nature of archetypes.

00:20:22.000 There's always been a battle between these two modes of existence.

00:20:25.000 But what happens in the midst of a technological revolution like the one we're in now is that it happens way faster and at a much larger scale.

00:20:34.000 And maybe the outlines even become clearer.

00:20:37.000 People are inclined at the moment to think conspiratorially, you know, they say it's as if there's a cabal behind the scenes maneuvering in a particular direction.

00:20:46.000 And I would say there are micro cabals now and then acting out this archetypal pattern, but the The conspiracy itself is actually a network of associated ideas that have an animating spirit within them that possesses people en masse, and they act in accordance with its dictates.

00:21:06.000 If you read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, for example, one of the great things he did that was probably the fundamental contribution of his work was to show that the horrors of the communist regimes weren't an anomaly, consequential to the instantiation of a potentially valid system, but the inevitable consequence of a non-playable game.

00:21:29.000 And so, the communist system laid itself out according to a certain set of animating principles, and that turned into this genocidal massacre.

00:21:39.000 The question is, so I know now, I'm writing a new book about this, I know now that the structure through which we look at the world is a story.

00:21:49.000 If you describe the structure through which we look at the world, that's what a story is.

00:21:53.000 That's why we value stories, because we need to know how to look at the world.

00:21:56.000 So the empiricists and the rationalists were wrong.

00:22:00.000 We cannot derive a picture of the world through mere reference to the facts, because there's one fact per phenomenon, and there's too many phenomena.

00:22:10.000 We're awash in them.

00:22:13.000 You have to arrange them hierarchically.

00:22:15.000 That's what a story is.

00:22:17.000 And once you know that, the next question obviously is, well, what's the correct story?

00:22:22.000 And I would say we at least know that it's not the story of Cain.

00:22:26.000 But plenty of people are playing that out.

00:22:28.000 Bitter, resentful, nihilistic, chaotic, you know, angry at the structure of existence itself for the implicit suffering, turning against humanity, well, and the cosmos for that matter, in their vengeful anger.

00:22:41.000 And the problem with that, I can understand why that's justifiable because lots of people suffer, but the problem with that is that it makes a bad situation into hell.

00:22:51.000 And that seems like a bad idea if what you're trying to avoid is hell.

00:22:55.000 Yes, yes, that is what I'm trying to avoid.

00:22:59.000 We know that order Rests continually upon chaos.

00:23:04.000 It's been a recurrent and defining theme of your work.

00:23:09.000 When you get the sense that the culture is being beyond curated, censored, Organized and controlled by bad actors, it seems that you have a duty to oppose those actions and that telos.

00:23:29.000 It's extraordinary to me to think that when you emerged as a sort of gifted or a from the world of academia, doubtless At the inaugural point an iconoclast but nevertheless framed within a quite limited and liminal space that you would emerge and unfold with so many germane arguments.

00:23:54.000 I suppose your particular phenomena will always be alloyed to that.

00:23:58.000 That is in fact what your phenomena is.

00:24:01.000 How do you feel now that You're operating in a space where some perspectives are censored on the basis that they are too right-wing, some perspectives are censored on the basis that they are not medically sound.

00:24:17.000 How can we have a framing where Donald Trump can be subject to these indictments, RFK,

00:24:23.000 you know your video with RFK was taken down, where you can't speak freely about the events

00:24:27.000 of the last three years, even when you're using as your basis demonstrable empirical

00:24:34.000 facts.

00:24:36.000 How are you going to continue to navigate this cancel culture and censorship when it

00:24:42.000 appears that legislatively now significant moves are being made in the EU now to penalize

00:24:48.000 social media companies, you're aware of that of course, and the Five Eyes Nations introducing

00:24:52.000 comparable legislation to impose further censorship.

00:24:56.000 What kind of challenges do you envisage that we will face over the coming years and how

00:25:00.000 might we oppose them?

00:25:02.000 Well, I think that we keep doing what we're doing, you know, you and I and a number of

00:25:09.000 of other people.

00:25:11.000 And people on a smaller scale, many people on a smaller scale, are trying to use whatever communication techniques they have accessible to them to stay one jump ahead of the people who would just as soon shut down free discourse.

00:25:24.000 Now it's possible as well that the free discourse that we're describing, fractious as though it may be, and offensive as though it may sometimes become, is part of the mechanism by which we keep the parasitic predators under control.

00:25:37.000 It's also part of the mechanism whereby we solve difficult problems without having to, you know, engage in real conflict with one another.

00:25:45.000 Difficult thought is the alternative to war.

00:25:50.000 And that's definitely the case.

00:25:52.000 Well, so what do I do?

00:25:53.000 I try to find all the avenues I can to communicate.

00:25:56.000 I try to keep the channels open.

00:25:58.000 I try to stay on top of the changing social media environment so that I can dance ahead of the censors, let's say.

00:26:05.000 And I tend also not to apologize for things I've said if I don't think they were wrong.

00:26:10.000 And so far, so far, you know, there's reason for me to be optimistic because people, the sensorial types who are irritated at me, have been trying to take me out for seven years.

00:26:22.000 And none of that's been, it's been dreadful in some ways, but it hasn't been successful.

00:26:28.000 In fact, I think quite the contrary.

00:26:29.000 You know, there's an injunction that In the Gospels that you should embrace your enemy.

00:26:35.000 And you know what that means in part is even to regard enmity as an opportunity to dance with it, you know?

00:26:44.000 And there's some real truth in that if you can manage it, you know?

00:26:47.000 I mean, one of the things my family has learned is if we are subject to a particularly grotesque attack, and I would say the most emblematic of those was the attempt to cast me as Red Skull in the Captain America comics, you know, it's preposterous to the point of surreality But we turned it into a productive joke, and that's part of that trickster mentality, I suppose, on the positive side.

00:27:15.000 And all that happened were positive things.

00:27:18.000 You know, it was stressful as hell when it first broke and unfolded, but the longer-term consequences were very positive.

00:27:25.000 And so I think, Russell, I think we all could be secure in the knowledge that if we faced enmity with truth and with the True desire to aim up, that even the worst of adversarial situations could be transformed into something that would further the enterprise.

00:27:46.000 You know, you see this in Goethe, in Faust as well, when he characterizes Mephistopheles, right, who's a figure, a satanic figure, he's the figure to whom Faust sells his soul for infinite knowledge.

00:28:00.000 He describes himself as part of the process that always What would you say?

00:28:06.000 Always aims at evil, but ends up producing good.

00:28:09.000 And so, I mean, that's a high level of moral standard, right?

00:28:13.000 To embrace your enemy to that degree, to regard enmity itself as an opportunity to do good.

00:28:19.000 But, well, if you're talking about archetypal realities, then you also end up talking about what constitutes the highest ideal.

00:28:25.000 I mean, it's very hard to live like that.

00:28:27.000 I mean, it's not like I don't get irritated, let's say, and sometimes worse than that, when These attacks occur, but you have to keep in mind what you're after.

00:28:42.000 If one of these archetypal notions that we're attempting to understand is that behind apparent separateness there is a unitive force, and that it is benign, and that it is loving, Loving not, I don't mean that in an erotic sense, neither really in an emotional sense, but in that is the felt experience of unity.

00:29:09.000 Then the idea that enmity, conflict and suffering represent the erosion of the edges that keep you from unity and that in suffering there is sacrifice and there are, as you referenced earlier, deaths that have to be undertaken.

00:29:29.000 Then I suppose this would represent a kind of embrace of the enemy.

00:29:34.000 Do you sense in identity politics a further fetishization of individualism that can no longer really be sustained?

00:29:44.000 That the But rationalism has brought us to this point where all of our functions tend to be predicated on the service of our preferences and our aversions, that our individual likes and dislikes become our Quran, they become our religion.

00:30:03.000 And do you feel, Jordan, that partly what you are trying to do is reintroduce Transcendent spiritual ideas to a cultural conversation that is bereft in them and is framed only really within the lexicon of materialism and the

00:30:19.000 The tropes of post-enlightenment philosophy that really doesn't embrace mysticism the way that perhaps it could.

00:30:27.000 And within this idea around identity politics and it being a kind of the ultimate celebration of the individual that it has baked into it, kind of is preventative of unity almost in the way that it defines itself, could you also touch upon this attack perhaps on nature, nature's self, And within that, masculinity.

00:30:47.000 I know it's an idea you've talked about extensively, but in relation to identity politics in particular.

00:30:52.000 So, interesting.

00:30:54.000 It's very interesting, Russell.

00:30:56.000 One of the things that Carl Jung intimated near the end of the Second World War was that the fundamental danger of Protestantism as such Was the continual fragmentation of the religious enterprise and you see this with the multiplication of protestant sex Let's say and he thought that the ultimate extension of that would be that each individual in some sense would become their own church And so when god identifies himself to moses in exodus, he says I am That I am or I am what I am.

00:31:29.000 He identifies himself as the principle of being and becoming itself all right now If you identify reality with your subjective experience only, you attribute to yourself that quality.

00:31:43.000 I am the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes reality.

00:31:46.000 But there's a weird twist in that, and it's one that I don't exactly understand, because The subjectivity to which all things are to be subordinated tends to be allied with an extremely narrow hedonism.

00:32:01.000 And so the people who are pushing forward an identity politics seem to identify their own individuality with nothing more, let's say, than their immediate sexual desire.

00:32:10.000 And I would say sexual particularly because so much of identity politics is about sexual attraction.

00:32:17.000 And then you might say, well, it's a pretty strange theory of human existence that you are to be identified with one biological whim, let's say.

00:32:29.000 And so, and the unity that you're describing, I don't even think in some sense is metaphysical or transcendent.

00:32:36.000 I think what it is, is the hammering into a higher order unity of the plethora of fundamental motivational and emotional systems that would otherwise manifest themselves as a pure local subjectivity.

00:32:51.000 And if that happens, you run into the psychopath problem.

00:32:53.000 Like, if you're only out, let's say you identify yourself with your desires, your immediate desires.

00:33:00.000 Well then you're going to treat everyone around you and yourself like a means to the gratification of those immediate desires.

00:33:08.000 And what that will do is that'll destroy you in the future because you're not giving your future self any allowance.

00:33:15.000 You do terrible things now because they're pleasurable regardless of consequences.

00:33:19.000 And you treat everyone else as if they're lesser and subordinate to your whims.

00:33:25.000 This higher unity, you know, it isn't less real than the subordinate whims.

00:33:31.000 It's more real.

00:33:32.000 Like the hero archetype is the most real representation of the human self.

00:33:38.000 It's the most real and it's based on the idea of something approximating courageous self-sacrifice.

00:33:44.000 So, for example, you see in the dragon fight story the notion that you have to confront what you're terrified of and repelled by.

00:33:52.000 You have to do that voluntarily.

00:33:54.000 The more Assiduously, you pursue that.

00:33:59.000 The bigger the treasure you garner, if you garner the treasure, you're obligated to distribute it generously to the community.

00:34:07.000 And it's all of that that makes up that central archetype of the hero.

00:34:11.000 And that is the central unity, right?

00:34:13.000 That unites the individual internally, unites motivation and emotion, and then unites each individual with the community.

00:34:21.000 A sense that the hero cannot be mobilized or galvanized without that motivation.

00:34:25.000 That the fuel doesn't arrive until the hero transcends from egoic motivation to communal motivation.

00:34:34.000 That when fueled by the ego, you cannot confront the dragon sufficiently.

00:34:39.000 There's a few things that I want to pick up on.

00:34:41.000 And this idea, if I may, sir, of utility.

00:34:45.000 But when we see other only in terms of utility, it's obviously restrictive.

00:34:49.000 But I would love to fold into this one of the things you taught us earlier in the conversation, the role of sex in our evolution, and indeed all of evolution, in order to introduce new complexity.

00:35:02.000 If sex has such an epochal role in the evolution of our entire species, surely then it is connected to this consciousness that is ulterior to manifestation and materialization, and therefore its role is almost archetypically significant.

00:35:17.000 I also want to offer you this, if I may, regarding the Cain and Abel analysis.

00:35:24.000 There has to be an ongoing tension between the assertion of our roles as individuals.

00:35:34.000 I have to exist as Russell in the world.

00:35:36.000 I have to know that it is Russell's mouth that I put food into.

00:35:40.000 Rather than the mouths of others, on the most basic biological level.

00:35:44.000 That I am indeed, that my entire reality is subjective.

00:35:48.000 That is all I know of reality, and yet I am aware of my insignificance.

00:35:52.000 Somewhere within us, there is some fractal interface between our relative insignificance and our total omni-, if not omnipotent, omniscience.

00:36:03.000 That all reality takes place within my consciousness, Yet materially, I'm borderline irrelevant.

00:36:10.000 Perhaps there is something of this Cain and Abel tension here.

00:36:14.000 I believe that if people don't have a felt and personal subjective experience of God, whether that's through Christ or the Prophet Muhammad or Buddha, or yogically, some sense of a self beyond self, or some sense of an entity beyond self, some felt experience of knowing that is not about what Russell wants and what Russell doesn't want, Then we do become victim to this hedonic ideology that seems to assert itself in the absence of a more deliberate ideology.

00:36:46.000 I've been thinking too of the distinction between bliss and ecstasy.

00:36:51.000 Bliss perhaps offers us the idea of fulfillment.

00:36:55.000 Fulfillment.

00:36:56.000 Our cup is full.

00:36:58.000 Ecstasy offers us the idea that my cup runneth over.

00:37:01.000 That boundaries are being burst.

00:37:03.000 This seems to me relevant with your hedonic analysis.

00:37:07.000 So I say that when we strip away God and the possibility of God, then that subjective experience becomes God.

00:37:14.000 That becomes the higher principle around which we organize.

00:37:17.000 So there does need to be some new way of introducing to politics The sacredness, the sacrament, the idea, somehow the representation of this tension, that we are part of the divine, that we have rights, but we are not only our rights, we are also our duties.

00:37:39.000 I know that's not a question, but I also know you'll have things to say.

00:37:42.000 Well, okay, so there is a gospel injunction as well to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's, and you mentioned a reintroduction of the sacred into the political, and what has happened, as you also intimated, is that the sacred has collapsed into the political, And that means there are now sacred cows in the political, which is why we can't discuss politics with each other.

00:38:06.000 You need to separate the sacred and the political, and the political has to be subordinate to the sacred.

00:38:13.000 This is one of the most remarkable and powerful discoveries of mankind as a whole, is that The principle of political sovereignty has to be subordinate to the principle of sacred sovereignty.

00:38:26.000 And the Christian idea, and this develops out of the Jewish tradition, is that the fundamental principle of sovereignty is, what would you say, is voluntary.

00:38:35.000 It's voluntary.

00:38:37.000 It's a voluntary sacrifice.

00:38:39.000 That's what's at the center of the community, and that the highest is properly devoted to serving the lowest.

00:38:45.000 That's an inversion of the, let's say, the classical notion of power.

00:38:51.000 Might makes right, if I can crush you.

00:38:53.000 And if might isn't the principle of sovereignty, you have to ask yourself, well, what is?

00:38:57.000 And you could say, well, nothing, in which case you have a kind of nihilistic chaos, and then hedonism rules.

00:39:03.000 And if there's something sovereign above power, then you have to ask yourself what that is.

00:39:07.000 And that's really, that is exactly what the biblical corpus, by the way, is trying to sort out.

00:39:13.000 So you see prophets, for example, emerging repetitively in the Old Testament, and they are people who What would you say?

00:39:19.000 The events faith that the fundamental structure of reality is good, and that if you live in truth, you can bring about a new reality that's even better.

00:39:30.000 That's the axiom of faith.

00:39:32.000 Then they'll confront, let's say, the tyrant or the catastrophes of the natural world with that banner in hand and revitalize.

00:39:40.000 And the biblical narrative is predicated on the idea that the Christian savior is the ultimate expression of that Developing spirit, right?

00:39:49.000 The manifestation of that, the embodied manifestation of that.

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00:40:27.000 I'm going to ask you now some questions that will be elicited and have been elicited from our audience.

00:40:35.000 Excuse me.

00:40:36.000 See Sound of Freedom, what does this mean, the success of this movie?

00:40:39.000 Does it mean that you can now bypass the typical and former establishment models of promo?

00:40:45.000 Does it mean that people are interested in stories that have a sort of a plain sort of Christian ethos?

00:40:51.000 What do you think is the significance of this film and its success, Jordan?

00:40:55.000 Well, you know, I was just in Hollywood two weeks ago, and I met some stars there, and they were older and very well-established people, trying to make their way forward appropriately, to the best of their ability, and doing that well, I would say.

00:41:13.000 But I really got the sense, and it was from other things that happened in LA too, that that time is over.

00:41:19.000 And I know from talking to my friends in LA, and you know, I can't be sure that this is 100% correct, but that the only star now, for example, who can ensure box office success is Tom Cruise.

00:41:30.000 And interestingly, Cruise is also one of the stars who's completely dissociated himself from the political.

00:41:36.000 I mean, I know he's involved with Scientologists, and that's neither here nor there for the moment, although it might have given him somewhere to put his religious enterprise, you know, and kept him out of the political.

00:41:46.000 But then you see that also happening at the same time as the writer's strike, and my sense of the writer's strike is that no one cares.

00:41:57.000 And I think that system has collapsed.

00:41:59.000 Now, you look at what happened with The Sound of Freedom.

00:42:03.000 Part of that is people saying, to hell with the woke entertainment mob.

00:42:08.000 We'll go watch this just because we're being told not to.

00:42:12.000 But part of it also is the desire for people's The desire that people have for a truly archetypal story.

00:42:17.000 And whatever else you might say about The Sound of Freedom, it's essentially a hero story.

00:42:22.000 I mean, it has political connotations, and it's grounded in the events of the real world, let's say.

00:42:27.000 But fundamentally, it's, you know, one lone guy, supported by his dutiful wife, who's motivated by higher order principles, to take on the worst of the predators and the parasites.

00:42:40.000 And so, yes, people are dying for that.

00:42:43.000 People have always died for that story, psychologically and literally.

00:42:46.000 Because it's the right story.

00:42:49.000 The hero stands up against the tyrant.

00:42:51.000 The hero leads people out of slavery.

00:42:53.000 The hero confronts the dragon.

00:42:55.000 There's no getting away from that.

00:42:58.000 That's the intrinsic pattern of our instinctual being.

00:43:02.000 And the reason we find those stories meaningful is because meaning is the instinct that guides us on that on that revelatory and redemptive pathway.

00:43:12.000 And you see, this is where the atheist types get it so wrong, you know, because they tend, like the more literal Protestants, to assume that what religious practice is, is the mouthing of a set of propositions.

00:43:25.000 It's like a theory of the world, and that's not the case.

00:43:28.000 It's a manner of conducting yourself, directing your attention, and acting.

00:43:34.000 And then there's representations of that in imagination and semantically, but the fundamental issue is the actual pattern of action.

00:43:41.000 You know, that's why the highest level of religious devotion in the Christian tradition It's the same in Buddhism with regard to Buddha.

00:43:47.000 It's the imitation of Christ.

00:43:49.000 It's the attempt to act out the archetype in the confines of your life.

00:43:54.000 And the offering there is that this is a strange offering.

00:43:58.000 The offering there is that that's possible.

00:44:01.000 It's possible for each person to operate as a center of divinity in the world.

00:44:05.000 And I believe that I don't believe that there is a more reliable truth than that.

00:44:10.000 And I also think that's true scientifically, by the way.

00:44:13.000 Yes, it's beautiful that the word conduct obviously has those connotations of being a carriage for energy or for heat that you can connect to the source through conduct.

00:44:27.000 Regarding atheism, tell us a little of your recent challenge.

00:44:31.000 We did a video on it to Richard Dawkins who we've had on the show, I've had conversations with.

00:44:36.000 Do you think that he's an example of the reductive atheism and deliberate straw man atheism?

00:44:43.000 Oh yes and yes and no.

00:44:44.000 You know, the thing about Dawkins is, I like Dawkins and he's super smart and I learned a lot from reading his books.

00:44:51.000 And I think that Dawkins fundamentally is an intellectually honest man.

00:44:58.000 I don't think he knows how to reconcile the gap between the propositional view of religion and the scientific view.

00:45:05.000 Now, I think he's wrong on a variety of fronts.

00:45:09.000 I don't think that his reading of the biblical corpus is particularly sophisticated.

00:45:14.000 It's dismissive.

00:45:15.000 Now what Dawkins does is the same thing that Harris does, is that they're very opposed to the totalitarian proclivity, and rightly so.

00:45:27.000 But they identify the totalitarian proclivity with the religious enterprise.

00:45:34.000 Now, there are totalitarian proclivities within the religious enterprise, right?

00:45:39.000 Because the most psychopathic tyrants will use the highest principles to justify their own self-interest.

00:45:49.000 So the worst totalitarians are likely the ones who subvert religion.

00:45:53.000 And that's rightfully objected to, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

00:45:58.000 And Dawkins and Harris both underestimate the necessity of narrative, Irreducible necessity of narrative and they don't contend with the fact of religious phenomenology, right?

00:46:11.000 The religious experience as such, the instinct of meaning.

00:46:14.000 Now Harris has moved in that direction because he is a devoted meditator and so he admits in practice that there is a religious enterprise.

00:46:24.000 He doesn't like to concretize it, but partly that's because Sam knows perfectly well at some level that if he concretized his relationship with the divine, his rational mind would tear it to shreds and leave him bereft.

00:46:36.000 So, I have been in contact with Dawkins representatives since you made that video and since Richard, Dr. Dawkins and I have been bandying back and forth on Twitter and there is some possibility that we will meet and discuss these things and I would like it to be a discussion because this is not simple and I don't think it's it's not the place where you want to have a defeat.

00:47:02.000 I understand where Dawkins is coming from but I think that See, he's such an interesting person, because his notion of meme is right on the threshold of the notion of archetype.

00:47:13.000 If he would have pursued that, he would have entered the Jungian world, because the ultimate memes are sacred stories.

00:47:20.000 Now, then the question is, does the meme bear any relationship to reality?

00:47:25.000 And the answer is, well, it depends on what you mean by reality.

00:47:28.000 And I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it isn't, because Memes that survive.

00:47:33.000 You can make a perfectly reasonable argument that the memes that survive over the longest spans of times are the ones that most effectively serve the purposes of reproduction.

00:47:44.000 That's a Darwinian argument which Dawkins should support.

00:47:48.000 And I would say that the memes that have guided us, let's say the memes that are part of the biblical tradition that have lasted for at least thousands and likely tens of thousands of years, are the memes that have been selected By two processes of reproduction, right?

00:48:03.000 The transmission of information, so the propagation of information as reproduction, but that have also facilitated genuine reproduction itself.

00:48:11.000 And so I don't understand, I don't see how someone who's Darwinian in their thinking can avoid that conclusion if they take their thinking right to the logical end.

00:48:22.000 Successful memes have emerged as a consequence of Darwinian competition.

00:48:27.000 And so why would you not say, then they're adapted to the world, then they're microcosms of the world.

00:48:32.000 Dawkins himself said that an adapted organism, he said this explicitly in a brilliant paper, An adapted organism must be a microcosm of the world.

00:48:43.000 Well, we're storied organisms.

00:48:46.000 So how in the world can you not derive the conclusion that what we live in is best construed as a story?

00:48:52.000 I think it is.

00:48:53.000 I think it's inevitable.

00:48:55.000 And then the question is, well, what's the story?

00:48:57.000 Well, we've been trying to figure that out since we've been able to communicate.

00:49:02.000 Thousands, tens of thousands of years.

00:49:04.000 and voluntary self-sacrifice, the dragon fight motif, the bearing of the cross, the voluntary bearing of the cross,

00:49:12.000 that being the precondition for redemption and renewal.

00:49:16.000 That's all part of that system of ideas, and I think it's inescapable.

00:49:20.000 Yes, there would have to be some concomitant magnetism, for a meme to land, for a meme to imprint.

00:49:30.000 It can't sustain its own ongoing randomness and simultaneously narrativize.

00:49:37.000 Those two things, there's a juxtaposition in that.

00:49:41.000 Another way of looking at it, you're absolutely right, here's another way of looking at it.

00:49:47.000 The stories that survive Are those that are maximally adapted to the structure of human memory and communication?

00:49:56.000 Obviously!

00:49:57.000 Because they wouldn't be remembered or transmitted.

00:49:59.000 They wouldn't strike home.

00:50:00.000 They wouldn't have any compelling power.

00:50:02.000 So the stories have to Arrange themselves so they're analogs of the biological substrate that's representing them and that means they're an echo of you could say they're an echo of the soul, right?

00:50:14.000 But you can you can make that case biologically and I don't see any escape from it.

00:50:19.000 So one of the things I've learned, for example, is that The instinct of meaning itself.

00:50:24.000 It's a reflection of something the Russian neuropsychologist called the orienting reflex, the orienting response, which is the response that orients you to the emergence of new information in the environment.

00:50:35.000 That grips you.

00:50:36.000 It's like the burning bush.

00:50:37.000 It grips you.

00:50:38.000 And that grip is represented at multiple levels in the nervous system.

00:50:42.000 And that grip occurs on the border between order and chaos.

00:50:46.000 Like, technically speaking, that happens to be the case.

00:50:50.000 You want to be somewhere where you have one foot in order and one foot in the unknown.

00:50:53.000 That's the eternal dragon fight.

00:50:55.000 That way you're stable enough to maintain yourself, but you're also challenging yourself enough to continue to grow and change.

00:51:02.000 Meaning signifies your existence in that place, right?

00:51:06.000 And that's part of the divine order.

00:51:08.000 And I see absolutely no evidence in the relevant neuropsychological literature that any of that is less than biologically accurate.

00:51:16.000 And I know the great literature Jeffrey Gray's book, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, in particular, and Jaak Panksepp's Affect of Neuroscience.

00:51:24.000 I've talked to many neuroscientists, What's his name now?

00:51:29.000 He's the most cited neuroscientist in the world.

00:51:32.000 He wrote a lot about emotional responses and entropy.

00:51:36.000 I asked him specifically, his name will come to me, whether or not object perception was a micro-narrative, and he said necessarily yes.

00:51:44.000 You think about that.

00:51:45.000 Every object we see is a prop in a play.

00:51:50.000 At the perceptual level, that shatters empiricism.

00:51:53.000 You don't see facts and objects and attribute to them meaning.

00:51:58.000 You see props in a play.

00:52:01.000 And the question is, well, what play are you playing?

00:52:03.000 What part are you playing?

00:52:04.000 There's no detaching perception from the underlying narrative.

00:52:08.000 It's not technically possible.

00:52:10.000 Yes, I like that because it suggests that consciousness is the prima materia of our reality, that consciousness is the baseline, is the fundamental frequency from which secondary phenomena emerge, that this is Genesis, this is the point of origin, this is what precedes that molecular explosion that grants us all reality.

00:52:33.000 Is this the way that you might conduct yourself at the Peterson Academy?

00:52:37.000 Bringing together a variety of subjects to create a multi-discipline education.

00:52:43.000 Would you house debates between yourself and Dickie Dawkins?

00:52:47.000 Would you find me in some cyber corridor, in a mortar board, in a Hogwarts scarf?

00:52:53.000 Will there be inter-house competitions and Quidditch matches?

00:52:57.000 Would you invite JK Rowling so you can be the most controversial in the staff room?

00:53:03.000 What's it going to be like at the Peterson Academy, JP?

00:53:07.000 Well, I think all of that would be great fun, you know, and as you know, we've invited you to participate.

00:53:11.000 We'll work out the details of that as we move along.

00:53:14.000 What we're doing at the moment is we're trying to find people who are great communicators, who believe fervently in the integrity of their ideas, and then inviting them to produce eight hours of content pertaining to what they would love to teach most if the restrictions were stripped from them.

00:53:32.000 So, you know, we're trying to produce a diverse range of courses.

00:53:35.000 Our first goal is to produce a Bachelor of Arts for people, an online equivalent to a Bachelor of Arts.

00:53:41.000 I don't think we'll accredit the university because we have to deal with the accrediting agencies and that's so much of a bureaucratic nightmare that it would be fundamentally counterproductive.

00:53:50.000 But I think we'll be able to guarantee potential employers that our graduates will be accredited in a manner that truly indicates their ability to learn and their disciplined conscientiousness and their potential creativity.

00:54:03.000 So the market value should be there.

00:54:05.000 And we want to walk people through a corpus of courses that will What would you say?

00:54:13.000 Enable them to think more clearly and make them sophisticated players so that if they want to be successful in whatever way they define success, they're going to be armed with the tools that enable them to do that.

00:54:24.000 And we produced a writing app, too, called Essay, Essay.app, that teaches people to write.

00:54:30.000 And, you know, a cynic might say, well, I don't have to write because I have ChatGPT.

00:54:36.000 And the proper response to that is, and this might be the motto of our university, Think or die, right?

00:54:43.000 That's the purpose of thinking.

00:54:45.000 Alfred North Whitehead said this, you think so your thoughts can die instead of you. 1.00

00:54:50.000 You engage in combative dialogue so your idiot notions can perish before you act them out and suffer. 0.98

00:54:57.000 And the reason you think, and the reason you write, and the reason you don't cheat when you do that, because if you don't think you suffer and die, And so we would like to arm people with the best of thoughts and also with the skills necessary to think so that they can make their way forward properly in the world. 0.99

00:55:14.000 That's the goal.

00:55:15.000 And then we want to do this, and this is part of the comical element of it.

00:55:19.000 I'd like to knock the price of a bachelor's degree down 95% because I think that's possible.

00:55:25.000 And I think it would be... it's comical.

00:55:27.000 It's comical that that's a possibility.

00:55:30.000 But I think it is a possibility.

00:55:31.000 We have great lectures lined up already.

00:55:33.000 We've taped 20 courses.

00:55:34.000 They're very nicely filmed, very professionally.

00:55:38.000 They'll be delivered at a much higher quality than the typical university lecture.

00:55:45.000 Now, we know that a university isn't just lectures and tests, right?

00:55:48.000 There's a social element to it.

00:55:50.000 You want to meet new peers.

00:55:51.000 Perhaps you want to meet your mate.

00:55:53.000 That's maybe why you're willing to give a university $250,000.

00:55:56.000 And so we're trying to set up a social media platform around it that will enable people to communicate about what they're learning, to aggregate together in their local communities, and perhaps to figure out how to come together now and then on a larger scale so that they can have some more of the actual, you know, bricks-and-mortar university experience.

00:56:16.000 And so, you know, we'll see if we can manage it.

00:56:19.000 But so far, We have had enthusiastic participation from our lecturers, and that's also partly because we treat them nicely.

00:56:28.000 You know, one of the things that's really struck me working with the Oxford and Cambridge professors, because we have a number of them, is that they are so grateful to be treated Decently, that it's really quite heartbreaking.

00:56:40.000 You know, it's like we make them a decent financial offer, but when they come to do their lectures, like, we're actually really happy they're there.

00:56:48.000 And we're pleased that they're willing to share our knowledge with them.

00:56:51.000 And we treat them like they're worthy of respect.

00:56:53.000 And all of the people that we've had come to lecture have indicated their interest to repeat the experience.

00:57:00.000 And so we want to bring people together who want to teach and we want to leave them the hell alone.

00:57:05.000 So they can teach.

00:57:06.000 And then we want to offer that to people at as broad a level as possible, as inexpensively as possible.

00:57:12.000 And we'll see, you know, it's a ridiculously ambitious goal, but But I can't see why it's impossible, you know?

00:57:22.000 I don't think it is.

00:57:23.000 I'm beginning to experience that independent media conflates with independent politics almost organically because the issues that you cover are essentially political and unavoidably political.

00:57:38.000 Adding education to that now triumvirate It appears necessary and essential and a significant part of your modality of decentralization and your desire for decentralized models.

00:57:54.000 Professor, please finish.

00:57:56.000 There are people all over the world that are clamoring for high quality education, not least in the West, but also everywhere else.

00:58:02.000 And the new technologies of translation also may make it possible, at least in principle, to offer what we're offering in a multitude of languages.

00:58:10.000 And you know, and the translations are very accurate and very high quality.

00:58:14.000 And so, well, we'll see what happens.

00:58:17.000 We're very much looking forward to doing it.

00:58:19.000 We figured the eight-hour format seems to be about right.

00:58:23.000 You know, maybe we'll bundle like two eight-hour courses together to make a single university credit, something like that.

00:58:30.000 But, you know, obviously people can tolerate a three-hour podcast, and those are educational content.

00:58:36.000 I think 30 hours, which is a standard university course, is actually too long for online provision.

00:58:43.000 There's no reason not to break that up and to not overwhelm people with, you know, content that would require a devotion of time that they might not be able to manage, especially when you can aggregate courses together anyways.

00:58:57.000 And so four two-hour lectures seems to be Maybe the sweet spot for the electronic delivery of educational material.

00:59:06.000 We'll see.

00:59:07.000 You know, we launched this Exodus seminar on YouTube, and it's 16 two-hour seminars devoted to an explication of the Exodus story, which was a remarkable thing to participate in, by the way.

00:59:19.000 And people are responding very positively to that, as they did to my series on Genesis.

00:59:24.000 So there's definitely a hunger for high-quality educational material.

00:59:28.000 And it's also lovely to be one of the things that's been quite delightful in some ways about no longer being associated with the university, even though there's parts of it I miss, is that when I'm lecturing, I'm only teaching people who actually want to learn.

00:59:43.000 And hopefully this Peterson Academy will be set up that way too.

00:59:46.000 We'll only have teachers who want to teach and we'll only be teaching students who actually want to learn.

00:59:52.000 So that's an optimized play situation, right?

00:59:55.000 And so hopefully there can be some joy in it and some playfulness.

00:59:58.000 You know, you referred to that as a possibility and that would be Well, that's the goal.

01:00:04.000 I shall set about designing my lectures even now.

01:00:09.000 You will find me a renegade, teacher.

01:00:11.000 Sure, I don't play by the rules, but I get the job done.

01:00:14.000 While people are in my class, they'll play by my rules.

01:00:17.000 First rule, there is no rules.

01:00:18.000 Twelve rules for life, I give you thirteen rules for life.

01:00:22.000 The thirteenth rule is ignore the preceding twelve.

01:00:24.000 It's gonna be An education in skullduggery and needless trickery.

01:00:29.000 JP, thank you so much for joining us today.

01:00:31.000 We're only curtailing our conversation to broadcast it, as a matter of fact, because we're putting it out this evening.

01:00:37.000 Otherwise, I'll carry on long into the English night.

01:00:40.000 Well, and hopefully you'll be moderating my discussion with Richard Dawkins.

01:00:43.000 I think that would be ridiculously comical and interesting.

01:00:47.000 And hopefully we can do it in a manner that's truly productive.

01:00:49.000 I think we could manage it, you know?

01:00:51.000 And like I said, I have a lot of respect for Dawkins.

01:00:55.000 He's the most effective voice there is for that reductive materialist atheism, and that's a non-trivial force to be reckoned with, right?

01:01:04.000 And the totalitarian contamination of the religious enterprise is also something that has to be hashed out.

01:01:10.000 When he came here, he was so lovely to bear my dog, not realizing that if you were to make an anagram of that three-letter word, he'd be in all sorts of trouble.

01:01:24.000 Talking to you, man.

01:01:25.000 Good luck with continued enterprises.

01:01:27.000 Thank you.

01:01:28.000 Thanks to everyone who's watching and listening, too, really.

01:01:31.000 Thank you.

01:01:32.000 Yeah, you're getting a lot of love here.

01:01:33.000 I'm sorry I didn't get to ask your questions, guys.

01:01:35.000 JP, thank you, as always.

01:01:36.000 Lots of love.

01:01:38.000 Thank you so much, Jordan.

01:01:39.000 Now, the Peterson Academy is launching soon, and you can see Jordan Peterson speaking at the O2 in London on Wednesday, November 1st.

01:01:46.000 Tickets are available at the02.co.uk.

01:01:50.000 On the show tomorrow, we've got Glenn Greenwald, our friend from Rumble and an incredibly influential Journalist and thought leader to join our locals community to get advanced access to our content.

01:02:02.000 Click the red button on your screen, you'll get first access to interviews.

01:02:05.000 We've got Vivek Ramaswamy coming up on Wednesday.

01:02:07.000 You get meditations, podcasts, all sorts of events.

01:02:09.000 Now, as I told you at the beginning, we're looking today about the ongoing circus around Donald Trump.

01:02:16.000 Is he going to go to jail?

01:02:17.000 And what is What is so strange about this case is it's predicated on knowing what goes on specifically within Donald Trump's consciousness.

01:02:24.000 What is his subjective experience?

01:02:27.000 Is he deliberately sowing doubt?

01:02:29.000 And what are his intentions?

01:02:30.000 Here's the news.

01:02:31.000 No, here's the effing news.

01:02:33.000 Thank you for choosing Fox News.

01:02:34.000 Here's the news. 1.00

01:02:36.000 No, here's the fucking news. 0.99

01:02:38.000 Donald Trump has been charged with three conspiracy theories related to the 2020 elections. 0.99

01:02:45.000 So is this the end of democracy or just another distraction away from the Biden crime family?

01:02:53.000 We've got a fantastic video to discuss.

01:02:55.000 Donald Trump has of course been indicted once more with charges related to conspiracy in connection to the 2020 election.

01:03:02.000 We've got some pretty big questions to ask you about the nature of democracy right now.

01:03:07.000 Will we Should we ever again have an uncontested democracy?

01:03:10.000 And while we're focusing on the intricacies and details of this case, are we not missing the bigger picture?

01:03:16.000 That democracy itself is corrupt.

01:03:18.000 Furthermore, is the Biden administration using this as a kind of smoke and mirrors veil to distract us from their own corruption?

01:03:24.000 And shouldn't we be discussing all corruption, whether it's left or right or blue and red Through the same lens, with the same degree of scrutiny, in order to expose systemic hypocrisy and corruption.

01:03:36.000 Let's look at the mainstream media reporting on this wacky old story.

01:03:39.000 Former President Donald Trump returned to Washington, this time under federal indictment for allegedly trying to steal an election.

01:03:47.000 His motorcade going through the city that symbolizes American democracy.

01:03:52.000 At Washington, it symbolizes American democracy.

01:03:56.000 Don't you ever stop to think that when people are clutching their pearls over January 6th?

01:04:00.000 The Capitol?

01:04:01.000 How dare you attack that building?

01:04:03.000 That's where Paul Pelosi gets all his stock trading tips from.

01:04:06.000 Arriving for his third arraignment in less than five months.

01:04:10.000 The courthouse just blocks away from where the January 6th attack on the US Capitol unfolded.

01:04:16.000 Now, many people think, and this is a big problem, that part of the insurrection, if you want to call it that, was instigated by deep cover agents.

01:04:26.000 We've had Tucker on our show.

01:04:28.000 One of the main problems with Tucker and Fox, it seems, was Tucker's willingness to say that January the 6th was at least in part orchestrated or amplified by FBI and other deep state agencies.

01:04:41.000 The former president pleaded not guilty to four felony counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States.

01:04:49.000 It was fueled by lies.

01:04:52.000 Lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S.

01:04:56.000 government, the nation's process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.

01:05:04.000 If you're going to approach this topic with piety of that magnitude, then you better be certain of your own moral authority.

01:05:12.000 You better be certain that there is no corruption in the way that your party is funded, the behaviour of your congress people, the way that wars are funded and continually funded without due recourse to the electorate.

01:05:27.000 The problem here, if you ask me, and in a way by clicking on this video you have, is that we are focusing on merely highlighted aspects of hypocrisy and corruption.

01:05:36.000 Did Trump know?

01:05:37.000 Didn't he know?

01:05:38.000 Did he amplify?

01:05:39.000 Didn't he amplify?

01:05:40.000 Let's look at the entire system for a moment.

01:05:42.000 Is this working?

01:05:43.000 Can any of us really imagine that on the morning after the election in 2024, one side is going to say, well, well done, let's have a traditional and cordial transfer of power now.

01:05:53.000 The best party won.

01:05:55.000 The best man won, because it will be a man. 0.57

01:05:56.000 In spite of all this talk of progressivism, nothing's really changed, has it?

01:06:01.000 Funded in the same way.

01:06:02.000 Regulated in the same way, benefits the same class of people, ignores the same people.

01:06:07.000 Apart from all the Sturm and Drang and rhetoric and racket, nothing is really changing.

01:06:12.000 We're like cats following the laser of the latest corruption.

01:06:15.000 Meanwhile, business as usual for Raytheon, business as usual for the FDA.

01:06:20.000 What's that laser doing?

01:06:21.000 I like this laser!

01:06:23.000 This laser's got crazy hair!

01:06:24.000 This laser's really old!

01:06:26.000 Stop chasing those lasers like cats and focus on the systemic corruption.

01:06:31.000 Special Counsel Jack Smith insists Trump knew he'd lost the election, but tried to overturn the results anyway.

01:06:39.000 Determined to remain in power, claiming that he spread lies about fraud, though he knew they were false.

01:06:46.000 This is from our friend Michael Schellenberger, that advocate of free speech, on his substack platform, Public.

01:06:52.000 In a sense, that's odd, isn't it?

01:06:53.000 Because what is the United States at this point?

01:06:55.000 What do we mean?

01:06:56.000 Former President Donald J. Trump with three conspiracies related to the 2020 election

01:07:00.000 and its aftermath.

01:07:02.000 Conspiracy to defraud the United States.

01:07:03.000 In a sense that's odd isn't it?

01:07:04.000 Because what is the United States at this point?

01:07:07.000 What do we mean?

01:07:08.000 Do we mean the United States that the Redcoats were fighting against? 0.99

01:07:13.000 Do we mean the United States of the Vietnam War?

01:07:15.000 Do you mean the United States of Jimi Hendrix or James Baldwin?

01:07:19.000 At this point, the United States, if you ask me, is a veil to mask the ongoing corrupt activities of elite globalist organizations executed by a managerial class of corrupt politicians.

01:07:32.000 What is it, the United States?

01:07:34.000 How can you defraud the United States when the United States is a fraudulent enterprise at this point?

01:07:40.000 Conspiracy to obstruct vote certification proceedings and conspiracy to violate the civil right to vote and have one's vote counted.

01:07:47.000 Extraordinary, given the amount of debate, controversy, and doubt around this election, and likely for future elections.

01:07:55.000 And remember, it's not just the Republicans, and in particular Trump's supporting Republicans in 2020, that have doubted the outcome of elections, but the Democrats, too, in 2016.

01:08:05.000 Oh, it must be a Russian hoax. 0.93

01:08:06.000 This is because of Russia. 0.98

01:08:07.000 Didn't he get peed on?

01:08:09.000 And in other elections, in both midterms and presidentials, both sides have previously aggressively queried the outcome of elections, as we will later demonstrate.

01:08:17.000 These charges all rest on the idea that Trump made knowingly false claims.

01:08:21.000 He knew!

01:08:22.000 He knew inside his mind that these claims were false.

01:08:25.000 At this point in history, with the state and the condition that he's in, we're talking about an ontological debate about the nature of Trump's subjective experience.

01:08:34.000 Let's look inside Trump's mind.

01:08:36.000 What did he think in there?

01:08:38.000 What's he thinking in there?

01:08:39.000 And while we're at it, let's look inside Biden's mind.

01:08:41.000 Hello?

01:08:41.000 Oh!

01:08:43.000 Hunter!

01:08:45.000 But if Trump actually did believe the 2020 election was stolen, the accusation of a conspiracy to undermine democracy through illegal interference falls apart.

01:08:53.000 Smith's indictment, notably, does not provide evidence that Trump's allegations of election fraud were knowingly false.

01:09:00.000 Smith simply states that Trump was notified repeatedly that his claims are untrue.

01:09:05.000 Without reading Trump's mind, it is impossible to know whether he believed his claims or not.

01:09:09.000 It's actually quite an existential legal matter, this.

01:09:13.000 What did you believe?

01:09:14.000 I did believe it, though.

01:09:16.000 No, you didn't really believe it.

01:09:17.000 You're pretending to believe it.

01:09:18.000 Nope, I'm sorry.

01:09:19.000 I actually believed it.

01:09:20.000 I believed it more than anyone's believed anything.

01:09:22.000 No one believes anything like I believe things.

01:09:24.000 The indictment does not accuse Trump of inciting the Capitol riot, and yet Smith, in announcing his charges against Trump, discussed January the 6th.

01:09:32.000 The attack on our nation's Capitol on January 6th, 2021, he said, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy.

01:09:39.000 How, though, do the event of January 6th Compare to the systemic corruption that we regularly discuss.

01:09:45.000 Think just of the last three years.

01:09:48.000 Think of the things you were told at the beginning of the pandemic compared to things you learned by the end of the pandemic when it comes to profits for Pfizer, for example.

01:09:57.000 Then consider for a moment the Ukraine-Russia conflict and how it is funded and the seeming bypass of ordinary electoral function there.

01:10:05.000 In short, what I'm saying is, how can you ever corrupt or attack a system that is by its nature so corrupted, so atrophying, so obviously embodied by the cadaverous figures that govern?

01:10:17.000 It's over.

01:10:18.000 It doesn't function anymore.

01:10:19.000 What we're having piped into our minds is a kind of obfuscating fog to prevent us from realizing it's the systems themselves that need to change, not the actors on the stage that are cast by either side.

01:10:32.000 Smith's indictment cites Trump's speech on January 6th as a feature of his effort to sow doubt about the election and allegedly organise a conspiracy to overturn it.

01:10:42.000 Sow doubt ain't like a bad cry.

01:10:44.000 How dare you! 0.99

01:10:45.000 How dare you sow doubt!

01:10:47.000 Hey, have Have you ever considered that electoral democracy may be corrupt?

01:10:52.000 No, I hadn't considered that.

01:10:54.000 But now that I think about it, it doesn't matter who you vote for, the same elite globalist institutions, be they deep state or corporate, always seem to benefit.

01:11:05.000 There you go.

01:11:06.000 Arrest that man! 1.00

01:11:07.000 Arrest that doubt-sowing son of a bitch! 1.00

01:11:10.000 It's such a meaningless, shallow victory. 1.00

01:11:12.000 That particular thing was wrong.

01:11:15.000 Yeah, but what about everything else that's wrong?

01:11:16.000 Never mind all that.

01:11:17.000 We're not going to do anything about that.

01:11:19.000 That particular thing was wrong. 0.90

01:11:20.000 But what about the whole stinking, burning edifice of wretched corruption? 0.90

01:11:25.000 Yeah, that's a bit much. 0.96

01:11:26.000 This doubt was sowing.

01:11:28.000 That's the problem, that you dare sow doubt in this doubtful thing.

01:11:32.000 But as Public reported, there was more going on during the January 6th riot than Trump's speech.

01:11:37.000 Dozens of undercover agents and confidential human informants from multiple law enforcement agencies were present.

01:11:43.000 They weren't reporting on that, were they? 0.98

01:11:44.000 They weren't saying, as well as Trump sowing doubt, that doubt sowing son of a bitch, there are also hundreds of deep state agents. 0.99

01:11:52.000 I mean, there's sowing doubt and then there's sowing insurrections. 0.98

01:11:55.000 What relates and pertains more specifically to this specific legal matter?

01:12:01.000 Let me know in the comments which you think had a bigger impact.

01:12:03.000 Court documents indicate that there were FBI informants in two of the groups that organized the riot, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

01:12:11.000 And as public documented last month, the FBI has a long history of using confidential informants to entrap people who otherwise would not have committed a crime.

01:12:19.000 A long and ridiculous and hilarious history of literally going, hey, you guys, why don't you bomb that building? 0.68

01:12:24.000 Yeah, why don't we? 0.99

01:12:25.000 I'm afraid I'm going to have to arrest you.

01:12:26.000 What for?

01:12:27.000 That building.

01:12:27.000 But that was your idea.

01:12:28.000 It was my idea.

01:12:29.000 Hey, don't you so doubt in me now.

01:12:32.000 That's the worst crime of all.

01:12:33.000 At best, the riot was a massive security failure.

01:12:36.000 At worst, informants may have encouraged rioters to enter the Capitol.

01:12:40.000 Let me know in the comments where you While it is true that Trump lied before, during and after the election, the Supreme Court has held that it is unconstitutional to prosecute politicians for lying.

01:12:51.000 Because otherwise we wouldn't have any, right?

01:12:53.000 One need not be a Trump supporter to recognise the dangerous precedent that Smith is setting.

01:12:58.000 Democrats who wish to question or challenge election results in the future should be cautious.

01:13:02.000 Because you better believe they will, unless they're able to somehow ensure that they always win elections.

01:13:07.000 And I don't know how they would do that.

01:13:08.000 Some might remember when Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams denied her own election defeat.

01:13:14.000 We had this little election back in 2018, she said, and despite the final tally and the inauguration and the situation we find ourselves in, I do have one very affirmative statement to make.

01:13:23.000 We won.

01:13:24.000 That sounds like election denying.

01:13:25.000 Lest there be any doubt about this, Abrams said the election was stolen and that it was not a free or fair election.

01:13:31.000 She told the New York Times, who presumably printed it, I won.

01:13:35.000 She claimed Georgia's election laws were rigged.

01:13:37.000 Like Abrams' claims, Trump's false statements about the election were instances of political speech about a political event, and his attempt to have state legislatures submit alternative electoral college electors was a fundamentally political act.

01:13:51.000 We may not like this act, but that does not necessarily make it an illegal conspiracy.

01:13:56.000 Smith's indictment effectively criminalizes issues of political opinion and constitutional or statutory interpretation.

01:14:03.000 What's more, it's clear that election denial has become baked into the political process.

01:14:08.000 It is commonplace on both sides of the political aisle to question electoral losses.

01:14:13.000 When Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, her campaign crafted the Russiagate narrative which fuelled a vast conspiracy within the government to clamp down on freedom of expression on social media.

01:14:23.000 We are still uncovering the extent and lasting effects that Clinton's election denial has had on the country.

01:14:29.000 People that are Clinton supporters or Democrat voters will say, You can't compare that to this January 6th insurrection.

01:14:36.000 But you do have to consider a variety of interesting variables.

01:14:40.000 For example, the fact that there were deep state informants and agents in the crowd on January 6th.

01:14:46.000 And the fact that previous Democrat candidates have made comparable claims.

01:14:50.000 In the end, it becomes minutiae.

01:14:52.000 It becomes a delicate act of brinkmanship to argue for your own party.

01:14:56.000 What we are testifying, what we believe, is that you should start now looking at the corruption of the system itself and say, look, why are we quibbling about this?

01:15:04.000 Is our argument, we're not as bad as the other lot, whichever side you're on. 0.96

01:15:09.000 We may be bad.

01:15:10.000 We're not arguing with that. 0.93

01:15:11.000 We may be corrupt.

01:15:13.000 We may be funded by corporate interests.

01:15:15.000 We may have Congress people that benefit financially from their position through their trading.

01:15:20.000 All of that's true. 1.00

01:15:21.000 But if you read Trump's mind, Deep down inside, you will see he is the worst doubt-sowing son of a bitch on this earth, and there ain't no doubt about that. 1.00

01:15:34.000 Unless he sows some in me, and I'd kill him for that! 0.99

01:15:37.000 We can acknowledge that Trump did not execute a respectable and traditional transfer of power, while still maintaining that prosecuting him for spreading disinformation about the election is a grave violation of the First Amendment. 0.95

01:15:48.000 Arguably, it is a much greater threat to democracy than Trump's false claims.

01:15:52.000 What is the bigger threat to democracy?

01:15:55.000 Whether or not Trump knew stuff in his own mind when he was dousoing, or transgressing the First Amendment, the right to free speech, the right to free communication, which you can see is being violated and legislated against on a global scale right now.

01:16:09.000 The legal case will play out in the coming months, but the political point to keep in mind is that this is exactly where Democrats want voters to focus.

01:16:16.000 On Mr Trump all day, every day.

01:16:19.000 That's interesting, isn't it?

01:16:20.000 Have you considered that?

01:16:21.000 Have you considered that this is what they want?

01:16:23.000 At the beginning of this electoral process, at the beginning of this campaign process, DeSantis and Trump were neck and neck.

01:16:29.000 Now Trump is soaring ahead.

01:16:31.000 Do you think that this is an accident?

01:16:33.000 Do you think that the establishment hasn't considered the likelihood of this outcome, given what they went through in 2016 and 2020?

01:16:39.000 Let me know in the comments.

01:16:40.000 Is this a deliberate campaign?

01:16:42.000 They have elsewhere employed what they call Pied Piper strategies, where they empower and amplify the message of the candidate that they would most like to face.

01:16:51.000 They've done that in midterms, and they did it previously with Trump.

01:16:55.000 Is it possible that this is part of a grander strategy?

01:16:57.000 Let me know in the comments.

01:16:58.000 The more the press is preoccupied by Mr Trump's courtroom dramas, the less public attention there will be to President Biden's declining capacities or to the facts emerging about Mr Biden's promotion of the family business.

01:17:10.000 The indictment keeps all eyes on Mr Trump's troubles rather than on Mr Biden's record or debates about the next four years.

01:17:17.000 The truth is America needs to have a serious conversation about Joe Biden and the Biden family and their business dealings and Biden's capacity even to be a president.

01:17:24.000 And that conversation is happening, but it's not happening in a bipartisan, sensible and unbiased way, is it?

01:17:30.000 It's either slanders and attacks from people who don't like him, understandably, or it's sort of ignoring it elsewhere in the media space.

01:17:38.000 Mr Trump on trial also means his competitors for the GOP presidential nomination can barely get media attention.

01:17:44.000 The press asks first and last what they think about Mr Trump's indictment and then upbraids them if they aren't sufficiently critical.

01:17:51.000 Their policies or differences with Mr. Trump might as well be shouts in the forest.

01:17:55.000 All of this has Democrats elated because they want Mr. Trump to be the Republican nominee.

01:18:00.000 They hope GOP voters will respond to the indictment by nominating Mr. Trump as a form of political retribution.

01:18:06.000 No matter that this essentially means Republicans would be letting Democrats choose their nominee.

01:18:10.000 And so we careen without an apparent off-ramp towards a 2024 campaign debate about a sitting president's age and family business and what a former president did in 2020 as he tries to stay out of jail.

01:18:21.000 To mention a quaint notion, this isn't good for the country.

01:18:24.000 And maybe that's the most significant point.

01:18:27.000 All of this mudslinging and condemnation And fretting over the minutiae of a plainly corrupt system is not good for America as a whole.

01:18:36.000 Yet for all of his legal troubles, the former president is dominating his rivals and remains the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.

01:18:46.000 The support that he has nationally has grown since February.

01:18:51.000 Twelve points since February.

01:18:53.000 Who are these people who are looking at everything that's going on, that happened on January 6th, and they're saying, okay, I'll throw my support behind Donald Trump?

01:19:03.000 Okay, the less educated you are, the more likely you are to support Donald Trump.

01:19:08.000 That's probably a very satisfactory analysis to offer.

01:19:12.000 But if you consider recent electoral phenomena, you had Barack Obama winning a couple of cycles back for two terms and then Donald Trump winning.

01:19:21.000 So I think you can almost rule out the idea that is prominently put forward of race and class as being the determining factors in American politics.

01:19:31.000 I would offer you this.

01:19:32.000 An appetite for anti-establishment candidates.

01:19:35.000 What did Barack Obama offer?

01:19:36.000 We've covered at length what he delivered, but what he offered was change and hope.

01:19:41.000 What did Trump offer?

01:19:42.000 A departure from corrupt systemic politics.

01:19:45.000 What did Barack Obama look like?

01:19:47.000 Different from what we'd previously had.

01:19:49.000 What did Trump talk like?

01:19:50.000 Different from what we previously had.

01:19:52.000 What do people crave?

01:19:54.000 They crave something different.

01:19:55.000 They recognise that the systems have been corrupted and co-opted and now no longer respond to the will of the electorate.

01:20:02.000 Doesn't matter if you're a democrat, hard left.

01:20:04.000 Doesn't matter if you're a republican, hard right.

01:20:06.000 Doesn't matter if you're an independent, libertarian, anarchist.

01:20:09.000 None of it matters.

01:20:10.000 The reality of American politics now is that these systems have entirely been co-opted by corporate and globalist interests.

01:20:16.000 It's been happening for a long, long while.

01:20:18.000 Now, when political figures emerge that at least sound or look like they have integrity or authority or morality or things that we recognize as advanced apes, as human beings, as being significant and necessary for our tribe, it's appealing.

01:20:35.000 Of course people that are not benefiting from America's current institutions are likely to find an anti-establishment figure like Trump appealing because the establishment is screwing them over.

01:20:46.000 What we should be doing is listening to the voice of RFK, listening to the voice of Cornel West, listening to independent voices in political spaces and media spaces to ensure that these systems recognize that their days are numbered.

01:21:00.000 That it's over, that you can see already that these systems are beginning to decay and decline before our eyes and are being continually defibrillated by lies held up only by virtue of the fact that most of us are distracted by events such as this one.

01:21:15.000 The people have come over to the GOP, they gave them the majority in 2016.

01:21:19.000 A lot of them, maybe 15% have been voting Democrat in the past and they were simply frustrated, fed up, they feel ignored, forgotten, even betrayed.

01:21:29.000 And there's a level of anger there that brought them to Donald Trump because he represented and offered to be their voice and to speak for them.

01:21:38.000 This indictment is both a strategy and a distraction.

01:21:42.000 Plainly, the Democrat establishment would prefer to face Trump than anyone else.

01:21:47.000 I could see that going dreadfully wrong, but that seems to be strategic.

01:21:51.000 They must have considered things that we consider.

01:21:53.000 Surely, let me know in the comments if I'm being naive there.

01:21:55.000 It's also a distraction from the obvious incapacity of Joe Biden and the plain and emergent corruption within the Biden family, alleged corruption at this stage.

01:22:07.000 It's also an attempt, more broadly, to focus all of our collective attention, whether we're on the left or the right, on minutiae, on very particular and sometimes actually Quite metaphysical notions, like Donald Trump's subjective experience, whether or not he knew he was making fraudulent claims at the time he was making them, and the impossibility of ever proving that, unless I suppose you've got tapes of him saying, listen, I'm about to do this fraudulent doubt-sowing.

01:22:32.000 I'm going to sow doubt, even though I have no doubt.

01:22:35.000 Sow doubt, but no doubt.

01:22:37.000 That's my new catchphrase, brilliant catchphrase.

01:22:39.000 What's more important than the ontological inner workings of Donald Trump is the fact that Donald Trump is being effective precisely because most of us are sick and tired of being offered just another reboot of the same old politics, just another version of corruption.

01:22:58.000 The very fact that anyone was willing to entertain someone who looks and sounds like Joe Biden, who's been in Congress for 40, 50 years, presenting himself as the brave, bold, new voice of emergent American progressive politics, shows you how broken, berserk, corrupted and empty the whole system is.

01:23:15.000 What's required now is a radical revision of these systems.

01:23:19.000 A willingness to, for example, prevent people in Congress trading stocks and shares in companies that they regulate, To prevent political parties being funded by corporate institutions, to demand the maximum amount of local democracy, and to ensure that regulatory bodies are accountable to people, not to the corporations that fund them.

01:23:36.000 That's just a few policies from the top of my head, just to sow a little doubt in your minds.

01:23:41.000 And believe me, I'm deliberately sowing that doubt.

01:23:44.000 But that's just what I think.

01:23:45.000 Let me know what you think in the chat.

01:23:47.000 Until next time, if you can, stay free.

01:23:49.000 Many switches, switch on, switch off.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - August 07, 2023

Jordan Peterson & Russell Brand On Politics, Censorship & Religion - Stay Free #184

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