00:00:00.000Jordan Peterson is one of the most misunderstood people I know, and believe me, I know a lot of people that people think they know and they don't.
00:00:08.360To me and millions of others all around the world, he is reshaping the world in incredible educational ways.
00:00:16.620He is a force of positive change in a world that badly needs it.
00:00:21.560Now, the fanatics who hate him, mostly woke elites pretending to be journalists or pundits or academics, they really, really hate him.
00:00:31.400And I mean, it's an obsession with them, but they not only hate him, they hate anyone who associates with him, which was an extra added bonus of associating him with me in this podcast.
00:00:44.280They hate anyone who is effective, and he is very effective.
00:00:54.420Those people are trying to destroy anything, like I said, that is effective, even the conservative media.
00:01:01.060They can they accuse the conservative media of going easy on Peterson.
00:01:06.120I don't think anybody goes easy on Peterson.
00:01:08.940I just I think, you know, maybe there's manners and we're like, hey, he's down.
00:01:58.300I took my son to see him because he did a for an entire year, a stage show where he just sat and he talked and he sold out opera houses and theaters and arenas all around the world for his book tour.
00:02:39.300Discourse has deteriorated so much that a conversation about life and love and the importance of cleaning your room has been deemed not just offensive, but deadly to the hateful activists.
00:02:54.360The mere fact that anyone, but especially Glenn Beck and some of his other conservative friends are having Jordan Peterson on and they're having civil conversations is proof that all of their delusions are true.
00:04:24.420Your woman in your life will love them.
00:04:26.880It is a revolution in the world of protein bars because it's made by people who first wanted to make something taste good and then second wanted to make that something actually good for you.
00:05:42.020Um, I want to talk, uh, let's start here.
00:05:46.240I don't know if you've been following this, but the Pentagon in the U S has for the last five years, and it's becoming more and more clear.
00:06:01.380They're saying that we now have technology that is extraterrestrial.
00:06:07.620Uh, and it is a fascinating thing to watch.
00:06:12.360And the one question that I've been having is what will that do if one day we wake up and, uh, you know, the president says, Hey, a three, a three headed alien was in my office last night.
00:07:21.400Now, what that means for the fundamental structure of underlying reality, I don't know, but it's definitely there.
00:07:28.240I mean, you, you can see the manifestation of that instinct in all sorts of ways once you learn to look.
00:07:35.780So I was writing this morning about a hypothetical football team in a hypothetical American small town, you know, which is the theme of endless numbers of American films and stories.
00:07:47.520It's an, it's a story that's told over and over the high school team.
00:07:51.960Everyone knows the whole town watches the boys compete to be on the team or they're jealous and envious because they can't be.
00:07:58.580Then when they make the team, they compete for top spot.
00:08:01.360Sometimes the best sport comes out on top, even if he's not as athletically gifted as the cynical player.
00:08:07.240You know, you know, the story, everyone knows the story.
00:08:37.120It's a religious ceremony to go to a football game and to watch that.
00:08:40.660That accounts for the tribal identification with the teams and the spontaneous and deep enjoyment that everybody has in witnessing the spectacle.
00:08:51.640And we want ethical behavior as well as part of the play because we want the great player to be a great teammate, to be generous with his prowess, to bring his teammates along for the ride, to help them develop their skill.
00:09:03.760And so, even in something as basic as that, as fundamental as that, as trivial and day-to-day in some sense as that, you can see this deep desire we have to identify an ideal and to pursue it.
00:10:12.220So, I know, I lived in New York City for a long time, and it was amazing.
00:10:18.500I bought a ranch in the middle of nowhere.
00:10:20.880And, I mean, you see the depth of the sky when there's no lights around you.
00:10:25.940And we sat outside the first night, and we just talked about the meaning of things and life.
00:10:36.100I hadn't done that at all, really, like that, when I was in New York.
00:10:42.180There's some relationship where you are pondering bigger things.
00:10:48.060And I think as we go into the cities, as we have more and more light and more and more distractions, we are missing some fundamental things of just, I guess we're just becoming so arrogant.
00:11:02.500And we don't ponder how small we really are in things.
00:11:07.960Well, I think your comment about the night sky is well taken.
00:11:11.800I mean, it's definitely a good view of the night sky when it's dark is definitely one of those places, let's say, one of those situations where you encounter the absolute.
00:11:24.940And you have to ask yourself, well, what's your life like when you don't have that opportunity?
00:11:31.440Now, people made opportunities like that, too, right?
00:11:33.860That's why they built cathedrals with their massive ceilings and the light pouring through in color and the music that would produce that sense of encounter with the transcendent.
00:11:44.460But you can certainly experience that in nature, especially at night, especially in relationship to the sky.
00:11:50.800People experience a similar sort of experience, I suppose, when they look at something like the Grand Canyon or the Niagara Falls, some massive work of nature.
00:12:00.340But it calls to that part of us that's always aiming to move ourselves higher.
00:12:06.420And it's become increasingly clear to me as a psychologist and as a biologically minded psychologist, just exactly how deep an instinct that is.
00:12:15.160And, you know, there are people who believe that we can dispense, for example, with religious belief.
00:12:37.180And so we need a realm that provides answers.
00:12:39.620I think one of the first things I ever heard you talk about was relationship in a kind of abstract way with God and how important the redemptive story is.
00:12:54.780And I so like the way you approach it because you don't know or maybe you do and you don't say, but you you don't you don't profess that you are a believer, but you understand the importance to humans to be able to start again and have redemption.
00:13:15.460And we are destroying that now in in our culture, you know, cancel culture, all of this stuff, critical race theory.
00:16:22.700And then we're not crushed by the weight of the detailed recollection.
00:16:26.420And that's actually a consequence of very sophisticated psychological processing, that ability to reduce and forget.
00:16:33.240So one of the things you do in therapy, for example, I wrote about this in my new book about writing memories down if they still bother you.
00:16:41.060So if you have a memory, for example, that's more than 18 months old, for technical reasons I won't go into.
00:16:46.240And it still produces a negative emotion when it comes to mind, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, then that memory has information in it that has not yet been unpacked.
00:16:58.260So imagine the purpose of your memory is to extract wisdom from the past that you can apply to the future so that you don't do the same stupid thing over and over or so that you repeat things that worked well.
00:17:09.780That's the purpose of memory, not recollection as such.
00:17:14.020It's the extraction of wisdom, the lesson.
00:17:17.280Well, if you have a memory that's more than 18 months old and it's still hurting you, making you anxious, disappointed, ashamed, guilty, any of that, it means that you have not undertaken the complex process of analyzing that memory, pulling out from it the moral and dispensing with the details.
00:17:33.400So that's why you say in the book, if you have a bad experience, you have a bad memory, it won't leave you alone.
00:17:46.560We have software online at a site called selfauthoring.com that helps people write an autobiography.
00:17:55.960And so they go through their lives, breaking their lives into epochs and identifying the most emotionally and practically significant events and detailing them.
00:18:04.740And that's all in an attempt to help people forget and to let go of uncertainty and threat and anxiety and, well, the whole panoply of negative emotions that their life memories might otherwise be contaminated with.
00:18:17.860And so you do that in therapy continually with people when you're talking about their past.
00:18:23.640The Freudians believed, for example, that if someone had a traumatic experience and then they were able to express the emotion that was associated with that experience, that that would be curative.
00:18:34.100But it doesn't look like it's the expression of the emotion.
00:18:36.580It looks like it's the extraction of the significance of the event.
00:18:42.600I had a friend over last night who has had, you know, a year like I have had in the past and you have had.
00:18:51.180They're just under attack and it's relentless.
00:18:54.200And and the attacks, they always go to, it seems to me, to the thing that you hold most dear, like I've always valued my my word to tell the truth as I understand it, to correct my mistakes because I was an alcoholic and I lost the ability to tell anybody anything and have them believe me.
00:19:19.580So I understood the the importance of your word.
00:19:24.720And and so that's where the attacks would always hit me, or at least that's those are the ones that I felt his were very specific to.
00:19:32.820He's a public figure and he just had the worst year of his life.
00:19:37.280And he came over and as he was recalling some of the things he's gone through, he teared up and I said to him, and I'd love to hear your opinion on this.
00:19:59.180You've you've had to face every fear that, you know, any fear that you had somebody come after me or somebody's going to say this about me or something.
00:20:49.380And I'm very concerned about what the consequences are going to be.
00:20:53.540Now, I've learned and my family has learned that if we're careful and we ride it out and we attempt to deal with it truthfully and carefully, that it'll likely subside within about two weeks and that public opinion will maintain itself on my side.
00:21:16.060I do think it's made reacting to the attacks somewhat less stressful, somewhat less stressful, but it's still nothing that I would I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone else.
00:21:31.840I mean, there is some utility in watching yourself go through it.
00:21:35.380Yeah, I don't I would never wish it on anybody and I don't even want to think about it.
00:21:43.820But if you do go through it, I think you become it either destroys you or it makes you much stronger because you are you you know, the bogus lie that you're dealing with.
00:22:01.440You know, if they're taking you down in such a way and it's kind of true, I don't know.
00:22:07.420I think it would be easier in some ways if it's absolutely not true.
00:22:11.380It's hard to get your arms around things and say, well, that's that.
00:22:17.000I mean, you know, you feel like you're in a Hitchcock movie where, you know, where you're just trapped and it's it's surreal.
00:22:24.260But once you get through it and you're on the other side and you've made it, you realize that is nothing but shadows and mirrors and smoke.
00:22:33.360It's nothing unless you give into it, unless you play ball, unless you start to become part of it and put it back out in the other direction.
00:22:46.080You know, it was making any sense that yes, yes, it was helping people deal with that sort of thing when I was a clinician that really alerted me to the miracle of the presumption of innocence.
00:22:58.000So, for example, I had a client whose details I'll obviously disguise, who is a very competent professional.
00:23:06.600And this person had brought a substantial amount of work into a new company they had been hired by.
00:23:13.920And then that work was taken by a predatory individual and aspersions cast on this person's reputation.
00:23:23.860They described them as unstable and unreliable and vengeful and vindictive and partly, I suppose, because the person whose work had been stolen was actually upset about it.
00:23:34.080But they produced a very credible case.
00:23:37.380And because the person I was working with was a good person with a strong conscience, it wasn't easy for them to defend themselves.
00:23:46.860Because most people, when they're attacked, especially if many people are doing it, and many doesn't mean that many.
00:24:41.300Well, if it works out for you and if you have support from people.
00:24:44.180You know, generally what happens in my experience is generally what happens is people cave very rapidly and they apologize like mad, even if they haven't done anything wrong.
00:25:08.360Because if you think that, you know, if I accuse you, my tendency is to think that you're bad and you might think, well, my tendency is to think that I'm good.
00:25:16.580But, you know, that isn't the tendency for most people.
00:25:20.080People have a pretty guilty conscience, almost everyone.
00:25:22.920And it does tie itself up with this idea of monstrosity that you just described.
00:25:26.920The only person for whom public opinion means nothing is a psychopath, right?
00:25:32.520The rest of us regulate ourselves by watching our impact on others.
00:25:57.960So I think I agree with you, but I think if we want to put this in today's terms, the idea of I'm not that we've heard, you know, racist, racist, racist, bigot, whatever, all these name calling for so long that it is now it's now made that charge laughable.
00:26:22.120And some people are deeply affected by it, but most people are like, yeah, whatever, everything is racist now.
00:26:28.700What happens when you don't when you have so overexposed and you've called everything, you know, bad, dangerous, bigoted, racist?
00:26:39.180What happens to a society when they lose the ability to point something out when it's real?
00:26:46.880Yeah, well, that is the danger of casual critique, isn't it, is that you lose the capability of pointing to actual danger when it exists.
00:26:55.640It's the problem with with with with gerrymandering the the borders around concepts.
00:27:01.880So, I mean, I think what's happening, what we're seeing now, and I'm not exactly sure why it's happening, but it definitely is happening, is we're seeing a tremendous decrease in trust in public institutions and institutions in general.
00:27:17.660And that's that's not good, because societies societies are healthy and prosperous to the degree that they run on trust and trust is a moral virtue.
00:27:31.940You're a fool when you naively trust, but you're courageous when you trust when you're not naive and societies that are functional run on trust.
00:27:39.640It's a catastrophe when it's eroded, and that is happening now, you know, is that happening?
00:27:45.420Why is how is that related to the constant assaults that our culture is taking?
00:27:50.700I can't put my finger on that exactly.
00:27:52.840I don't understand the relationship, but.
00:27:57.200But this deep cynicism about our institutions is a real it's a real problem.
00:28:02.240It's growing part of it is because things have gone on too long, but a lot of it is smears and and intentional things.
00:28:15.900And I don't know why this keeps coming to mind as we've been talking, but Star Wars, there is there there is Darth Vader all dressed in black.
00:28:26.940You know, he's a bad guy the minute he walks in, then you have the reluctant hero of of what's his name?
00:28:48.680Because right now, I think we're looking at some things that are truly evil.
00:28:53.700And I don't use that word lightly, but as I look at things like critical race theory, I can only see destruction out of that.
00:29:05.020I can't see any positive telling people you'll never make it because this group of people are after you.
00:29:13.640So we have to destroy these people and these people are irredeemable.
00:29:18.100I can't think of anything more evil and good.
00:29:24.360Well, I've in my writings and my my lectures, I've tried to encourage people to deal with malevolence at the level of the individual, because when you start dealing with it in others, you you there's a big risk in that.
00:29:42.200It's like clean up your own house, which is right.
00:31:30.780And the people who are standing around are looking and just following the crowd.
00:31:37.940How do you get, or what's happening to us, to where so many people are seeing what's going on, if they know history at all, they'll understand the pitfalls.
00:31:51.100It doesn't mean we end in the same place, but we can see the patterns repeating.
00:31:54.580How do you get people to recognize and then have the courage to stand?
00:34:37.480I want to ask the question I was going to ask, but let me switch gears on this because I think it's tied into this.
00:34:42.040Because you have, I read someplace that in one room in your house, maybe your living room or hallway or whatever, you have real, pretty dark propaganda from Soviet Union.
00:36:59.940And that was really fascinating because over time, as we moved farther and farther away from the Soviet Union, the art won out over the propaganda.
00:37:36.040And I was very interested in that in those paintings as well, to watch that and to see it.
00:37:40.020And so right now they're in storage because we renovated our house and we're not exactly sure what to do now in terms of what the wall should portray, because maybe the time for that is past.
00:37:54.220But yes, I had many, many paintings for years.
00:37:57.020Your whole book is about what you just talked about in the art, the battle between the extremes, that it is it's this it's this daily fight.
00:38:09.860I'm fascinated by the contract of wave or the the pendulum of, you know, the societal pendulum that keeps going from, you know, me, me, me to the collective.
00:38:22.020It's the same thing over and over again.
00:38:24.660And when we as a society get it right, it's generally, you know, five o'clock to seven o'clock, not nine o'clock and three o'clock.
00:38:57.340You have instincts that orient you in the world.
00:38:59.960Deep, deep instincts way underneath your cognition.
00:39:02.700They direct your cognition in ways you you can barely comprehend.
00:39:06.900And one of those deep instincts is the instinct of meaning.
00:39:09.820And so, look, you know, you're you do this sort of thing, this conversing.
00:39:14.320You do this for a living, at least in part.
00:39:16.080Now, you know perfectly well that there is a difference between a high quality and a low quality conversation.
00:39:20.540You can feel that you, you know, when you're in the zone in the conversation and, you know, because you're completely compelled by what's happening.
00:39:38.800Well, then that's because you you're because the conversation is manifesting itself to your deepest instincts as meaningful.
00:39:45.860That meaning signifies that you're in the right place between chaos and order, that you're you're able to maintain a certain stability of thought and outlook.
00:39:57.620But you're introducing new information into that stable structure at the rate that's optimal for you.
00:40:03.540And all of a sudden you're in the right place at the right time.
00:40:07.020And that's the marker for that, because being in the right place at the right time is.
00:40:11.300But but I think there are a lot of people that are agents of chaos and Antifa, they're agents of chaos.
00:40:22.640They are going for they believe burn it all down.
00:40:27.540Others have been like this, that they they believe their meaning is something extraordinarily destructive without a true north marker.
00:40:43.680Look, one of the things that I puzzled out a long while back and tried to adhere to to the best of my ability was driven by exactly the concern that you're expressing, because I realized that the instinct for meaning is a genuine instinct.
00:41:01.260And it it underlies even our attention.
00:42:23.100You're I think what you're saying is you find meaning in truth.
00:42:27.180And if you're lying about something, then that's the the absence of truth.
00:42:33.880Well, if you tell the truth, if you tell the truth to the best of your ability, then you can trust your instincts to some to some degree, to the to the greatest degree that you're capable of.
00:42:45.720And then that can help orient you in the world properly.
00:42:48.280You can rely on your instincts if you don't pathologize the information that you're feeding yourself.
00:42:54.380So, you know, if you want to live in harmony with yourself, which you would assume to be somewhat desirable rather than a hellish disharmony, then don't feed yourself what's indigestible.
00:43:07.200And certainly don't warp the world around you with deceit, you know, to be deceitful.
00:43:12.700It's extraordinarily damaging and dangerous.
00:43:16.260And so, but because I go ahead, go ahead.
00:43:20.220Well, because I realized that the instinct for meaning could become pathologized.
00:43:24.200That's what made me obsessed to begin with about spoken, the spoken word with free speech, for example.
00:43:31.540You are also talking about what orients us in the middle.
00:43:34.240Well, the thing about the middle is where the middle is shifts because the environment around us shifts.
00:44:18.200But the idea that there's a desirable middle that we can attain through dialogue, well, that's a presupposition of the – that's a presupposition of Western individualism.
00:44:28.300It's also something that's under attack conceptually.
00:44:56.760But that self-absorbed, you know, nature of just there's nobody important but me is also dangerous.
00:45:02.640But we've lost, it seems, in a country that should understand it, in a society, the entire Western society, that was entirely built around the individual.
00:45:16.300Well, there is an assault on that idea.
00:45:25.220Like, so, if you buy the idea that our institutions are basically predicated on tyrannical power, so that's the basis for institutional organization is power.
00:45:34.960Then you buy the argument that the dialogue between institutions is nothing but the expression of that power.
00:45:46.380There are no individuals, and there's no space for rational negotiation.
00:45:51.240And that case is being made constantly, particularly by radicals on the left.
00:48:25.100Well, you know, you might think, at least under some circumstances, that it's useful to have an enemy because perhaps they could point out flaws that you wouldn't be otherwise prone to notice.
00:48:35.420And so there is just at that level alone, there's utility in free speech and dialogue across avenues of disagreement.
00:48:42.960You want to approach the conversation ready to hold your fort, but not with the assumption that you're absolutely right.
00:48:50.260I mean, I remember I was on – oh, now I'm going to forget the name of the show.
00:53:55.000But we can start with tragedy because you need a theory of tragedy because otherwise you tend to blame simplistically.
00:54:04.020Okay, so we could walk through it very quickly.
00:54:06.060You just talked about one particular kind of tragedy, which is natural.
00:54:09.860It's like you can do everything right and nature can take you out at the knees, right?
00:54:14.200Okay, so that's one source of suffering in life, the natural world.
00:54:18.560Another source of suffering is the inadequacy of our social institutions.
00:54:23.820And a third source of tragedy is our inadequacy as individuals.
00:54:28.360And malevolence doesn't apply particularly to the natural world, although it can feel like that at times if someone you love is afflicted by some terrible disease, for example.
00:54:37.260And we tend to think of that as particularly malevolent when we admire the moral stature of the person so affected, right?
00:54:44.240But it's somewhat unfair to attribute malevolence to nature.
00:54:47.520It's more fair to attribute it to social structures.
00:54:50.600And it's more fair to attribute it to the darkness in our own souls.
00:54:54.120But you need to know, you need to know, I think you need to know, you need to have a sophisticated representation of tragedy and malevolence so that you don't fall prey to simplistic blaming.
00:55:09.840So human suffering is not caused by capitalism.
00:55:29.180But you should say perhaps at the same time that for all its faults, this is the good that it's done and it isn't obvious what system would work better.
00:55:40.020So now the question, I suppose, part of the question is why do we fall prey to more simplistic forms of reasoning?
00:55:48.240And some of that is, well, it's convenient.
00:56:08.560You've taken a huge burden off your shoulders and you certainly don't have to take on the moral requirement of participating in the system.
00:56:36.740I've had these conversations recently that have been quite interesting.
00:56:39.780You know, they're very disturbing, actually.
00:56:41.280I talked to two of Canada's most outstanding people in the last two weeks, Conrad Black, who ran a huge newspaper empire, and Rex Murphy, who's probably Canada's best-known journalist personality, because he's both.
00:56:57.080He's a great journalist, but he's a personality as well.
00:56:59.320And they remembered their university education.
00:57:05.360He's not a Canadian, but he had the same kind of memory.
00:57:07.620He talked about, they talked about their education in the humanities, mostly concentrating on English literature, and described it with tremendous fondness as a turning point in their life, as an opening up of the world of knowledge to their youthful eyes, right?
00:57:25.800I contrasted that with Yeonmi Park, who was an escapee, is an escapee from North Korea, very brave woman, who was then enslaved in China, had a life that was just sheer hell, and spent a good part of the interview telling me how much better her life was than the lives of many people she knew.
00:57:43.300She wrote a book called In Order to Live.
00:57:46.160But the book stopped at the year 2015, so I asked her what she did.
00:57:50.820She went to Columbia, took a humanities degree, which was a dream of hers, after finishing her entire education in one year, her education prior to university.
00:58:09.800I said, what was it like going to Columbia?
00:58:14.200Taking a humanities degree from this escapee from totalitarianism, who was once enslaved, got to go to one of America's august institutions and be trained in the humanities.
00:58:24.780Someone who'd been exposed to George Orwell and who was motivated to write because she read Animal Farm, understood the power of literature.
00:58:31.720She said it was a complete waste of time and money, and that she was afraid to say anything.
00:58:41.340It's a hell of a thing to hear when you're a university professor.
00:58:44.360I thought, how catastrophic, how utterly catastrophic that that can be the case.
00:58:48.840She compared it to being in North Korea.
00:58:52.540I said, surely, surely there was one professor, one course that provided you what you were searching for.
00:59:01.080She thought for a while and conjured up a biology course where she learned about human evolution, but said that that had degenerated into political correctness by the end of the semester as well.
00:59:12.900I know we are really we are really over time, but you can't leave it with that story.
00:59:19.300Where do you find the hope and the strength to continue to fight or for those who are listening to get the motivation to stand up and say what's on their mind?
00:59:33.060Well, people have to have a dialogue with their own conscience.
00:59:38.700Imagine that you get upset with something when you recognize an obstacle in your path, and then imagine that you need a path and that you've chosen reasonably wisely, let's say.
00:59:51.680Not perfectly, but reasonably wisely, an obstacle arises, you're frustrated, disappointed, ashamed, afraid.
00:59:58.900Well, you have something to do to clear out the obstacle.
01:00:02.600Well, then you don't clear out the obstacle because you're afraid to speak or you're unwilling to speak.
01:00:06.880You want to defer the conflict because you hope it will go away.
01:00:10.340All that will happen is that the obstacles will pile up, but then your life will be nothing but obstacles.
01:00:16.400Well, you need to know that, and you have to ask yourself if you believe that's true.
01:00:20.220If it's true, then you don't want to remain silent.
01:00:27.940Imagine, too, that as you remain silent, you get smaller because you're not manifesting the courage necessary to live by your own standards, and the problem gets bigger.
01:00:38.600Well, if you're not going to speak now, what makes you think you're going to be more prepared in the future?
01:01:00.260You don't have the courage when you're paying.
01:01:03.440When somebody is paying you and they're doing something at work and they want you to play along, you think you're going to have courage then?
01:02:59.480You can ask people to delineate out an argument that runs contrary to their viewpoint.
01:03:03.980That can be part of the reasonable process of learning.
01:03:07.460That is not the same thing as doing it for deceptive purposes to manipulate your professor because you're too cowardly to formulate your arguments properly.
01:03:15.020And I mean, I blame the professors for setting up an environment where that is implicitly expected.
01:03:23.740But I will tell you my experience within the university system is that it's the rare professors still who's so corrupt that they're going to severely punish a student who writes an essay that runs counter to their opinion.
01:03:37.560And that's a good essay and fail them.