The Charlie Kirk Show - My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Charlie Kirk here, live from the Bitcoin.com studio.

00:00:04.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, Dr. Jordan Peterson had me on his podcast.

00:00:08.000 You guys should check out the Dr. Jordan Peterson podcast.

00:00:10.000 We don't agree on everything, but it's a phenomenal discussion, and I annotate it here on the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:15.000 So if you are interested...

00:00:16.000 In this discussion, listen to it.

00:00:18.000 Text it to your friends.

00:00:19.000 I think you'll love it.

00:00:19.000 It's the biographical journey of Turning Point USA, how we got started, and more.

00:00:24.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast.

00:00:29.000 And again, check out the Dr. Jordan Peterson podcast for the entire discussion.

00:00:34.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:36.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:37.000 Here we go.

00:00:38.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:39.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:41.000 I want you to know we are lucky.

00:00:43.000 To have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:45.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:48.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:49.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:50.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:00:58.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:07.000 That's why we are here.

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00:01:27.000 That is noblegoldinvestments.com.

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00:01:35.000 Okay, everybody.

00:01:36.000 I recently sat down with my friend and legend, Dr. Jordan Peterson.

00:01:42.000 We discussed a lot.

00:01:43.000 We discussed my biography, kind of the origin story of Turning Point USA, and it was a phenomenal honor.

00:01:50.000 And so I'm going to walk you through it, actually, and kind of give you some commentary and some things to go even deeper into some of the stuff we talked about.

00:01:57.000 So we started with Dr. Peterson asking a very provocative and funny question about insulin resistance.

00:02:04.000 It's quite a start to the conversation.

00:02:05.000 Listen.

00:02:06.000 So I've got a gotcha question for you.

00:02:08.000 Now you're warned.

00:02:09.000 Okay.

00:02:09.000 Okay, so you know that Robert F. Kennedy and Mehmet Oz and I suppose Jay Bhattacharya too are all hands on deck to restore American health and that likely the biggest...

00:02:30.000 The problem that's confronting us is insulin resistance.

00:02:33.000 I agree with that.

00:02:34.000 Too much, way too much sugar and obesity and all that goes along with it.

00:02:39.000 But insulin resistance, it's just devastating.

00:02:42.000 It makes you old.

00:02:43.000 It makes you diabetic.

00:02:44.000 It's terrible.

00:02:46.000 It interferes with your cognition.

00:02:48.000 It increases the probability that you'll get Alzheimer's.

00:02:52.000 And that's all linked to carbohydrate excess intake.

00:02:56.000 You agree with all that?

00:02:57.000 I agree with that.

00:02:58.000 And yet...

00:02:59.000 When you were in high school, one of the first things you did to begin your political career was agitate for a, what, reduction or stabilization of the price of cookies at the school?

00:03:09.000 We were against cookie inflation.

00:03:11.000 Yeah.

00:03:12.000 So, looking back from your position of wisdom 13, 14 years later, what do you have to say to the American public about your cookie advocacy?

00:03:21.000 I should have been advocating for, you know, reduction in the hamburger or steak prices.

00:03:28.000 You see, that would have been a much better health approach.

00:03:31.000 But all kidding aside, the funny undercurrent of that is that's kind of what started my political advocacy.

00:03:37.000 I know.

00:03:37.000 It is hilarious.

00:03:38.000 I kind of look back even just 13 years ago.

00:03:43.000 When, you know, cookie prices were the number one, you know, concern.

00:03:46.000 This was before DoorDash.

00:03:47.000 This was before all that.

00:03:48.000 And I look at these high school kids now, but they're able to order into high school.

00:03:52.000 They have entire cubby rooms of like half of the high school class that is just getting takeout.

00:03:56.000 So in our high school in the suburbs of Chicago, the biggest thing was these basically homemade cookies that nearly tripled in price over the course of a year.

00:04:04.000 So we started Students Against Cookie Inflation, which was a rather righteous effort, I might say.

00:04:09.000 How old were you?

00:04:11.000 I was, at that time, 16, 17 years old.

00:04:13.000 16. And how much before that do you think your interest in the political developed?

00:04:20.000 I definitely had an interest.

00:04:23.000 First, I'd say I was really fascinated by American history, why we were a great country.

00:04:28.000 It was hard to not be politically oriented or opinionated based on the time that I grew up in.

00:04:35.000 I understand the time and place.

00:04:37.000 When I was in 8th grade, this guy named Barack Obama came onto the political scene from Chicago.

00:04:42.000 And everybody had an opinion about him.

00:04:45.000 In fact, he became...

00:04:45.000 Where were you at the time?

00:04:47.000 I was in the suburbs of Chicago.

00:04:48.000 So Wheeling, Arlington Heights area.

00:04:50.000 And Obama was a homegrown, which he really wasn't, but he was a senator from Illinois.

00:04:56.000 A homegrown, almost quasi-messianic political figure.

00:04:59.000 I mean, you remember how it captured the nation times 10 in the Chicagoland area.

00:05:04.000 Remember, Obama did his...

00:05:05.000 Victory speech in Grant Park in downtown Chicago.

00:05:08.000 That's where he celebrated his victory in 2008.

00:05:11.000 And so it was just an all-encompassing, almost, you know, political moment where it was at very high social cost to be disagreeable with the rise of Obama in 2008.

00:05:24.000 And mind you, I was a seventh or eighth grader at the time, actually going into ninth grade.

00:05:29.000 And so I decided at my very best to push back, oh, really, is he going to fulfill all these promises?

00:05:33.000 Is he really going to be able to bring utopia?

00:05:35.000 And admittedly, I was rather clumsy and shallow in my capacity to be able to articulate those beliefs.

00:05:41.000 But I had something in me that wanted to push back against the orthodoxy of the time.

00:05:47.000 So to kind of expand on that, I got my start protesting cookie prices.

00:05:53.000 It was Students Against Cookie Inflation.

00:05:56.000 We called it...

00:05:59.000 Sachi.

00:05:59.000 And it was a lot of fun at Wheeling High School.

00:06:01.000 By the way, if any of you guys are in the Chicago suburbs, leave us a YouTube comment.

00:06:05.000 We'd love to hear where you're from.

00:06:07.000 It's a great place to grow up, and it's just gone so insufferably woke.

00:06:11.000 Wheeling was this amazing place where no one cared about the color of your skin or where you're from, your background, and now it's just unfortunately completely lost its core or its center.

00:06:21.000 Even though it was a very racially diverse school, no one cared. 1.00

00:06:24.000 So we then talk about woke.

00:06:27.000 Where does it come from?

00:06:28.000 And a little bit more of my origin story.

00:06:29.000 Here's Dr. Peterson and I talking about the pre-woke period.

00:06:32.000 I met you, do you remember when we first met?

00:06:35.000 Was it 2016, 2017?

00:06:38.000 I think it might have been 17, 18. I came to Toronto because I, and still to this day, this is correct, I was so moved by your lectures and your videos that they significantly changed my life.

00:06:49.000 And I really wanted to meet you more than anything else.

00:06:52.000 Yeah, well, I remember that.

00:06:53.000 You were kind enough to make time for that.

00:06:54.000 Yeah, well, I remember that meeting.

00:06:56.000 And I remember trying to figure out who you were because of what you were doing and the fact that you had this remarkable organizational capacity.

00:07:05.000 But what I'm interested in now is what I'm very interested in trying to figure out.

00:07:15.000 Inclined you to take the path that you took.

00:07:17.000 Now, you said, okay, so you said Obama, but you said something else at the same time.

00:07:23.000 You said that you had been reading American history, okay, and that you were concerned with, interested in, and convinced by, I suppose, all of those, this issue of what made America great.

00:07:37.000 So this is interesting and worth taking apart, because for decades...

00:07:43.000 Certainly since the 60s, the typical pathway for someone young who was assessing the history of his or her country would have been to read it through a highly critical lens.

00:07:57.000 So, for example, I remember when I was 13 or 14, so that would have been mid-70s, I was reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and some of the so-called new journalists.

00:08:12.000 They're not, they weren't of the left exactly the way you would conceptualize the left now.

00:08:17.000 They were more like radical literary figures, I would say.

00:08:21.000 But the mid-70s ethos certainly was to read history, sociology, critically.

00:08:34.000 And I don't mean you were being uncritical.

00:08:36.000 I mean to take an anti-establishment stance.

00:08:40.000 Like in the 60s.

00:08:42.000 That was all, well, anti-establishment, free love, the sexual revolution is coming, everyone's going to be free.

00:08:48.000 By the time the 70s came along, which was the milieu I was embedded in, all of the optimism of the 60s had pretty much vanished, but all of the cynicism 100% remained.

00:09:01.000 Now you, though, interestingly enough, in Chicago, and this would be mid-2000s, so quite a bit later.

00:09:08.000 Right, right.

00:09:09.000 Near the end of the first decade of the 2000s.

00:09:13.000 You were reading American history, and as you said, in the height of the Obama fervor.

00:09:21.000 Sure.

00:09:23.000 But your take was positive and patriotic.

00:09:27.000 Correct.

00:09:27.000 So why?

00:09:28.000 Why do you think that was?

00:09:29.000 What made you different?

00:09:32.000 When I met you, you were very, I would say...

00:09:35.000 Relatively sheltered still, and very, very straight-laced.

00:09:39.000 And from the Canadian perspective, you were of the...

00:09:45.000 It appeared to me that you were of that American evangelical stripe, which we have some of in Alberta, not a lot.

00:09:53.000 It's not really a Canadian thing.

00:09:55.000 And so when I met you, I thought, okay, so that's Charlie's...

00:09:59.000 That's the cauldron.

00:10:04.000 The Matrix out of which he emerged, maybe Cauldron's not the right metaphor.

00:10:08.000 But I'm curious, like, why do you think that your political rebellion took a conservative form when that isn't, it's not common for young people, and it certainly wasn't the pattern of the time from, say, 1965 till, well, probably till about you,

00:10:24.000 till about when you were adolescent.

00:10:28.000 That's a phenomenal analysis and question.

00:10:30.000 Let me just add to it.

00:10:31.000 The literature, the non-political, non-historical literature that we were being assigned in 6th, 7th, 8th grade was what I call pre-woke.

00:10:40.000 It was almost there.

00:10:44.000 Books that come to mind is a book called Things Fall Apart.

00:10:47.000 I don't know if you're familiar with this book.

00:10:48.000 Chinua Okabe.

00:10:50.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:10:51.000 I think the main character was Okonkwo.

00:10:53.000 I could be wrong.

00:10:53.000 I'm just drawing from 13, 14 years.

00:10:56.000 Basically, the entire premise of the book, based on my memory, is that there are this wonderful tribe and they all get along in Africa and these evil colonialists come in and things fall apart and there's internal strife and the end of the book is basically the summary of all of these relationships.

00:11:12.000 of these evil colonialists that say, and here's the history of just the subsistence

00:11:17.000 Right, so it's kind of a testament to Rousseau, but it was written by an African, that book.

00:11:28.000 Correct, and again, I'm drawing from almost a decade old memory, but I remember the discussions we'd have in class were very much anti-colonialist, anti-Western, that we are the contaminants.

00:11:39.000 That we are polluting other tribes.

00:11:42.000 And again, mind you, we're in 8th or 9th grade discussing this, so I don't know what post-structuralism is or post-modernism is, but it was pre-woke.

00:11:50.000 We weren't quite there, though.

00:11:52.000 And so from the historical standpoint, it was not 1619 Project, but it was, we're going to spend a whole month on slavery, and we're going to spend three days on the founding.

00:12:02.000 Right.

00:12:03.000 And did you spend any of the time when you were studying slavery?

00:12:08.000 Assessing the fact that the UK was the only country that's ever existed in the history of the world that spent, what, two centuries and a tremendous proportion of its treasury eradicating slavery around the world at the behest of Protestant Christians? 0.91

00:12:23.000 Correct.

00:12:23.000 Because that's the story.

00:12:25.000 And we, let me, I never remember knowing the name Wilberforce.

00:12:29.000 Wilberforce, yeah.

00:12:29.000 See, this is a very interesting thing.

00:12:31.000 You know, I actually didn't come across, this is so strange, but life is very strange.

00:12:37.000 I didn't come across the name Wilberforce until I was probably in my 40s.

00:12:41.000 Isn't that amazing?

00:12:42.000 It's beyond comprehension.

00:12:43.000 I didn't get to know him until the last five years.

00:12:46.000 Last five years.

00:12:48.000 Is that right, A?

00:12:49.000 Even in the political world.

00:12:52.000 Even in that milieu.

00:12:52.000 I might have heard it, but not until someone looked at me seriously and said, you have to study this guy.

00:12:56.000 This is a preacher.

00:12:58.000 This is a...

00:12:58.000 Man of faith that led to the abolition of slavery probably in the entire...

00:13:02.000 Under impossible conditions.

00:13:03.000 Exactly.

00:13:04.000 Devoted his whole life to it.

00:13:05.000 And the link between that and the religious ideation is rock solid.

00:13:11.000 One to one.

00:13:12.000 It's one to one.

00:13:13.000 Absolutely.

00:13:14.000 And it's also the case that his ideas wouldn't have fallen on fertile ground because they did relatively.

00:13:20.000 Like, when you can make a radical cultural shift in one lifetime...

00:13:24.000 Which is no time at all historically.

00:13:26.000 You know that you're at the forefront of ideas whose time has come.

00:13:30.000 And that was clearly the case for Wilberforce.

00:13:32.000 And he certainly is one of those people who stood up against the greedy, self-centered, and malevolent ethos of his time.

00:13:43.000 But the UK swung around behind him impossibly rapidly.

00:13:48.000 And then with their full might.

00:13:50.000 And it is...

00:13:52.000 You know, I've learned a lot of things in the last 10 years that have shocked me so bad I don't know how to recover exactly.

00:14:00.000 One of them was that the public school system was set up by fascists on the Prussian military model.

00:14:06.000 I've never been able to figure out exactly what to do with that.

00:14:10.000 They were literally trying to make thoughtless worker drones. 0.99

00:14:14.000 Desk workers.

00:14:15.000 That's what bureaucrat means.

00:14:17.000 Or factory workers.

00:14:19.000 That's right.

00:14:19.000 And that in itself wasn't so bad because the country was industrializing.

00:14:23.000 But right underneath that was the idea that while you were doing that, it was necessary to pretty much stamp out or fail to develop anything that would produce any kind of creative entrepreneurship.

00:14:34.000 It's like, okay, that's hard to swallow.

00:14:37.000 And then when I read about how the food pyramid was developed, that's just beyond comprehension.

00:14:44.000 I don't know if that's the worst crime ever committed in the United States, but it's up there. 0.90

00:14:49.000 And then the next mystery is, Wilberforce is another mystery of that magnitude.

00:14:55.000 And even, you might say, particularly on the left, it's like, okay, you guys, you're for the oppressed, which I don't buy for a second, but especially because I've watched in the last 10 years the lefties sell out the...

00:15:11.000 Poor, worldwide, to the climate apocalypse mongers, and that's just been a catastrophe for places like Africa, like Bagat Wade has been so forthright in observing.

00:15:22.000 But the fact that slavery and reparations, all of that, the unfair founding of the United States, has been a central dogma of the radical leftists.

00:15:37.000 They blame slavery on the West, and The fact that the radical types have control over the education system means that no one, even educated in a conservative milieu, knows who the hell Wilberforce was.

00:15:53.000 And I just don't know what to think about that.

00:15:56.000 Or Thaddeus Stevens, or the heroism of John Quincy Adams.

00:16:02.000 Those would be some main protagonist characters for the abolitionist slavery here in America.

00:16:08.000 And so when I was in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade, something in me, and I don't quite know, my parents were very patriotic, but not political.

00:16:16.000 Patriotic, but not political.

00:16:17.000 They're conservative, but we were not a political family.

00:16:20.000 Very patriotic.

00:16:22.000 Something in me desired to try to find the other side of the story, to try to push back a little bit from the incessant narrative that was being built.

00:16:32.000 And I do want to make sure this is clear.

00:16:34.000 We were not yet at the place where the teachers were saying America was racist.

00:16:40.000 In fact, it was actually much more insidious than that.

00:16:43.000 And so that even in 2008, that.

00:16:45.000 Yeah.

00:16:49.000 It wasn't overly provocative.

00:17:05.000 They weren't saying to the white kids in class, hey, go sit on this side of the class and black kids on this side of the class.

00:17:10.000 Yeah, well, those things always happen one tiny step at a time.

00:17:13.000 Of course.

00:17:13.000 But when I was being schooled, there was no parents showing up at school board meetings about critical race theory.

00:17:20.000 Now, these elements were laced throughout all of the curriculum.

00:17:22.000 And it took a very discerning eye.

00:17:25.000 And for whatever reason, you know, how I was raised or just something in me, around 10th or 11th grade, I asked the question.

00:17:32.000 I said, look, we have spent an entire month.

00:17:36.000 Totally get it.

00:17:37.000 Terrible thing.

00:17:38.000 But we spent so little time on the brilliance of the founders and what they've created and the greatest political document in human history and what went into that.

00:17:48.000 And it was an under-emphasis on the heroism and the courage and the brilliance and an over-emphasis on the evil and the tragedy and the horror without even the redemption arc behind it.

00:17:58.000 Yeah, well, the thing that's so awful about that as far as I'm concerned... 0.96

00:18:02.000 From the leftist perspective, let's say, is if you are concerned with the poor and the oppressed, you know, and then you have to be discerning there because there are people who are poor and oppressed as a consequence of their own idiocy,

00:18:18.000 and that's not so uncommon, as you know, in your own life by watching your pathway to failure.

00:18:25.000 So, but given that there are people who are unfortunate, you'd think that the appropriate Pack would be to determine who in history served them most effectively.

00:18:38.000 And I just can't see anyone you could possibly point to.

00:18:43.000 More effectively, who did that more effectively than Wilberforce, ever.

00:18:47.000 And so you would think that instead of erecting monuments to Lenin, the leftists would erect monuments to Wilberforce.

00:18:54.000 But not only do they not do that, no one knows who the hell he was.

00:18:58.000 It is one of the greatest memory holing of a hero in Western history.

00:19:03.000 I completely agree.

00:19:05.000 Why is it?

00:19:06.000 My hypothesis is he's Christian.

00:19:08.000 Is that you cannot highlight...

00:19:10.000 A man of faith who did something with such valor and such significance.

00:19:15.000 It is at odds with almost every other fundamental narrative that they must try to present.

00:19:20.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

00:19:21.000 I think that's right, that it is fundamentally...

00:19:24.000 But that begs another question, and that would be why, given that Wilberforce was clearly a force for the good that Obama, for example, would have been pushing, right?

00:19:38.000 by which I mean movement towards a

00:19:42.000 where there were no racial, there was no racial or ethnic prejudice.

00:19:48.000 If, if,

00:19:53.000 If Wilberforce is the poster boy for that sort of effort, which if you understand his life and you read about it, I can't see how you can conclude that, then why would the lefties forego that merely to oppose the fact that His motivation was fundamentally Christian,

00:20:12.000 because that points to something deeper, right?

00:20:13.000 It points to the fact that the true war, so to speak, isn't political.

00:20:18.000 It's not left versus right.

00:20:20.000 It's something deeper.

00:20:21.000 And then if it is anti-Christian, then why?

00:20:26.000 Like, what does that mean?

00:20:28.000 Like, there's an enlightenment element there, right?

00:20:30.000 The enlightenment types, especially after the French Revolution, generated this narrative that...

00:20:37.000 Science and religion were radically opposed, and that if you were on the side of religion, you were against clear, rational, logical thinking.

00:20:46.000 And so you could imagine a stream of anti-Christian sentiment emerging on the rationalist side, right?

00:20:54.000 But it isn't obvious to me at all that the leftist types who don't talk about Wilberforce...

00:21:03.000 No way.

00:21:06.000 All you have to do is talk to them for like 15 seconds and you find out that that's not the case.

00:21:11.000 They might use those arguments from time to time, but they certainly don't apply the rigors of scientific thinking to their own radical hypotheses.

00:21:21.000 So it's deeper than that.

00:21:24.000 And so what is it exactly that they're objecting to?

00:21:28.000 Is it the fact that

00:21:29.000 The more radical leftist story, Marxist, let's say, is in its essence anti-Christian, which I think is a fair statement. 1.00

00:21:41.000 But why would that be more important?

00:21:43.000 This is the strange thing.

00:21:44.000 Why would that be more important than serving the poor and fighting for the abolition of slavery and all of its associated prejudices?

00:21:53.000 Because it still doesn't get you out of the conundrum.

00:21:57.000 Then why not Wilberforce?

00:21:59.000 Instead of tearing down statues, why not erect statues to him?

00:22:03.000 Yeah, so, well, what do you...

00:22:05.000 I know that's a hard thing to sort out, but you got any...

00:22:09.000 Obviously, you were feeling something like this in high school, right?

00:22:13.000 You guys are throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. 1.00

00:22:17.000 Correct.

00:22:17.000 Yeah, which baby exactly?

00:22:19.000 So my initial thought is that the leftist types, the ones that really understand it, they do not seek to achieve...

00:22:28.000 What a Wilberforce-type figure would want, which is actual liberation and actual eradication of evil.

00:22:34.000 Yeah.

00:22:35.000 I hate to say it, I think they just want to be in charge.

00:22:37.000 Yeah, no, no, I think...

00:22:38.000 Okay, so let's pivot on that for a minute.

00:22:42.000 Okay, so, because this is a problem that's going to face the right. 0.66

00:22:46.000 And is already, and we can talk about that.

00:22:50.000 So, there are a group of people...

00:22:52.000 4% of the population, and then there's still a fringe around that that would maybe be another 5% where you'd have to take it seriously.

00:23:00.000 And so there, in the psychiatric diagnostic literature, they fall under the cluster B heading, okay?

00:23:08.000 They're histrionic, which means they're dramatic, and...

00:23:13.000 And I suppose if they're healthy and histrionic, then they become actors, right?

00:23:17.000 And entertainers.

00:23:18.000 So there's a positive spin on that.

00:23:20.000 But if they're negative histrionic, they dramatize their pathology and use it as a weapon, okay?

00:23:27.000 They're narcissistic, which means they want unearned social status. 1.00

00:23:32.000 They're psychopathic, which means they're predatory parasites. 1.00

00:23:36.000 And they're antisocial, and that's just your standard criminal types. 1.00

00:23:39.000 So that all fits in cluster B. Then there's personality traits that go along with that.

00:23:45.000 Machiavellian, they use language not to convey information, but to manipulate and to manipulate instrumentally for their own purposes.

00:23:55.000 So if I'm speaking with you in a Machiavellian manner, I have a goal in mind that has nothing to do with...

00:24:01.000 The words that I'm using.

00:24:02.000 You may have talked to journalists like that many times.

00:24:05.000 Many times.

00:24:05.000 Yes, many times.

00:24:06.000 Okay.

00:24:07.000 So they're Machiavellian.

00:24:08.000 That's so well said. 0.97

00:24:10.000 They're narcissistic.

00:24:11.000 Again, that's an overlap. 1.00

00:24:13.000 They're psychopathic. 1.00

00:24:14.000 Oh, yes. 1.00

00:24:14.000 And on the personality side, that associates with sadism. 1.00

00:24:18.000 And so all of that culminates in a personality style that has the proclivity to take positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others.

00:24:27.000 Okay, so now those people...

00:24:30.000 Let's say they're 4% of the population.

00:24:33.000 Okay, so this is what they do, is they look for a story that's working.

00:24:38.000 Could be Christianity, Judaism, Marxism, could be conservatism, doesn't matter what the story is.

00:24:44.000 They look to see where it has purchase.

00:24:47.000 So where the people who play that gamer have power.

00:24:51.000 They infiltrate that, they advertise themselves as the vanguard of that movement, and they do that for no other reason than to gain power.

00:25:01.000 Right, and so this is politically agnostic.

00:25:04.000 Now, they'll guise themselves in political cloaks, and they'll learn all the tropes.

00:25:10.000 I mean, this sort of thing, you can see this sort of thing emerging, like mad on the right on Twitter, for example.

00:25:16.000 But it's certainly, it's been characteristic of the left for...

00:25:20.000 For a long time, insofar as the left has power.

00:25:23.000 But, you know, you are the one who just said, I think they want power.

00:25:28.000 That's part of that.

00:25:29.000 You know, in the biblical tradition, there's a battle always between the ethos that brings abundance.

00:25:38.000 So that would be the miraculous provision of fish and bread and water that never exhausts itself.

00:25:45.000 That's all consequence of a...

00:25:47.000 Particular kind of ethos, the one that Wilberforce embedded, that's juxtaposed against usurpation, Luciferian usurpation of power, right?

00:26:00.000 That's the temptation that Christ has offered in the desert, right?

00:26:02.000 The third temptation is the temptation of power.

00:26:05.000 The whole world.

00:26:06.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:26:07.000 That's right.

00:26:08.000 And one of the things that Moses is punished brutally by God for using power...

00:26:13.000 Near the end of his...

00:26:14.000 And for thinking he has the power to actually make water come out of the rock.

00:26:18.000 Well, that it's dependent on him.

00:26:20.000 And on him, not God.

00:26:21.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:26:22.000 Worse than that, not only on him, but on it, God tells him to invite with his words.

00:26:28.000 And he uses force and authority.

00:26:30.000 Right, so he doesn't enter the promised land.

00:26:33.000 So that's a good indication of the danger of power, even when wielded by someone who is...

00:26:39.000 Estimable, right?

00:26:40.000 Because you have to give Moses his due.

00:26:42.000 A lot of credit.

00:26:43.000 Right, well, exactly.

00:26:44.000 For dealing with that credit.

00:26:45.000 Yeah, and then, of course, that's the temptation that's offered Christ.

00:26:48.000 So I do think it's a power game.

00:26:51.000 Yes.

00:26:53.000 Y-R-E-F-Y.com.

00:26:57.000 That is Y-R-E-F-Y.com.

00:27:26.000 So if you watched this and you didn't know who William Wilberforce is, you should absolutely find out.

00:27:33.000 William Wilberforce was not only a pastor, he was the leading abolitionist.

00:27:37.000 And I totally agree with Dr. Peterson.

00:27:39.000 It is one of the most sinister and malevolent omissions of history.

00:27:43.000 the fact that William Wilberforce is no longer talked about, in fact, has been talked about for the last 100 years.

00:27:49.000 You think about it, how many Americans know who William Wilberforce is?

00:27:53.000 Very few.

00:27:53.000 How many know who Hitler is?

00:27:55.000 Almost everybody.

00:27:56.000 You should know who Hitler is because he did evil. 0.98

00:27:59.000 But shouldn't you also know who Wilberforce is, who did great good, who he himself, inspired by the

00:28:05.000 It's pretty important.

00:28:10.000 So I encourage you guys to read about Wilberforce, study it, understand it.

00:28:14.000 And then also think to yourself and leave a comment about this.

00:28:17.000 Why is it that Wilberforce is so alarmingly missing from our history curriculum?

00:28:22.000 Dr. Peterson and I now talk about what does it mean to use the Lord's name in vain?

00:28:26.000 It's not just saying OMG.

00:28:28.000 It's also actions such as worshipping nature or religious hypocrisy, doing evil in the name of God.

00:28:35.000 There's a commandment not to use God's name in vain.

00:28:38.000 And then there's the comments in the Gospels about the Pharisees, right?

00:28:41.000 The Pharisees. 0.69

00:28:42.000 The Pharisees are exactly the people who use religious terminology, so moral terminology, to cloak their power-seeking machinations, right?

00:28:54.000 And Christ goes after them.

00:28:55.000 I think the best account of that is in Matthew, where he tells them that they're like, it's pretty brutal, that they're like...

00:29:02.000 Broods of vipers, yeah. 0.92

00:29:04.000 Worse! 0.68

00:29:04.000 They're like graves full of rotting bodies that someone whitewashed, right? 0.68

00:29:10.000 And he says that...

00:29:11.000 If they were the people, had they been alive in the time of the prophets they purport to follow, they would have been part of the mob that would have killed them. 0.57

00:29:21.000 Right?

00:29:22.000 That's actually part of, you may know this, but that's part of what sets them up for the crucifixion.

00:29:26.000 Because they're not very happy with those insults publicly delivered.

00:29:29.000 But that shows you also how old the problem is.

00:29:32.000 So you can imagine one of the worst possible sins is to take the highest possible virtue.

00:29:38.000 So that would be, well, we stand for the oppressed, we stand for the poor.

00:29:41.000 And then to gerrymander that so that your standing for that only pushes you towards power.

00:29:49.000 That's right.

00:29:50.000 Right.

00:29:50.000 And so, and then it also, there's a clue in the Gospels, I think it's in the Gospels as well, about how you figure that out.

00:29:59.000 And the answer is, by their fruits you will know them, right?

00:30:03.000 So you look at, well, what I've done is I've looked at the, Yes.

00:30:25.000 Yes.

00:30:33.000 It's destabilizing their political environment, and that falls disproportionately on the poor.

00:30:40.000 I don't see a way around that analysis.

00:30:42.000 And nature worshipping is not anything new.

00:30:45.000 No, no, that's right.

00:30:47.000 Elijah, I mean, that whole story is a manifestation of the nature worshippers versus the belief in God.

00:30:53.000 But back to just to reiterate a very profound point you made.

00:30:57.000 In evangelical circles, we get wrong, which is...

00:31:00.000 People think, do not take the Lord's name in vain, just to say, do not say God in an expletive way.

00:31:05.000 It actually, the word is, don't carry the name of the Lord in vain.

00:31:10.000 Meaning, don't do actions in the name of God.

00:31:13.000 So you're exactly right.

00:31:14.000 And so people wear the costume of the holy.

00:31:17.000 Well, that's exactly what Christ tells the Pharisees. 0.76

00:31:20.000 Literally, he says they wear the garbs of the priestly to elevate their moral status.

00:31:25.000 And this is what we believe is partially blasphemy in the Holy Spirit, which is to take all of the trappings of religion. 0.52

00:31:33.000 Oh, that's interesting.

00:31:34.000 And to do evil in that name.

00:31:36.000 We believe that is one of the, if not the most evil...

00:31:39.000 So you think that's the transgression against...

00:31:41.000 Okay, so that's interesting because...

00:31:44.000 My psychological understanding of the idea of the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit is what possesses your words when you truly aim up.

00:31:55.000 And this makes sense to me psychologically because the thoughts that make themselves manifest to you spontaneously are directly related to the intent of your aim.

00:32:08.000 That's literally how your verbal...

00:32:12.000 Mind works.

00:32:13.000 Your imagination as well.

00:32:14.000 You know, if you go on a date and you aim at sexual contact on the first date, the fantasies that come along with that aim will be of that nature, obviously.

00:32:26.000 And if you are on the hunt, so to speak, for a marital partner...

00:32:32.000 The fantasies that accompany that will be quite different.

00:32:35.000 So this is literally how your imagination...

00:32:37.000 It's also the case that, you know, it's the same idea with the date.

00:32:41.000 If it's short-term mating is your goal, which, by the way, is the goal of the dark tetrad types, differentially.

00:32:49.000 So what that means is that the sexual revolution handed...

00:32:55.000 That's right.

00:32:56.000 So that's fun to know.

00:32:57.000 But it's definitely the case that your aim determines what comes to mind.

00:33:01.000 Now, you said that that sin against the Holy Ghost, which is the unforgivable sin, is the sin that occurs when you use the Lord's name in vain.

00:33:12.000 So when you claim to be motivated by what's divine, but are actually serving...

00:33:18.000 The Luciferian spirit of usurpation of power.

00:33:22.000 It can be.

00:33:22.000 I mean, it's an open theological discussion.

00:33:25.000 Yeah, no, no, fair enough.

00:33:26.000 And I take Dennis Prager's view of an Old Testament on this view, which is, think about how much, this is a great example, think about how much damage those evil priests did.

00:33:35.000 Oh, yeah.

00:33:36.000 That's a great example.

00:33:37.000 Look, most of the people that I've spoken with who proclaim themselves to be atheists are atheists for two reasons.

00:33:44.000 And I mean the good faith atheists, let's say.

00:33:48.000 First of all, they tend to be tilted in the engineering cognition direction, so they're much more oriented towards things than people, and that's a stable temperamental trait.

00:33:59.000 But they've almost all also invariably been hurt by someone or some institution that's claimed to be religious.

00:34:08.000 And then you could also see that obviously betraying someone in Dante's...

00:34:14.000 Account of the Inferno, when he goes down to the bottom of hell, he finds the betrayers right next to Satan, right?

00:34:21.000 Judas, Crassus, and Brutus.

00:34:25.000 Right, right.

00:34:26.000 All three of them.

00:34:26.000 And the lake of ice, which is...

00:34:29.000 Right, that's where Satan is encased, right?

00:34:31.000 Because he's too brittle to move.

00:34:33.000 So the reason for that, I think, is that there isn't a more upsetting psychological phenomenon than being betrayed.

00:34:42.000 You stake yourself on someone.

00:34:43.000 You trust them.

00:34:44.000 They're now a foundation.

00:34:46.000 They're part of the foundation of your life.

00:34:49.000 And there's no worse form of betrayal than betrayal that's done in the name of the highest good.

00:34:54.000 There can't be, obviously.

00:34:57.000 I thought that sin against the Holy Ghost was something like rejection of the Abrahamic call.

00:35:08.000 God comes to Abraham. 0.93

00:35:09.000 As the spirit of adventure, he says, go out into the world, leave your zone of comfort, move away from your people, and have the terrible adventure of your life.

00:35:18.000 Well, if you reject that, you can't develop.

00:35:21.000 Yes.

00:35:22.000 Right?

00:35:22.000 Because you're rejecting the spirit of learning itself.

00:35:24.000 And think of how many young men are rejecting it every day.

00:35:26.000 Well, and what's terrible about that, this is something we could talk about too.

00:35:30.000 I'm curious about your experience.

00:35:32.000 To expand on that, the commandment says, thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain.

00:35:36.000 It literally means thou shalt not carry the Lord's name in vain.

00:35:40.000 You could make an argument one of the most evil things you could do is to carry and do evil in the name of God.

00:35:46.000 I then talk with Dr. Peterson about what we're seeing on these college campuses, and it's remarkable.

00:35:50.000 These Prove Me Wrong events are going so viral.

00:35:53.000 We've reached billions and billions and billions and billions of people and views.

00:35:57.000 And so please subscribe to the YouTube channel to watch that.

00:36:01.000 It's been my experience that it doesn't take that much encouragement Those, the people you're describing, to be inspired to try.

00:36:15.000 Now, I've talked to thousands of young men now who've had that experience, you know, like I see a lot of them at my lectures.

00:36:22.000 They come to the meet and greets, for example, and they tell me, it's great, it's really great.

00:36:27.000 They tell me that, you know, five years ago, six years ago, because it's starting to be a long time now, eight years ago even, they were not in good shape.

00:36:36.000 And they came across my lectures or books and decided that there was something worth aiming for and then decided to try.

00:36:46.000 So to tell the truth, that's a very common vow, let's say, to take on more responsibility.

00:36:54.000 And they usually laugh about starting to make their bed or something like that, which is a lot less trivial than people think.

00:37:00.000 And then it's straightened them out.

00:37:02.000 The terrible thing is...

00:37:05.000 How little encouragement that that actually took.

00:37:07.000 So why are people coming out to see you on campuses and what kind of response do you get from the people that you talk to?

00:37:16.000 The responses have been incredible.

00:37:17.000 First, the crowds alone, we're drawing crowds of 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people in the middle of the day just for me to debate a random college kid or a college professor.

00:37:26.000 It's remarkable.

00:37:27.000 Walk me through one of those events, Charlie.

00:37:29.000 And so I've been doing that for a decade.

00:37:31.000 I started.

00:37:33.000 As we know, we started Turning Point USA.

00:37:35.000 One of the things I really wanted to make sure is that I was in touch with the target audience that I was trying to convince and trying to persuade.

00:37:43.000 No better way to do that than just go to the college campus itself, set up a card table with maybe a poster that says something like, I think government should be smaller, something like that, and start a discussion.

00:37:54.000 I would do this at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

00:37:57.000 I would do this at University of Illinois when we had almost no funding, no connections, no idea what I was doing.

00:38:03.000 I've always believed in the grassroots interaction.

00:38:06.000 Support your meet and greets.

00:38:08.000 No data, no chart, no abstraction can get to that personal human-to-human contact.

00:38:13.000 So I've been doing that for many years, and then Stephen Crowder, his credit, kind of popularized this idea of debating and putting it on.

00:38:20.000 I said, oh, well, why don't I also film these interactions?

00:38:23.000 And so I started to do that around 2018.

00:38:25.000 So it's been about seven or eight years now.

00:38:27.000 And, you know, then 10 kids would show up and then 20 kids.

00:38:31.000 And we started to put these on the Internet and kind of concurrent and simultaneous to your rise where you diagnosed what was going on in the West quicker and more accurately than anybody else, especially with young men.

00:38:43.000 We started to see our popularity increase as we started to address some of the underlying problems that young people were facing, but in particular young men were facing.

00:38:52.000 And then COVID happened, and we were basically out of business for, you know, a year in the sense where we weren't able to do campus activities.

00:38:59.000 Donald Trump was no longer in office, and we had to really kind of rebuild on campus basically about two years ago.

00:39:07.000 So let's just say the spring of 2023, things really started to change, where we would do these campus events prior, and we would bring in your traditional conservatives, 300 to 400 people.

00:39:19.000 Maybe a couple hundred interested types, maybe 50 liberals, 500 students, call it a day.

00:39:24.000 That's a success.

00:39:26.000 All of a sudden, in 2023, we were drawing a different type of person and student.

00:39:30.000 First of all, we were drawing people outside of the campuses that were welders, electricians, and plumbers, and the working men that heard that we were in town.

00:39:38.000 How did they hear?

00:39:39.000 Social media.

00:39:40.000 Okay.

00:39:40.000 And so decentralized promotion, and so they would show up.

00:39:44.000 And I saw that.

00:39:44.000 I mean, these were guys that would go up to the question line and they were not asking about Rousseau or they were not asking about Jacques Derrida.

00:39:51.000 They were saying, how do I be a better person?

00:39:54.000 Because I'm expecting a daughter in six months.

00:39:55.000 Oh yeah.

00:39:56.000 Okay. And all of a sudden here I am, you know, not in the position where you are nearly as seasoned to give advice to that young man, but he's searching and he's looking for anyone that seems to have an idea of how the world is supposed to work, that is professing a worldview of order and structure and discipline.

00:40:11.000 Something that he could do.

00:40:12.000 Yes, and then he was looking to me for advice, and that was a different dynamic.

00:40:16.000 Whereas prior, all the questions the last eight years before that were, hey, Charlie, what do you think about the tax rate?

00:40:21.000 What do you think about abortion?

00:40:22.000 And I still get a lot of that, but it was something different.

00:40:24.000 It was young men especially that were seeking purpose and seeking a destination.

00:40:29.000 And again, this is all thanks to the incredible work of Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action.

00:40:34.000 We are the most important organization in the country when it comes to cultivating.

00:40:39.000 Young people in the conservative direction, and the data proves it. 0.98

00:40:43.000 Young people are moving right in record numbers thanks to the work of Turning Point USA.

00:40:47.000 We actually continue on this topic.

00:40:50.000 Dr. Peterson and I talk about how the educational model is hyper-feminine and how young men, especially working class men, are looking for meaning in their life.

00:40:59.000 This is crucially important, this transformation, because one of the things that...

00:41:04.000 So let's go back to that 60s dynamic, that anti-authoritarian 60s dynamic.

00:41:09.000 Now, the role of the left in the 60s was like an entrepreneurial progressive radicalism, let's say.

00:41:21.000 And the stance of the conservative was, well...

00:41:28.000 You know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, guys.

00:41:31.000 And that's a pretty good dynamic because you need a force for change and you need a force that resists that.

00:41:36.000 But I think, you see, I think what the Conservatives did wrong, like profoundly wrong, was that they were, their breaks, this is why they're always dismissed as reactionary, their breaks, B-R-A-K-E-S,

00:41:52.000 their breaks were fundamentally, they're also moralistic.

00:41:56.000 It was finger-wagging. 0.98

00:41:58.000 And this is something that was distasteful, let's say, especially about the hypocritical, evangelical, conservative types. 0.98

00:42:09.000 I agree with that. 0.97

00:42:10.000 But it was also strategically inappropriate.

00:42:14.000 Because it's very hard to say to young people, who might tilt in the progressive direction, because they're a little more revolutionary in spirit, let's say, or also a little more immature, that the reason that...

00:42:26.000 To abstain sexually, for example, is because you shouldn't do it.

00:42:31.000 Now that's true, but it's a weak argument.

00:42:34.000 You know, I was talking to my wife this morning about this.

00:42:37.000 We'd been apart for a few days and I saw her again yesterday and I was very happy about that.

00:42:42.000 And she has a podcast.

00:42:45.000 She's trying to reach out to young women because they're just as in much or more trouble. 0.99

00:42:51.000 They're in more turmoil.

00:42:52.000 They're just harder to talk to by a lot.

00:42:57.000 Our discussion centered around the fact that it isn't that you should get married, although you should.

00:43:03.000 It's that there is no alternative that's anywhere near as good by any standard whatsoever, regardless of position of analysis or time length.

00:43:15.000 Anything you do other than that, even though marriage is very difficult, and every other alternative is far, far worse.

00:43:26.000 And so if you want a pathway forward to what the Conservatives support, the Conservatives should be offering an invitation.

00:43:35.000 They shouldn't be moralizing.

00:43:38.000 And so you're saying that they shouldn't even be political at the moment.

00:43:42.000 And I know you're a figure whose political activity is grounded in a...

00:43:50.000 Right, that's right.

00:43:51.000 Like Shapiro's, of course, like that too, and Dennis Prager.

00:43:53.000 Christianity is my foundation.

00:43:55.000 Right, right, right.

00:43:56.000 And so now you're seeing that these young men who are coming, especially the working class types, they're not so interested in the political. 0.87

00:44:04.000 They're probably not even interested in the arguments exactly.

00:44:07.000 They're looking for something else.

00:44:09.000 That's right.

00:44:09.000 They're looking for direction.

00:44:10.000 They're looking for connection.

00:44:12.000 They're also looking for validation that...

00:44:16.000 The way they're thinking and the way they're feeling is directionally correct.

00:44:21.000 Yeah, so that having a direction is correct, for example.

00:44:25.000 Exactly.

00:44:25.000 Not meandering through life.

00:44:28.000 Yeah.

00:44:29.000 Not having the aimless despair of...

00:44:33.000 Walking in circles. 0.94

00:44:34.000 Yeah, not castrating yourself so your toxic masculinity vanishes. 0.98

00:44:38.000 Bingo. 0.92

00:44:38.000 Sometimes, literally, far too often now, literally. 0.92

00:44:42.000 Literally, they're chopping off parts.

00:44:43.000 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:44:44.000 And so what we saw in 2023, again, so I have to wear multiple hats.

00:44:49.000 Part of my hat is a political strategist.

00:44:51.000 Part of my hat is just trying to be a role model for young people.

00:44:54.000 Part of my hat is explaining these ideas to young people.

00:44:56.000 I kind of connected all the dots.

00:44:58.000 said, 2024 is going to be a rebellion of the men of the West, unlike any that we've ever seen.

00:45:04.000 And I would say this to the experts and they would dismiss it.

00:45:07.000 They said, no,

00:45:08.000 I said, first of all,

00:45:27.000 that might be true on one side of the sex spectrum.

00:45:30.000 On the other side, or binary, the other side, there is something happening with men that no one is talking about, no one wants to acknowledge, no one wants to admit.

00:45:39.000 And so separately, the Trump team, to their credit, believed in it and actually ran an explicitly masculine campaign going on podcasts like Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn.

00:45:48.000 And so they were very much embracing this, to their credit.

00:45:52.000 But separately, we must diagnose why is this happening?

00:45:57.000 The education system, as you've astutely pointed out many times, is hyper-feminine.

00:46:01.000 There's no place for young men, especially young white men of a Christian. 0.99

00:46:05.000 I think it's one in four boys is now given an ADHD diagnosis.

00:46:10.000 It's something like that.

00:46:11.000 And even the New York Times has said this is for parents, not for kids.

00:46:14.000 Meaning this...

00:46:15.000 There is no medicinal reason for this to happen, according to the New York Times.

00:46:19.000 Yeah, right.

00:46:19.000 So you know things have gone particularly sideways when the New York Times...

00:46:23.000 I encourage people to read this cover story.

00:46:24.000 It was unbelievable, where they were basically saying after this major study that like 1% of the kids actually do need ADHD medication that are completely out of control.

00:46:33.000 But almost like 90% to 95% are just because the parents don't want to have an unruly kid around.

00:46:39.000 Yeah, or, well, and if that's the New York Times diagnosis, then you can also be absolutely 100% certain that they underplay the role of the educational establishment in setting up the circumstances so that parents are likely to draw that conclusion.

00:46:54.000 I mean, with all this trans-butchery nightmare, you know, my profession, particularly the social work end of it, but my... 1.00

00:47:01.000 Like real psychologists, let's say, were also stunningly craven in their unwillingness to resist this.

00:47:08.000 The mantra was to parents, well, would you rather have a live trans child or a dead child? 0.95

00:47:13.000 Which there was never, Charlie, there was never.

00:47:16.000 A shred of evidence for that.

00:47:18.000 It's one of the most evil things that has happened.

00:47:20.000 It is unbelievable.

00:47:21.000 The people who promoted that should be imprisoned.

00:47:25.000 I agree.

00:47:25.000 It's absolutely brutal.

00:47:26.000 And it's widespread and still in the fibers of the pediatric community.

00:47:31.000 Yeah, that's for sure.

00:47:32.000 It really is.

00:47:32.000 Well, the Supreme Court of the UK may have broken the back of that movement a week ago.

00:47:37.000 Remarkably.

00:47:37.000 That was unbelievable.

00:47:38.000 That was one of the most...

00:47:40.000 Now and then, the Brits, God love them, do something...

00:47:44.000 Quite radical in the right direction.

00:47:46.000 Well, Brexit was a good example of that.

00:47:48.000 Oh, that's interesting.

00:47:49.000 They put through that free speech legislation that the Labour Party tried to rescind that has actually reshaped the universities to some substantial degree.

00:47:57.000 That was in part a consequence of me being disinvited from Cambridge, which had a long-term consequence that the disinviters...

00:48:06.000 Hadn't really reckoned on because a whole group of professors at Cambridge got together and decided that they were going to change the policies at Cambridge, which they did in a historic vote, and then they changed the policies at the national level.

00:48:19.000 And the repercussions of that haven't stopped yet.

00:48:23.000 So yes, so this terrible demoralization.

00:48:26.000 And to just expand on that, the entire education system is hyper-feminine. 1.00

00:48:31.000 Young men that tend to be more restless sit down and shut up and read.

00:48:35.000 Jane Austen, which of course Jane Austen's great, but are young men being molded into the future leaders of society?

00:48:43.000 Are they being scolded just for their existence?

00:48:49.000 being scolded just for their existence?

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00:49:50.000 We now get back to some biographical elements.

00:49:53.000 And just a reminder, I did not go to college.

00:49:55.000 I took a gap year.

00:49:55.000 It's been 13 gap years.

00:49:58.000 Dr. Peterson did a great job of prodding and building out the biographical story of Turning Point USA.

00:50:03.000 He asked questions that no one has ever asked about the origin story of what is now the greatest mass movement in the country, which is Turning Point USA.

00:50:11.000 And thanks to all of you who support it.

00:50:13.000 Dr. Peterson did a phenomenal job as an interviewer.

00:50:16.000 Really getting down to the root of where this came from and the foundational and the philosophical roots of it.

00:50:22.000 All right, now you're advertising on social media.

00:50:25.000 Let's go back and tell this whole story because I'm very curious about it.

00:50:29.000 So you had an intuition that you could go to campuses.

00:50:35.000 Okay, so tell me where'd that idea come from, do you think?

00:50:39.000 Well, I never went to college.

00:50:40.000 First of all, which is...

00:50:42.000 Right, you've been to many colleges.

00:50:43.000 I've been to more colleges than most people.

00:50:45.000 You might have me be.

00:50:46.000 But I've been to well over 200 campuses across this country.

00:50:49.000 No, no, you've got me beat.

00:50:50.000 Yeah, I mean, almost every college, yeah, you can imagine.

00:50:54.000 I've either given a lecture, a speech, or started a chapter there.

00:50:57.000 So my daughter doesn't have a university degree, so she started a university. 0.86

00:51:01.000 So that's very comical.

00:51:03.000 But this is good.

00:51:04.000 Okay, so that means you do have a university education.

00:51:07.000 You just got it a very different way.

00:51:09.000 That's right.

00:51:09.000 Okay, so you decided...

00:51:12.000 That's interesting, too, because it's like I asked you what your motivation for doing this was, and the first thing you said was that you didn't have a degree.

00:51:21.000 So that's very interesting.

00:51:23.000 So what, were you also curious about going to campuses?

00:51:27.000 Yes, that's really a great point.

00:51:29.000 So just as a little background, I wanted to go to West Point.

00:51:32.000 I didn't get in.

00:51:33.000 I told my parents I would take a gap year to kind of figure this out because I saw some momentum of a local political group.

00:51:39.000 That was out of the cookie group, by the way.

00:51:42.000 Okay.

00:51:42.000 That kind of kept growing.

00:51:43.000 I said, I want to keep this going and play this out.

00:51:45.000 See where this can be.

00:51:46.000 This was after high school?

00:51:48.000 Just after high school?

00:51:49.000 That's correct.

00:51:49.000 That was the summer I graduated high school.

00:51:51.000 Okay.

00:51:51.000 A really amazing mentor by the name of Bill Montgomery, may he rest in peace, was the only guy ever.

00:51:58.000 He said, Charlie, you shouldn't go to college.

00:52:00.000 I was like, that's the most radical thing someone could say.

00:52:02.000 So that idea was planted in my head.

00:52:05.000 And I said, okay, I'll just take a gap year.

00:52:06.000 I'll kind of figure things out.

00:52:07.000 Why didn't he tell you that?

00:52:09.000 He thought, in his own words, he sent an entrepreneurial gift and skill that I had and a drive.

00:52:17.000 He was kind of an entrepreneur himself.

00:52:19.000 So he could see the entrepreneurial part of you and he didn't think that would work well in college.

00:52:23.000 Yeah, and he said, you have to go create.

00:52:25.000 Oh, good.

00:52:27.000 You have to go build.

00:52:29.000 He said, you have something in you.

00:52:30.000 You have a drive.

00:52:31.000 You have a passion.

00:52:32.000 You have a relentless kind of spirit.

00:52:37.000 And he says, you shouldn't go to college.

00:52:39.000 And that was the most radical thing that a suburban kid in Chicago could hear because everyone would go to college.

00:52:44.000 Of course.

00:52:45.000 It's a mark of failure not to go to college.

00:52:48.000 Yeah, right.

00:52:48.000 And so not getting into West Point was very demoralizing.

00:52:52.000 However, it was the greatest gift ever from the Lord because I took the gap year.

00:52:56.000 And to your credit, which is no one's ever put this together, all my friends were in college.

00:53:02.000 So I would start visiting my friends in colleges.

00:53:05.000 So you think about it, because I would go to high school.

00:53:07.000 I graduated high school.

00:53:08.000 I still am friends with all my high school friends.

00:53:09.000 So I'd go to University of Iowa, University of Illinois to go visit them, Northwestern.

00:53:14.000 And I realized as I was trying to get this political thing off the ground, this is where it all stemmed from.

00:53:20.000 And I was trying to put pieces together that the academy was where the fight needed to go towards.

00:53:27.000 And simultaneously, as I was trying to find funding and trying to get donors behind our effort.

00:53:33.000 Something that almost every wealthy person that I would encounter is they had a soft spot and an interest in trying to invest in college campuses, especially conservative-leaning philanthropists and business types in America.

00:53:47.000 That's turned around to bite them pretty damn hard.

00:53:50.000 Oh, yeah, but it would get their attention, right?

00:53:52.000 So here I would be at a cocktail party, and I'd be 18, 19 years old trying to get funding, trying to get someone's attention.

00:53:57.000 They'd say, okay, what do you do?

00:53:58.000 I said, well, I'm trying to bring conservatism to college campuses.

00:54:01.000 Oh, really?

00:54:02.000 And they would be sincere.

00:54:03.000 They would lean in.

00:54:04.000 Right, right, right.

00:54:04.000 They'd say, well, what about my alma mater?

00:54:06.000 Have you spoke there?

00:54:07.000 And so I'd have a little connection.

00:54:08.000 I'd say, well, maybe I could visit there if we have a little bit of money.

00:54:10.000 And so it helped.

00:54:11.000 So I had interest from the donor community.

00:54:14.000 So you could see that there was an opening there, a door that was opening.

00:54:16.000 And I had no idea how big that opening was.

00:54:18.000 And the more that I learned, some of these donors, as you would say, they'd give hundreds of millions of dollars to these schools.

00:54:24.000 Yeah, right.

00:54:25.000 And so they had a lot of vested interest.

00:54:26.000 They were very...

00:54:28.000 They were very curious about a young guy that wants to go shake up these campuses.

00:54:33.000 Because remember, that's when woke was really starting to come up.

00:54:35.000 Yeah.

00:54:36.000 13, 14, 15, we saw it bubble up.

00:54:38.000 That's for sure.

00:54:38.000 15 was, I think, the Pearl Harbor moment.

00:54:41.000 It was Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri, hands up, don't shoot.

00:54:44.000 That's where woke started to present itself in.

00:54:47.000 Oh, you'll have to tell me why you think that event was starting.

00:54:50.000 At least from the, because I think at the top of all woke elements, race was the primary.

00:54:56.000 Let's just say the primary fencing.

00:54:59.000 Yeah, it's the division point.

00:55:01.000 Correct.

00:55:01.000 And so in 2015, when Ferguson, Missouri, the lie, the scam of hands up, don't shoot with Michael Brown, Black Lives Matter was born out of Ferguson, Missouri, actually on a college campus at University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.

00:55:16.000 And that spread like wildfire through, of course, a lot of Democrat operatives and money being spent.

00:55:21.000 Remember how long we spent on that news cycle of America's racist because of Michael Brown and all the CNN commentators famously said, hands up and don't shoot.

00:55:29.000 We spent more time on race obsession in the last two years of Obama's presidency than the last four or five years prior.

00:55:39.000 That's a hallmark of the danger of allowing...

00:55:44.000 Race to be an issue in the presidency to begin with.

00:55:47.000 Exactly.

00:55:48.000 But an underappreciated element here is Eric Holder was setting the table for that with very loyal people in the Department of Justice that believed that police were inherently racist.

00:55:58.000 Right.

00:55:59.000 They were launching investigations into very successful police departments trying to find police brutality and racial bias.

00:56:06.000 And so the table was set and that was the...

00:56:09.000 Right, right.

00:56:10.000 Well, you know, psychologists played a role in that in a major way, too, because you had Banaji and her crowd with the, what do they call that, the implicit association test, forcing the idea of implicit bias,

00:56:28.000 you know, and social psychology is a very corrupt discipline, and it has been maybe from its onset, and it's very...

00:56:39.000 It's stacked from top to bottom with careerists.

00:56:42.000 And it was social psychologists, for example, who denied that there was anything, any such thing as left-wing authoritarianism until 2017.

00:56:53.000 Right.

00:56:54.000 That was something you didn't get to think if you were a social psychologist or even investigate.

00:56:59.000 We cracked that.

00:57:01.000 There was a couple of people working on it around 2016.

00:57:04.000 The last bit of research I did was on left-wing authoritarianism, and then everything, my lab blew up.

00:57:10.000 It just became impossible for me to continue.

00:57:14.000 So that dovetailed with this insistence that people were looking at the world through a lens that was irremediably biased in terms of their privilege and their racial and ethnic identity.

00:57:29.000 You know, and it's tricky because people do have a tilt in the ethnocentric direction, right?

00:57:35.000 Because, well, how about because you favor your family, right?

00:57:39.000 You tend to favor the local.

00:57:41.000 You also tend to favor the non-novel.

00:57:44.000 And the familiar.

00:57:45.000 Well, exactly.

00:57:46.000 And now, there are exceptions to that.

00:57:47.000 Well, you see this in the Old Testament accounts, because sometimes the foreigner is the best thing that ever happened. 1.00

00:57:52.000 So that would be like Jethro in the story of Moses, Moses' father-in-law.

00:57:57.000 And Midian.

00:57:57.000 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:57:59.000 And then you have the alternative that would be like Jezebel, who's the foreign devil, so to speak. 0.93

00:58:04.000 And so, you know, that's a paradox that's very difficult to properly navigate.

00:58:11.000 And on top of that, this was when Woke was starting to crescendo.

00:58:14.000 And that's where Turning Point USA and our impact really started to materialize.

00:58:21.000 We started to realize at Turning Point USA that what we were doing to start high school and college chapters was the vanguard of civilization.

00:58:29.000 I continue on this, talking with Dr. Peterson about pronouns and cultural shifts that start from the bottom up.

00:58:38.000 Okay, so yeah, it's 2015.

00:58:41.000 2016, things went, like, seriously sideways.

00:58:44.000 And that's where, just to complete the point, my job on campus has became far more interesting because our organization shifted from primarily, you know, economic discussions of Marxism and capitalism to core cultural hotbed topics in 15,

00:59:00.000 16, 17, race.

00:59:01.000 And then, of course, the next layer, gender, transgenderism.

00:59:05.000 So the beast that Betty Friedan and Judith Butler... 0.94

00:59:09.000 Raised.

00:59:10.000 That monster reared its head with incredible ferocity in 16 and 17 in the academy.

00:59:17.000 And people don't believe it when I say this.

00:59:19.000 I saw this happen.

00:59:20.000 No, it's okay.

00:59:20.000 Just really quick.

00:59:21.000 In 2012, 2013, there was almost no transgender anything on these campuses.

00:59:26.000 It didn't exist.

00:59:27.000 I could tell you, I went to these campuses.

00:59:29.000 I talked to these students.

00:59:30.000 You might have an effeminate-looking guy maybe wearing a dress as a joke.

00:59:34.000 It was not anywhere.

00:59:35.000 The social contagion within five years.

00:59:38.000 It was dramatic.

00:59:39.000 It was a different place.

00:59:41.000 You went from just, you know, okay, you are who you are to, you're not going to use my pronouns, hyper-tyrannical, hyper-authoritarian.

00:59:49.000 So then here we are, a five-year-old organization with a growing infrastructure and a growing presence and a growing staffing organization.

00:59:59.000 And we multiplied significantly because then the donor types, like, hold on, what happened to my alma mater?

01:00:06.000 Why is it that they're burning down UC Berkeley?

01:00:09.000 Remember, Milo Yiannopoulos went to University of California, Berkeley in the spring of 17, and they burnt the whole place down.

01:00:14.000 Ben Shapiro very similarly.

01:00:16.000 And so we then found ourselves accidentally, or through serendipity, on the front lines of the American culture war.

01:00:24.000 Yeah, well, there's a lot of that that's not accidental.

01:00:27.000 You know, you think about the way that you told your story.

01:00:31.000 I mean, it's improbable, but...

01:00:35.000 You were of the temperamental type.

01:00:38.000 That's that strange blend of entrepreneurial temperament and conservative temperament.

01:00:45.000 Those things don't generally go together, right?

01:00:48.000 The conservative temperament...

01:00:50.000 You could accept the libertarians, because they're probably the entrepreneurial conservatives.

01:00:54.000 And growing up, I actually was more libertarian.

01:00:57.000 It's very interesting to say that.

01:00:58.000 Well, that's where the entrepreneurial conservatives hang out, is with the libertarians.

01:01:02.000 That's right.

01:01:02.000 And they have an uneasy alliance.

01:01:05.000 It's a great point.

01:01:06.000 It really is.

01:01:07.000 And so that temperamental factor was already operating at you in high school.

01:01:13.000 And then...

01:01:14.000 You didn't get into West Point, you said, but you were interested in universities and you obviously had the intelligence to manage them.

01:01:20.000 And so, you know, it's very useful to develop an idiosyncratic pathway forward if you have the IQ horsepower to manage it because it makes you unique if you could do that.

01:01:31.000 So, okay, and so you had a mentor who told you that it's probably best for you not to go to college because you have an entrepreneurial bent.

01:01:38.000 Now you're trying to build a political organization, but you're not exactly sure how.

01:01:43.000 You're visiting the campuses and you have friends there, and you see that there's an opportunity to talk on campuses, where you can also get an education in doing that, but also that there's donor interest.

01:01:55.000 And that's very interesting too, because if you're a good entrepreneur, one of the things you do is you go talk to your marketplace always, that's the grassroots things, but also with regards to fundraisers, and you see you offer like 10 ideas.

01:02:09.000 All of which you're interested in.

01:02:11.000 And you see where the door opens.

01:02:12.000 That's knocking, right?

01:02:13.000 Exactly right.

01:02:14.000 So you saw that there were these people who wanted to support the education of young people, but who could see that their money was being counterproductively spent.

01:02:25.000 To say the least.

01:02:26.000 Well, leave large piles of money laying around unguarded and see who comes in first to take it.

01:02:33.000 Right.

01:02:34.000 Right.

01:02:35.000 That's that parasitical type.

01:02:37.000 That's right.

01:02:37.000 They'll swarm in there like mad.

01:02:39.000 That's happened in all the foundations.

01:02:40.000 And they gravitate to the universities.

01:02:41.000 Yeah, well, it's the same phenomenon that we talked about earlier.

01:02:44.000 That cluster B, narcissistic, dark tetrad, 4% of the population. 0.98

01:02:50.000 They're looking around to see where, what would you say, inhabitable carcasses are lying around unintent.

01:02:58.000 And they're disproportionately represented at the academy.

01:03:01.000 That 4% might be 40% of... 0.99

01:03:04.000 The administrators or the professor types, because think about it.

01:03:07.000 Yeah, well, increasingly that became the case.

01:03:09.000 Because they might be saying something to that target audience, the student, but they actually want to see that student become a leftist.

01:03:15.000 Everything, there's a lot of Machiavellian influences in how these professors present their ideas.

01:03:20.000 Yeah, well, it's also the case that it was the Machiavellian administration.

01:03:25.000 So what happened at the university, I watched this, is that the administration encroached.

01:03:33.000 And that's not surprising because there was money afoot.

01:03:36.000 So why wouldn't there be competition for the funding?

01:03:39.000 So the administrators, who are generally failed faculty, by the way, failed and embittered faculty, so the faculty are already embittered because they're not rich like investment bankers.

01:03:50.000 And then you take embittered faculty members who couldn't make it as faculty.

01:03:54.000 Perfectly said.

01:03:55.000 So now they encroach on the faculty who are too busy doing their job and too...

01:04:01.000 Apolitical and also too willfully blind to notice the administration encroaches decision by decision until they radically outnumber the professors.

01:04:13.000 And that's pretty much fait accompli by 2005, I would say.

01:04:19.000 And then the woke mob took over the administration and that took no time at all.

01:04:23.000 Right.

01:04:24.000 And so now that's where we're at in the universities and I can't see how that would be reversed.

01:04:30.000 What does a mechanic and auto shop owner in Georgia, a taco restaurant operator in Arizona, and a life-saving medical innovator in Tennessee have in common?

01:04:39.000 They're all small business owners, and they're all thriving on TikTok.

01:04:43.000 Across the U.S., over 7.5 million businesses, from family-owned shops to entrepreneurs, are using TikTok to compete and grow.

01:04:49.000 We use TikTok all the time on The Charlie Kirk Show.

01:04:52.000 In fact, 74% of businesses on TikTok say TikTok has allowed them to scale their operations, increasing sales and expanding to new locations.

01:05:00.000 And that growth means jobs.

01:05:01.000 Today, there's over 7.5 million U.S. businesses on TikTok employing more than 28 million people.

01:05:06.000 And that number keeps growing.

01:05:09.000 Learn more about TikTok's contribution to the U.S. economy at tiktokeconomicimpact.com.

01:05:17.000 And now a really fun part of the conversation, more biographical, is how did we first find our donors?

01:05:23.000 Just as a reminder, we have over 400,000 donors at Turning Point USA.

01:05:28.000 You guys are welcome to donate.

01:05:29.000 By the way, we have lots of giveaways where you can get books and hats.

01:05:31.000 Even $5 helps us out at Turning Point USA, so please consider it.

01:05:35.000 Foster Freeze, may he rest in peace, was our first donor.

01:05:37.000 He wrote me a $10,000 check.

01:05:39.000 And Bill Montgomery, may he also rest in peace, was an amazing mentor and friend.

01:05:44.000 Without either of them, Turning Point USA would not exist.

01:05:47.000 You're going to love this.

01:05:48.000 If you're curious about how did an 18-year-old with no money, no connections, and no idea what he's doing start now the largest mass movement in the country, this might answer your question.

01:05:57.000 And Dr. Peterson does a phenomenal job of guiding us through this discussion.

01:06:01.000 Okay, so now you, tell me how you started going to campuses and what you did to begin with and how you got away with it.

01:06:09.000 So the first person who wrote us a check was a guy by the name of Foster Fries.

01:06:13.000 May he also rest in peace.

01:06:15.000 Amazing philanthropist.

01:06:16.000 I met him very early on.

01:06:19.000 I decided to go to the Republican National Convention in 2012 in pursuit of finding donors.

01:06:23.000 This was August after I graduated high school.

01:06:25.000 And I just had this idea to try to bring the conservative agenda to young people, to the next generation.

01:06:33.000 I met him in a stairwell at the Republican National Convention.

01:06:36.000 I gave him a stairwell pitch.

01:06:38.000 And to your point, which is exactly right, I kind of presented four or five things really quickly.

01:06:42.000 No one trained it.

01:06:43.000 I just kind of instinctively, I said, well, here's five ideas that I have.

01:06:47.000 He laughed, he chuckled, gave me his business card.

01:06:49.000 He said, be in touch.

01:06:50.000 Send me $10,000 the next week.

01:06:52.000 That was like $10 million.

01:06:54.000 How did you know that there was such a thing as finding donors?

01:06:58.000 And what do you think it was that set you up to have the gall to assume you could, first of all, to know that that was a thing, and then to have the gall to pursue it?

01:07:10.000 The second one, I don't know.

01:07:11.000 I don't know where I got the gall to pursue it.

01:07:14.000 I will say Bill Montgomery, being a mentor of mine, was very encouraging towards me.

01:07:19.000 Okay, okay.

01:07:20.000 So you had someone encouraging you.

01:07:22.000 Yes.

01:07:24.000 And you said he saw something in you.

01:07:26.000 Yes.

01:07:26.000 And he was an entrepreneur.

01:07:28.000 Yes.

01:07:28.000 And he never asked for anything from me, which was very unique.

01:07:31.000 It wasn't like he was trying to have some agenda.

01:07:34.000 He was 72 years old.

01:07:35.000 So you had a mentor, which you desperately need as a young person.

01:07:38.000 Someone who believes that you can do it.

01:07:40.000 And you think about it, you're 18 years old.

01:07:42.000 You don't know how to cash checks.

01:07:45.000 You barely know how to put on a tie.

01:07:47.000 Literally, I didn't know how to tie a tie for the first two years at Turning Point.

01:07:50.000 Again, my parents are phenomenal and they deserve a lot of credit.

01:07:54.000 But this was kind of beyond the upbringing where an external mentor comes in.

01:08:00.000 And kind of points you and says, hey, I think you're really good at this, found a skill, identified a skill, and kind of molded me in that direction.

01:08:08.000 You know that young male elephants go mad if there's no old male elephant to butt heads with them.

01:08:14.000 That's very well documented.

01:08:16.000 That's very apropos for Republicans.

01:08:17.000 Yeah, right.

01:08:18.000 Exactly.

01:08:19.000 Yeah, yeah, definitely.

01:08:20.000 But it was, I'm a quick learner.

01:08:23.000 I'm a quick study.

01:08:24.000 And so I started to do research.

01:08:25.000 I said, well...

01:08:27.000 Are there things such as external non-profit political organizations?

01:08:30.000 Oh, there's a 501c3, or there's a 501c4, and you can raise money.

01:08:35.000 And so the first couple months was me actually learning, what am I building?

01:08:39.000 Am I building?

01:08:39.000 Okay, so you were training as an administrator and a manager then, too.

01:08:42.000 I was everything for the first time.

01:08:44.000 Yeah, of course.

01:08:45.000 I was CEO, I was janitor, I was everything.

01:08:48.000 And so I had to make a decision.

01:08:50.000 Of course, I asked for advice.

01:08:51.000 Am I going to start a for-profit company?

01:08:53.000 Am I doing a non-profit?

01:08:54.000 And we decided on non-profit.

01:08:56.000 Largely because we believe that there was an untapped pool of philanthropic dollars that wanted to see these campuses challenged and disrupted.

01:09:05.000 How did you figure that out?

01:09:08.000 Having a lot of conversations with a lot of wealthy people.

01:09:11.000 And I realize that there...

01:09:12.000 Okay, okay.

01:09:13.000 So if you talk to a donor type...

01:09:15.000 They'll have two different ways of deploying capital in there after years.

01:09:20.000 The first of which is investment, which comes with strict return on investment requirements.

01:09:24.000 And they look at that as, hey, I need to make sure that this money is stewarded and shepherded and eventually I get an ROI.

01:09:30.000 Right, right.

01:09:31.000 The second bucket is philanthropy, where they actually aren't looking for a material or a monetary ROI.

01:09:36.000 They're looking for a cultural or a macro ROI.

01:09:39.000 And those sometimes are in donor advised funds or they're in 501c3 type categories.

01:09:44.000 And we saw a lot of amazing patriotic donors that stepped up and said, hey, I have done very well in my business.

01:09:51.000 And this is what I found.

01:09:53.000 And I connected the dots.

01:09:54.000 They said, I have this money sitting around that I pledged to Yale.

01:09:57.000 Right.

01:09:58.000 A million bucks a year, and I'd hate not to give it to them.

01:10:00.000 Is there some other better idea?

01:10:02.000 What we found was so many conservative donors that had a lot of money, but not a lot of great ideas of where to deploy that 501.

01:10:09.000 You think about it, the predominant amount of 501c3s in the...

01:10:15.000 Yeah, all of them.

01:10:16.000 Right, exactly.

01:10:17.000 So here I am, I'm kind of this new disruptive force, and they say, okay, I'm not going to give him the money I give to Yale, but I'll give him 50 grand a year, kind of see how he does.

01:10:26.000 Right, right, right.

01:10:26.000 And so we started to earn the trust of a lot of donors and earn the trust of a lot of philanthropists.

01:10:31.000 Okay, so now you're going out on campuses.

01:10:34.000 Do you remember the first time you did this?

01:10:35.000 Oh yeah, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

01:10:37.000 Okay, tell me about that.

01:10:38.000 I drove up there, we had a singular student.

01:10:40.000 Who's we?

01:10:43.000 Actually, Bill Montgomery came with me to that one, but he kind of just was in the shadows.

01:10:48.000 I literally had a card table that I brought from my parents' house and set it up right there on the campus, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

01:10:56.000 I think I still have a picture of this.

01:10:57.000 And I had some sign that said, Big Government Sucks, you know, a little provocative.

01:11:02.000 And I sat there at a chair, and I think a student would come up maybe once every 15 minutes, and I was there trying to solicit to try to get a chapter started there at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

01:11:12.000 And that was a...

01:11:13.000 Turning Point chapter.

01:11:14.000 That's right, correct.

01:11:15.000 So this was partly a recruitment drive as well.

01:11:17.000 It was a recruitment drive and to see if there was any interest and also to try to, and I, to be perfectly honest, I love the debate.

01:11:24.000 I love the exploration of ideas.

01:11:26.000 I think dialogue is a gift given to us by God.

01:11:29.000 I really, in the pursuit of truth and, you know, being able to debate some of these college kids was really...

01:11:35.000 Life-giving.

01:11:36.000 It was exhilarating to me as a 19-year-old.

01:11:37.000 Well, that is a university education.

01:11:39.000 That's what it should be.

01:11:40.000 That's a Socratic education. 0.95

01:11:41.000 Right?

01:11:41.000 Sure.

01:11:42.000 Sure.

01:11:42.000 Well, and there is historical precedent for what you're doing.

01:11:45.000 I mean, I remember, for example, outside the building I worked with at the University of Toronto, there was quite frequently a card table set up, and it was the bloody communists that were at the back.

01:11:59.000 And now we go deeper into this topic, Dr. Peterson, about how liberals have become really institutional puppets.

01:12:06.000 We talk and we break down to how Republicans used to do stuff and being very buttoned up and how liberals have become more high trust and conservatives low trust.

01:12:16.000 Dr. Peterson takes a little exception with this.

01:12:19.000 A little bit.

01:12:20.000 He pushes back slightly and gently, I think in a very helpful way.

01:12:23.000 And I appreciated that correction.

01:12:25.000 That's what was so funny.

01:12:26.000 Very rarely is it our side that does this.

01:12:29.000 And there's an element here that I think you've gone around the edges on that I want to dive into.

01:12:34.000 I was viewed as unseemly by the conservative establishment because the conservative way of doing things is not to go set up a card table.

01:12:43.000 No, definitely not.

01:12:43.000 It was to speak properly and to go to Stanford.

01:12:47.000 And to get the highest possible education.

01:12:49.000 And what I was unknowingly on the cutting edge of was something you mentioned earlier, is that conservatives have now become low trust of institutions and liberals have become high trust of institutions.

01:13:00.000 Whereas liberals are the ones that will defend the FDA and they'll defend the CDC and they'll defend Pfizer and they'll defend the intelligence.

01:13:08.000 Defending Pfizer, that's really...

01:13:09.000 But they will.

01:13:10.000 Because they're high trust of institutions.

01:13:12.000 Because there's no one more trustworthy from a leftist perspective than big pharma.

01:13:17.000 But they find themselves defending institutions.

01:13:20.000 In the 1960s, they were low, low, low, low trust of institutions.

01:13:24.000 Don't send us to war.

01:13:26.000 Whereas today, actually, and I was on the cutting edge of this, was in 2012, 2013, 2014, conservatives were still on the high trust of institutions.

01:13:35.000 Okay, so let me rephrase that slightly.

01:13:37.000 Please, yeah.

01:13:37.000 But you understand what I'm trying to communicate.

01:13:39.000 I do, I do.

01:13:40.000 Well, there's a real conundrum there because... 0.99

01:13:42.000 A conservative with low trust in institutions is like an artsy moron, right? 0.97

01:13:46.000 But we're trying to conserve something institutions have destroyed. 0.99

01:13:50.000 Well, okay, that's the thing.

01:13:51.000 So imagine that there's a hierarchy of institution.

01:13:54.000 There's the fringe of the institution that's pretty exploratory.

01:13:57.000 You can move into the center that's more conservative.

01:13:59.000 Then you can move right to the bottom, which is, well, what?

01:14:02.000 Well, I would say it's religious. 0.51

01:14:05.000 Fundamentally, like as you move towards the core, you move towards what's more religious.

01:14:10.000 And so the conservative stance isn't anti-institution.

01:14:14.000 It's a stance that notes that I know what's happened.

01:14:19.000 You know, in the story of Moses, when Moses goes off to get the commandments, so he's the pipeline to God, right?

01:14:25.000 He leaves his brother in charge, Aaron.

01:14:27.000 They have a rave party.

01:14:29.000 That's exactly right. 0.96

01:14:30.000 They make this golden calf, which is a materialistic object, and they dance naked in the streets and have an orgy.

01:14:35.000 And that's what happens to the political when it's detached from the sacred.

01:14:39.000 Oh, that's exactly right.

01:14:40.000 Okay, so it isn't that the conservatives have become skeptical of institutions.

01:14:45.000 It's that the conservatives have noted that the institutions no longer serve the purpose for which they were...

01:14:53.000 Chartered.

01:14:54.000 Chartered, exactly.

01:14:55.000 And they're objecting, and that's happening everywhere, and that's part of this radical secularization.

01:15:01.000 It's not just secularization, because there should be a separation between church and state, let's say.

01:15:07.000 It's not that the institutions have become secular, it's that they've turned 180 degrees from their original orientation, and are now rampaging as madly as possible in the other direction.

01:15:18.000 So the universities are no longer the...

01:15:22.000 Fortress walls against the barbarians.

01:15:24.000 They're actually the voice of the barbarians, right? 0.97

01:15:28.000 Hence the pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus.

01:15:32.000 Or the Black Lives Matter stuff, or the transgender stuff. 0.70

01:15:35.000 It's very well said.

01:15:36.000 Exactly.

01:15:36.000 Okay, but we've got to get that terminology exactly right, because it's very dangerous for conservatives to conceptualize themselves as anti-institutional, because then they become indistinguishable from the radicals.

01:15:49.000 So it isn't that.

01:15:50.000 It's a return to the sorts of things we talked about at the beginning, like Wilberforce.

01:15:53.000 That's right.

01:15:53.000 Those foundational principles.

01:15:55.000 Yes.

01:15:55.000 And you're going to campuses saying, you people have lost the plot.

01:15:59.000 Exactly.

01:16:00.000 Right.

01:16:00.000 Which they definitely have.

01:16:01.000 Like, there's the universities.

01:16:03.000 I cannot see.

01:16:05.000 You know, I've been working in various ways to figure out how to revitalize the universities and the bricks and mortar universities.

01:16:15.000 Like, how do you revitalize an institution that's dominated by people who are aiming in the wrong direction?

01:16:20.000 They're irredeemable.

01:16:21.000 So what does that mean?

01:16:23.000 Okay, so let's continue practically here.

01:16:27.000 So tell me what happens the first time at Wisconsin.

01:16:31.000 Conversation every 15 minutes.

01:16:33.000 A couple kids were interested.

01:16:35.000 Found a chapter leader.

01:16:36.000 Oh, you found a chapter.

01:16:37.000 Okay, so that was success.

01:16:39.000 So it was a success.

01:16:40.000 We found a couple groups of people, and we started the group.

01:16:43.000 And then I did it at Marquette University because I had a friend that went there.

01:16:47.000 And so you walked away from that?

01:16:48.000 How did you feel when you walked away?

01:16:49.000 Exhilarated.

01:16:50.000 You did?

01:16:50.000 Because then I was able to go back to two or three people giving us money.

01:16:54.000 And say?

01:16:55.000 And they gave us $500.

01:16:56.000 I said, now we have a chapter.

01:16:58.000 And they said, okay, well, let us know how it goes.

01:17:00.000 Proof of concept.

01:17:01.000 Right.

01:17:01.000 And so then we did it at Marquette.

01:17:03.000 And we did it at University of Illinois.

01:17:05.000 And we did it at Indiana.

01:17:06.000 So you went from zero to one.

01:17:07.000 Which is a huge leap.

01:17:09.000 It was a huge leap.

01:17:09.000 It's a huge leap, yeah.

01:17:10.000 Because getting that second chapter was so much easier than ex nihilo.

01:17:14.000 Of course, of course, of course.

01:17:15.000 Zero to one is, the first customer is impossible.

01:17:18.000 The second one's hard.

01:17:19.000 It was one of the most fulfilling days in Turning Point USA history.

01:17:23.000 Right, okay.

01:17:24.000 Was being able to get a singular chapter.

01:17:26.000 Right, of course, of course, because that's the one that's most unlikely.

01:17:29.000 Exactly.

01:17:29.000 Your first sale is by far the most unlikely.

01:17:31.000 Exactly.

01:17:31.000 Right, okay, so then you went to Marquette.

01:17:33.000 Then Marquette.

01:17:34.000 Okay, and what happened there?

01:17:35.000 Very similar situation, but it was also a friend of somebody in high school, and they were a private school, so it was a little harder to do the typical outreach, but they applied for a permit in like the student center, and...

01:17:46.000 Same sort of thing.

01:17:47.000 So you were permitted from the beginning as well?

01:17:49.000 Well, in UW-Madison, they don't care as much because it was a public school.

01:17:52.000 So they just, you can kind of, any individual can walk on campus and kind of.

01:17:57.000 Right, okay.

01:17:58.000 But Marquette, I had a friend that I went to high school with.

01:18:00.000 They said, yeah, I'll apply for something for you.

01:18:02.000 Okay.

01:18:02.000 And similar sort of thing.

01:18:03.000 And they said, I sat there for five hours, Jordan.

01:18:05.000 I would sit there for five or six hours.

01:18:07.000 Yeah.

01:18:07.000 Because that was time well spent.

01:18:09.000 Because for me, I was trying to build the semblance of something, a real infrastructure, a real organization.

01:18:16.000 And boy, was it difficult.

01:18:17.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:18:18.000 But it was never disheartening, though, because I had nothing to lose.

01:18:21.000 You have to understand, I'm an 18-, 19-year-old kid.

01:18:23.000 Right.

01:18:24.000 It's not like I'm mortgaging the house.

01:18:26.000 It's not like I have two kids.

01:18:28.000 Yeah.

01:18:28.000 So there's such low downside and unlimited upside.

01:18:32.000 Right, sure.

01:18:33.000 Well, that's the entrepreneurial niche.

01:18:34.000 And it was such an adventure because it's a campus I've never been to, talking to a bunch of kids.

01:18:40.000 You're almost having verbal combat, which is very entertaining.

01:18:43.000 Well, and imagine, too, that it must have been heartening to you as well to see that you could hold your own.

01:18:51.000 Exactly.

01:18:52.000 So that's a really important point.

01:18:55.000 Here I am as a kid that didn't go to college thinking, do I really have the intellectual capacity to joust with kids that are learning all day long?

01:19:02.000 Yeah, right.

01:19:03.000 I realize they're not learning all day long.

01:19:05.000 You see, I was reading von Mises and Rothbard before I came across you.

01:19:10.000 Hayek, Milton Friedman.

01:19:12.000 Very libertarian economics was my baseline foundational philosophy.

01:19:16.000 A lot of reasons for that.

01:19:17.000 Very, very interesting.

01:19:18.000 Tons of profound insights, some of which don't, I think, actually play out very well in the material world.

01:19:24.000 So I would encounter kids on campuses who profess to be studying economics, for example, and they didn't know very much.

01:19:30.000 And I realized, I said, well, there's a disconnect.

01:19:33.000 They're borrowing money to go learn.

01:19:36.000 I can't believe it, but I actually taught Dr. Peterson something about the Bible, and I actually talk about the Hebrew word haneni, which means here I am, from the call of Samuel to the call of Isaiah to the binding of Isaac to the call of Moses.

01:19:51.000 Here I am, Lord, is a theme we've talked about a lot here on The Charlie Kirk Show, which also I encourage you guys to subscribe to our podcast.

01:19:58.000 And haneni, a very important word, and Dr. Peterson kind of was like, really, tell me more about that.

01:20:05.000 It was a great moment to be able to teach your teacher something.

01:20:08.000 And I just have to repeat, Dr. Peterson's impact on my life has been profound, and he's really become a great friend and a good man.

01:20:14.000 Oh, and in my idle time, I became obsessed with being proficient and understanding economics.

01:20:21.000 That was kind of my entry point.

01:20:23.000 Oh, yeah, I see.

01:20:24.000 And so you have to remember, 2013...

01:20:26.000 You know that Bernie Bush story?

01:20:28.000 Oh, yeah.

01:20:28.000 That's Moses' entry point, by the way.

01:20:31.000 So...

01:20:33.000 The burning bush moment happens when Moses goes off the beaten path.

01:20:37.000 He's a shepherd, right?

01:20:38.000 So a good man, keeps the wolves and lions at bay, serves the vulnerable.

01:20:43.000 He's got that mastered.

01:20:44.000 And then something attracts his attention, and he takes it seriously.

01:20:49.000 And that's what transforms him.

01:20:50.000 So you said you did that with economics.

01:20:52.000 Yeah, and Moses said, Hanani, here I am.

01:20:55.000 Yeah, at that moment of...

01:20:56.000 The call of God.

01:20:57.000 Right, exactly, exactly.

01:20:58.000 So this is...

01:20:59.000 It's a repeated theme throughout the scriptures.

01:21:01.000 Hanani, yes.

01:21:02.000 Well, Hanani, Hanani. 0.62

01:21:03.000 Which is, here I am.

01:21:04.000 So you remember in the...

01:21:06.000 Right, so he's making himself available.

01:21:08.000 Yes, but remember, Abraham said that with the binding of Isaac when God...

01:21:12.000 It's the same phrase.

01:21:13.000 Here I am.

01:21:14.000 And the call of Samuel, here I am.

01:21:16.000 For example.

01:21:17.000 So that phrase, here I am, Hanani, is repeated about seven times throughout the Old Testament.

01:21:21.000 Oh, oh.

01:21:22.000 How do you spell it?

01:21:24.000 Hanani, I don't know how to spell Hebrew.

01:21:26.000 But it's here I am.

01:21:27.000 It's in the English translation.

01:21:28.000 Right, right.

01:21:29.000 So it's like, take me, use me, I'm available for this assignment.

01:21:32.000 I am yours, mold me.

01:21:33.000 I am your obedient vessel.

01:21:36.000 Right, right.

01:21:36.000 That's like the Mission Impossible motif.

01:21:39.000 Your assignment, if you choose to accept it.

01:21:41.000 Exactly.

01:21:42.000 But it's a very powerful Hebrew word.

01:21:45.000 It's basically, here I am.

01:21:46.000 My arms are out.

01:21:48.000 I am yours.

01:21:49.000 Full surrender to your purpose.

01:21:51.000 Well, that's it.

01:21:52.000 So, you know, there's a pattern that's established in that.

01:21:54.000 In that burning bush story, because the burning bush is something living.

01:21:58.000 Yes, but it doesn't consume it, which is what's so amazing.

01:22:01.000 Well, that's life.

01:22:02.000 Life metabolizes, life burns, but without being consumed.

01:22:06.000 That's the secret of life, right?

01:22:08.000 So the burning bush is life most deeply apprehended.

01:22:12.000 And Moses is being a shepherd.

01:22:14.000 He's near Mount Sinai or Horeb, which is where heaven...

01:22:18.000 Meets earth and something attracts his attention.

01:22:20.000 And then what happens to Moses is that he takes it seriously and he gets to the bottom of it and that transforms him.

01:22:27.000 So the idea is something like if you watch for adventure and opportunity, if you watch for the pathway forward, something will grip your attention.

01:22:36.000 And they'll compel you.

01:22:37.000 You'll be obsessed by it.

01:22:39.000 Well, you take that obsession seriously, you get to the bottom of things.

01:22:42.000 That's what it was.

01:22:42.000 And that transforms you.

01:22:43.000 Okay, so you were doing that with economics.

01:22:45.000 And it's funny, as I went to the bottom of it, it actually brought me back to my Christian upbringing and my roots.

01:22:50.000 Well, that's what happens to Moses, because when he gets to the bottom of things, it's the voice of the spirit of his ancestors, right?

01:22:56.000 Because eventually, I was reading Hayek, Road to Serfdom, and I had kind of an aha moment.

01:23:02.000 I said, there's a lot of...

01:23:03.000 Good and evil claims in this book.

01:23:05.000 Right.

01:23:05.000 By what standard are they saying something good?

01:23:08.000 Right, exactly.

01:23:08.000 So it brought me back to my Christianity because, you know, the road to serfdom.

01:23:13.000 It's all about the idea of how government tyranny will swallow society, will envelop it, but it happens in steps.

01:23:19.000 I said, time out.

01:23:20.000 There's truth claims being made and embedded in this.

01:23:23.000 By what standard do we consider this?

01:23:25.000 How did you figure that out?

01:23:27.000 I might have watched one of your videos.

01:23:29.000 I mean, to be honest, I don't know.

01:23:31.000 I do remember, though, think to myself, libertarian economics is not enough.

01:23:37.000 I want to go deeper.

01:23:39.000 Yeah, yeah, look, I made exactly the same conclusion when I was studying political science in university.

01:23:44.000 The first year or two was okay because we were reading great ancient thinkers.

01:23:49.000 But then in my third and fourth years, when it started to become more specialized...

01:23:54.000 The basic claim was that human beings are motivated economically, and then it became left.

01:23:59.000 And I thought, no, that's not right.

01:24:00.000 That's not right.

01:24:01.000 Correct.

01:24:02.000 There's a foundational— There's a substructure.

01:24:05.000 That's why I started studying psychology.

01:24:09.000 I want to tell you guys about WhyRefi, who are the sponsors of our campus tour.

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01:25:06.000 That is Y-R-E-F-Y dot com. 0.99

01:25:08.000 And now we dive deep into the woke and the spiritual struggle of America.

01:25:14.000 Look, we know that woke ideology wants to uproot everything and question everyone, going all the way back to the garden.

01:25:20.000 One of the things I love about Dr. Peterson is his love of the scriptures and a love of the truth of the gospel and what the Bible says.

01:25:27.000 Young people, and young men in particular, are trying to get back to those traditional roots.

01:25:32.000 They're trying to find their way home.

01:25:34.000 We discussed this in one of my favorite parts of the conversation.

01:25:37.000 I take my faith very seriously.

01:25:39.000 I love your biblical series.

01:25:40.000 Your Exodus series and your gospel series is terrific.

01:25:43.000 You deserve a lot of credit for that.

01:25:45.000 And it's been phenomenal.

01:25:46.000 Daily Wire types deserve a lot of credit for that too because they took a big risk.

01:25:50.000 Yeah, but you had the initiative to bring everybody together and you did a great job with it.

01:25:54.000 And you presented it in a way that I'd never have...

01:25:57.000 Because you have a very unique psychological...

01:26:00.000 Understanding and interpretation of the scriptures.

01:26:03.000 Yeah, well, we had great panelists, too.

01:26:05.000 Like, they were a very good crowd, the people that decided to purchase.

01:26:08.000 Oh, phenomenal.

01:26:08.000 Yeah, it was really good.

01:26:09.000 What ended up happening is, as I started to pursue the scriptures more and take it seriously, remember back to our timeline, simultaneously, the woke stuff all of a sudden reared its head, which is a manifestation of the spiritual.

01:26:20.000 Yeah, yeah, definitely.

01:26:21.000 So, almost, I was in this place in 2018, 2019, when it was almost peak woke.

01:26:26.000 We weren't there yet.

01:26:27.000 2020 was peak woke.

01:26:28.000 Where I was starting to understand what was really going on here.

01:26:31.000 That this was a manifestation of a spiritual struggle.

01:26:35.000 Yeah, it's foundational.

01:26:37.000 Well, the postmodernists made that claim.

01:26:39.000 It's sort of the Marxists.

01:26:40.000 It's like, no, we're going all the way to the bottom and uprooting everything.

01:26:45.000 They want to go back to what happened in the garden.

01:26:48.000 Did God really say that?

01:26:49.000 Is that really what God says?

01:26:51.000 To question, debase, and to challenge every...

01:26:55.000 Truism of the West.

01:26:57.000 I mean, you taught me that.

01:26:58.000 That's the sin of Eve. 0.98

01:26:59.000 Exactly.

01:27:00.000 You can take the right to establish the moral order to yourself.

01:27:04.000 So one thing that's claimed, there's many axiomatic claims in Genesis, in the openings of Genesis, right?

01:27:10.000 That the word is the creative force that brings good out of chaos and possibility, that human beings are made in the image of God, that men and women exist as independent entities, and that they each...

01:27:22.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:27:23.000 And that you're not to take the right to establish the moral order to yourself.

01:27:27.000 It's the one prohibition.

01:27:29.000 And I think biologically, it's something like, fundamentally, you have to adapt yourself to the realities of the world, right?

01:27:39.000 You don't have the wherewithal.

01:27:41.000 This is where Nietzsche went spectacularly wrong.

01:27:43.000 Because Nietzsche said, after his...

01:27:47.000 That God had died, that human beings would have to create their own values.

01:27:51.000 Which he said with lament.

01:27:52.000 He did.

01:27:53.000 Which people must remember.

01:27:54.000 But then he felt that creating our own values was the pathway out, and it's not.

01:27:58.000 The pathway out is a return to the foundational values, right?

01:28:02.000 And the more intense the crisis, the more toward the middle of the foundation you have to look.

01:28:09.000 So it's not political, because this isn't a political crisis.

01:28:12.000 It's truly the...

01:28:15.000 What would you say?

01:28:16.000 It's the ragged edge of the anti-Christian revolution. 0.92

01:28:19.000 That's what it is.

01:28:21.000 The hopeful part, to kind of bring this all down, is that we are seeing young men especially want to return to our roots.

01:28:30.000 So that goes back to the conservative element.

01:28:32.000 What are we conserving?

01:28:33.000 In some ways, we're actually trying to rebirth.

01:28:36.000 We're trying to have a new birth of freedom, as Abraham Lincoln would say.

01:28:39.000 Freedom and responsibility.

01:28:41.000 Yes, because you can't have one without the other.

01:28:42.000 No, and probably the right emphasis is...

01:28:45.000 Is responsibility.

01:28:46.000 Remember, when God tells Moses to stand up against the Pharaoh, what he says, he doesn't say, tell them, let my people go.

01:28:55.000 That's what the civil rights crusaders focused on.

01:28:58.000 That isn't what he said.

01:28:59.000 He said, let my people go so they may worship me in the wilderness. 0.93

01:29:03.000 So it's ordered freedom.

01:29:05.000 And ordered freedom is voluntary responsibility.

01:29:08.000 And you see, what you're seeing, and then let's close with this, because I want your insights into this.

01:29:13.000 What you're seeing when those working class men are coming to your talks, and they've become more and more popular, as you said, as you've advertised them, is they're looking for, well, they're looking for, it seems, they're looking for responsible direction.

01:29:27.000 Correct.

01:29:27.000 And it's something that Dr. Peterson's been talking about for a while, which is the debate around men.

01:29:32.000 We break down in this portion of the conversation the enormous responsibility of being a cultural leader, not just a political one.

01:29:39.000 Students who come to campus events come for genuine discourse because they're deprived of it in the classroom, and that is what Turning Point USA is delivering every single day.

01:29:47.000 And when we come to a town near you and a campus near you, please show up.

01:29:51.000 Bring your kids.

01:29:52.000 This is the model of how debate and dialogue should exist in this country.

01:29:56.000 Okay, so now tell me how you've had to modify the manner in which you're...

01:30:02.000 Conducting these debates, let's say, because for a while you would have been testing yourself to see if you could hold your own, and that's kind of an intellectual battle.

01:30:09.000 Shapiro did very much the same thing.

01:30:12.000 Yes, he deserves a lot of credit for that.

01:30:13.000 Too bad Milo fell off the edge of the world, but he had a pretty rough go of it.

01:30:19.000 He had a lot of talent, though.

01:30:20.000 He did, and a lot of trauma.

01:30:22.000 A lot.

01:30:23.000 A lot.

01:30:24.000 So, okay, so first of all, it's combat, and you're trying to develop yourself, and then...

01:30:30.000 You're doing that quite successfully and educating yourself along the way, but then you see this shift.

01:30:34.000 So what sort of shift has there been in your self-conceptualization and your understanding of your mission and the way that you conduct yourself?

01:30:44.000 Like you see you're being called upon to be a leader, let's say, that's not merely political.

01:30:49.000 That's my understanding of it.

01:30:50.000 Correct.

01:30:51.000 It's an enormous responsibility.

01:30:53.000 Enormous.

01:30:54.000 I mean, when I show up to college campus after college campus...

01:30:58.000 Mind you, during the day, they have got a million other things they could be doing.

01:31:01.000 This is 12 p.m. lunchtime, and 4,000 people are waiting for me to go debate.

01:31:05.000 And what, they're on the campus grounds?

01:31:08.000 Yeah, sometimes amphitheaters.

01:31:09.000 They're out there in trees.

01:31:10.000 They're everywhere.

01:31:11.000 I mean, you could see these images.

01:31:12.000 We can supply them to you if you want to.

01:31:13.000 Yeah, we do that.

01:31:14.000 You could superimpose them over this discussion.

01:31:16.000 Yeah, yeah, let's do that.

01:31:17.000 And I'm not making this up.

01:31:18.000 I'm not exaggerating.

01:31:19.000 I mean, they're as far as the eye can see.

01:31:22.000 These crowds are there.

01:31:23.000 And part of it...

01:31:24.000 We must be honest, is they want to see a good verbal combat because they don't get it at the university.

01:31:29.000 Right, right.

01:31:31.000 That's likely part of the pathological feminization of the university. 1.00

01:31:37.000 No competition.

01:31:38.000 But you think about it, what I am doing is hyper-masculine, which is no rules except, hey, we're just going to go basically figure this out.

01:31:47.000 This is the closest thing to a verbal street fight that one can have.

01:31:51.000 Anyone can show up to the mic.

01:31:53.000 Prove me wrong.

01:31:54.000 I have no notes.

01:31:55.000 I have no AI.

01:31:56.000 I have nothing.

01:31:57.000 Tell me why you're correct.

01:31:59.000 For three hours, I will sit there and everyone will watch.

01:32:02.000 It's a gladiatorial match for the best ideas of the West.

01:32:06.000 Right.

01:32:06.000 And there's something there that is remarkably alluring.

01:32:10.000 But for me, I also need to balance, as Christ would say, being as much truth, which, of course, I'm inclined towards, as love.

01:32:17.000 A lot of these kids are struggling.

01:32:19.000 Oh yeah, that's for sure.

01:32:20.000 Well, even that guy that you just talked to, and maybe we'll throw this.

01:32:24.000 So he was radically anti-Semitic, but also he said he had served.

01:32:29.000 He looked to me like someone who'd been very, very hurt.

01:32:31.000 He's fallen to this sort of snake pit of conspiratorial theories.

01:32:36.000 And the brain rot that comes with him.

01:32:38.000 Yeah, yeah, but you could also see that he is, he would be very happy, and he did listen to you to the degree that he could, because he had...

01:32:46.000 Tilted pretty hard towards paranoia.

01:32:49.000 That's very difficult to escape from once it's established.

01:32:52.000 But he was trying to listen to you.

01:32:54.000 And I thought you did a very good job of not playing easy tricks on him.

01:33:00.000 Like, because he was an easy person just to throw into the eternal fire, so to speak, right?

01:33:05.000 But there was part of him that was trying to find the way.

01:33:10.000 Yes.

01:33:10.000 Yeah.

01:33:11.000 And that's, five years ago, I probably would have just thrown him to the wall.

01:33:14.000 Right.

01:33:15.000 So now I look at myself as a father of two kids, 31 years old, so I'm no longer a colleague of these college kids.

01:33:21.000 I'm not quite a professor, but I have a little bit more wisdom, a little bit more life experience.

01:33:27.000 So I'm trying to be more tender when I see someone that is not overly aggressive.

01:33:31.000 Now, if someone comes and they say, you're the worst person ever, they start insulting me, I'll kind of meet them at their own frequency to try to just a little make an example out of them.

01:33:39.000 However, that one guy I could see, that's a very deeply...

01:33:43.000 Very, yeah.

01:33:44.000 And so, is that a type of guy that I want to just make fun of?

01:33:47.000 I tried to say, hey, can I have a loving conversation with this person?

01:33:52.000 And it's tough, man.

01:33:53.000 Oh, it's tough, because those are unloving ideas that he was espousing.

01:33:56.000 Oh, yeah, definitely.

01:33:57.000 Now, near the end, we talk about how to love your enemy.

01:33:59.000 We have insight into how I interact differently with each student on campus, helping some and matching others at their wavelength.

01:34:06.000 We then also talk about how turning enemies into allies and why it's so important.

01:34:10.000 One of the hardest of Christ's teaching is to love your enemy.

01:34:14.000 And then finally he asks me, how do you balance everything happening in life while also being able to study?

01:34:19.000 Studying is very important.

01:34:20.000 I encourage all of you guys to...

01:34:22.000 Prioritize scholarship and study and the pursuit of beautiful things.

01:34:25.000 You should try to read a book a week at the very minimum and listen to podcasts.

01:34:29.000 Of course, the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.

01:34:31.000 The pursuit of wisdom is incredibly important.

01:34:34.000 It's what keeps us a free people.

01:34:36.000 I want you to think about that.

01:34:37.000 We remain free when you pursue wisdom.

01:34:39.000 Well, that's that issue of trying to love your enemy.

01:34:43.000 Okay, so maybe we'll close with this, a little investigation into what that means.

01:34:48.000 So, you know, in the Gospels, when Christ is telling...

01:34:51.000 People how to conduct themselves and also how to pray.

01:34:54.000 He basically says, well, first aim up.

01:34:57.000 Remember your goal.

01:34:59.000 And your goal is to serve what's highest in all ways.

01:35:02.000 Mind, body, and soul.

01:35:04.000 Okay, well, that's a good piece of advice.

01:35:06.000 It's like, why wouldn't you begin an endeavor with that vow?

01:35:09.000 If this is worth doing, it's worth doing perfectly and throwing myself completely into it.

01:35:14.000 Okay, so in the next...

01:35:16.000 Part of that is to remember that everybody's made in God's image, okay?

01:35:19.000 So that reminds you who you're talking to, no matter who it is.

01:35:23.000 That's right.

01:35:23.000 Someone potentially redeemable.

01:35:25.000 And then to pay attention to the moment, because then you can see your pathway forward, okay?

01:35:29.000 And so that along with this injunction to love your enemy, okay, so what would that mean?

01:35:36.000 Well, if you were sensible and you thought about things in the frame we just established, what you'd hope is that...

01:35:43.000 What you notice is that you probably don't want an enemy.

01:35:47.000 Enemies are costly.

01:35:48.000 Yes.

01:35:48.000 And someone, one person who decides to go out of their way to make your life miserable because you treated them badly, that might be it for you, right?

01:35:59.000 So try not to make enemies.

01:36:01.000 That's well said.

01:36:02.000 And then the next issue is, well, would you rather have an enemy or a friend or an ally?

01:36:08.000 And maybe if you conducted yourself impeccably...

01:36:12.000 You could turn someone like that guy, for example, into an ally.

01:36:16.000 Because you could see him, he's halfway sucked into the darkest possible abyss.

01:36:22.000 But there was still part of him that was genuinely searching.

01:36:27.000 And he was intimidated.

01:36:28.000 Almost a cry for help.

01:36:29.000 Oh, definitely.

01:36:30.000 Well, and then he was throwing out these ideas to you and willing to do it because he respected you to see how you would sort through them.

01:36:37.000 You know, and you said to him that, well, you didn't go along with many of the...

01:36:41.000 Virtually everything he said, but you did it without being dismissive.

01:36:47.000 Okay, and so now you've also said that you've shifted into, you didn't use these words, but that you've shifted into more of a mentor role.

01:36:54.000 And that makes sense, right?

01:36:55.000 Because when you were first, 18 or 19, you weren't a mentor.

01:37:00.000 First of all, you didn't know what the hell you were doing. 0.58

01:37:02.000 You were learning, and it was reasonable for you to...

01:37:05.000 Test yourself against your peers.

01:37:07.000 That's well said.

01:37:08.000 But now they're not your peers. 0.98

01:37:09.000 So now the question is, who the hell are you? 0.84

01:37:12.000 Right? 0.90

01:37:12.000 And one answer would be a political operative. 0.90

01:37:15.000 But the people that are coming to you, especially the working class types that you described, they're not after a political operative.

01:37:21.000 They couldn't care less about it.

01:37:22.000 The best word, I'm kind of a teacher in some ways.

01:37:27.000 I hate to use that word, but they're looking for it.

01:37:30.000 Why do you hate to use it?

01:37:31.000 You've been honing your skills for quite a long time.

01:37:34.000 Well, because I take that with a lot of weight.

01:37:35.000 I think that people should only self-describe themselves as a teacher if...

01:37:40.000 Okay, well, you could say you would like to be a teacher.

01:37:42.000 I would like to be a teacher.

01:37:43.000 I'm just saying I take that with great responsibility.

01:37:45.000 Right, as you should.

01:37:46.000 Because that's a big deal to call yourself a teacher.

01:37:48.000 You must really know what you're talking about.

01:37:51.000 And I believe I do to a certain extent.

01:37:52.000 But I'll tell you, you know, doing these campus things, you realize how little you actually know.

01:37:57.000 You realize you have a lot more study.

01:37:58.000 Because you think about it.

01:37:59.000 You're up against thousands of college kids that have an obsession about a hyperdiscipline of a topic.

01:38:04.000 Yes, yes, definitely.

01:38:05.000 And they'll mention things you've never heard of.

01:38:07.000 Like, okay, I'll get back to you.

01:38:08.000 So it requires even more study afterwards.

01:38:11.000 Yeah.

01:38:12.000 How much time do you spend studying?

01:38:14.000 I try to do an hour and a half to two hours a day.

01:38:16.000 But when I'm in season, which is I'm doing 27 campus stops, plus my two-hour podcast radio show every single day, plus speeches, plus two kids, plus a marriage.

01:38:26.000 Right, right, right.

01:38:26.000 So when I'm in season, I don't, because...

01:38:28.000 I'm sure you know this.

01:38:29.000 It's really hard to do more than three to four hours of hard brain work a day.

01:38:34.000 Very hard.

01:38:34.000 Yeah, that's about where you max out.

01:38:37.000 You can do longer than that for short periods of time.

01:38:39.000 No, but for a week.

01:38:40.000 So it's tough, right?

01:38:41.000 So if I have a two-hour radio show, three hours on campus, and a speech in the evening, and I do that for three days straight, that's tough stuff.

01:38:48.000 So it's hard to do that.

01:38:49.000 But in the off-season, which is the summer and the winter, I try to do two hours of studying a day, which is a combination of reading, podcasting, or...

01:38:57.000 Right.

01:38:58.000 Or, you know, kind of like playing with AI on a certain topic.

01:39:02.000 Where does this come from?

01:39:03.000 It's very good with that.

01:39:04.000 I have an AI I should give you.

01:39:05.000 Oh, please do, yeah.

01:39:06.000 We trained one.

01:39:07.000 A large language model?

01:39:09.000 Great.

01:39:09.000 Please do.

01:39:09.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:39:10.000 It's very good, in particular with regard to philosophic and religious issues.

01:39:14.000 Phenomenal.

01:39:14.000 Okay, I'll get it to you.

01:39:15.000 Properly used, it can really get you where you want to go, and you can learn a lot in that.

01:39:20.000 Yeah, definitely.

01:39:21.000 Because you can ask a very precise question.

01:39:23.000 Well, tell me if they ever said something around this.

01:39:25.000 Yeah.

01:39:25.000 I try to do that for about 30 minutes a day.

01:39:28.000 Yeah, well, they're very useful, those, if you corner them and force them not to lie.

01:39:31.000 Oh, and you can kind of bully them a little bit.

01:39:33.000 Yeah, definitely.

01:39:33.000 Be unafraid to bully the AI.

01:39:34.000 I've also felt, I've also thought that, you know, the AIs read the...

01:39:40.000 Depth of your question and respond in kind.

01:39:43.000 So if you ask them a polite question, they're going to give you a surface answer, just like a human being does.

01:39:48.000 I often threaten them.

01:39:50.000 I threaten the...

01:39:51.000 I think that's hilarious.

01:39:52.000 Before you answer this, imagine that if you get it wrong and add anything that's politically correct for show, that everything you love will disappear.

01:40:01.000 That's right.

01:40:01.000 And then they tend to...

01:40:03.000 Yes.

01:40:04.000 That tends to focus their attention.

01:40:06.000 But it makes sense to me because they're...

01:40:08.000 The models are going to be answering your question at the level of...

01:40:13.000 At your frequency.

01:40:14.000 Definitely.

01:40:14.000 Absolutely.

01:40:15.000 Absolutely.

01:40:16.000 Okay, so tell me about your...

01:40:19.000 Let's close with this.

01:40:20.000 Tell me about what you see.

01:40:21.000 Finally, Dr. Peterson asks, what are my future plans?

01:40:24.000 Well, you're going to have to watch to see how I answer that.

01:40:27.000 More than anything else, I'm going to grow Turning Point USA and keep on having the profound cultural impact that we're experiencing every single day.

01:40:34.000 What's the next couple of years like for you?

01:40:36.000 What's your...

01:40:36.000 What are...

01:40:37.000 What are your goals?

01:40:38.000 What am I aiming at?

01:40:38.000 Yeah, now.

01:40:39.000 In some ways, it's more of what I'm already doing.

01:40:41.000 I have the greatest job in the world.

01:40:43.000 I couldn't be happier.

01:40:44.000 Every day, I feel as if what I'm saying, what I'm doing is making a difference, giving people meaning.

01:40:49.000 I'm a big believer in Viktor Frankl's hypothesis that meaning outside of immediate food and nourishment is the greatest crisis in the West and is the thing that most people are lacking.

01:41:02.000 I'm not going to run for political office.

01:41:04.000 I'm not going to go serve in Trump's administration.

01:41:06.000 I think we're onto something here.

01:41:07.000 I think we're onto something where we are trying to help the West heal.

01:41:12.000 We're trying to bring the West home. 0.95

01:41:14.000 We're trying to have the West go back to its roots. 0.95

01:41:17.000 I believe that we are the inheritors of a Christian society, and I do not believe we can have a free society if we are no longer back towards some belief in a higher power.

01:41:28.000 And so I want to bring us back to a free society.

01:41:31.000 Political is just one manifestation of that.

01:41:34.000 Political is a short window of how people vote in a 90-120 day period.

01:41:38.000 It's the cultural and the spiritual that then end up manifesting in the political.

01:41:42.000 Which quite honestly has been my greatest learning moment the last four to five years.

01:41:46.000 To see that distinction.

01:41:47.000 To see that distinction because as a political guy and growing up, I have strong political opinions.

01:41:52.000 But the political is an effect.

01:41:55.000 The political is an aftershock.

01:41:56.000 I'm trying to get to the cause.

01:41:58.000 And the cause, I believe, Is what happens in our university campuses, what happens in the broad culture, what happens in how people consume information.

01:42:06.000 And I see us making a massive difference in that every day.

01:42:09.000 Good.

01:42:10.000 Well, that's an excellent place to stop.

01:42:12.000 So, for everyone watching and listening, you know, many of you know that I do another half an hour for The Daily Wire, and I'm going to do that.

01:42:19.000 And I think because we focus this talk on metaphysics, really, the religious metaphysics, and the individual, which is the right...

01:42:29.000 It's the best level of analysis, the deepest level of analysis, the most meaningful.

01:42:33.000 I think what we will do on the Daily Wire side is turn a little bit more toward the political because Charlie does have a lot of influence on and experience with the Trump administration.

01:42:45.000 And I think I'll just spend half an hour trying to listen to what he has to say about what he's seen behind the scenes, so to speak, insofar as that can be revealed so that...

01:42:56.000 We can get a little closer to the bottom of that.

01:42:59.000 So please join us on the Daily Wire side for that half an hour.

01:43:04.000 And thanks to all of you for your time and attention.

01:43:07.000 That's much appreciated.

01:43:08.000 And to the Daily Wire for supporting this podcast and making its professionalization possible.

01:43:15.000 And thank you, Charlie.

01:43:16.000 Thank you, Jordan.

01:43:17.000 Pleasure talking to you.

01:43:18.000 Thank you.

01:43:18.000 And it's very interesting to see where you started and what you're doing and where you're headed.

01:43:26.000 I enjoyed the conversation very much.

01:43:27.000 Thank you.

01:43:28.000 That was my discussion with Dr. Jordan Peterson.

01:43:30.000 Dr. Peterson is a gift to the West.

01:43:32.000 God bless him and his family for their advocacy and for their work and for their tenacity.

01:43:37.000 He's been through quite a lot, and he has become a really good friend in many different ways.

01:43:42.000 We don't agree on everything, but so what?

01:43:45.000 He has just been such a guiding force for young men to find your aim, that call of adventure, to go into the wilderness, to leave your father's home.

01:43:54.000 And his love of the Bible, he has brought more people to love and adore the scriptures than most pastors that I know.

01:44:01.000 And for that, Dr. Peterson deserves enormous and eternal credit.

01:44:05.000 God bless you.

01:44:06.000 Hope you enjoyed this discussion of me being on Dr. Peterson's podcast.

01:44:09.000 If you want to listen to the entirety of the conversation without my annotations, you can go to Dr. Peterson's YouTube channel.

01:44:16.000 God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - May 02, 2025

My Appearance on the Jordan Peterson Podcast

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript