The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1933 - Jordan Peterson

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00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

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00:00:12.000 Hello, Jordan Peterson.

00:00:14.000 I didn't even notice you have a two-tone suit going on.

00:00:17.000 Can I tell you about this suit?

00:00:18.000 Please do.

00:00:19.000 Okay.

00:00:19.000 Well...

00:00:20.000 What's happening with that?

00:00:21.000 The company made this for me.

00:00:23.000 LGFG. They made me a dozen suits.

00:00:24.000 Yeah?

00:00:25.000 One for each rule from 12 Rules for Life.

00:00:27.000 Ah.

00:00:27.000 The rules are printed on the back of this, underneath the collar.

00:00:31.000 This is a heaven and hell suit, so it's quite fun.

00:00:34.000 Which one's hell?

00:00:35.000 I'll show you in a sec.

00:00:36.000 So this is...

00:00:37.000 Hell's red, Joe.

00:00:38.000 Come on.

00:00:39.000 But that's not really red.

00:00:40.000 Well, you know, it's stylish.

00:00:42.000 Yeah, it's okay.

00:00:42.000 Hell's magenta.

00:00:43.000 Yeah, it's designer hell.

00:00:45.000 Ah, nice.

00:00:46.000 So this is made out of sheep's wool and this is made out of goat's wool.

00:00:50.000 So that's pretty funny.

00:00:51.000 And then in here you've got your basic heaven lining and your basic hell lining.

00:00:57.000 Oh, okay.

00:00:58.000 Yeah, so.

00:00:59.000 I don't think I've ever seen a man walk around with a, I think you're one up. 1.00

00:01:04.000 Am I one up?

00:01:04.000 Yeah, you're one up.

00:01:05.000 Are you?

00:01:06.000 No, that's good.

00:01:07.000 No, are you good?

00:01:08.000 It's double-breasted.

00:01:09.000 Double-breasted.

00:01:10.000 Fancy.

00:01:10.000 Yeah.

00:01:11.000 Got one suit with you in the lining, too.

00:01:13.000 Oh, no.

00:01:13.000 I was going to wear it today.

00:01:14.000 I thought about wearing it.

00:01:15.000 It's a black suit with platinum wires in it, which is kind of cool, and inside it's got black and white images of, like, really sharp, harsh graphic images of you and Brett Weinstein, and Ben Shapiro and Russell Brand and,

00:01:34.000 you know, as an assortment to the...

00:01:36.000 Oh, that whole intellectual dark web thing?

00:01:39.000 Sam's in there.

00:01:40.000 Sam's in there too, yeah.

00:01:42.000 I still have hope for Sam Harris.

00:01:44.000 Yeah, me too.

00:01:45.000 Me too.

00:01:45.000 Yeah, I hope he makes a comeback.

00:01:48.000 I mean, he's not really going away.

00:01:50.000 He's just got some weird opinions.

00:01:52.000 Yeah, well, there's plenty of that floating around.

00:01:54.000 Well, you know, I think when you have, like, complex, fascinating brains, they go off in all kinds of different directions, don't you think?

00:02:02.000 This is one of the dangers of being creative, right?

00:02:05.000 Most creative ideas are wrong, and a good section of those wrong ones are fatal.

00:02:10.000 But now and then you get one that's necessary, so...

00:02:13.000 Yeah, we were talking about Twitter files before we got rolling and what the new stuff is.

00:02:19.000 So the new stuff has something to do with AI and some sort of content moderation?

00:02:25.000 Oh, yeah.

00:02:25.000 Well, Tabby released some Twitter files today on Twitter, obviously, and they're going through the code.

00:02:33.000 Now, I don't understand the technical details, You know, you don't exactly know when you see the output of a code-generated system exactly what rules it's using to sort the information.

00:02:45.000 I suppose that's the equivalent of shadow banning.

00:02:48.000 And there's all sorts of...

00:02:49.000 There was apparently all sorts of directives built into the code to amplify certain kinds of messages and, you know, de-amplify others.

00:02:57.000 And so...

00:02:58.000 Apparently, Musk is doing what he can to clean that up.

00:03:03.000 Reuben reported that the other day.

00:03:05.000 And then Tybee today, he was talking more about the whole Russian collusion fabrication.

00:03:12.000 Yeah.

00:03:13.000 So that's also real fun.

00:03:14.000 Well, how about the one guy that was going after Trump, who it turned out was actually in collusion with the Russians?

00:03:21.000 Oh yeah, that's a rough one.

00:03:22.000 Yeah.

00:03:26.000 Well, the best defense is a good offense.

00:03:29.000 I guess.

00:03:31.000 Yeah, I guess.

00:03:32.000 I know.

00:03:33.000 We're in a crazy world.

00:03:34.000 Why would anybody not think that that was going to come around to get them?

00:03:38.000 It's amazing how often people don't think that what they're doing isn't going to end up aimed squarely at them.

00:03:46.000 Well, this Twitter thing, right?

00:03:47.000 Like, they never suspected that someone like Elon was going to come along and buy Twitter and then, in an unheard-of tactic, have a bunch of journalists review everything in all their Slack meetings and all their emails, look under the code,

00:04:03.000 look under the wiring under the machine and find out how it was actually running.

00:04:07.000 Yeah.

00:04:08.000 I mean, the fact that anyone would ever think that any of this stuff is a good idea, that people don't understand the dangers of censorship.

00:04:17.000 They don't understand where this leads to.

00:04:20.000 Yeah, well, we're seeing a little bit of that emerge on the right now, you know, which is kind of frightening to me.

00:04:24.000 So I'm an admirer in many ways of what's going on in Florida, you know, with DeSantis.

00:04:31.000 Him and Rufo, who I also think has got a bit of a clue, are trying to, what would you say, limit or even ban critical race theory.

00:04:39.000 And the problem with that is you can't define it, right?

00:04:41.000 Right.

00:04:42.000 So how do you control something you can't define?

00:04:44.000 And the answer is you battle it out on the battleground of ideas.

00:04:48.000 Because as soon as you start to try to define it and then try to censor it, well, first of all, that's just going to grow because that's how those things work.

00:04:55.000 You know, like, where does critical race theory shade into Marxism?

00:04:59.000 Well, who the hell knows?

00:05:00.000 Where does Marxism shade into socialism?

00:05:04.000 That's an even harder question.

00:05:05.000 Then, where does socialism shade into, you know, just being on the side of the working class?

00:05:10.000 Well, all that's fuzzy beyond belief.

00:05:12.000 And so, once you get to the point where the government has to step in and regulate, say, what education systems are doing, you're already in deep trouble.

00:05:20.000 Because I don't see how it can really be done.

00:05:23.000 Because I can't define critical race theory.

00:05:25.000 You know, I mean, more or less, you can get some sense of the cloud of ideas that's associated with it.

00:05:32.000 But trying to draw the lines, how are you going to do that?

00:05:35.000 And then, of course, you enable...

00:05:38.000 Inevitably, no matter what your goal is to begin with, you're going to control a certain form, let's say, of pathological communication, misinformation.

00:05:48.000 That's just going to play into the hands of people who like to censor, and that's just as likely on the right as it is on the left.

00:05:54.000 So, no, it's a real dangerous game.

00:05:56.000 Is the problem, like, the term critical race theory is...

00:06:01.000 It's open to interpretation.

00:06:03.000 Yeah, well, it's often even hard, except in retrospect, to understand a lot of what these things actually are, you know, because new clouds of ideas emerge and they kind of have an animating spirit and they have a set of associated, what would you say, presumptions.

00:06:18.000 And you can often only see what that is in retrospect.

00:06:21.000 You know, it took me a long time to understand whatever existentialism was, enough to sort of define it, phenomenology, these different schools of thought that occupied the thoughts of psychological investigators over a couple of centuries, post-modernism,

00:06:37.000 modernism, you know.

00:06:38.000 It's not an easy thing to extract out the gist of those and define them.

00:06:43.000 Plus, as I said, they have very fuzzy boundaries.

00:06:46.000 What I saw with DeSantis was he had a concern that it wasn't just black history that they were putting into this critical race theory, but that he saw that there was queer theory.

00:06:59.000 Which was in this thing that they were teaching in school.

00:07:01.000 How does that have anything to do with black history?

00:07:04.000 Why is queer theory inserted into that?

00:07:07.000 Yeah, well, I think the way those are linked is essentially through what you might regard as, well, it's an implicit Marxism, but it's even deeper than Marxism.

00:07:16.000 So if you're a Marxist, you basically have a heuristic that simplifies the world, and that heuristic is that you can understand any social relationship from Well, from an intimate relationship all the way up to the state by just dividing the parties,

00:07:33.000 let's call them the narrative partners in a discussion or an interaction into those who are oppressed and victimized and those who are taking advantage of them and profiting.

00:07:43.000 That's basic Marxist theory of economics.

00:07:45.000 And there's obviously some truth in that because when systems become corrupt, that's how they operate, right?

00:07:51.000 It's exploitation and victimization.

00:07:53.000 And every system tends towards corruption, and if your eyes are open a little bit, or if you're, let's call it, if you've moved from naivety to cynicism, then you can see every interaction has a power dynamic.

00:08:07.000 And then that drives, as soon as you have that established, that idea that the basic relationship is one of power, well then you can see, well, there's no difference between what's happened to queer people In relationship to those in power and what's happened to black people in relationship to those in power. 0.67

00:08:24.000 But it's united by that underlying...

00:08:26.000 That's why I always make a case for the domination of something like postmodernism and Marxism.

00:08:32.000 You know, I've been criticized for that, but I think it's inaccurate.

00:08:36.000 The postmodernists figured out, and they were right about this, that we see the world through a story.

00:08:41.000 Now that turns out to be something unbelievably complicated, and I think all the top end neuroscientists like Carl Friston are, what would you call, converging on this presumption that you have to see the world through a story.

00:08:54.000 And the postmodernists actually figured that out.

00:08:56.000 The French postmodernists, you know, Foucault and Derrida and people like that.

00:09:00.000 But then they did something that was a sleight of hand, and this all happened in the 1970s.

00:09:06.000 They said, well, we have to see the world through a story, and even if you're a scientist, you're not exactly objective, because there's a narrative driving your work that you might be unaware of.

00:09:15.000 That's your implicit narrative.

00:09:16.000 That's what might be implicitly biasing you.

00:09:19.000 But they jumped to the conclusion that the underlying narrative was one of power.

00:09:25.000 It's basically that all human relationships are predicated on power.

00:09:29.000 You know, there isn't a more cynical viewpoint than that.

00:09:32.000 And it's easy to take apart, you know, if you think about it for a moment, in a practical sense.

00:09:39.000 If your marriage is just based on power, first of all, it's an unpleasant place because it's tyrant and slave. 0.75

00:09:46.000 And second, like, good luck with that.

00:09:48.000 Because people aren't that easy to tyrannize, you know.

00:09:50.000 Like, maybe you have a willing slave in your wife, but I doubt it. 1.00

00:09:53.000 If you're just trying to play power games with her, she's going to fight back with everything she's got. 1.00

00:09:58.000 And then if you have friends, it's like, that's a relationship of mutual exploitation, is it? 0.96

00:10:03.000 Then you're just a bully with henchmen, and they're going to stab you in the back the first chance they get. 0.99

00:10:08.000 You're a mob man. 1.00

00:10:09.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.99

00:10:09.000 You're a mob leader. 0.99

00:10:10.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.95

00:10:11.000 Well, worse than that, even.

00:10:12.000 A dictator.

00:10:13.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:10:14.000 You're a dictator. 0.91

00:10:15.000 You're a dictator, you know. 0.98

00:10:17.000 And, you know, people say, well, look at how successful dictator psychopaths can be.

00:10:22.000 But I look at them, and I think...

00:10:24.000 Well, that's your definition of success, man.

00:10:26.000 Yeah, what is success?

00:10:27.000 I mean, are you spiritually fulfilled? 0.99

00:10:29.000 You're the biggest devil in hell. 0.99

00:10:30.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:10:30.000 Are you happy? 1.00

00:10:31.000 Yeah.

00:10:31.000 Right.

00:10:32.000 Well, the leader of a bad place might be the person who's worst off in some fundamental sense, right? 0.98

00:10:37.000 They're the most corrupt.

00:10:38.000 Isn't that funny, though, that the way we define success is power and money. 0.60

00:10:43.000 Like, look how successful they are.

00:10:46.000 Power and money.

00:10:47.000 A complete absence of love and trust and respect and...

00:10:51.000 Yeah, well, it's also not really how people operate.

00:10:57.000 So there's an anthropological literature on the formation of elders in, say, traditional societies, because you might ask yourself, you know, who becomes an elder?

00:11:09.000 And if you were a Marxist cynic, you'd say, well, those who used exploitation to dominate, like the priestly class or something like that, and that goes along with the supposition that...

00:11:19.000 You know, religion is the opiate of the masses. 0.83

00:11:22.000 And some of that's obviously true, but a lot of it isn't.

00:11:25.000 The elders aren't that at all.

00:11:26.000 They're the people who others go to spontaneously to ask for counsel.

00:11:33.000 And then you ask, well, who do people naturally gravitate towards for counsel?

00:11:38.000 And the answer is, well, productive, generous people who've managed their interpersonal relationships well.

00:11:44.000 Because who the hell else would you go ask for advice if you had any sense?

00:11:47.000 Like you might go ask the local dictator and kowtow to him if you need a favor to take somebody out, but if you're actually asking for counsel, you're going to ask someone who's decent and who's generous and who plays a reciprocal game.

00:11:59.000 It's also the case, this is worth knowing too, The problem with a power game is that it's not playable, not in the final analysis.

00:12:07.000 So Frans de Waal, the Dutch primatologist, has showed even pretty clearly in chimpanzees, you know, you think the roughest, toughest chimpanzee rules the damn roost and he pounds everybody flat and he gets access to the females.

00:12:21.000 And there's a little bit of truth to that because Female chimps aren't sexually choosy, but the male chimps will chase weaker males away from them. 0.54

00:12:30.000 And so if you are more powerful physically as a male chimp, you do have preferential mating access. 0.95

00:12:36.000 But the problem with being a brute, even if you're a chimp, is that you have an off day and two of the chimps that you oppressed band together and tear you into pieces. 1.00

00:12:45.000 And so what De Waal found was that in chimp troops, the stable alpha can sometimes even be the smallest male of the troop. 0.54

00:12:54.000 He'll ally himself with some of the dominant females and makes networks that are essentially friendships, reciprocal friendships.

00:13:00.000 And that gives him a stable position, not of power but of authority.

00:13:04.000 And that's definitely the case in functional human societies.

00:13:07.000 It's not based on power.

00:13:09.000 Now, it's tricky because if it degenerates, then it degenerates into a relationship of power.

00:13:15.000 You know, and so that means the critics who make the claim that everything's about power are right in some sense when they're talking about nothing but corruption, but they're really 100% seriously wrong about the idea that it's power relation that constitutes the basis for the organization of any social interaction.

00:13:34.000 You know, it doesn't work in your marriage, doesn't work with your friends, doesn't work with your children, doesn't work with your business partners, doesn't work with your customers.

00:13:42.000 It doesn't work with politicians, although Here's another twist that's complicated.

00:13:48.000 So, imagine you have a population of people who basically cooperate reciprocally.

00:13:52.000 So, you know, I do you a favor, you do me one, and maybe we figure out how to advance each other across time.

00:13:58.000 That's a good game, right?

00:13:59.000 Fair trade plus advancement.

00:14:01.000 That's a good definition for a good marriage.

00:14:04.000 Okay, but now you have a community of people like that together.

00:14:07.000 Okay, now it opens up an ecological niche.

00:14:10.000 And the niche is psychopathy.

00:14:13.000 And the psychopath comes in and pretends that he's a productive, generous reciprocator.

00:14:18.000 But he's not. 0.91

00:14:19.000 He's just an instrumental manipulator.

00:14:21.000 But he can get away with it because there's enough wealth generated by the cooperators, you know, the honest cooperators, so that there's a space for someone to exploit the system.

00:14:31.000 And that stabilizes that 4% of the population.

00:14:35.000 So across the world, 4% of people are close enough to clinically diagnosable psychopaths.

00:14:43.000 And that's probably better than being paralyzed by fear and anxiety and just staying in your bed.

00:14:49.000 It's better in terms of reproductive success, let's say, and maybe even success in general.

00:14:53.000 But it's not a good game because in the real world, Most psychopaths get found out pretty quickly.

00:15:00.000 So, you know, you can screw somebody once and maybe twice, but then they figure it out and then word gets around.

00:15:06.000 And so in the real world, two things happen.

00:15:09.000 Psychopaths have to be itinerant so they can find new people to exploit.

00:15:13.000 And the other thing that happens is generally non-psychopathic males who are fairly aggressive keep the psychopaths under control.

00:15:21.000 And so, part of the reason that women like men who have some capacity for aggression, but who are still productive and reciprocal, is that men who are productive and reciprocal, who have some capacity for aggression, can keep the real monsters at bay.

00:15:35.000 So it's hard on women, eh? 1.00

00:15:37.000 Because they have to navigate that really thin line between productive generosity And the capacity for aggression, that's a really tough thing to navigate.

00:15:47.000 That's basically the story of Beauty and the Beast, the Disney movie, right? 0.84

00:15:50.000 Because Gaston is a narcissistic psychopath.

00:15:53.000 And the Beast is someone capable of aggression, but he's not tamed into a reciprocal relationship. 0.96

00:15:59.000 It's also the basis of the most fundamental female pornographic fantasy. 1.00

00:16:04.000 And the Google guys figured that out, you know, 15 years ago when they analyzed billions of...

00:16:10.000 Sex fantasy searches by men and women.

00:16:12.000 Men go for visual imagery, but women go for story. 0.99

00:16:15.000 And the story's the same.

00:16:17.000 It's, you know, innocent young woman with a lot to offer, but kind of hidden, find some male, five categories of men, vampire, werewolf, pirate, surgeon, billionaire.

00:16:30.000 And he's, you know, kind of an aggressive guy, but he's capable of being tamed into an intimate relationship.

00:16:36.000 That's the standard female pornographic fantasy. 1.00

00:16:39.000 And it's pretty much the standard fantasy of romance.

00:16:41.000 And so you can see, you know, what women are trying to do in that situation is they're trying to find some guy that's got the capacity for mayhem, but that's under control, but who can integrate that into a productive, generous, reciprocal relationship. 0.94

00:16:57.000 It's fascinating because the capacity for violence and the capacity for aggression is one of the things that's been...

00:17:06.000 Actively muted in our male population.

00:17:09.000 Yeah, well, there's a bunch of reasons for that, and some of them turn into positive feedback loops, like they're sort of self-fulfilling prophecies.

00:17:20.000 So there's a lot of women out there who've never had a positive relationship with any male in their life, right?

00:17:26.000 And maybe not only not a positive relationship, but really a series of pretty negative relationships.

00:17:32.000 And so women like that are very leery of any expression of male ability of any sort, because they can't distinguish productive competence from arbitrary power. 1.00

00:17:43.000 And because they're trying to defend themselves because they've been hurt repeatedly, maybe they come from broken families and catastrophically arranged neighborhoods.

00:17:50.000 You know, one of the tactics that can be used in that situation is just to try to do everything you can to distance yourself as much as you can from any display of male ability because it can't be distinguished from psychopathy.

00:18:03.000 It can't be distinguished from the use of power.

00:18:05.000 It takes a sophisticated woman to be able to make that distinction. 1.00

00:18:08.000 So the other thing you see too is that young women are much more likely to be seduced by psychopaths than older women because the psychopaths mimic competence.

00:18:18.000 That's what a narcissist does too.

00:18:20.000 They're confident, and women read confidence as a marker of competence, and that's reasonable, but that opens up a space for exploitation. 1.00

00:18:31.000 Because if you can mimic confidence, That's false confidence.

00:18:36.000 Narcissistic false confidence.

00:18:38.000 Then you look competent and that works particularly well on naive young women. 1.00

00:18:42.000 And of course they get exploited by people like that and they think, well that's what men are like.

00:18:46.000 Then women like that, you know, they have boys and then they're afraid of the boys whenever they express anything looking like masculine competence. 1.00

00:18:54.000 Yeah.

00:19:03.000 Yeah.

00:19:06.000 Yeah.

00:19:14.000 So we decided to have this conversation because of what's going on with you in Canada.

00:19:18.000 Oh, yeah.

00:19:19.000 And that your clinical psychology license is in jeopardy because you have opinions about politics that they disagree with, which is a very dangerous and bizarre turn of events.

00:19:36.000 Well, it's your fault, actually.

00:19:37.000 You know, I told you, I think, a week or so ago when we talked about this, that Okay, so let me give you some background here.

00:19:43.000 I want to know how it's my fault.

00:19:45.000 I will.

00:19:45.000 I'll tell you.

00:19:46.000 A lot of things are your fault, as it turns out.

00:19:48.000 Oh, no.

00:19:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:19:49.000 So the College of Psychologists has basically levied what are equivalent to about 13 lawsuits against me simultaneously.

00:19:59.000 Now, the reason I call them lawsuits is because...

00:20:01.000 There are actions undertaken on behalf of a complainant.

00:20:05.000 Now the complainant can be anyone anywhere in the world who complains about me for any reason.

00:20:10.000 They don't have to be former clients.

00:20:12.000 They don't even have to be anybody I've ever met.

00:20:14.000 They don't even have to have met anybody I've ever met.

00:20:18.000 So it could be someone online?

00:20:20.000 It is.

00:20:21.000 All these complaints are someone online.

00:20:24.000 None of them are my clients, although half of them claim to be, falsely, and the college didn't throw out their complaints despite that, which is really quite interesting.

00:20:32.000 And what are the complaints?

00:20:34.000 Okay, let's see.

00:20:37.000 One complaint is about the tweet I made about Ellen or Elliot Page.

00:20:41.000 And when I said that a criminal physician cut off her breasts and that pride was the sin. 1.00

00:20:46.000 So now I'm in trouble again because I just said the same thing.

00:20:48.000 One was about Sports Illustrated cover that featured that overweight model. 1.00

00:20:54.000 And I tweeted out, not beautiful.

00:20:56.000 And I guess that was something like fat shaming.

00:20:59.000 I don't remember exactly what the...

00:21:01.000 What the charge was.

00:21:03.000 And then I criticized Justin Trudeau and a former staff member of Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern.

00:21:09.000 I made a joke about her.

00:21:11.000 I was going to New Zealand and the New Zealand leftist press was freaking out.

00:21:15.000 And I made this joke about bringing my alt-right trolls to New Zealand.

00:21:19.000 And then I put in parentheses, or maybe they're just ordinary people who are trying to clean up their rooms.

00:21:24.000 So apparently that was...

00:21:26.000 Casting the profession into disgrace and then they submitted one complainant from the U.S. Submitted the entire transcript of our last discussion.

00:21:38.000 So, you know, I don't know how to defend myself against that because apparently everything I say and apparently everything you say too is bringing the profession of psychology into disgrace.

00:21:47.000 And I think they're most upset in that case about my comments about the inadequacy of climate models.

00:21:53.000 And so, you know, what that has to do with my clinical practice is questionable to say the least.

00:21:58.000 And so, anyways, does that cover it?

00:22:01.000 Yeah, it seems like this climate thing is a very rigid ideology that one must subscribe to wholesale.

00:22:07.000 You can't have any nuanced opinions on it.

00:22:12.000 There's no variation.

00:22:14.000 It's a religion.

00:22:15.000 Actually, it's a partial pseudo-religion.

00:22:20.000 And I mean that technically.

00:22:22.000 I'm going to write about this to some degree, and I'm writing a new book, which will come out in November, called We Who Wrestle with God, and I'll cover that in this.

00:22:29.000 But Alex Epstein, who wrote Fossil Fuel Future recently, comments about this bit.

00:22:35.000 So the basic structure of the quasi-religious belief, and so this is the set of initial presumptions.

00:22:41.000 That's a way of thinking about it.

00:22:43.000 You know, we were talking about how ideas are structured earlier.

00:22:46.000 The Marxists believe that everything's about power.

00:22:48.000 There's a narrative at the base of any belief system and the climate pseudo-religion is based on characterization of nature as something like a hapless, what would you call, hapless, defenseless,

00:23:04.000 fragile virgin. 0.83

00:23:05.000 The industrial activity of mankind is characterized as something like a rapacious, power-mad demolisher of natural virginity and beauty,

00:23:21.000 and then the human being The individual is characterized as nothing but a devouring mouth whose activity runs contrary to the untrammeled beauty of the planet and that supports the activity of the tyrannical patriarchy.

00:23:41.000 That's basically it.

00:23:42.000 And so the reason that Narrative has force is because it draws on underlying religious archetypes.

00:23:50.000 And so, to characterize the world properly, you do need to characterize the positive aspect of nature.

00:23:57.000 Because you have to live in something approximating a reciprocal harmony with nature.

00:24:01.000 Because if you just eat everything and, you know, devour everything in your local landscape, well, then you die.

00:24:07.000 So that's a bad idea.

00:24:08.000 So you have to have some sense of the value of nature.

00:24:12.000 Now, you also have to have some sense of the fact that if you were dropped in the jungle naked in the Amazon, you'd be dead in about 48 hours.

00:24:20.000 So you also need a figure to characterize the negative element of nature, and that's completely absent from the environmental myth.

00:24:26.000 That's part of what makes it pathological.

00:24:28.000 And then, with regard to the rapacious tyranny, let's say...

00:24:34.000 You know, any industrial system or any human organization can exploit the natural world to the point where that's not sustainable and it can become oppressive and tyrannical.

00:24:46.000 That's the evil king, ancient part of religious mythology going back as far back as we can chase it.

00:24:52.000 So you need a representation of the negative aspect of society Because, you know, you send your kids to school and they kind of get turned into these cookie cutter kids and that crushes their innate, what would you say, difference and beauty and it's all the pain of having to be socialized and you have to understand that there is this oppressive element of culture.

00:25:13.000 And so, but then, you know, you should also wake up and notice that you've got the wise king, too, and that means you plug in your damn toaster in the morning and the electricity works and you go out on the street and everyone isn't rioting and, you know, there's workmen who are knee-deep in the sludge trying to keep everything going and you're not starving to death like everybody on the planet was in 1860. And so,

00:25:37.000 a little gratitude for the positive end of the patriarchy is in order, too.

00:25:42.000 That's completely absent in the environmental view.

00:25:44.000 And then with regard to the individual, it's like, well, of course you can be a selfish, impulsive, hedonistic consumer, and you can facilitate the rapacious tyranny as a consequence of that rape the planet.

00:25:57.000 But by the same token, you know, we're not a cancer on the face of the earth.

00:26:00.000 We're not a virus that's mutating and taking out the planet.

00:26:04.000 You know, and we're not trapped in a Malthusian nightmare.

00:26:07.000 And you've got to give...

00:26:08.000 Credit where it's due and, you know, there's an element of people, of everyone, that's noble and generous and kind and productive and capable of living in a well-ordered state in something like sustainable and productive harmony with nature.

00:26:24.000 You only get half that story.

00:26:26.000 Now, if you have no Comprehensive underlying cultural narrative, which is increasingly the case in our society, and someone offers you, when you're a teenager, half the religious story, that'll just snap you up in a second,

00:26:42.000 because it helps you order your relationship with the world.

00:26:44.000 It gives you a pathway too, eh?

00:26:45.000 So, Jean Piaget, a great developmental psychologist, he called the last stage of adolescence the messianic period, the messianic stage.

00:26:56.000 Now, most people don't talk much about that, I think, because they don't know what to make of Piaget's claim, but he was a real genius, Jean Piaget.

00:27:04.000 And he said, you know, when you're making that transition from the group identity that you're chasing as a teenager to becoming an individual, and that's not a journey everyone takes because lots of people just get lost in group identity,

00:27:19.000 you're going to be looking for a pathway that's essentially heroic.

00:27:25.000 And what that pathway should be is that you identify with your culture deeply.

00:27:30.000 You are socialized deeply into the traditions of your culture, but you're also capable of transcending it.

00:27:35.000 You know, so then you become a culture creator as well as a disciplined member of culture.

00:27:41.000 But young people need to be offered something like a, well, a vision of destiny in order to catalyze their identity.

00:27:48.000 And we're very, very bad at that.

00:27:51.000 Except on the ideological front.

00:27:53.000 So the woke types come along and say, you know, the planet's a virgin. 0.62

00:27:56.000 The great father's a tyrant.

00:27:58.000 You could be a hero if you just stood up to that.

00:28:01.000 And the kids think, well, I'd like to do something important with my life.

00:28:04.000 And so they're just caught into that immediately.

00:28:07.000 But because it's a one-sided story, well, a one-sided religious story is an ideology.

00:28:15.000 And a great representation of that is what they've done with Greta Thornburg.

00:28:19.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:28:20.000 It's so funny, you know, because I thought 10 years ago, I thought, we live in the delusion of a disturbed 13-year-old girl.

00:28:27.000 How did that happen?

00:28:28.000 And then, you know, Greta Thunberg showed up, and I thought, oh, well, there we go.

00:28:30.000 Now we've got the...

00:28:32.000 We've got the 13-year-old.

00:28:34.000 I feel sorry for her, you know, because she was chased into this apocalyptic terror that we're trying to enforce on all our kids.

00:28:42.000 And then you think about her position, you know, so now she's all afraid.

00:28:46.000 And her mother's facilitating that like mad. 1.00

00:28:48.000 And then, you know, she announces her fear, her neurotic fear, essentially.

00:28:53.000 It's driven by negative emotion.

00:28:55.000 And, you know, Macron says to her, oh my God, Greta, you're absolutely right, and bows.

00:29:00.000 It's like, what the hell is a girl to think? 1.00

00:29:02.000 You know, because what she really wants is to freak out a bit and for someone calm and reasonable to say, hey, look, kid, you know, the apocalypse has always been on us.

00:29:12.000 It's always the case that the future has the possibility of being dreadful.

00:29:16.000 But, you know, we've conquered terrible things in the past and overcome massive obstacles, and there's no reason at all not to assume that we can do the same thing.

00:29:25.000 That's a very important point.

00:29:26.000 Well, yeah.

00:29:27.000 It's such an important point because there's never been a time ever where everything was perfect.

00:29:32.000 Well, that's for sure.

00:29:33.000 There's never been a time ever environmentally where the earth was stable.

00:29:36.000 No.

00:29:37.000 If you go, I mean, stable, you know, currently, you can kind of like guess what the weather's going to be.

00:29:42.000 But if you look at like models of like thousands of years, it's never been flat.

00:29:46.000 It's always been up and down.

00:29:48.000 It heats up.

00:29:48.000 Well, the earth was an ice ball many times.

00:29:50.000 Many times.

00:29:50.000 Yeah.

00:29:51.000 So, yeah.

00:29:51.000 Yeah.

00:29:52.000 Well...

00:29:52.000 Randall Carlson was saying there's been times in our distant past where the CO2 levels and the oxygen levels were so fucked up that we were close to losing all life on Earth.

00:30:02.000 Right, right.

00:30:03.000 And then this can happen.

00:30:05.000 See, the antithesis to that is to believe in something like the intrinsic paradisal stability of well-balanced Mother Nature.

00:30:15.000 Right.

00:30:16.000 Yeah, a bit, but no, not really.

00:30:20.000 There's a lot of variability.

00:30:22.000 A lot.

00:30:22.000 And of course, that kind of variability, that's hard on people because you want a certain amount of stability so you don't die.

00:30:29.000 Right, but it doesn't deny that human beings have an impact on this either.

00:30:33.000 No, no.

00:30:34.000 Well, this is why I really respect Bjorn Lomberg, you know, because Lomberg's hard to grasp because he forces you to think complexly.

00:30:42.000 You know, he says, well, we don't have one problem, carbon dioxide, which is, you know, I don't even think it's clear that carbon dioxide is actually a problem, but we can leave that aside.

00:30:51.000 That'll get me in trouble with the College of Psychologists again.

00:30:54.000 But, you know, Lomberg says, look, you know...

00:30:56.000 It's a factor, yeah, yeah, but there's lots of factors and God only knows what the most pressing problems that confront us truly are.

00:31:04.000 When I wandered through the ecological sustainability literature about 10 years ago and, you know, I concluded a couple of things.

00:31:11.000 One was that the best way forward to a sustainable planet...

00:31:16.000 Is to make everyone who's poor rich as fast as you possibly can.

00:31:19.000 That's Lomburg's position too.

00:31:20.000 Yeah, not to put limits to growth on because it turns out if you get people above about $5,000 a year in average GDP, they start taking long-term view of the future instead of scrabbling around in the dirt trying to get lunch, you know.

00:31:34.000 You're going to burn everything up around you to stay alive if you have to.

00:31:37.000 Right.

00:31:37.000 But if you got a bit of wealth and now you can think over, you know, maybe a 20-year period, which is quite the damn luxury, then you actually start being concerned about, you know, the quality, the aesthetic quality of the local environment.

00:31:50.000 And so I was so excited when I found that data because I thought, oh, this is so cool.

00:31:55.000 It means that we could have our cake and eat it too.

00:31:57.000 Work really hard to provide cheap, reliable energy, you know, at the lowest cost possible to the widest number of people worldwide, and the emergent consequence of that would be the whole planet would clean itself up.

00:32:10.000 So wouldn't that be great?

00:32:11.000 Because we could make our goal The eradication of absolute poverty, which we've actually done pretty good at eliminating over the last 15 years, but we could really make that a goal.

00:32:20.000 And then one of the consequences of that, inevitable consequences, would be a greener and healthier planet.

00:32:26.000 And then you think, well, why aren't we doing that?

00:32:28.000 And that's a question, all right.

00:32:30.000 And I think part of the reason is, I've been trying to understand the driving ideas underneath this Globalist utopian tyranny that seems to be developing from the top down, and I think it's driven at least in part by this religious vision that I already described,

00:32:46.000 you know, that you have to construe culture itself, especially industrial culture, as the tyrannical father raping and pillaging everything in its way, which is an unbelievably dangerous way to think, too one-sided.

00:32:58.000 And the idea that you have to impose limits to growth on people in order to have a sustainable planet.

00:33:05.000 And that's allied with a view that probably stems all the way back to people like Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s, who really believe Really believe, truly, that maybe the planet should only have 500 million people on it or a billion,

00:33:21.000 you know, in relative poverty or two billion barely scraping by because otherwise they're going to be wrecking everything and, you know, controlled by some top-down authority that makes bloody well sure that no one's consuming too much.

00:33:33.000 And so when I look at ideas like that, that first assumption, you know, the planet has too many people on it, it's like, I don't like to hear people say that, because when I hear that, I think, okay, buddy, who exactly are you thinking about getting rid of?

00:33:48.000 Oh, well, it's not like that.

00:33:49.000 It's like, yeah, it's like that.

00:33:51.000 It has to be like that.

00:33:51.000 It is absolutely like that.

00:33:53.000 So, you know, it's easy to get all paranoid conspiracy theorists about the WEF, say, and maybe there's some utility in that, but...

00:34:01.000 You know, I don't think anybody's sitting at Davos going, well, we've got to scrap 7 billion people.

00:34:07.000 But if the underlying narrative is the one I just described, you know, virginal planet, tyrannical patriarchy, and rapacious individual, and you believe, well, we're overpopulated, like Paul Ehrlich has believed since, really, literally the mid-1960s,

00:34:22.000 then...

00:34:23.000 How is it not going to be that the policies that you craft, stemming from that narrative, are colored by the belief that there's far too many people?

00:34:32.000 Like, I've really felt that I'd be at war for the last six months.

00:34:35.000 And I would say it's war because what I observed happening in Europe when I was there last was that, well, you can see this, you don't have to be in Europe to see it, but it's more direct if you're there, is that it's pretty damn clear that the globalist utopians are willing to sacrifice the poor for the sake of the planet.

00:34:52.000 You know, and they're doing that by cranking energy prices up through the roof, and that means that people die.

00:34:57.000 Lomburg has estimated that maybe you have to turn your thermostat down by three degrees, right?

00:35:02.000 Save the planet.

00:35:03.000 We don't have enough energy.

00:35:04.000 We'll pay you not to use your electricity between five and six, which is what they're doing in the UK. You turn your damn thermostat down three degrees, that sounds like nothing. 0.98

00:35:12.000 But if you're old... 1.00

00:35:14.000 That radically increases the probability that you'll get a respiratory disease and die.

00:35:18.000 You know, and if the Europeans would have had a cold winter and that could still happen, Lomborg estimated it'd wipe out 135,000 people.

00:35:26.000 It's like, well, you know, we're just making energy more expensive.

00:35:29.000 It's like, what do you mean you're just doing that?

00:35:30.000 So imagine the economic system.

00:35:32.000 It's a pyramid.

00:35:33.000 There's a bunch of people at the top.

00:35:36.000 They have almost all the money.

00:35:37.000 That's par for the course for any productive system.

00:35:40.000 Any system that's productive ends up with a distribution like that.

00:35:43.000 It's pretty...

00:35:44.000 It's like a law of nature.

00:35:45.000 And then you move farther down the pyramid till you get down to the bottom where most of the people are and they're barely clinging on to the edge of reality, right?

00:35:53.000 It doesn't take much of a crisis to tip them into, you know, death.

00:35:57.000 And then you crank up energy prices.

00:35:59.000 Well, what happens is you just take a bunch of those people at the bottom of the distribution, the poor that the left is so, you know, hypothetically concerned with, and they're just done.

00:36:10.000 They go from barely hanging on to not hanging on.

00:36:13.000 And their kids go from having some ghost of a chance of opportunity to having none.

00:36:18.000 And I could see this coming.

00:36:20.000 You really saw it happening in Germany and the UK, you know, where we have this absolute rat's nest of way more expensive energy.

00:36:28.000 And, and this is where it gets extremely perverse, you know, you might say, okay, look, We have to save the future poor.

00:36:37.000 And so now, some of the present poor are going to have to suffer.

00:36:40.000 That's convenient for you, if you happen not to be one of those poor people.

00:36:43.000 But let's give the devil his due and say, okay.

00:36:46.000 It's like, that'd be fine with me.

00:36:47.000 Not really.

00:36:48.000 That'd be fine with me if the consequence of your actions, raising energy prices, for example, actually produced an improvement in those things you wanted to improve.

00:37:00.000 So, for example, energy is more expensive, but now the air is cleaner.

00:37:05.000 But that isn't what's happened in Germany.

00:37:07.000 What's happened in Germany is energy is like five times as expensive, and the coal plants are back on.

00:37:13.000 So it's like, even by your own criteria for success, you failed, and you did it at the expense of the poor.

00:37:20.000 And, you know, the World Bank estimated, I don't remember how many months ago, it was probably nine months ago, that we're putting 350 million people on the brink of starvation because we're cranking energy prices up.

00:37:32.000 And so for me, it's like, that's 350 million people.

00:37:36.000 That's three times as many as the communists killed, you know, in their six decades of trying.

00:37:41.000 And if your cure for the planet is, well, you know, we've got to put 350 million poor people in jeopardy just so that things are hypothetically better in 100 years, I think.

00:37:52.000 Yeah, I don't think so, buddy.

00:37:54.000 And also, it's a little bit too convenient for me that your prescriptions to save the planet are accompanied by this insistence that the only way forward to that is to give you all the power.

00:38:05.000 It's like, there's a bit of a moral hazard in that, don't you think?

00:38:08.000 It's like, I'm just saving the planet.

00:38:10.000 Give me all the power.

00:38:11.000 It's like...

00:38:12.000 You want to save the planet?

00:38:13.000 Or do you want the power?

00:38:15.000 And let's put the second one first, because the probability that you're a saint or the Messiah is pretty damn low.

00:38:22.000 So that's the danger of the Davos crowd.

00:38:25.000 It's a very bizarre narrative that doesn't get challenged.

00:38:29.000 And I don't hear this very nuanced, complex perspective, like what you're laying out right now.

00:38:35.000 I don't hear that often.

00:38:36.000 No, I don't hear it at all.

00:38:38.000 I hear it from you and maybe a couple other people that I... I actively seek out.

00:38:42.000 But you would think that when you're dealing with such a complex issue that you would want to see the most brilliant minds think out, how does this play out?

00:38:55.000 What are the consequences?

00:38:57.000 Let's think about what mitigates against that.

00:39:03.000 Young people are looking for a productive and visionary pathway forward.

00:39:09.000 We already covered that a bit.

00:39:10.000 But then there's a dark side of that too.

00:39:13.000 And the dark side of that for everyone is that our reputations are very important to us.

00:39:18.000 They're our most crucial currency.

00:39:20.000 And what that means is that We're tempted to elevate our reputations in an undeserved manner.

00:39:28.000 And we do that to gain social status with very little work.

00:39:32.000 And so we're tilted towards being tempted by theories that provide us with an easy way forward to that.

00:39:40.000 And so one is, well, I'm a good person.

00:39:43.000 Well, how do I know that?

00:39:44.000 Well, I'm concerned about the planet.

00:39:46.000 Well, that's a complex problem, the planet, right?

00:39:49.000 That's a trillion problems, not one.

00:39:52.000 I'm concerned about the planet.

00:39:54.000 Therefore, I'm good.

00:39:55.000 But that's complicated.

00:39:57.000 You've got to take it apart.

00:39:58.000 No, you don't.

00:39:58.000 You just say, well, the planet only has one problem.

00:40:02.000 Well, what's that?

00:40:04.000 Untrammeled industrial activity and the rapacious nature of the consumer.

00:40:08.000 Okay, what's the output?

00:40:10.000 Too much carbon dioxide.

00:40:12.000 Okay, I'm against carbon dioxide.

00:40:14.000 Well, bang, you're the messiah.

00:40:16.000 You know, with no work.

00:40:17.000 And then someone, Lomburg, comes along and says, hold on there, guys, we got like 30 problems, not one. 1.00

00:40:24.000 And we need to rank order the problems, and we need to do a differentiated analysis, and your idiot interventions are going to cause nothing but unintended consequences. 0.99

00:40:32.000 And no one wants to hear that, because number one, it's complicated. 1.00

00:40:35.000 You've got to read the damn book, and you've got to think through his arguments. 0.97

00:40:38.000 And number two, well, now where are you going to get your cheap moral virtue? 0.99

00:40:42.000 You can't just be the messiah by waving a banner that says, I don't like carbon dioxide.

00:40:48.000 And so that runs against a very, very deep narcissism.

00:40:52.000 And so that's part of what stands in opposition to people, especially people like Lombard.

00:40:57.000 And that's accentuated by social media.

00:41:00.000 Yeah, yeah, definitely.

00:41:01.000 Like, greatly.

00:41:03.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:41:04.000 Well, social media is a great place to garner unearned social reputation.

00:41:10.000 Yeah.

00:41:10.000 I mean, it can be gamed, and it is gamed, and we also even know the nature of the people who game it.

00:41:16.000 There's a whole emergent psychological literature concentrating on dark tetrad traits, so we could walk through that a little bit.

00:41:24.000 So, the standard personality models that produced the big five, extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, they were derived sort of with a primitive AI, that's a way of thinking about it, that looked for patterns of description across huge corpuses of linguistic data.

00:41:42.000 How do people talk about each other?

00:41:43.000 It turns out, they talk about each other differently.

00:41:46.000 Using five dimensions, and those are the dimensions I just described.

00:41:50.000 But the people who derived the Big Five didn't use evaluative descriptors.

00:41:54.000 They threw anything out that looked like a value judgment.

00:41:57.000 So, for example, you might say of someone, he's a good person, and you might say of someone else, he's a malevolent person.

00:42:03.000 Those descriptors weren't included in the Big Five corpus because they were trying to derive a model of normative personality.

00:42:10.000 Okay, so, but that meant that the pathological personality wasn't encapsulated or well-defined.

00:42:17.000 Now, this guy Robert Hare, who worked at University of British Columbia, as world's leading authority on psychopathy, and he interviewed hundreds and hundreds of psychopaths, and was always fooled by them, by the way.

00:42:29.000 And then he had a student, Dale Paulus, who works at UBC, and Paulus developed a model of personality that was based on pathology, like on the dark side.

00:42:39.000 And He called that the dark triad.

00:42:43.000 Machiavellianism.

00:42:44.000 That means Machiavellian is someone who...

00:42:47.000 So let's say, if I was Machiavellian in our discussions, what I would have done was think, before I came here, I thought, well, you know, what can Joe offer me?

00:42:55.000 And then I think, well, how can I play Joe with my language so I'm most likely to get what I'm, you know, the narrow, impulsive, selfish thing that I'm aiming at right now?

00:43:05.000 So that's how a Machiavellian operates.

00:43:07.000 A narcissist, that's the next part of the dark triad, is someone who wants social status without doing any of the work.

00:43:14.000 They want all the attention.

00:43:16.000 If you're dating a narcissist or in a relationship with a narcissist, they'll alienate all your family members and your friends so that they get all the attention.

00:43:24.000 And that'll just be the first of the games they play with you. 0.88

00:43:27.000 Then you have psychopathy, and the psychopaths are parasitical predators. 0.98

00:43:33.000 And so the predator will take whatever you've got and the parasite will live off you. 0.98

00:43:38.000 And then here's a parasitical ideological statement.

00:43:41.000 Property is theft.

00:43:43.000 A classic Marxist trope.

00:43:45.000 Why would you say that?

00:43:46.000 Well, if I want to live off you, the way I'm going to justify that ethically is by claiming, well, you know, Joe, look how privileged you are.

00:43:54.000 You've got all this money.

00:43:55.000 You just took that from the oppressed.

00:43:59.000 And if I'm manipulating you so that I get some of your money, that's only just because, first of all, it's exactly what you did, and second of all, well, why not spread some of that wealth around?

00:44:08.000 So that's Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, dark triad.

00:44:13.000 They've expanded that recently to add another dimension that was missing, sadism.

00:44:19.000 And the sadist takes positive delight in causing pain to others. 0.96

00:44:22.000 And the lulz culture, L-U-L-Z, the lulz culture online is a culture of sadistic, Machiavellian, narcissistic psychopaths. 0.99

00:44:31.000 Lulz meaning like people are joking around shitposting. 0.99

00:44:34.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:44:35.000 I did it for the lulls, and it's the plural of LOL, laugh out loud.

00:44:39.000 But if you look at the Urban Dictionary, for example, the definition of lulls is positive delight in the suffering of others.

00:44:45.000 It's like, yeah, it's sadistic.

00:44:46.000 And bloody well, social media just facilitates like...

00:44:50.000 I never thought of lulls as being sadistic.

00:44:53.000 In and of itself, it's not a sufficient marker.

00:44:56.000 Right?

00:44:56.000 You have to have like six or seven things going on before it's clear that you're manifesting this underlying tetrad of personality traits.

00:45:05.000 Like if you use the odd acronym and you're throwing out a joke at someone, this is a habitual pattern of doing nothing but provoking people online.

00:45:16.000 And using deception and lies to do it to attract attention to yourself.

00:45:19.000 You know, it has to be a very consistent pattern.

00:45:22.000 But Paulos, first of all, and his crew of researchers and people who've been influenced by him have laid out this four-dimensional structure of the dark side, let's say.

00:45:31.000 And they've shown that Hyper users of social media Instagram for example and and people who do a lot of anonymous shit posting are Characterized by you know, what would you call it?

00:45:43.000 Domination by those four traits and part of the reason for that this is very very dangerous to our whole society I think is that You gotta ask yourself what keeps the psychopaths under control in the normal population and the answer seems to be Especially on the male side, 0.88

00:46:01.000 is that narcissistic aggressive men get put in their place by non-narcissistic aggressive men.

00:46:09.000 And that usually has to do with something like the threat of physical intervention.

00:46:13.000 You know how it is if you get a bunch of guys together.

00:46:15.000 I can make a joke about you.

00:46:17.000 You know, and I could even make a joke that sort of put you down.

00:46:21.000 But the joke would have to be funny...

00:46:24.000 You'd have to have the opportunity to reciprocate and you'd have to believe that I was doing it in good spirit.

00:46:29.000 Because if I just used the opportunity to, you know, stick the knife in, we're not going to get along with each other very long.

00:46:35.000 And we know that.

00:46:36.000 And men know that when they talk to each other.

00:46:38.000 And so part of what keeps dialogue among men civilized is the possibility that it won't be civilized if it goes too sideways.

00:46:46.000 And everybody knows that.

00:46:47.000 But there is none of that online.

00:46:49.000 Because anybody can post anything about anyone, no matter how denigrating and derisive.

00:46:54.000 Especially if they do it anonymously.

00:46:56.000 And there's zero consequence.

00:46:57.000 In fact, quite the opposite.

00:46:59.000 If they're good at it, they get a lot of attention.

00:47:02.000 And the social media companies will monetize it.

00:47:04.000 And so not only is it not inhibited, it's actually facilitated.

00:47:10.000 And this isn't a trivial problem.

00:47:11.000 Because if the psychopaths multiply enough, they take the whole society out.

00:47:16.000 So I think virtualization enables psychopathy.

00:47:20.000 And it's worse than just the trolling bit.

00:47:23.000 That's bad enough because it pollutes political dialogue and it makes everyone think that everything is more unstable than it really is.

00:47:29.000 But online criminality is actually a terrible thing.

00:47:33.000 Plague.

00:47:34.000 You know, I don't think there's an old person in North America who isn't being targeted by some gang of psychopaths who's, you know, documented all of their interests and their locale and who knows how much money is in their bank account and who's doing everything they possibly can at every second to leverage access to it.

00:47:50.000 That's just happening.

00:47:52.000 Continually.

00:47:53.000 Well, that's certainly algorithms, right, for a lot of people that get trapped into these sort of situations where people are constantly throwing at them things that are opportunities for them to either make money or get this or avoid pain.

00:48:06.000 Or get a refund.

00:48:06.000 Yeah, get a refund.

00:48:07.000 You bet.

00:48:08.000 Or they befriend them.

00:48:09.000 You know, they get it in and some lonely old character who's not functioning cognitively quite like he used to, you know, he gets sucked in by someone pretending to be his friend and offered a great investment opportunity.

00:48:21.000 Yeah.

00:48:21.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:48:21.000 And it's very, very, very difficult to track this sort of thing online.

00:48:25.000 So you get the real enabling of the criminals because how the hell, if they're anonymous, how the hell do you keep them, you know, how do you hold them to account?

00:48:34.000 And then a secondary derivation of that is something like trolling. 0.92

00:48:37.000 And that's really not so good either because if the psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian sadists are dominating the political discourse, then ordinary people look at that and think, oh my god, Everything's going to hell. 0.90

00:48:50.000 Everyone's really extreme. 0.85

00:48:52.000 And really, it's a non-random sample.

00:48:54.000 And so, you know, I can really see this in my own life, you know, because if you just looked at me virtually, you'd think like I was the world's most embattled person in some way, you know, maybe not the world's most, but I'm up in the top 10, maybe.

00:49:08.000 But in my real life, I don't have any problems.

00:49:13.000 I go around from town to town or from city to city and every interaction I have with people on the street is positive.

00:49:19.000 They either don't know me, which is fine, or they do and then we have a positive interaction.

00:49:24.000 I've only had...

00:49:25.000 Like, three negative interactions with people in real life in the last six years.

00:49:30.000 Like, they stand out because they're not fun, but they're extremely rare.

00:49:34.000 But online, it's like, well, 50% of the people oppose Jordan Peterson.

00:49:38.000 It's like, no, they don't.

00:49:39.000 It's not even 1%.

00:49:44.000 We're building a virtual world that doesn't sample the real world very well, and that's not much different from building a delusion.

00:49:51.000 So, not good.

00:49:53.000 Very unsettling.

00:49:57.000 That's Twitter.

00:49:58.000 Well, it's certainly Twitter before Elon Musk came along.

00:50:00.000 Yeah, well, Twitter's better, but it's still quite the snake pit.

00:50:03.000 You know, one of the things I think might be done about that...

00:50:09.000 See, I don't think that...

00:50:13.000 I've made this claim on Twitter that there's something cowardly about anonymous posting.

00:50:19.000 And I'm not going to retract that because I believe that in 99% of the cases that's true.

00:50:22.000 Now people say, well, you know, if you're a whistleblower, you have to be anonymous.

00:50:26.000 And what about people in totalitarian states or in a company?

00:50:30.000 Well, same.

00:50:31.000 That's the whistleblowing problem, I think.

00:50:33.000 Yeah, 1% of anonymous posters are heroes, but 80% of them are Machiavellians.

00:50:39.000 And so...

00:50:40.000 Well, there's also the factor of people that don't want to get in trouble at work.

00:50:43.000 Yeah, I know, I know.

00:50:44.000 Well, that's kind of the whistleblower problem.

00:50:46.000 But not even whistleblowers.

00:50:48.000 I mean, people that just have opinions that vary...

00:50:51.000 You mean that might get them in trouble with the College of Psychologists in Ontario, for example.

00:50:54.000 Yes!

00:50:54.000 Yeah, I know.

00:50:55.000 So while I think one of the ways of handling that technically, what I'd like to see happen at Twitter, for example, you know, not that I'm in a position to know, because I know it's complicated, is I think the anonymous types should be separated from the real people.

00:51:08.000 So you could go visit them and see what they have to say, but the verified people, you know, their comments are either at the top or in a different place.

00:51:16.000 Because I don't think that you can, I don't think that we can set up a playable game online When the anonymous trolls have the same rights as the verified, responsible people.

00:51:27.000 And I also think, and I don't know what you think about this, Joe, but, you know, let's say you want to be a whistleblower.

00:51:35.000 You want to say something that's going to get you in trouble at work.

00:51:37.000 So you want to do it anonymously.

00:51:39.000 It's like, maybe you're shirking your responsibility.

00:51:42.000 Because maybe you have a responsibility.

00:51:44.000 You know, and I could be persuaded...

00:51:47.000 Alternatively, but maybe you have a responsibility if you have something to say, to say it in your own voice and to put yourself behind it.

00:51:53.000 You know, and maybe you're taking the easy way out by not doing that.

00:51:57.000 And, you know, I don't want to say that about every single person who posts anonymously, but, you know...

00:52:03.000 Tyranny emerges when normal, honest people are now afraid to say what they think.

00:52:09.000 And when the tyranny is complete in a totalitarian state, no one ever says what they think about anything.

00:52:14.000 Everyone lies all the time.

00:52:15.000 And I see part of the pathway to that, the unwillingness of ordinary people to take the consequences of their truthful speech.

00:52:24.000 You know, and I also think that's detrimental to them, because...

00:52:29.000 I think that you find the adventure in your life.

00:52:32.000 I think this is certainly true of you.

00:52:35.000 You find the adventure in your life by standing behind your words.

00:52:40.000 Like, that's you, right?

00:52:41.000 Those are your words if you're telling the truth.

00:52:42.000 That's actually you.

00:52:44.000 And there's going to be consequences.

00:52:45.000 And sometimes they're going to be negative.

00:52:47.000 But do you really think that the consequences of telling the truth in your own voice are negative?

00:52:53.000 You think the world's structured like that?

00:52:55.000 Jesus, that's a dismal view, man.

00:52:57.000 Well, it depends on the amount of autonomy you have.

00:53:00.000 It depends on the amount of resources you have.

00:53:04.000 I mean, let's take for example...

00:53:07.000 Nurses.

00:53:09.000 Nurses who had contracted COVID during the pandemic and had developed natural immunity.

00:53:16.000 There was already studies that showed that that natural immunity was superior to the immunity that was imparted by the vaccine, but yet they were being mandated to take this vaccine.

00:53:25.000 And a lot of them had...

00:53:27.000 Some serious apprehensions about it that were logical based on people that they knew that had adverse reactions.

00:53:34.000 And now we're finding out more and more how common those adverse reactions were.

00:53:38.000 Now, if these women stepped up or these men who are nurses stepped up and said something about it publicly, they would be fired.

00:53:45.000 Well, look, when I was working as a clinician, I had lots of clients who were in that position.

00:53:50.000 You know, they're at work.

00:53:52.000 And they're being tyrannized by some...

00:53:54.000 Well, sometimes it was DEI types and sometimes it was just...

00:53:57.000 DEI? Yeah, diversity, inclusivity, and equity.

00:54:00.000 Oh.

00:54:01.000 You know, the woke ideologues who were coming for them and not letting them say what they wanted to say politically.

00:54:06.000 And sometimes they were just being tyrannized by garden-variety narcissists.

00:54:09.000 You know, their bosses were that sort.

00:54:11.000 Yeah.

00:54:11.000 And it was crushing them.

00:54:14.000 And, you know, it's easy to say to people like that, well, just stand up to your boss, but they often...

00:54:19.000 We're rather constrained in their employment opportunities and they had families. 0.99

00:54:23.000 And so you can't tell people, well, just go shoot off your mouth stupidly, get fired and taken out and mobbed and let your family starve. 1.00

00:54:30.000 That's a pretty dumb strategy. 1.00

00:54:32.000 But what we would always do in the therapeutic endeavor with someone in a situation like that was to situate themselves in their life so that they could afford to abide by their own truth. 0.88

00:54:43.000 And so that might mean if you're in a job, let's say, where you don't have freedom of expression, you know, you get your resume or your CV polished up so that if necessary, you could make a lateral move relatively quickly.

00:54:55.000 Maybe you send out some job applications just to test the market.

00:54:59.000 And if you're not marketable, maybe you pop up your skills.

00:55:02.000 And then maybe if you're in a position where you're vulnerable because someone else has got control over your tongue, maybe you work real hard to put some other ground under your feet so that you can't be taken out so easily.

00:55:13.000 You know, like when I opposed the Bill C-16 in Canada, the mandatory pronoun bill, I knew, first of all, I knew that that would cause a psychological epidemic. 0.99

00:55:23.000 I told the Senate that back in 2017. I said, you guys don't know what you're doing here.

00:55:29.000 You're going to confuse a lot of adolescent young women and for every girl you hypothetically save who has body dysmorphia.

00:55:35.000 And that'll be a vanishingly small number of people who are actually saved.

00:55:38.000 You're going to doom like 300. Of course, that's exactly what's happened.

00:55:42.000 That's why the Tavistock Clinic shut down in the UK. You know, and so there was that.

00:55:47.000 But I also had set myself up, you know, because I had three streams of income.

00:55:53.000 I had my university salary, I had a clinical practice, and I had a business.

00:55:57.000 And that wasn't accidental.

00:55:59.000 You know, I knew from my clinical practice that if you wanted to say what you had to say, you had to put yourself in a position where you couldn't be easily taken out by the mob or the tyrant.

00:56:09.000 And then I would say, well, if you're not in a position where you can afford to say what you have to say, then that's an indication that you haven't positioned yourself optimally, existentially, you haven't positioned yourself optimally in life.

00:56:22.000 Your foundation is too weak.

00:56:28.000 And so, you know, maybe it'll take you three years to fix that, you know, so that now you're grounded firmly so that a casual objection from your boss or even being fired isn't going to take you out.

00:56:40.000 It's not like that's easy.

00:56:42.000 But, I mean...

00:56:43.000 Abiding by the truth isn't easy.

00:56:45.000 The only thing, but it's a lot more preferable than abiding by falsehood.

00:56:50.000 That's the problem, right?

00:56:51.000 Of course, abiding by the truth isn't easy, obviously.

00:56:54.000 But, you know, what sort of devil do you let into your head if you abide by falsehood?

00:56:59.000 And some of that might be just not saying what you have to say.

00:57:02.000 And that's not just, you know.

00:57:04.000 Mostly we regard sins of commission as more egregious than sins of omission.

00:57:09.000 You know, an outright lie is worse than just failure to say what you know to be the truth.

00:57:14.000 But when enough people are silent about things they know they have something to say about, something to say something about, then you have a tyranny.

00:57:24.000 And so, well, we haven't sorted through all this, you know, very well in our society, but I think it's morally incumbent on all of us to set up our lives so that we can afford to tell the truth.

00:57:37.000 And if you can't, well, then you think, no, you haven't got the hatches battened down, right?

00:57:43.000 The walls of your towers, your fort aren't high enough.

00:57:46.000 You're not properly armed.

00:57:47.000 And you should be.

00:57:49.000 Because, you know, the mob's coming for you.

00:57:51.000 And so is the chaos of nature.

00:57:53.000 And you bloody well better be prepared.

00:57:55.000 And so I think if you're anonymous, you're depriving yourself of the necessity to put yourself in a position where you can tell the truth.

00:58:05.000 Now, think about what happened to you.

00:58:07.000 Now, you tell me what you think about this.

00:58:09.000 I mean, I've been watching you for a long time and it's quite remarkable seeing the impact that you've had that keeps increasing across time.

00:58:17.000 You know, but my...

00:58:19.000 My experience with you is that, you know, you have your opinions, your perspective, and you'll put them forward.

00:58:25.000 But mostly what you do is you ask people questions that you actually have as questions, right?

00:58:31.000 As far as I can tell, you're mostly trying to figure out what the hell's going on.

00:58:35.000 And so that's honest.

00:58:36.000 It's honest exposition.

00:58:38.000 It's an honest... 0.85

00:58:40.000 It honestly exposes your own ignorance as well.

00:58:43.000 And, you know, you can take the audience along as a consequence of that.

00:58:46.000 And for you, the consequence has been, you know, you've gone from just doing this podcast, sort of a side thing for you, at least when it started, to being, I don't know if there's anybody who has more impact as a single individual on the media environment worldwide than you do.

00:59:01.000 That's all a consequence of actually truthfully admitting your own ignorance and saying what you had to say.

00:59:07.000 And I know you were set up to do that because you had multiple streams of income, you know, and you couldn't easily be taken out.

00:59:13.000 You'd already accomplished things in a multitude of spheres.

00:59:16.000 But think of the consequence of that. 0.99

00:59:18.000 You think, well, would that happen to anybody who did everything they could to ask stupid questions and tell the truth? 1.00

00:59:24.000 The answer is maybe. 0.99

00:59:27.000 You know, so you don't do that.

00:59:28.000 You hide and you have your reasons.

00:59:30.000 You know, your family's at risk.

00:59:31.000 It's like, fair enough, man.

00:59:32.000 But you deprive yourself of the great adventure of your life and you contribute by remaining silent to pathologization of the whole society.

00:59:42.000 So...

00:59:44.000 Well, that doesn't seem like a very good route to me.

00:59:47.000 You're making sense, but it's a very, very complex situation for someone who has put all their eggs in one basket, like particularly someone who's a nurse who has to work long hours, doesn't have another stream of income, and isn't really making enough money to have a nest egg saved away.

01:00:04.000 Yeah, you bet.

01:00:04.000 Maybe as a single mother.

01:00:06.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:00:07.000 Well, there's a woman in Canada right now, a nurse, whose name, unfortunately, I forget, who's Being hauled over the coals by her college for, you know, making the radical claim that there are only two sexes. 0.99

01:00:17.000 And so, I know.

01:00:19.000 And, you know, part of the reason I'm pursuing this action with regard to the Ontario College of Psychologists, well, there's two reasons, really.

01:00:27.000 Three.

01:00:28.000 One is, you know, leave me the hell alone, guys.

01:00:30.000 You've been on my case nonstop for seven years.

01:00:33.000 Not once before that, in 20 years of practice, there's no complaints ever levied against me.

01:00:39.000 It wasn't until I started to become, you know, relatively well-known publicly that the college came after me.

01:00:44.000 And seven years of that gets to be a bit much, especially now that there's 13 lawsuits compiled up and all of them are for political opinions and half of them have been put forward on false grounds.

01:00:55.000 But even that's not enough for me to engage in the battle.

01:01:00.000 The reason I'm engaging in the battle is, well, first of all, you want me to do social media retraining so I communicate better according to your experts?

01:01:09.000 It's like, experts by what criteria exactly?

01:01:12.000 What's a social media communication expert?

01:01:15.000 You got any documentation that that even exists as a field?

01:01:18.000 And how do you know that if you have that social media expert train me, that I'm going to be a better therapist?

01:01:24.000 There's no body of data that suggests that in the least.

01:01:27.000 So I'm not going down that route, that's for sure.

01:01:29.000 We should explain that, because that is one of the things...

01:01:30.000 Oh yeah, so I've already been sentenced, right?

01:01:33.000 This isn't a threat by the college.

01:01:35.000 This is what the situation already is.

01:01:38.000 I haven't been hauled in front of their disciplinary board yet, but they've already convicted me of disgracing the profession and sentenced me to an indefinite period of re-education.

01:01:51.000 And that's the second most serious punishment that they can levy against a professional.

01:01:55.000 The first is to take away the license.

01:01:57.000 The second is to undergo this retraining and to publicly announce the necessity for that, which they've already done in my case.

01:02:05.000 And so now I have to sit down with these experts at my expense for an indefinite period of time until I'm trained properly, whatever the hell that means, by the criteria of the so-called experts and the college.

01:02:19.000 And that isn't pending an investigation.

01:02:22.000 That's already in place.

01:02:23.000 It's such a wild request, too.

01:02:25.000 Retraining, just even the way they phrase it, it's so bizarre, so Orwellian.

01:02:31.000 Yeah, well, like I said, it's your fault, you know, because it's the whole transcript of our last conversation.

01:02:36.000 I don't imagine they'll be that happy with this one.

01:02:38.000 But the other reason I'm pursuing it, and to the degree that I'm able to keep my head clear During this process because it definitely makes me angry and really made me angry over Christmas when I was spending Christmas going through the minutia of all these bloody lawsuits trying to figure out what the hell they were up to instead of you know taking a bit of a break and having some time with my family and so I was very upset about that but to the degree that I'm upset about it I'm not doing it right because this can't be personal can't be about me Part of the

01:03:08.000 reason that I want to pursue this and part of the reason we're pursuing an objection to what they're doing on Charter of Rights grounds in Canada is because they're interfering with my freedom of conscience and speech.

01:03:19.000 And again, it isn't even the case that the reason that that's a problem is because it's about me.

01:03:24.000 The reason it's a problem is because the colleges in general, like the regulatory boards of professionals, are doing this to everyone.

01:03:32.000 Lawyers, physicians, teachers, massage therapists, there's all these licensed professions.

01:03:38.000 And if you're a licensed profession, the government establishes a board of your peers to regulate conduct of the professionals.

01:03:47.000 Now, in a functional time, All that happens then is that generally the people who get in trouble, get in trouble with their own clients, right?

01:03:56.000 With the people they've been dealing with directly.

01:03:58.000 And then the board steps in on the side of the person who's been injured by a pathologically practicing professional.

01:04:06.000 And fair enough.

01:04:07.000 But now it's been weaponized.

01:04:09.000 And it's been weaponized as a political tool too.

01:04:11.000 And it's not like activists don't know that.

01:04:14.000 You know, and it's so preposterous because I have 20 million people following me on social media, you know, and God only knows how many views of my videos, for example, or the interviews you and I have done.

01:04:24.000 It's tens of millions.

01:04:25.000 And like, what, how many people complained?

01:04:30.000 20 out of millions?

01:04:32.000 And then the college didn't have to pursue those complaints.

01:04:36.000 They have to investigate them.

01:04:38.000 So I don't know what they're doing now because, of course, they've been inundated by thousands of complaints about their own behavior.

01:04:44.000 So I have no idea what they're going to do about that.

01:04:47.000 But they didn't have to investigate.

01:04:50.000 They chose to investigate.

01:04:51.000 And as I said, they did that despite the fact that half the complainants claimed to be my client's.

01:05:01.000 And weren't.

01:05:02.000 So what we have here is, we have 13 people who complained about me hypothetically doing harm to someone they didn't know, to someone who they didn't know, anyone who knew As a consequence of things I said on social media,

01:05:21.000 and that all of them, not only were they fourth-hand claims of harm, which, you know, no psychologist would ever claim that a fourth-hand account of harm constituted a valid measurement, so the bloody college is violating its own measurement standards by even pursuing this.

01:05:38.000 So not only are they based on fourth-hand information, and then an outright lie, which is, they were clients of mine, They're also predicated on the assumption that it's okay to go after a professional for expressing political criticism.

01:05:57.000 Because, like, literally half of them are...

01:06:00.000 Well, I said something about Trudeau.

01:06:03.000 I said something about one of his top aides.

01:06:07.000 I said something about Jacinda Ardern.

01:06:09.000 I said something about an Ottawa City Councillor in relationship to the Trucker Convoy.

01:06:14.000 You know, I said something about climate.

01:06:16.000 Every single one of the complaints is political.

01:06:19.000 And so why is that a problem?

01:06:20.000 Well, see if you can figure it out for yourself.

01:06:22.000 That'd be the first answer.

01:06:23.000 And the second is, I have a friend in Canada, very well-known physician, international reputation, and a reasonably decent secondary income stream.

01:06:32.000 And when this all hit, I reached out to him.

01:06:35.000 He's a very brave guy.

01:06:36.000 He's done a lot of writing that could easily get him in trouble.

01:06:40.000 I said, look, maybe I could get you and Bruce Pardy, this lawyer at Queen's University, who's gone after essentially the college that functions for lawyers.

01:06:49.000 I said, we should do three letters, same time, saying, you know, that the colleges are chilling free speech in Canada with psychologists, with physicians and with lawyers.

01:06:59.000 And he said he didn't have his house in order enough to dare to take on the college.

01:07:03.000 And the problem with that is that I don't know anybody in Canada who's a physician that's more well situated than him or braver.

01:07:09.000 And even he was loath to do it.

01:07:11.000 He'll do it eventually, but not now.

01:07:13.000 And so here's the situation we're in for all you who are listening.

01:07:18.000 If you go to see a professional when you have a crisis, psychologist or a physician or a lawyer, let's say, you bloody well better hope those people are telling you the truth.

01:07:26.000 So here's an example.

01:07:29.000 Let's say you got a 13-year-old girl, and she has body dysmorphia. 0.96

01:07:32.000 That's very common among 13-year-old girls, especially if they hit puberty early, because when women hit puberty, their levels of negative emotion go up. 0.64

01:07:41.000 That's a very well-established clinical finding.

01:07:43.000 And the reason for that, likely, is that when women hit puberty, the world becomes more dangerous to them, right? 0.99

01:07:48.000 Because they're sexually vulnerable.

01:07:50.000 And that's also when you get body dimorphism developed, so men get bigger than women.

01:07:54.000 And so, you know, women should be more intimidated in relationship to physical combat because they're not strong enough to prevail. 1.00

01:08:02.000 So they should be a little more anxious about that.

01:08:04.000 And so they're sexually vulnerable, so they should be a little more anxious about that.

01:08:08.000 And then also...

01:08:10.000 They should be a little more anxious because they have to take care of infants.

01:08:13.000 And if you're going to take care of an infant, you should be a little more sensitive to threat because the infant is extremely vulnerable.

01:08:19.000 So anyways, that kicks in women when they hit puberty. 1.00

01:08:22.000 It's very well documented.

01:08:24.000 This is why women have three to five times the rates of anxiety and depression worldwide.

01:08:28.000 It's because their baseline levels of negative emotion are higher.

01:08:31.000 Okay, so...

01:08:32.000 So now, but that also translates into something very specific for women. 1.00

01:08:37.000 So, anxiety and depression, shame, guilt, all those negative emotions, they make you self-conscious.

01:08:44.000 And self-consciousness takes the form of bodily shame in women much more than in men. 0.81

01:08:50.000 So if you're a girl and you hit puberty early, so you're dealing with the complexities of all that when you're still pretty immature, and your negative emotion goes up, the probability that you're going to negatively evaluate your body is virtually 100%.

01:09:06.000 There's no difference, especially in women, between feeling... 1.00

01:09:11.000 Bad about their bodies and being high in negative emotion.

01:09:15.000 It's the same thing.

01:09:16.000 So, I just interviewed this Chloe Cole, who's detransitioning and suing her medical, so-called medical professionals, who rushed her into a double mastectomy at 15, and the wounds have never properly healed, by the way, so that's her life.

01:09:32.000 You know, and I basically ran her through a clinical interview. 0.57

01:09:35.000 I said, hey, kiddo, you know, when you were 12 and miserable about your body, what the hell was going on?

01:09:41.000 She said, well, you know, I thought more like a boy.

01:09:46.000 She's a little autistic, so she's more thing-oriented than people-oriented. 0.94

01:09:49.000 And so she didn't get along with girls that well.

01:09:52.000 And then she was dreaming that she'd turn out like Kim Kardashian, but she turned out to have kind of a boyish figure.

01:09:58.000 And then she thought, well, I'll never really be a good, you know, full woman.

01:10:03.000 Maybe I should be a boy.

01:10:04.000 And she started to toy with that.

01:10:06.000 And then she went to her medical professionals with this body dysmorphia. 0.99

01:10:10.000 And instead of sitting her down and saying, look kid, you hit puberty kind of early.

01:10:14.000 You got a Partially autistic personality style that makes you a little more comfortable with boys than girls. 0.71

01:10:22.000 And every girl there is suffers body dysmorphia at your age. 0.75

01:10:28.000 So just tap her cool.

01:10:30.000 You know, the fact that you're embarrassed about yourself and feeling inadequate.

01:10:33.000 It's like, that doesn't mean you're marked out as pathological.

01:10:36.000 It certainly doesn't mean you're a boy.

01:10:38.000 No one ever told her that.

01:10:40.000 That's like basic information, man.

01:10:42.000 They just rush her along the pathway.

01:10:44.000 Puberty blockers at 13, and then a double mastectomy at 15. What is causing this rush to that?

01:10:53.000 Like, how did this happen, and how did this happen so quickly?

01:10:57.000 Well, this is partly tied up with this issue of the college, so here's one way into it.

01:11:02.000 So now, professionals are bound by law to offer gender-affirming advice.

01:11:11.000 They're bound by law.

01:11:12.000 Okay, so this is what this means.

01:11:13.000 If you bring your 13-year-old in to be evaluated by a physician or a psychologist, and maybe she has high levels of neuroticism, tilting towards depression and anxiety, and then that's making itself manifest in bodily discomfort, now that's being shaped by this cultural phenomenon Fad that insists that if you feel uncomfortable in your body, 0.67

01:11:35.000 it's because you're of the opposite gender. 0.88

01:11:37.000 That's the psychological epidemic part of it.

01:11:39.000 And we can talk about that in a little bit more detail.

01:11:41.000 But now you're duty-bound by law, if you're a professional, to say, oh, you think you're a boy?

01:11:47.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:11:49.000 Absolutely, 100%, you are.

01:11:52.000 What can we do to facilitate that move forward?

01:11:55.000 And that all got, what would you call...

01:11:59.000 Pushed into the law under the guise of the elimination of conversion therapy.

01:12:06.000 Now, the problem with that is, you see, if you're a therapist or a physician, you don't affirm someone's identity.

01:12:13.000 That's not your job.

01:12:14.000 And your job is not to deny their identity either.

01:12:17.000 Your job is to help them explore their identity and hopefully to develop it.

01:12:23.000 And so someone comes to you, maybe they have body dysmorphia.

01:12:27.000 And so maybe they're anorexic.

01:12:29.000 That's a form of body dysmorphia.

01:12:31.000 And so the first thing you do, if you have any sense, is you note that that's stemming out of an underlying more global proclivity to suffer from depression and anxiety.

01:12:41.000 So that's the big elephant in the room.

01:12:43.000 Depression and anxiety.

01:12:44.000 So, if the trans activist types say, well, the body dysmorphic types are more likely to have suicidal thoughts, it's not because they have body dysmorphia, it's because they're prone to depression and anxiety, and depressed and anxious people are more likely to have suicidal thoughts.

01:13:01.000 And maybe body dysmorphia adds a bit to that, but nobody really knows.

01:13:04.000 Probably adds some.

01:13:05.000 But the fundamental issue is one of depression and anxiety.

01:13:08.000 So now you're suffering from, you know, unspecified self-consciousness, And the culture twists around to offer you a narrative.

01:13:15.000 And the narrative is, oh well, you're in the wrong body.

01:13:18.000 And then that carrot is, and this is part of it that gets extraordinarily pathological, a lot of these kids who are suffering from this alienation are unpopular.

01:13:31.000 And so, and now they're being enticed, like, yeah, well, you're not unpopular.

01:13:37.000 You're interestingly special.

01:13:39.000 So if you just take this carrot, you know, you're the opposite sex, all of a sudden you're not a victim, you're a brave, what would you call, you're a brave seeker after your redemptive identity. 0.99

01:13:51.000 And now you can be elevated.

01:13:53.000 And you can be treated specially.

01:13:55.000 And my God, you know, if you're an unpopular teenager, how could anything be possibly more attractive than that?

01:14:02.000 And then you also think, well, why are teenagers gullible in that way?

01:14:06.000 You know, why do they go along with the crowd?

01:14:08.000 And the answer to that is, that's what you're supposed to do when you're a teenager.

01:14:13.000 That's your job, right?

01:14:15.000 Because, first of all, you're with your parents, and you're not yet a fully-fledged individual, so what you have to do is you have to become part of the group. 0.95

01:14:24.000 And if you're not part of the group, well, maybe you're a stellar, you know, creative genius, and you're exceptional in that manner, but more likely, you're just a loser who couldn't fit in. 0.99

01:14:34.000 And that sucks. 0.99

01:14:36.000 That's for sure. 0.99

01:14:37.000 So your job when you're a teenager is to fit in.

01:14:40.000 As every teenager knows, you know, and maybe not just to fit in, but, you know, to fit in in a positive way that elevates the community, but we could just settle for fitting in.

01:14:51.000 And so, teenagers are wired to go along with the crowd, and then if the crowd is offering something pathological, that happens all the time, you get a psychological epidemic.

01:15:02.000 And I knew that.

01:15:03.000 I told you.

01:15:04.000 I told the Senate this in 2017. And why did I know?

01:15:06.000 Well, I knew the literature.

01:15:08.000 We've tracked psychological epidemics going back 300 years.

01:15:12.000 300 years.

01:15:13.000 Here are some of them.

01:15:14.000 Multiple personality disorder.

01:15:16.000 It cycles in society.

01:15:19.000 Disappears.

01:15:19.000 Then there's one case.

01:15:20.000 Then it spreads like mad.

01:15:22.000 Then there's multiple personality disorder everywhere.

01:15:24.000 Teenage girls, mostly.

01:15:26.000 Then people get skeptical about it.

01:15:29.000 And it dies.

01:15:30.000 And maybe it disappears for a whole generation or two.

01:15:32.000 Then a case pops up.

01:15:34.000 Just does this.

01:15:35.000 That's happened for 300 years.

01:15:37.000 Cutting.

01:15:38.000 It was a psychological epidemic.

01:15:40.000 Bulimia was a psychological epidemic. 0.93

01:15:43.000 Anorexia was a psychological epidemic.

01:15:46.000 The satanic daycare ritual abuse accusations that came out in the 1980s, that was a psychological epidemic.

01:15:53.000 And the rule basically is that if you confuse people about a fundamental element of their identity, Then those who are already so confused they're barely hanging on are going to fall prey to that and all hell's going to break loose.

01:16:08.000 And that's exactly what's happened in the trans situation.

01:16:13.000 But the difference between this one as opposed to the other ones like multiple personality disorder is that this one is being reinforced culturally.

01:16:21.000 Like you are rewarded.

01:16:24.000 Yeah, well, the multiple personality disorder, that happened there too, because you'd get a lot of attention from media, especially the early, the people who are the first, who display the first symptoms of multiple personality disorder.

01:16:37.000 You know, you get a psychologist or a psychiatrist or an alienist, if you go back far enough, who reports this fascinating case of multiple personality.

01:16:46.000 And, you know, there are people who are dissociative.

01:16:50.000 So they kind of have multiple personalities.

01:16:52.000 They're united by memory.

01:16:54.000 They're usually creative people, because creative people have multiple personalities.

01:16:59.000 That's what makes them creative.

01:17:00.000 They're not the same from day to day.

01:17:02.000 You could even say they have fluid identities.

01:17:05.000 You know, and so the claims of the gender types that some people have fluid identities, it's like, Yeah, creative people do.

01:17:11.000 They're the purple-haired types with, like, nose rings and tattoos. 0.98

01:17:14.000 That's all part of trade openness.

01:17:16.000 You combine that with high neuroticism, negative emotion, then you get people who are fluid in their identity, who are also prone to depression and anxiety.

01:17:25.000 So, that's also crystal clear.

01:17:29.000 And so, well, so...

01:17:32.000 Look, if you're an outsider, will you want to be a dull and contemptible outsider?

01:17:38.000 Or do you want to be an interesting and compelling and nouveau, exciting outsider?

01:17:43.000 Well, you know, if you're a teenage girl and you've been unpopular, that's brutal.

01:17:48.000 Because, you know, you get tied up with those mean girls. 1.00

01:17:51.000 They shun you and exclude you.

01:17:53.000 It's absolutely brutal.

01:17:55.000 You know, you're just living a peripheral existence.

01:17:58.000 You've got no friends.

01:17:59.000 Everyone's contemptuous of you.

01:18:01.000 You know, and maybe that's partly because you have some...

01:18:05.000 Something that marks you out from the norm, like a tilt towards autism, because a lot of the people...

01:18:10.000 It was just released with the Tavistock staff.

01:18:13.000 You know, the Tavistock closed down in the UK. That was the big gender surgery performing institute in the UK. How was that closed down?

01:18:20.000 What happened?

01:18:20.000 Government closed it down.

01:18:22.000 Yeah, because they knew that, they figured out in the UK that, wow, the rates of transgender transformation requests were skyrocketing.

01:18:31.000 And even the people at the clinic knew that they were rushing people along the transformation pipeline way faster than they should have without proper clinical evaluation.

01:18:40.000 There's a thousand lawsuits out against the Tavistock in the UK now.

01:18:43.000 A thousand.

01:18:44.000 Yeah, out of I think 30,000 transition processes.

01:18:50.000 So what is the difference between the way the UK is processing this versus the way we are?

01:18:54.000 Well, we're still where the UK was three or four years ago.

01:18:58.000 We haven't woken up to the fact that, you know, all hell's going to break loose on this front with people like Chloe Cole, you know, launching lawsuits. 1.00

01:19:05.000 That's the only thing that's ever going to stop this.

01:19:07.000 Lawsuits?

01:19:08.000 Lawsuits, absolutely.

01:19:09.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:19:10.000 Or jail sentences.

01:19:11.000 Oh.

01:19:12.000 So, like, it's absolutely appalling.

01:19:14.000 This is also part of the reason that I felt like I've been at war for like six months.

01:19:19.000 It's so crazy that what you're saying here, although it's backed by the literature, it's obvious you have an expertise in this area, this is labeled as transphobic.

01:19:30.000 This is a transphobic conversation.

01:19:32.000 Well, it's even worse than that, you know, because the data, and this was known, let's say, ten years ago before this all became an issue.

01:19:39.000 Ken Zucker in Toronto.

01:19:41.000 He was the world's leading authority on transgenderism.

01:19:44.000 You know, he divided it into two parts.

01:19:46.000 There's the autogynephylic types. 0.86

01:19:48.000 Those are the guys who get sexual kicks from dressing up in women's clothing and then go do drag queen story hour. 0.68

01:19:53.000 Say, well, we're just, you know, pristine and pure. 0.83

01:19:56.000 It's like, no, you're not. 0.82

01:19:57.000 You're getting a sexual kick from dressing up in women's clothing. 1.00

01:19:59.000 And let's not bloody well forget it. 0.87

01:20:01.000 And you can't even say that now, but every clinician worth his salt knew that for decades.

01:20:06.000 And then there's another subpopulation, and those are usually gender non-conforming kids. 0.57

01:20:11.000 And, you know, like a conservative skeptic might say there's no such thing.

01:20:15.000 It's like, no, there is.

01:20:16.000 So your typical gender non-conforming kid would be, this would be the perfect target for this, would be a feminine boy or a masculine girl who's high in trait openness, so has kind of a mutable identity, who's also high in neuroticism. 0.98

01:20:32.000 And there's lots of kids like that.

01:20:33.000 And so they don't fit in that well with their peer group.

01:20:36.000 You know, they're tomboy girls or feminine boys. 0.63

01:20:38.000 And then if you track a lot of them, some of them develop body dysmorphia.

01:20:42.000 They're not very happy with themselves at puberty because they don't fit in.

01:20:45.000 But Zucker showed very clearly.

01:20:48.000 He ran the transgender treatment clinic at CAMH in Toronto for decades.

01:20:52.000 And he was one of the world's leading authorities in terms of publication.

01:20:55.000 I think he was the editor of the lead journal for years.

01:20:57.000 They just took him out in Canada for decades.

01:21:00.000 We fired him and disgraced him and he battled on the lawsuit front for like 10 years and was eventually vindicated.

01:21:05.000 But he didn't have a political bone in his body.

01:21:08.000 He was a clinician through and through, you know.

01:21:10.000 He wasn't playing political games documenting autogynephilia.

01:21:14.000 That was just clinical reality.

01:21:16.000 Now it's become verboten to even suggest such a thing.

01:21:19.000 Oh, there's nothing sexual about this.

01:21:21.000 It's like, yeah, right. 1.00

01:21:23.000 You're dressing up in lingerie before your mirror at home, tucking your dick between your legs, imagining you have a vagina for sexual kick. 1.00

01:21:31.000 Oh, there's nothing sexual about that. 1.00

01:21:33.000 Yeah, right. 1.00

01:21:34.000 Bloody absolute liars. 1.00

01:21:37.000 Now, then you have the kids who don't fit in on the gender front. 1.00

01:21:40.000 That's a different pathway.

01:21:41.000 But with them, If you leave them alone, so do no harm, leave them alone, 90% of them accept their body, their sex, by age 18 or 19, and 80% of them are gay. 0.98

01:21:58.000 So what that also means is, and the gay community is going to wake up to this sooner or later, is that Most of the kids being sterilized and mutilated are gay. 0.97

01:22:10.000 80% of them. 0.87

01:22:12.000 So, I don't see how the LGBT alliance is going to hold up under that sort of reality. 0.94

01:22:19.000 So?

01:22:20.000 Yeah.

01:22:21.000 That's for sure, man.

01:22:22.000 What a crazy situation.

01:22:23.000 And here, let's add something equally ugly to it.

01:22:27.000 Since we haven't gone far enough yet.

01:22:29.000 So here, we'll do a little bit of arithmetic.

01:22:32.000 So, a while back, Disney executive mentioned on video, this is when Florida went after Disney, was all when this was happening.

01:22:41.000 She came out and said, I think she was head of domestic programming for Disney.

01:22:45.000 She said, well, I have two children, five and seven.

01:22:48.000 One is trans and the other is pansexual.

01:22:51.000 And I just thought mathematically right away, it's like the chance you have a trans kid is one in 3,000.

01:22:56.000 That's not a very high chance.

01:22:59.000 And let's say the chance that you have a pansexual kid is the same, whatever pansexual means.

01:23:04.000 I don't even know how to calculate those odds.

01:23:06.000 But whatever that is, is rarer than trans, because no one ever even heard about it until five years ago.

01:23:13.000 So the joint probability that you have a trans kid and a pansexual kid is one in nine million.

01:23:20.000 The odds that you're a pathological narcissist sacrificing your own children to the glorification of your compassion is 8,999,999 to 1. So, like, do you have a trans kid and a pansexual kid? 0.65

01:23:37.000 Or are you a devouring mother? 1.00

01:23:39.000 Well, you can look at the odds and decide for yourself.

01:23:42.000 Oh, yeah.

01:23:43.000 Oh, yeah.

01:23:44.000 No kidding.

01:23:45.000 Look, man, Freud was no dummy.

01:23:48.000 When he pointed to the fact that the devouring mother was one of the major impediments to proper human development, he knew that.

01:23:55.000 Looking deep into the darkest families and seeing this proclivity of the overprotective mother to destroy the developing integrity of the child, to keep the child infantile, to cling to that relationship instead of developing life for herself and letting the child go flourish.

01:24:12.000 That's Hansel and Gretel.

01:24:14.000 Right?

01:24:14.000 You're lost in the woods.

01:24:16.000 Why?

01:24:16.000 Well, your family's broken up.

01:24:18.000 You have an evil stepmother. 1.00

01:24:19.000 So now you're lost in the woods.

01:24:21.000 What's your abuse rate if you have a step-parent?

01:24:24.000 100 times normal.

01:24:26.000 So, you're lost in the woods.

01:24:29.000 Well, what happens?

01:24:30.000 Well, you come across a gingerbread house.

01:24:32.000 Well, that's pretty damn convenient.

01:24:34.000 You need a house.

01:24:36.000 It's a little...

01:24:37.000 It's more than you could even hope for.

01:24:39.000 It's not just a house.

01:24:40.000 It's a house made out of candy.

01:24:43.000 Well, what's inside a house made out of candy?

01:24:45.000 A witch who wants to fatten you up and eat you. 1.00

01:24:49.000 And that's the devouring mother, you know, and that's an old fairy tale.

01:24:53.000 Yeah, no kidding.

01:24:55.000 Yeah, and so, you know, we could dwell on that for a minute, too.

01:24:59.000 One of the things we won't honestly discuss in our society, one of many, is the fundamental nature of female political psychopathology. 1.00

01:25:07.000 And there's male political psychopathology, obviously.

01:25:11.000 That's what the feminists complain about all the time when they talk about the oppressive patriarchy, toxic masculinity. 1.00

01:25:17.000 There's no shortage of toxic masculinity.

01:25:19.000 So is there any toxic femininity?

01:25:21.000 Well, not if the feminine is just the oppressed virgin... 1.00

01:25:26.000 Goddess who's nature, but how about we don't live in that fantasy world?

01:25:31.000 And we know, yeah, there's female political pathology, the tendency to infantilize everyone, and the tendency to assume that everyone who doesn't go along with the infantilization is properly characterized as a predator. 1.00

01:25:44.000 And so, you know, you wonder why are the universities turning into extended daycares?

01:25:49.000 Well, a lot of the reason for that is that...

01:25:55.000 Women who don't have anything better to do are turning the university students into the infants they never had. 1.00

01:26:03.000 Yeah, I don't know when we'll be able to be mature enough to have that conversation, you know, 20 years from now.

01:26:10.000 What is a path to bring this back to some sort of rational, logical way of discussing these problems?

01:26:19.000 Okay, so I tweeted out, I don't know if you saw this, that I was going to make an announcement on your show today, and so I set up an international consortium based in London.

01:26:29.000 I can't tell you all the details yet.

01:26:31.000 But we're trying to put together something like an alternative vision of the future, say an alternative to that kind of apocalyptic narrative that's being put forward at least implicitly by organizations like the WEF,

01:26:46.000 you know, and that's the virginal planet, rapacious tyrant, you know, all devouring consumer religion. 0.99

01:26:53.000 And it's more like something like, well, we want to ask people six key questions.

01:26:58.000 Okay, so...

01:27:00.000 How do we get energy and resources at the lowest possible cost as rapidly as possible to the largest number of people around the world?

01:27:08.000 That's one question.

01:27:09.000 And so there's a presumption in the question, and here's one of the presumptions.

01:27:12.000 You don't get to save the planet by making energy prices so expensive that no one poor can afford them.

01:27:17.000 That's off the table.

01:27:19.000 So if you want to develop alternative energy sources, no problem.

01:27:23.000 You know, because, hey man, the more energy sources we have, the better.

01:27:27.000 But you don't get to impose your utopian vision in the service of your narcissism on the poor.

01:27:34.000 We're going to try to make the poor rich.

01:27:36.000 We're going to try to alleviate absolute poverty.

01:27:38.000 Pro-human view on environmental stewardship front.

01:27:42.000 That's the next question.

01:27:44.000 What are the major problems that are confronting us?

01:27:46.000 How do we take a sophisticated multi-dimensional view of that?

01:27:49.000 How do we prioritize our attempts to establish our states and our international relationships properly so that we prioritize human well-being?

01:27:58.000 You know, in harmony with nature to the degree that's possible. 0.97

01:28:01.000 But human-focused and not predicated on the idea that there are too many goddamn mouths on the planet to feed and that you're evil if you just think about having children. 0.72

01:28:10.000 So then on the governance front, this is where it gets kind of more left-wing, I would say, is none of the people involved in this consortium so far are very thrilled with global corporate fascist government media and corporation collusion. 0.81

01:28:26.000 You know, and we're seeing this at the high end.

01:28:29.000 It's like a Tower of Babel. 0.95

01:28:32.000 The powerful players in the world are increasingly collaborating to impose a top-down vision of the future on everyone.

01:28:39.000 And that's a future that's predicated on a zero-growth model.

01:28:43.000 And the idea that, well, we need five planets, really, to support everyone at the current standard of living that obtains in the West.

01:28:50.000 So the best pathway forward is to deny loans by the World Bank to developing countries so they can't develop You know, energy sources, which all that'll mean is they're going to burn wood and coal, obviously.

01:29:02.000 So that's the third question is, you know, how do we arrange systems of governance to stop The march of something like pathological gigantism.

01:29:13.000 This is why I like people like Russell Brand and also you to some degree politically, you know, because you guys are very, what would you say, sensitive to the danger of that kind of corrupt collusion, that regulatory capture that occurs when corporate entities and media entities and governmental entities are all in bed together,

01:29:30.000 like the FDA and the CDC and so forth and so on without end.

01:29:36.000 So that's the third question.

01:29:38.000 The fourth question is, what do we put forward as a vision on the family policy front to facilitate the, what would you call it, the encouragement and the maintenance of long-term monogamous couples who are child-centered, and to make increasing the birth rate part of that policy,

01:29:55.000 to put policies in place that would support long-term stable monogamous families, two-parent families, and child-centered.

01:30:03.000 You know, because...

01:30:04.000 In the West, because we're very immature, we think that the purpose of a marriage is the happiness of the people who are involved in the marriage, the husband and the wife, and that's just not the purpose of marriage at all.

01:30:14.000 The purpose is long-term facilitation of their psychological and spiritual development and the establishment of an environment that's beneficial to children.

01:30:24.000 That's a responsible way of thinking about it, and so we need to have a serious conversation about what that means.

01:30:29.000 You know, it's tricky because Like, I think the ideal has to be long-term, committed, monogamous, heterosexual relationships.

01:30:38.000 And I had a big conversation about this with Dave Rubin.

01:30:41.000 You know, Rubin's gay and he's married, and him and his partner now have two infants, and we talked through how that was.

01:30:48.000 It was a very hard thing for them to arrange, obviously.

01:30:50.000 Why?

01:30:51.000 Well, they're both male.

01:30:52.000 So that poses a severe problem on the reproductive front, right? 1.00

01:30:56.000 And so they manage that, they have two infants, but it's very complex and it isn't, it's obviously not a solution to the problem of relationship and reproduction that's duplicatable across large numbers of people.

01:31:09.000 It just takes too many resources.

01:31:11.000 Now, I do think we have to have an ideal.

01:31:15.000 At the center of every concept.

01:31:16.000 But the ideal can't be too rigid, you know, because people aren't perfect.

01:31:22.000 You know, in my own family there's lots of people who are divorced.

01:31:25.000 In lots of people's families there are people who are gay.

01:31:28.000 You know, there are lots of people in unhappy marriages.

01:31:31.000 Nobody attains the ideal.

01:31:34.000 The ideal has to be surrounded by a fringe of tolerance.

01:31:37.000 But that doesn't mean you sacrifice the ideal.

01:31:40.000 And the ideal has to be...

01:31:41.000 Well, we know there's a literature on fatherlessness.

01:31:43.000 You know, it's a bloody catastrophe, fatherlessness.

01:31:46.000 For obvious reasons.

01:31:48.000 You know, human...

01:31:49.000 Children are complicated.

01:31:51.000 You think you can...

01:31:52.000 Maybe if you struggle madly as a single parent, you could do a decent job.

01:31:56.000 And lots of single parents do, but...

01:31:59.000 You're asking a lot, you know, for a woman to work 50 hours a week and then spend another 40 hours with her kids and to do both of those optimally with no help. 0.98

01:32:10.000 You know, and we know perfectly well that when women get divorced, especially if they have kids, they tend to fall down the economic hierarchy. 0.98

01:32:17.000 So it's very difficult.

01:32:19.000 So that's another one of the policies.

01:32:21.000 Then another question.

01:32:22.000 We're trying to make these into questions rather than, you know, we have the answer.

01:32:27.000 The other question is, well, it's pretty clear that we have to live inside a story.

01:32:33.000 And one story is, power rules everything.

01:32:36.000 But that's not a very good story.

01:32:38.000 It's a very pathological story.

01:32:40.000 It's more like a confession, too, if that's the story you insist upon.

01:32:43.000 It's like, so you think power governs everything, do you?

01:32:46.000 Okay, I know what you're like.

01:32:49.000 So that's what you truly believe.

01:32:51.000 See, I believe the spirit of voluntary play governs everything, not the spirit of power.

01:32:56.000 It's like voluntary association.

01:32:58.000 That's what we're doing in this conversation.

01:33:00.000 You know, we're playing towards an end and we're doing it voluntarily and we're taking everybody along for the ride.

01:33:05.000 No one's forced to do it.

01:33:07.000 So that's the other thing.

01:33:08.000 No compulsion here.

01:33:09.000 It's got to be invitational.

01:33:11.000 And so we're trying to work out what the story has to be.

01:33:14.000 And on that front, I just finished a seminar in Miami, and the first eight parts of it were released on The Daily Wire three months ago, Exodus Seminar.

01:33:24.000 We walked through the story of Exodus.

01:33:26.000 Exodus means ex hodos, means the way forward. 0.88

01:33:29.000 So it's the archetypal narrative of progression from tyranny and chaos into the future.

01:33:35.000 That's what the story is.

01:33:37.000 And we did half of it, released it on The Daily Wire, eight episodes, two hours long.

01:33:43.000 And we just recorded the last eight sessions two weeks ago, and that was an absolute blast.

01:33:48.000 I had really stellar people participating.

01:33:51.000 Man, I learned so much.

01:33:53.000 I learned so much, it's going to take me like two years to digest it.

01:33:57.000 But The Daily Wire is going to release it all on YouTube for free, starting in two months.

01:34:02.000 One episode a week for 16 weeks, and then we're going to keep it on YouTube and The Daily Wire for free for four months.

01:34:09.000 And so...

01:34:10.000 And it lays out a vision of appropriate governance that's an alternative to tyranny and to chaos.

01:34:19.000 So in the Exodus story, this is very germane to the notion of what might constitute a proper story.

01:34:27.000 So the question that you put forward in your life is something like, what spirit should guide you as you move ahead?

01:34:35.000 And you might say, well, I don't need a spirit to guide me.

01:34:37.000 It's like, yeah, you don't have that option.

01:34:40.000 Some spirit guides you.

01:34:42.000 It might be your stomach.

01:34:44.000 You might be a worshipper of the god Priapus, right?

01:34:47.000 He's the god of giant erections. 0.85

01:34:49.000 That's what happens if your whole identity is staked on your sexuality. 0.95

01:34:52.000 It's like, some spirit is going to guide you.

01:34:55.000 That's life.

01:34:56.000 The question is, what is the highest spirit that could guide you?

01:35:01.000 So, in the Exodus story, The proposition of the story is the highest spirit that could guide you is the spirit that objects to tyranny and that calls the enslaved to freedom.

01:35:13.000 And that's the representation of God in Exodus.

01:35:15.000 So that's what God is in the Exodus story.

01:35:19.000 Now that's not all that God is in the biblical stories.

01:35:22.000 That's God in the Exodus story.

01:35:24.000 And so that is the God that If you abide by that God, then you believe that tyranny is implicitly wrong, even if you tyrannize yourself, and that there's something implicitly virtuous about striving for freedom,

01:35:39.000 especially if you're enslaved.

01:35:41.000 So anyways, that's the voice that speaks to Moses, and the voice tells Moses to Tell the Pharaoh, the tyrant, to let his people go.

01:35:50.000 That's that famous line, let my people go.

01:35:52.000 But the line is actually, let my people go so that they may worship me in the desert. 0.97

01:35:57.000 Okay, so, anyways.

01:36:01.000 God, through Moses, calls the Israelites out of tyranny.

01:36:05.000 And he punishes the tyrant.

01:36:07.000 And so if you believe that fate punishes tyrants, you're already immersed in the Exodus story to some degree.

01:36:13.000 If you believe that tyranny is implicitly wrong.

01:36:15.000 Of course, most Americans believe that.

01:36:17.000 Okay, so now the Israelites leave the tyranny. 0.96

01:36:21.000 You think, hey man, great, freedom!

01:36:24.000 Because now you're out of the tyranny.

01:36:25.000 But that isn't how life works.

01:36:27.000 This is why people won't drop their tyrannical presuppositions.

01:36:30.000 Because you go out of the tyranny...

01:36:33.000 Into the desert, not to the Promised Land.

01:36:37.000 Desert first.

01:36:38.000 And what's the desert?

01:36:40.000 Everyone's lost.

01:36:41.000 No one knows which way to go.

01:36:43.000 Everyone fights.

01:36:44.000 Everyone turns to the worship of false idols.

01:36:47.000 Everyone wants the tyrant to reassert himself.

01:36:50.000 That's the situation we're in, in the aftermath of the death of God in the West.

01:36:56.000 And so, So that's really useful to know, because one of the things you might want to know in your life is why do people cling to their own tyrannical presuppositions?

01:37:06.000 And the answer is, well, at least they're orienting structures, pathological as they might be.

01:37:12.000 If you drop them, you're not redeemed, you're just lost.

01:37:16.000 And the idea that being lost is freedom That's a preposterous idea.

01:37:20.000 No one lost is free.

01:37:23.000 They're just enveloped in chaos.

01:37:25.000 Okay, so what happens in the Exodus story is now the Israelites are out in the desert, wandering around for like generations, and they get all fractious and fight and bitch and complain and start worshipping false idols and... 0.88

01:37:39.000 They're scrapping with each other.

01:37:41.000 And that's because they have the habits of slaves.

01:37:43.000 They don't know how to govern themselves.

01:37:45.000 And so they ask Moses to sit as a judge.

01:37:50.000 And so he does.

01:37:52.000 The story's very unclear about this, but for a long time, years and years.

01:37:56.000 Morning, dawn till midnight.

01:37:58.000 He's judging the Israelites like mad and adjudicating their squabbles.

01:38:04.000 And imagine what he's doing, eh?

01:38:08.000 If you had to make peace Between a thousand people who were squabbling with their, you know, their wife or their friends or their enemies.

01:38:21.000 You have to render judgment on that.

01:38:23.000 You know, and for judgment to work, the people who are judged have to see the judgment as just.

01:38:29.000 Because otherwise you have to impose it by force.

01:38:32.000 Right?

01:38:32.000 So if I hear you arguing with someone and I try to mediate, I have to come up with a solution that you'll both accept.

01:38:38.000 That means I have to extract out of that chaos some principle of order.

01:38:42.000 Imagine you do that a thousand times or five thousand times.

01:38:46.000 So now you start to understand the nature of the principles of order.

01:38:51.000 Okay, so now two things happen.

01:38:53.000 Jethro, who's Moses' father-in-law, comes along.

01:38:56.000 He's a Midianite, a foreigner, and he says, you've got to stop doing this. 1.00

01:39:01.000 You can't sit as judge on the Israelites.

01:39:05.000 There are two reasons.

01:39:06.000 They need the responsibility and you shouldn't turn yourself into another pharaoh.

01:39:12.000 So if you take all the responsibility onto yourself, you become a tyrant and the Israelites stay slaves. 0.82

01:39:18.000 So he says to Jethro, this is a signal moment in the development of Western culture, by the way.

01:39:23.000 He says you take the Israelites, you divide them into groups of ten, and you have each of the ten elect an elder.

01:39:29.000 And then you take the groups of elders, and you have them elect a meta-elder, and you do that all the way up to ten thousands.

01:39:37.000 And then you have the...

01:39:38.000 Judgments that are necessary rendered at the lowest level of the hierarchy possible.

01:39:44.000 So, you know, if I'm arguing with you, first we go to our elder, and then if the elder can't figure it out, he gets the elders together, and maybe they render judgment.

01:39:53.000 If they can't, it goes to the council of elder elders and all the way up.

01:39:57.000 If it isn't mediated by the time you have the groupings of 10,000, then Moses gets to weigh in.

01:40:03.000 And that's called subsidiarity.

01:40:05.000 And the idea is you have to produce a hierarchy of responsibility, distributed responsibility, as an antithesis to tyranny and to the desert.

01:40:12.000 And that's the model for good governance.

01:40:14.000 And that's symbolically equivalent to Mount Sinai.

01:40:17.000 And it's also the model of the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle.

01:40:22.000 So Jonathan Pajot did a lovely job of explaining that in this.

01:40:26.000 And so part of the model that we're trying to put forward in this group that I'm describing is based on this principle of subsidiarity and the idea that we wanna encourage everyone to take as much responsibility as possible at the most local level possible,

01:40:42.000 right?

01:40:42.000 So take responsibility for yourself.

01:40:46.000 Until you're good enough at that so you can take responsibility maybe for a wife. 0.95

01:40:50.000 And then if you're good enough at that, maybe you can extend that to some kids.

01:40:53.000 And then maybe you can serve your local community.

01:40:55.000 And then maybe you can serve your state.

01:40:58.000 And maybe if you really get good at it, you could serve your nation.

01:41:02.000 But you're taking the responsibility, and here's the basic rule.

01:41:06.000 All the responsibility you abdicate will be taken up by tyrants.

01:41:11.000 That's the cardinal rule of social organization.

01:41:15.000 And so, we're trying to build out this story.

01:41:19.000 That's based on the deepest elements of Western tradition.

01:41:23.000 That's an antidote to the, well, to the false claim that it's only power that rules.

01:41:31.000 Because it's not.

01:41:32.000 That's not right.

01:41:33.000 And there is a model of proper governance in there, this idea of a hierarchical structure of responsibility.

01:41:38.000 It's the proper computational structure.

01:41:41.000 It's not top-down tyranny with fractionated individuals.

01:41:44.000 And it's not utter chaos.

01:41:45.000 It's ordered freedom.

01:41:47.000 And that's what God tells Moses to tell the Pharaoh when he says, let my people go.

01:41:53.000 Let my people go.

01:41:54.000 No tyranny.

01:41:55.000 So that they may celebrate me in the desert.

01:41:59.000 It's ordered freedom.

01:42:00.000 And it's the ordered freedom that comes along with being oriented towards the highest possible good.

01:42:05.000 And so, we're trying to work all that out now.

01:42:07.000 We're going to have a conference in London.

01:42:10.000 October 31st, November 1st and November 2nd.

01:42:13.000 We're going to bring about 2,000 people together.

01:42:15.000 That's an invited list.

01:42:17.000 We want to bring in people who are cultural figures and political figures, business figures, and invite them to this discussion.

01:42:27.000 But we want to make that completely public, and we want to open up the organization to broad membership, as broad as possible.

01:42:33.000 And then, you know, if it's a success, then we'll open up the conferences as the years progress to larger and larger numbers of people.

01:42:40.000 But we can't, you know, we don't have the expertise or the wherewithal to manage that first off.

01:42:45.000 But we've got the venue.

01:42:48.000 Already set up in London.

01:42:49.000 I've got all sorts of people on board in Australia and all through Europe and through the UK and all through the United States, South America.

01:42:56.000 All sorts of people are interested in participating.

01:42:59.000 And so we want to help put forward a vision that's enticing and inviting.

01:43:06.000 It's like, imagine you could have the world you wanted.

01:43:10.000 You know, none of this Malthusian limits to growth nonsense.

01:43:14.000 We get our act together.

01:43:16.000 Everyone can have enough, and maybe more than enough.

01:43:19.000 There'll be enough educational opportunity for everyone.

01:43:22.000 No one will be scrabbling away in the dirt, burning dung, poisoning themselves.

01:43:27.000 Enough food for everyone.

01:43:29.000 There's also an idea in Exodus, and this is a very good idea, that if people organize themselves properly, so they're oriented on a transcendent axis, and they're oriented Towards their fellow man.

01:43:42.000 So you serve what's highest and you also abide by the principle of reciprocity in relationship to other people.

01:43:51.000 If we organize ourselves in that manner, there's no limit to the abundance the natural world can produce.

01:43:57.000 That's the actual Generator of genuine wealth, sustainable wealth, you know, that balances order and chaos properly, that balances nature and culture properly.

01:44:07.000 So the core idea is something like, you get the hierarchy of social organization right, it generates unlimited wealth.

01:44:18.000 And we've already seen that to a large degree.

01:44:20.000 We've lifted more people out of poverty in the last 15 years than really...

01:44:25.000 It's unparalleled.

01:44:27.000 Seven out of eight billion people now have...

01:44:31.000 Either have...

01:44:33.000 The minimum they need or something exceeding that.

01:44:37.000 And instead of, you know, starving to death by the billions, which is what everybody who was on the Malthusian side predicted back in the 1960s.

01:44:44.000 And so, I've been working on this for a long time and I've got a good group of core people who seem to be, you know, reliable and not motivated, we hope and pray, by something approaching, you know, narcissistic egotism and everybody's sworn to.

01:45:02.000 Try to make this as decentralized as possible on the principle that the more responsibility you can offload to people, the better everything will work.

01:45:10.000 That's a fundamentally conservative principle, like a small-c conservative principle, right? 0.55

01:45:15.000 So you need a hierarchy of responsibility, and you offload responsibility to the local where possible.

01:45:20.000 I think that's a good principle.

01:45:22.000 Let's hold that thought because I've got to pee, and I want to explore that more, but I do have to use the bathroom.

01:45:29.000 So, back to this thing that you're doing.

01:45:32.000 First of all, what are you calling this?

01:45:33.000 I can't tell you that yet.

01:45:35.000 So you're trying to, one of the things you were saying is you're trying to generate a story.

01:45:40.000 Yeah, we're trying to invite everybody to the table.

01:45:42.000 And we're trying to get the right story.

01:45:43.000 And we'll know it's the right story because people will say voluntarily, yeah, I could really go for that.

01:45:49.000 What do you mean by story, when you're saying the right story?

01:45:52.000 Well, a vision.

01:45:53.000 Well, I would say it's something, if you want to think about it archetypally, it's something like a vision of the Promised Land.

01:45:58.000 A structure.

01:45:59.000 Yeah, well, you have to...

01:46:01.000 Okay, we could talk about that technically.

01:46:04.000 A story is a description of a hierarchy of attentional prioritization.

01:46:12.000 So what do I mean by that?

01:46:15.000 There's an infinite number of things to look at in the world.

01:46:18.000 So perception seems technically impossible because you just drown in the complexity.

01:46:24.000 That's what happens in a psychedelic trip.

01:46:27.000 You drown in the complexity.

01:46:28.000 It's real, that complexity.

01:46:30.000 Now, usually that's shielded from you.

01:46:33.000 It's veiled from you.

01:46:34.000 Like God is veiled from you.

01:46:35.000 It's the same thing.

01:46:37.000 And so, it's veiled by the fact that you regard some things as more important than others.

01:46:43.000 And you do that implicitly.

01:46:44.000 And so, for example, right now, you're devoting most of your cognitive and perceptual resources to my face and to what I'm saying.

01:46:53.000 Now, there's lots of things you could be looking at in this room or thinking about, right?

01:46:57.000 There's an infinite number of things.

01:46:58.000 But you're not.

01:46:59.000 You're weighting some things more heavily.

01:47:03.000 Now, why?

01:47:04.000 Well, why are we having this conversation?

01:47:06.000 Well, I could ask you, why are we having this conversation?

01:47:10.000 Because I'm curious.

01:47:11.000 I want to know how you think.

01:47:12.000 Okay.

01:47:12.000 I want to know what your plans are.

01:47:14.000 What goal do you think your curiosity serves?

01:47:17.000 Better understanding of what you're trying to accomplish.

01:47:21.000 Okay.

01:47:22.000 Why do you think other people are interested in that?

01:47:24.000 Because they're going to watch this.

01:47:25.000 Why do you think people are interested in that?

01:47:27.000 Because what you're saying makes sense, and we also recognize that there's a real flaw in the way our society is constructed, and there's a real genuine threat in allowing these power structures to sort of maintain this narrative and create this narrative that's based upon them gaining control over resources,

01:47:48.000 our economics, our energy, and Okay.

01:48:07.000 Yes.

01:48:07.000 Okay, so you can see how that ties into an archetypal story, right?

01:48:10.000 And I think that's the big threat.

01:48:12.000 That's what people are terrified of when they see Klaus Schwab standing there with a Darth Vader outfit telling people that they're going to eat bugs.

01:48:18.000 Okay, and you're using the technology of free communication as an antidote to that?

01:48:24.000 Yes.

01:48:24.000 Okay, so then I would say archetypally what you're doing is you're doing something like serving the divine word that makes habitable order out of chaos as an antidote to tyranny.

01:48:36.000 That's a story.

01:48:37.000 It's a deep story.

01:48:38.000 And if you weren't acting out a deep story, you wouldn't have tens of millions of people listening to you.

01:48:45.000 The fact that that's like, it's like JK Rowling.

01:48:48.000 It's like, why is she so popular?

01:48:49.000 Well, she told an archetypal story, masterfully.

01:48:52.000 It has a religious substructure.

01:48:54.000 It just got people.

01:48:55.000 You know, like hundreds of millions of people and produced billions of dollars.

01:48:59.000 You have to see the world through a story.

01:49:02.000 You act out a story.

01:49:03.000 And the reason we like stories is because it's actually pretty hard to see the world and it's really useful to see the world the way other people see it, just in case they know something you don't.

01:49:13.000 And so we're telling each other stories all the time.

01:49:15.000 We're acting out stories.

01:49:18.000 A description of the pattern we're acting out, that is a story.

01:49:22.000 You know, and when you go to a movie, maybe you see the hero on the screen, you know, it's James Bond.

01:49:27.000 And that's, well, that's the same.

01:49:29.000 It's the same narrative in some sense.

01:49:31.000 It's, you know, it's a bit more stereotype, but Bond is, you know, this sophisticated, aggressive guy who's got his aggression under control, who's fighting the Hydra.

01:49:41.000 And it's not the Hydra and James Bond.

01:49:43.000 I don't remember the name of the underground organization there, but it's a Hydra for the Marvel heroes.

01:49:48.000 The Hydra is an amalgam of tyranny and chaos, right?

01:49:53.000 It's a Hydra with head of snakes.

01:49:55.000 It paralyzes you when you look at it.

01:49:56.000 It's an archetypal narrative.

01:49:58.000 And the fundamental question of life is, what is the proper orienting narrative?

01:50:04.000 That's the same question as...

01:50:07.000 What God do you worship?

01:50:09.000 It's the reason I titled my next book, We Who Wrestle With God, because you're stuck with that no matter what.

01:50:14.000 You're wrestling with one God or another all the time.

01:50:16.000 God's an animating spirit.

01:50:18.000 That's one way of thinking about it.

01:50:20.000 It's more than that, but that's one way of thinking about it.

01:50:23.000 And so I constantly look to these old stories, these archetypal stories, you know, as a student of Jung, let's say, to find out what the proper orienting pathway is.

01:50:32.000 And that's embedded in tradition.

01:50:34.000 You know, the stories that have lasted.

01:50:37.000 Richard Dawkins would have got to this conclusion if he would have pursued his thought far enough.

01:50:40.000 Because an archetype is a stable meme.

01:50:45.000 Propagates across time.

01:50:46.000 And there's some memes, some stories, let's say, that stabilize you as an individual.

01:50:51.000 They restrict your anxiety.

01:50:54.000 They provide you with hope.

01:50:55.000 They make you productive and generous.

01:50:57.000 And when they're extended, they produce a structure that unites people and produces productive peace.

01:51:04.000 You know, and it's not by fluke, for example, that America itself is founded in no small part on the motivational force of something like the Exodus narrative.

01:51:14.000 That was certainly the case for the civil rights movement.

01:51:16.000 It has to be that way because Exodus is an archetypal story about the establishment of proper order as an alternative to the tyrant and the desert.

01:51:26.000 So everyone is always doing that in their life whether they know it or not.

01:51:31.000 And you do it extremely well, if you don't mind the insult of a compliment.

01:51:35.000 And I think the reason for that is that, for whatever reason, you are acutely aware of your own ignorance and always trying to rectify it.

01:51:44.000 And I would say that's a reflection of a practice of humility.

01:51:48.000 You know, I know you're a competent guy, and you're no pushover, and so calling you humble is kind of a weird thing to do, but one of the things that I've been very pleased about constantly when talking to you is it's a conversation, man.

01:52:03.000 You know, what are we trying to do?

01:52:04.000 We're trying to make things clear.

01:52:06.000 We're trying to figure out what the hell's going on.

01:52:08.000 We're trying to say what we think.

01:52:10.000 We're trying to jointly make each other wiser.

01:52:12.000 You know?

01:52:13.000 Hopefully, to the degree we were able to manage it, and we're inviting people along for the ride.

01:52:17.000 And they seem pretty happy about that.

01:52:19.000 And that's partly because people aren't just oriented by power.

01:52:23.000 You know, there's all these truckers out there who are listening to this podcast while they're driving their rigs across the country.

01:52:29.000 You know?

01:52:31.000 What are they trying to do?

01:52:32.000 They're trying to get their acts together.

01:52:33.000 They're trying to understand.

01:52:35.000 They're trying to take their proper position in the social world.

01:52:38.000 And that's a fundamentally compelling...

01:52:41.000 It's not a drive.

01:52:42.000 It's an orienting and integrating spirit.

01:52:45.000 It's the same as the spirit of Yahweh in the Old Testament. 0.62

01:52:48.000 It's exactly the same thing.

01:52:49.000 It's the same thing.

01:52:51.000 So one of the things I learned about the biblical narrative...

01:52:54.000 This is so cool.

01:52:55.000 This is what the next book's about.

01:52:58.000 So, imagine there's two possible states.

01:53:01.000 One of disunity and chaos.

01:53:03.000 You're going in every direction at the same time.

01:53:05.000 And one of relative unity.

01:53:08.000 Now the unity can turn into tyranny and the multiplicity can turn into chaos.

01:53:13.000 Those are the two dangers.

01:53:15.000 But imagine there's a proper unity.

01:53:18.000 It stops you from being anxious.

01:53:22.000 Anxious, anxiety is a marker of internal disunity of narrative.

01:53:28.000 And I already talked about that with this Carl Fristen, for example, who's the world's most cited neuroscientist.

01:53:33.000 I asked him if perceptions were micro-narratives, and he said, yes, and that's quite something.

01:53:40.000 That isn't how we've looked at the world for the last 3,000 years.

01:53:44.000 In any case, to the degree that you're not anxious, Something is uniting all the directions you could take.

01:53:52.000 Okay.

01:53:52.000 Now, to the degree that you're not at odds with everyone else, you know, in the chaotic state of nature where everyone's at everyone's throat, it's because there's a mode of perception and action that unites you socially.

01:54:06.000 So you can be united psychologically, then you're not a house that's built on sand, and you can be united socially.

01:54:13.000 Imagine there's a spirit that is...

01:54:15.000 that...

01:54:17.000 That characterizes that unity.

01:54:19.000 So the biblical corpus is an attempt to portray that spirit and it does it using a technique called metonymy.

01:54:31.000 So metaphor is something being something else.

01:54:34.000 This is like that or this is that.

01:54:36.000 It's a way of taking what you know to explain what you don't know.

01:54:40.000 But metonymy is a technique where you take one story that seems to have one moral and you juxtapose it with another and maybe do that with sequence of stories and then there's an implication that There's a meta story that emerges across all the ordered stories.

01:54:56.000 And that's what the biblical corpus is because no one wrote it, not in any real sense.

01:55:01.000 And the processes by which it aggregated are mysterious.

01:55:04.000 They extend over thousands and thousands of years.

01:55:07.000 But here's what the book is.

01:55:09.000 It's a library, not a book.

01:55:11.000 Here's what the library is.

01:55:15.000 There's a proclivity towards monotheistic unity that unites us psychologically and socially.

01:55:22.000 It emerges out of a plurality of potential gods.

01:55:27.000 It emerges from the bottom up.

01:55:29.000 Now, you could argue that it descends from the top down, too, but I'm not going to get into that at the moment.

01:55:33.000 The question emerges, how do you understand that unifying, animating spirit?

01:55:39.000 And the answer is, well, it's beyond our comprehension, and we can more or less approach it with a story.

01:55:44.000 So here's some examples.

01:55:46.000 So in the story of Adam and Eve, God is the spirit that you walk with when you're unselfconscious in a properly tended garden.

01:55:58.000 You might say, well, do you believe in that?

01:56:00.000 It's like, well, do you have a garden?

01:56:02.000 Most people want a garden.

01:56:04.000 They want a house.

01:56:04.000 They want a little fenced-off plot.

01:56:06.000 They want to be able to go back there and relax and recreate, right, unselfconsciously.

01:56:14.000 Okay, so whatever's happening when you're there, that's what that is.

01:56:18.000 That's that walking unselfconsciously with the spirit of the paradisal garden.

01:56:23.000 So that's one picture of God.

01:56:25.000 Then in the story of Cain and Abel, you have another picture, which is God is the spirit that punishes you if you make poor sacrifices.

01:56:36.000 You say, well, what does that mean?

01:56:38.000 It's like, are you giving it your all or not?

01:56:41.000 Are you playing both sides of the fence?

01:56:44.000 Are you just, you know, chipping in when you have to and trying to go along for a free ride?

01:56:49.000 And that's what happens with Cain.

01:56:50.000 He gets all bitter about it because his sacrifices are rejected.

01:56:55.000 So God is the spirit that rejects false sacrifices.

01:56:59.000 And what happens to Cain?

01:57:01.000 He gets bitter and then murderous and then his descendants become genocidal.

01:57:06.000 That's the Cain and Abel story in like two paragraphs.

01:57:10.000 So then you have the story of Noah.

01:57:13.000 So in Noah, God is the spirit that calls the wise of his time because Noah is portrayed as someone wise in his generations, right?

01:57:22.000 So for his time and place, he's a wise man. 0.99

01:57:24.000 He has the sense that the storms are coming and it's time to batten down the damn hatches. 0.98

01:57:31.000 And so like in your own life, maybe your eyes are open to some degree and you think a storm is coming. 0.99

01:57:38.000 You have an intuition that a storm is coming.

01:57:41.000 Do you prepare or do you ignore that?

01:57:42.000 Because those are your options.

01:57:44.000 If you prepare, then you're manifesting faith in that spirit.

01:57:48.000 So that's the spirit in Noah, in the Tower of Babel.

01:57:53.000 You have God as the spirit that punishes the technological pretensions of mankind.

01:57:59.000 So men get together to build a tower that stretches to the heavens.

01:58:04.000 That's the Tower of Babel. 0.98

01:58:06.000 And they want to do that to replace the transcendence.

01:58:09.000 They want to replace the mystery of being with their own presumptions.

01:58:13.000 And what happens is no one can talk to each other anymore.

01:58:16.000 That's the state we're in right now.

01:58:18.000 That's why Matt Walsh can make a movie that's entitled What is a Woman?

01:58:22.000 We can't even agree on that.

01:58:24.000 That's the Tower of Babel. 0.98

01:58:26.000 And so, then you have the story of Abraham, and God is presented in that story as the spirit that calls the overprotected and privileged, that's Abraham, to the catastrophic adventure of their life.

01:58:44.000 Because that's what happens to Abraham. 0.63

01:58:47.000 You know, he's 83, lives in his father's tent, eats peeled grapes.

01:58:50.000 He doesn't have to do anything.

01:58:52.000 And this voice makes itself manifest within him and says, get the hell up off your comfortable bed.

01:58:59.000 Get out there in the world.

01:59:01.000 Suffer your adventure.

01:59:02.000 And you know, Abraham's life is just, he leaves.

01:59:05.000 It's not like it's...

01:59:07.000 It's no promised land for him.

01:59:08.000 It's like starvation and tyranny and war and the Egyptian rulers conspire to steal his wife and, you know, it's brutal life, but it's life, it's adventure.

01:59:19.000 And so then you think, well, all of this is an attempt to characterize Yahweh.

01:59:25.000 And this is the Jewish God with whom the Jews have a relationship. 0.50

01:59:29.000 All of these stories are an attempt to characterize that.

01:59:31.000 And so you could say, well, what is the spirit that you walk with unselfconsciously in the well-tended garden and the spirit that calls you to adventure and the spirit that punishes tyranny?

01:59:43.000 That would be the Exodus story.

01:59:45.000 What do they have in common?

01:59:47.000 Well, that's Yahweh, whatever that is.

01:59:49.000 And so then there's an attempt to characterize the nature of that spirit.

01:59:54.000 And then there's a twist on that in the New Testament, which is an amazing twist.

01:59:59.000 It's an amazing twist, because the conclusion is that the spirit of Yahweh, portrayed in all these different ways, is the same spirit that calls people to voluntarily bear the catastrophe of their life. 0.70

02:00:15.000 And that that's the union of God and man.

02:00:17.000 That's the idea.

02:00:19.000 So it's a hypothesis.

02:00:20.000 It's like, well, is that the same God?

02:00:22.000 So imagine that, you know, you're confronting Your horizon of possibility and tragedy as bravely and honestly as you can.

02:00:30.000 Well, that's the spirit of Yahweh making itself manifest within you.

02:00:34.000 And if you do that properly, then you can bear up under that load.

02:00:40.000 So, that's a way better story than power.

02:00:46.000 You know, so...

02:00:51.000 And it looks to me like it's looking at it psychologically.

02:00:55.000 I try to strip it to the degree that it's possible of its religious overtones.

02:00:58.000 You can't strip it completely.

02:01:01.000 Because, you know, there's an open question.

02:01:03.000 So imagine that there's a pattern of existence that, you know, Quells your anxiety and gives you hope and unites people.

02:01:13.000 Well, then you have an open question is, well, how much does that reflect the structure of being itself?

02:01:18.000 There's a Greek idea of the logos that's intrinsic in the world, that there's an order in the world, right, that we can discover, and that makes itself manifest from the bottom up.

02:01:29.000 And that's the logos of the world, the logic of the world.

02:01:32.000 And it's certainly possible that The logic of the world as expressed in human existence is the same as this spirit of Yahweh that's transmuted in the New Testament into the Logos.

02:01:48.000 And, you know, what happened, I did a lecture about this at Ephesus in Turkey.

02:01:53.000 That was fun.

02:01:56.000 Which was where the logos was discussed 3,000 years ago, the Greek logos.

02:02:00.000 So what you have in Western culture is you have this Greek idea that there's an intrinsic order in the universe, bottom-up sort of, and then the Christians come along and say, well, there's also an intrinsic order in the psychological realm, and then Western culture is the juxtaposition of those two, 0.69

02:02:17.000 the claim that those are the same thing.

02:02:19.000 And so that would be the same claim as If you honestly and truthfully confront the tragic limitations of your life, you'll discover the truth of the implicit order and that will redeem you.

02:02:36.000 And that's the fundamental claim of science, for example.

02:02:40.000 So even science, insofar as it's a practice, is embedded in this tradition.

02:02:45.000 So, well, that's a way better story.

02:02:49.000 It's the greatest story ever told, man.

02:02:51.000 And this idea that you're putting together...

02:02:56.000 How do you go about structuring something like this?

02:02:59.000 And how do you go about getting people to agree upon the parameters and how it should be implemented?

02:03:09.000 It seems like a massive undertaking.

02:03:12.000 You figure it out as you go.

02:03:13.000 Well, I'll tell you what's happened.

02:03:14.000 Because some of it's already happened.

02:03:17.000 So I was traveling through Eastern Europe.

02:03:19.000 Last year to all these countries that had been communist not that long ago.

02:03:24.000 And I was fortunate because I was meeting like 30 to 50 people in each country.

02:03:28.000 I had a team of people who were setting up meetings for me of cultural and political leaders in each country.

02:03:35.000 And so I'd have dinner with them or an event, you know, and talk to everybody.

02:03:38.000 And I was listening to what their concerns were.

02:03:41.000 And throughout Eastern Europe, it was the same concern.

02:03:44.000 And the concern was, what the hell are you guys toying with in the West?

02:03:48.000 You know, this woke neo-Marxism.

02:03:53.000 They're terrified of that in Eastern Europe because it was just 1989, not that long ago.

02:03:58.000 They said, I don't know what you guys are doing.

02:04:00.000 Don't you know where that goes?

02:04:01.000 Very pro-American, by the way, all through Eastern Europe.

02:04:05.000 Unbelievably pro-American. 0.79

02:04:07.000 And everybody that I met said, like, we're really afraid of what's happening in the West.

02:04:11.000 Can I pause you there for a second?

02:04:12.000 When you say pro-American, what do you mean by that?

02:04:15.000 Like, what about America?

02:04:16.000 They think the fundamental ethos of the U.S. is reliable.

02:04:20.000 What is that fundamental ethos, you think?

02:04:23.000 I think it's the logos, fundamentally.

02:04:26.000 But, you know, if you differentiated that, one of the things that's really quite amazing about the U.S., and I think it's unique, really, is that Your society is fundamentally not envious.

02:04:40.000 Now, there's plenty of envy in it, because that's hard to eradicate, but one thing about you Americans is you're actually capable of admiring success, and you're capable of trying to replicate it for yourselves and your children, and you actually celebrate that.

02:04:54.000 Well, we think it's possible, but there's not a caste system here.

02:04:56.000 That's a faith.

02:04:57.000 Yes.

02:04:57.000 It's a faith.

02:04:59.000 Not only do you believe that that's possible, you believe that it's appropriate.

02:05:03.000 And that's the American dream.

02:05:04.000 And it's celebrated.

02:05:05.000 And celebrated.

02:05:06.000 And that's no different than worshipped, fundamentally.

02:05:08.000 Like, the difference between those words is, like, systematic and trivial.

02:05:13.000 And so that is what is attractive.

02:05:15.000 Yeah.

02:05:15.000 Well, partly, too, because you remember, like, one of the countries I went to visit was Albania.

02:05:19.000 And Albania was the worst of the Soviet countries. 0.97

02:05:22.000 And that's a hard contest to win.

02:05:24.000 Like, there are...

02:05:26.000 Caverns all over Albania that the government dug out because the whole story there was Albania was the richest most desirable country in the world and they were absolutely surrounded by enemies it was like the ultimate paranoid paranoid totalitarian states you know and they're they're not very happy about the devastation that wreaked for 60 years and you know they look to the west to To the best part of the West and think,

02:05:51.000 God, don't lose that, guys.

02:05:52.000 Like, we had the totalitarian utopia, and it wasn't...

02:05:57.000 I wouldn't recommend it.

02:05:59.000 So I'm going through all these countries, and people are telling me this concern they have.

02:06:06.000 And then they also say, well, we feel like we're voices crying in the wilderness, like we're concerned about the direction of the culture war, let's say.

02:06:15.000 If we say anything about it, we get taken out by the mob.

02:06:19.000 But then I went to like 14 countries and everyone said the same thing.

02:06:22.000 And I thought, well, if the same thing is happening in 14 countries, You're not a voice growing in the wilderness.

02:06:29.000 You're just people aren't communicating very well with each other.

02:06:31.000 So I thought, well, why isn't there an international organization that's really centrist, you know, that would attract traditionalist small-c conservatives and classic liberals alike?

02:06:42.000 You know, we don't want the ultra-nationalist types because they go off the deep end in one particular way.

02:06:47.000 And, you know, the radical leftist globalist utopians who are under the The grip of the Marxist idea, that's a very small minority of people.

02:06:58.000 There's a huge number of people in the reasonable middle, but they don't seem to...

02:07:03.000 They've abdicated their responsibility.

02:07:06.000 That's a good way of thinking about it.

02:07:08.000 So then I started talking when I went through Europe.

02:07:10.000 I said, well, you know, I'm thinking about organizing a convention where I could bring people together to talk about A different vision and also maybe to share specific policy ideas that worked.

02:07:23.000 Right?

02:07:23.000 So that's more concrete.

02:07:25.000 And everyone I talked to I'd really be interested in that.

02:07:30.000 I'll change my schedule.

02:07:32.000 I'll do everything I can to help.

02:07:35.000 And that just happened in every country.

02:07:37.000 And so I thought, well, that's weird because, you know, this is a preposterous idea.

02:07:41.000 And what should happen is that people, you know, maybe they're pleased to meet me and they give some lip service to the idea and it just ends there.

02:07:48.000 That's the Destiny of most ideas.

02:07:51.000 That isn't what happened.

02:07:53.000 Then I went to the UK and started talking about it and exactly the same thing happened.

02:07:57.000 People were just like, sign me up, man.

02:07:59.000 What can I do?

02:08:00.000 Then I went to Washington.

02:08:01.000 I talked to the Republican Study Committee about this and they make policy for the Republicans and the same thing happened.

02:08:07.000 A whole bunch of Republicans came up and said, We'll change our schedule, make sure you have the conference at some time when the House isn't sitting so we can attend.

02:08:15.000 Is there anything I can do to help?

02:08:17.000 And I realized then, you know, the conservative types, they're pretty good at implementing.

02:08:21.000 They're pretty good incremental movers because they're conscientious, but they're not very good at vision.

02:08:25.000 And so they get reactionary, you know, and what happens on the Republican side is they're always pointing to the left saying, you go too far, you go too far, but...

02:08:34.000 There's no vision, so it's hard for them to attract young people.

02:08:38.000 But it turns out if you put forward something that approximates an invitational vision, they're just all over that, like in no time flat.

02:08:46.000 So then how to implement it?

02:08:49.000 Well, we got together a group of people in London twice, a very diverse group of people, and we Hashed out these five questions that I presented to you, and everyone basically agreed, despite a wide range of political opinions in the room.

02:09:06.000 Said, yeah, those seem to be the key questions.

02:09:08.000 And then we figured out that we needed to put this forward as an invitation and not as a top-down, you know, compulsion-based, you have to do this or the planet's going to be doomed.

02:09:19.000 It has to be an invitation.

02:09:21.000 And so, and now we're trying to work out the details.

02:09:24.000 And, well, the first real question Move will be to open this up to public participation, to figure out how to do that, to get a dialogue going, but then also to have this conference October 31st, November 1st, and November 2nd in London.

02:09:39.000 And I plan to do three lectures at night there, one on the crisis of the West, one on environmental stewardship, and one on metaphysics.

02:09:52.000 Public lecture to kind of anchor the convention.

02:09:55.000 We've got I think the Apollo in London already set up for that and You know and our goal God willing is that we develop a vision that people Everyone says yeah, I'm in I'm in what can I do instead of the vision being You're emitting too much carbon dioxide there buddy and enough cars and comedians for you Yeah So,

02:10:24.000 we'll see.

02:10:24.000 But the thing that's been striking is how How rapidly this came together and how motivated people were to participate.

02:10:35.000 We had people from Australia, for example, who have lots to do, the people who came. 1.00

02:10:41.000 They flew all the way from Australia for a two-day meeting three weeks ago to discuss this.

02:10:46.000 They were only there for two days.

02:10:47.000 People came from Washington and from all over Europe, and it's weird.

02:10:53.000 But I think the reason is, and you know this, is that What do they say?

02:10:58.000 The people perish for lack of vision.

02:11:01.000 Absolutely, man.

02:11:03.000 And this vision we're being offered is this dire, bloody apocalypse.

02:11:07.000 And, you know, we have to limit our consumption.

02:11:09.000 We have to make energy expensive.

02:11:11.000 Everyone can't have enough.

02:11:12.000 We have to accept limits.

02:11:14.000 There's too many people on the planet.

02:11:16.000 We have to run around like frightened tyrants to clamp everything down.

02:11:20.000 It's like all that's doing, it's demoralizing young men like mad. 0.98

02:11:24.000 You know, young people aren't even having relationships anymore, because especially the men, if they're not bloody patriarchal tyrants, they're virgin raping planetary despoilers. 0.90

02:11:34.000 You know, it's like, what kind of vision is that for young men? 0.98

02:11:38.000 It just makes them sick, you know, and I've seen, believe me, I've seen plenty of that.

02:11:43.000 People are so grateful if you provide them with an alternative that says, you know, that ambitious striving that you have within you, that's something that's making itself manifest in the optimal way as something that's the highest,

02:11:58.000 not just a manifestation of your tyrannical, patriarchal, rapacious nature.

02:12:04.000 That's what we tell young men.

02:12:06.000 Like, non-stop from the time they're three onward.

02:12:10.000 And then what, you know?

02:12:11.000 Then they're all timid shells of themselves, embarrassed about everything they want and do.

02:12:16.000 They don't even have enough spine to approach a woman and try to establish a relationship. 1.00

02:12:23.000 You know, they're in love with Tinkerbell the porn fairy instead. 0.98

02:12:27.000 It's horrible. 0.80

02:12:28.000 And so we're hoping to put forward a vision that That's an invitation, you know, to the table.

02:12:35.000 And with the idea that if we got our act together, especially given our technological power, God only knows what sort of world we could build.

02:12:44.000 You know, but definitely one where there was enough for everybody.

02:12:47.000 Enough of everything basic and enough opportunity, educational resources.

02:12:51.000 I'm working with Bjorn Lomborg on this, so I'm very happy about that because Bjorn, like, he's the real thing, you know.

02:12:58.000 He's done the work and so that's very good to have him on board and Yeah, I really enjoyed talking to him.

02:13:03.000 Yeah.

02:13:04.000 I got a couple other projects underway.

02:13:06.000 How could you have time for other projects if you're doing this?

02:13:09.000 Subsidiary organization.

02:13:11.000 You know, like I got a lot of people around me who are doing their work, you know.

02:13:18.000 So if I don't micromanage and provide people with maximal autonomy and try to get committed people, can distribute the effort, which you have to.

02:13:31.000 As much as possible, and then who knows what's possible, you know?

02:13:35.000 So I'm working with my son.

02:13:38.000 We have this app called Essay, which we launched back in November, that teaches people how to write while they use it.

02:13:44.000 He just developed Dark Mode for that.

02:13:46.000 That was released this week, and we got about 8,000 subscribers on that.

02:13:50.000 Dark Mode?

02:13:50.000 Dark Mode, you can use it at night without blinding yourself.

02:13:54.000 So it teaches you how to...

02:13:56.000 It teaches you how to write while you use it.

02:13:59.000 It's a word processor, but it teaches you how to write and to think because if you learn to write, you learn to think.

02:14:04.000 And it teaches you how to edit, you know, to concentrate on each word, to evaluate every phrase, to evaluate every sentence, to evaluate the organization of sentences within paragraphs and paragraphs within sequenced properly within the essay and to think about how to produce A set of thoughts and then how to critically evaluate them.

02:14:24.000 So that's fun.

02:14:25.000 That's going very well.

02:14:26.000 We have, like I said, about 8,000 subscribers now and about, I think it's about 80,000 users.

02:14:33.000 And so that's a good project because we'd like to teach a million people to write.

02:14:38.000 I think the ordinary person, if they used essay instead of a standard word processor, the first thing they wrote would be the best thing they ever wrote, right off the bat.

02:14:49.000 Because we built the tools right into the software.

02:14:52.000 It steps you through the process of writing.

02:14:54.000 How so?

02:14:55.000 Well, one of the features, for example, is...

02:14:58.000 So imagine that you want to write about something, whatever it is.

02:15:05.000 The first question is, what problem are you trying to solve?

02:15:08.000 What's the question here?

02:15:09.000 And then there's an injunction in the documentation.

02:15:13.000 If the question that you're trying to solve doesn't grip you, then you're starting the whole bloody thing off with a lie.

02:15:19.000 It has to be something you care about.

02:15:21.000 It has to be something that grips you.

02:15:23.000 So it has to be a question you want to answer to, like the questions you ask in the podcast.

02:15:27.000 Then what?

02:15:27.000 Well, then you write down what you think.

02:15:30.000 And if you don't know enough, go read.

02:15:32.000 And then write down what you think.

02:15:33.000 And don't worry about ordering it.

02:15:34.000 Just get it down.

02:15:36.000 And then it steps you through.

02:15:37.000 It's like, okay, here's a paragraph you wrote.

02:15:40.000 We'll break the paragraph into sentences.

02:15:44.000 Now, here's a little box that opens up.

02:15:46.000 Write five variants of the sentence.

02:15:49.000 Shorten it.

02:15:49.000 Make it more concise.

02:15:51.000 Write five variants that makes that sentence precise.

02:15:54.000 When you get a better sentence, hit click and it'll snap into the essay.

02:15:58.000 Then there's another module that helps you move the sentences around.

02:16:02.000 So here's your paragraph.

02:16:03.000 Well, maybe there are too many sentences in it and the sentences aren't in the right place.

02:16:08.000 Order the sentences so that each paragraph is like a little coherent essay.

02:16:12.000 And so then do the same thing with the paragraphs.

02:16:14.000 If you run through the...

02:16:15.000 So we ask people, separate production from editing.

02:16:19.000 Get the question right.

02:16:21.000 Do your research.

02:16:22.000 Separate production from editing.

02:16:25.000 Overproduce, then edit.

02:16:27.000 Edit for words.

02:16:28.000 Did you use the right word?

02:16:31.000 Is every word the right word?

02:16:33.000 Is every phrase the right phrase?

02:16:36.000 Are the phrases organized into proper sentences?

02:16:39.000 Are the sentences sequenced properly?

02:16:40.000 And so that's the editing.

02:16:42.000 And there's no difference between that really and critical thinking.

02:16:45.000 So that's the...

02:16:47.000 That's the essay app.

02:16:48.000 And I used that process for my students, earlier iterations of this, and by the third draft of the essays they wrote, there was the best essays they ever wrote in their life.

02:16:58.000 Like, this actually works.

02:16:58.000 It's how I write, by the way, for whatever utility that might be.

02:17:02.000 You know, it is how I write.

02:17:04.000 I tried to formalize that.

02:17:06.000 And then with my daughter, Michaela, I've started this Peterson Academy, and our plan, this is a funny plan, we want to drive the cost of a bachelor's degree down to $4,000.

02:17:17.000 And so we've got 30 professors on board so far.

02:17:20.000 I've been able to identify stellar lecturers from all over the world.

02:17:23.000 We bought a studio in Miami.

02:17:25.000 We have the professors come there.

02:17:27.000 We try to be very hospitable and to treat them well, which doesn't generally happen at universities, by the way.

02:17:32.000 And they lecture four...

02:17:36.000 They give four two-hour lectures on whatever they really want to teach about.

02:17:40.000 And we just...

02:17:41.000 They have a lot of autonomy.

02:17:42.000 We're not constraining them.

02:17:44.000 The rule is we'll put an audience together for you in the studio.

02:17:48.000 We want you to teach what you love at the edge of your ability.

02:17:52.000 And we'll offer that to as many people as we possibly can.

02:17:56.000 We're pursuing accreditation through a variety of different avenues.

02:18:00.000 So we hope to be able to...

02:18:01.000 What we'll do is take two or three of those eight-hour lectures, bundle them together.

02:18:06.000 That'll give you one university credit.

02:18:08.000 We want to get actual credit for it.

02:18:11.000 And then we're planning as well, we hope...

02:18:13.000 So imagine we charge tuition and we'll try to keep that low cost.

02:18:19.000 Like I said, we want to knock the cost of the whole degree down to $4,000.

02:18:23.000 That's 95% reduction in cost.

02:18:25.000 That's the plan.

02:18:26.000 And then if you're in the developed world, we'd like to offer you the opportunity to pair yourself with a student in the developing world.

02:18:34.000 Who couldn't afford it, and we'll give them the opportunity for free, but they'll be like your partner.

02:18:41.000 So that should produce some interesting partnerships between people, you know, but also give people who don't have access to high-quality university-level education a real in.

02:18:53.000 And we are talking to some different institutions, you know, mortar and brick institutions, about how accreditation might be Pursued and how we could partner with them to also offer people other elements of the university experience that you can't easily virtualize.

02:19:07.000 And we've developed a good app that adds a social component to it so that people can discuss the lectures while they're watching them and, you know, can make social contacts and maybe have meetup groups in different cities.

02:19:20.000 So we want to universalize higher education.

02:19:23.000 And then we're going to set the grading system in stone.

02:19:28.000 So the grade you'll get for this university will be your performance.

02:19:32.000 So there will be no grade inflation.

02:19:35.000 So what we're hoping too is that if...

02:19:39.000 We're going to also, you know, amalgamate it with this essay program so that all our graduates will be able to write.

02:19:44.000 We're hoping that a degree from this university will indicate to employers a true level of competence.

02:19:51.000 And so that's the plan.

02:19:53.000 And we've got, like I said, we have 30 professors on board already.

02:19:56.000 I recorded three lectures for it now.

02:19:59.000 One on the Sermon on the Mount, so that was really fun.

02:20:02.000 One on It'll be a two-part one, but I did the first half of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, and I did an eight-hour summary of my book, Maps of Meaning.

02:20:12.000 And so we have all sorts of other people who are, you know, from Cambridge and Oxford and Stanford and MIT, and then people from outside the academy, too, who are brilliant.

02:20:21.000 Jonathan Paggio just did a series on symbolic thought.

02:20:25.000 He's absolutely brilliant.

02:20:27.000 Deepest religious thinker I've ever met.

02:20:30.000 Old Testament prophet, man.

02:20:32.000 Something to see.

02:20:33.000 So we're going to roll that out, we hope, in November.

02:20:37.000 And, you know, I'm working with The Daily Wire and that seems to be going great too.

02:20:40.000 They've been great partners.

02:20:43.000 They leave me the hell alone.

02:20:44.000 I can still do my YouTube channel and offer it for nothing.

02:20:48.000 You know, I do some extra work for them behind the scenes.

02:20:50.000 I do a 30-minute interview after my YouTube interviews and put that behind the paywall.

02:20:55.000 And I've done a bunch of documentaries for them, some on Western civilization.

02:21:00.000 They've been really good partners.

02:21:02.000 Like I said, they leave me alone and they help me.

02:21:04.000 That's a pretty good deal.

02:21:06.000 So, and my wife and I are cruising all around the world, you know, doing these lectures all the time.

02:21:13.000 That's fun.

02:21:14.000 It's ridiculously entertaining.

02:21:17.000 And she's getting really good at it, too.

02:21:19.000 She opens the show.

02:21:20.000 She usually tells about a 10-minute story about one of the rules from my latest book.

02:21:24.000 Ties that in with her life.

02:21:25.000 She's getting to be a real good public speaker. 1.00

02:21:27.000 So that's really fun.

02:21:28.000 She's got a good comedic touch. 1.00

02:21:30.000 And my son's going to tour with us starting on the 30th.

02:21:33.000 He's a musician, and I've had a musician.

02:21:36.000 David Cotter opened my shows for the last 30 lectures, and he plays classical guitar.

02:21:41.000 So he does a 20-minute set while everyone's coming in to sit down, you know, and so that kind of sets a nice tone for the lecture, and then we do this exploration of an idea, and I do a Q&A with my wife, and that's the lectures.

02:21:56.000 It's an amazing amount of things you're doing.

02:21:58.000 Like, how do you have this energy?

02:21:59.000 Like, where are you getting all the energy to do all this stuff?

02:22:02.000 It's got to be overwhelming.

02:22:03.000 Well, I'm not sick anymore.

02:22:04.000 That helps.

02:22:06.000 Yeah.

02:22:06.000 Well, you seem better now than you were even when I saw you a while ago.

02:22:13.000 Oh, definitely.

02:22:14.000 I've never done an interview with you where I was healthy.

02:22:18.000 Wow.

02:22:18.000 You know, like the best I ever got with you was about 60%.

02:22:21.000 And so...

02:22:23.000 I'm up about 80% now.

02:22:26.000 You seem great.

02:22:27.000 You seem like completely there.

02:22:29.000 Much better.

02:22:30.000 Well, it's hard to be completely there.

02:22:32.000 And there are people who would debate that.

02:22:35.000 Right.

02:22:35.000 Sure.

02:22:36.000 Yeah, but the lecturers, it's such an adventure.

02:22:40.000 It's so crazy.

02:22:42.000 It's so positive.

02:22:44.000 You know, I don't talk about political things much at the lectures.

02:22:47.000 I'll make a joke now and then.

02:22:48.000 That's about it.

02:22:49.000 But mostly it's metaphysical exploration, you know, exploration of narrative, I would say.

02:22:56.000 And people come there because for the same reason they listen to you, you know, trying to figure something out.

02:23:01.000 Yeah.

02:23:02.000 Well, there's a deep hunger for that because there are a lot of people that don't feel served by the narrative that they're being fed.

02:23:09.000 And they also don't feel like there's anyone around them that they aspire to.

02:23:14.000 There's no one around them that seems to be living a life that looks satisfying or rewarding or attractive.

02:23:21.000 Yeah.

02:23:21.000 And that's more...

02:23:22.000 So one of the things...

02:23:24.000 So I was doing a different lecture every night for about 70 minutes and then doing a Q&A and that was wearing me out because it was sort of like writing a whole book chapter every night, you know, because I really wanted to do something different.

02:23:38.000 And, you know, I draw from stories that I've aggregated.

02:23:40.000 It's not like 100% new content, but it's like variations on a theme.

02:23:45.000 And that was wearing me out.

02:23:46.000 So Tammy suggested at one point that we just try a straight Q&A. And that doesn't take as much preparation.

02:23:53.000 And I kind of like the pressure of having to spontaneously answer.

02:23:57.000 And people like that just as much.

02:24:00.000 And so that made it a bit more sustainable.

02:24:02.000 But what was also cool, and we didn't realize this, people like to see her and I interacting.

02:24:10.000 You know?

02:24:11.000 And that was a real revelation to us both because we were doing it more for reasons of necessity.

02:24:18.000 You know, knowing that people would like the Q&A's, but it simplified things because we're...

02:24:24.000 You know, I don't know how many shows we did last year.

02:24:28.000 200 maybe?

02:24:29.000 Like a lot.

02:24:30.000 All over the place.

02:24:31.000 So it's...

02:24:35.000 You know, man, it's time to get to the next venue and be prepared.

02:24:40.000 So it was tiring.

02:24:41.000 But one of the things that happened was that people seemed really pleased to see us interacting.

02:24:48.000 And we realized that there's a lot of people out there who never really had a good model of couples communication, ever.

02:24:59.000 And that's pretty sad, you know.

02:25:02.000 So, yeah, there's plenty of wandering around in the desert.

02:25:07.000 But I'll tell you something else that's cool.

02:25:09.000 You know, when I first did this back in 2018...

02:25:13.000 Did a meet and greet after and I'd say a third of the people were in pretty bad emotional distress.

02:25:19.000 You know often when they came to meet me after the lectures they were in tears or you know they had some pretty brutal story to relate and it's pretty emotionally grueling to see that night after night and now There's way more women who come, 1.00

02:25:35.000 there's way more couples, and the guys are way more put together.

02:25:39.000 So that's pretty cool.

02:25:41.000 You know, and lots of them, especially the ones that get the meet and greet tickets, they've been listening for five or six years, and they've really been trying to put their lives together.

02:25:49.000 And so most of the stories I hear now are stories like, I was in a pretty rough place, but I started to put my life together, and now I have this girlfriend, and we're getting married, or we're just having our first child, and now I have a business, and here's what I'm doing that's really working, and they're all standing up,

02:26:04.000 and half of them are in suits or three-piece suits, and that's something, man.

02:26:10.000 I mean, that's partly why we keep doing it, Tammy and I, you know.

02:26:13.000 It's like, it's so positive.

02:26:15.000 You think, well, why wouldn't you keep doing that?

02:26:17.000 That's an overwhelming responsibility too, right?

02:26:20.000 Like the feeling behind that, that you've had this enormously positive impact on these people's lives, and then Yeah.

02:26:35.000 Yeah.

02:26:37.000 Yeah.

02:26:41.000 Yeah.

02:26:47.000 Well, some of it's, what would you say, it's utterly unpredictable and it's utterly surreal and entirely predictable, both at the same time, because I knew that what I was dealing with when I was working at Harvard, when I was writing Maps of Meaning,

02:27:03.000 I knew that there was something about that that was core.

02:27:05.000 I knew it.

02:27:06.000 And I could tell partly because of the effect it was having on my students when I was teaching, because I was watching that.

02:27:12.000 The typical comment for my course evaluation was, this course changed the way I looked at everything.

02:27:17.000 And so, and that's a pretty radical claim.

02:27:20.000 And, you know, I had 20 years of that, practicing doing that.

02:27:23.000 And then I started lecturing on TV Ontario, because my classes were popular.

02:27:28.000 And that got an audience.

02:27:30.000 And then, you know, I had a pretty big corpus of work online by the time I objected to Bill C-16.

02:27:35.000 And then, well, that brought a huge audience in, partly for the scandal, but I had all that content.

02:27:43.000 So they came for the scandal but stayed for the content.

02:27:46.000 But there is an element of predictability to it because I am a clinician, so I'm interested in helping people.

02:27:54.000 And that's a deep interest, you know.

02:27:56.000 And part of that's curiosity and part of that's fear of hell, I would say, you know, so to speak.

02:28:04.000 I've always been interested in being an educator.

02:28:06.000 I like lecturing.

02:28:07.000 I like having students.

02:28:08.000 And so, you know, I'm a clinical educator.

02:28:11.000 And then I started playing with YouTube and it turned out that could scale, you know.

02:28:17.000 And then there's this hunger for a uniting narrative that, well, was identified by people like Carl Jung, you know, 60 years ago.

02:28:24.000 So there's an element of it in some way that's inevitable.

02:28:28.000 God died, you know, that's Nietzsche's pronouncement.

02:28:31.000 Well, that sets up a certain kind of stage, a certain kind of hunger.

02:28:35.000 You know, it's the hunger for the revivication of the dead father, in archetypal terms.

02:28:40.000 And that's responsibility, most fundamentally.

02:28:44.000 It's discipline.

02:28:45.000 That's the sort of thing Jocko pushes, you know, on U2 to a large degree.

02:28:50.000 Because young men, they're clamoring for disciplined responsibility, weirdly enough. 0.98

02:28:56.000 And you can't offer that if you think that all male activity is just toxic masculinity, you know.

02:29:02.000 But you're wise enough to know that's not true.

02:29:04.000 And so I saw Jocko last night, by the way.

02:29:06.000 So that was last night or the night before.

02:29:08.000 So that was quite fun.

02:29:09.000 There's a thing that men need.

02:29:12.000 They need difficult tasks, and they need to know that they can overcome difficult tasks.

02:29:16.000 And through that, you develop your human potential.

02:29:22.000 You develop what you're capable of doing.

02:29:24.000 And if you don't encounter those things in life, you remain feeble.

02:29:28.000 Fetal, even.

02:29:29.000 Yeah.

02:29:30.000 And very, not just immature, but insecure.

02:29:35.000 Well, and not just insecure, but insecure, then bitter, then resentful, then dangerous.

02:29:41.000 Right, right.

02:29:42.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.81

02:29:43.000 The alternative, like, weak, insecure, bitter men are not harmless. 0.68

02:29:50.000 No. 0.67

02:29:51.000 No.

02:29:51.000 Quite the contrary.

02:29:52.000 And they try to damage people.

02:29:54.000 Oh, yeah.

02:29:54.000 Yeah.

02:29:55.000 And they try to damage people oftentimes because in comparison to those people they're trying to damage, they feel they come up short.

02:30:03.000 They don't like it.

02:30:04.000 They don't like the feeling.

02:30:05.000 Yeah.

02:30:05.000 And they try to destroy the thing that makes them feel bad.

02:30:11.000 That's Cain and Abel.

02:30:11.000 Yeah.

02:30:12.000 And it's so interesting because in the biblical story, that's the first story about human beings, right?

02:30:18.000 Because Adam and Eve are made by God.

02:30:20.000 They don't count.

02:30:21.000 The first two human beings are fratricidal brothers engaged in a war of envy that degenerates into the flood and the Tower of Babel. 0.88

02:30:31.000 It's stunning.

02:30:33.000 It's stunning.

02:30:35.000 It's so relatable.

02:30:36.000 I mean, if you are a person that, you know, strives to work hard and accomplish things and you have grand ambitions, you will find so many people that try to destroy that.

02:30:48.000 Yeah, but I mean, what's your life like when you go out in public?

02:30:53.000 People are friendly.

02:30:54.000 How often?

02:30:55.000 Mostly.

02:30:56.000 99%, more, more than 99%.

02:30:58.000 But I'm friendly.

02:30:59.000 Yeah, I know, I know.

02:31:00.000 But still, it's remarkable, right?

02:31:02.000 I mean, because you're an axis of contention online.

02:31:08.000 But, I mean, you're very good at handling people.

02:31:11.000 I've watched how you treat people.

02:31:12.000 But it is the case that when you go out in public, I mean, how many bad encounters have you had with people in public?

02:31:18.000 Very few.

02:31:18.000 Very, very few.

02:31:19.000 Right.

02:31:20.000 Well, that's the same with me.

02:31:21.000 Yeah.

02:31:22.000 But it's also like when I'm in public, I'm in public doing my things, you know?

02:31:26.000 What if you're just walking around on the street, though?

02:31:29.000 People are friendly.

02:31:29.000 Yeah.

02:31:30.000 And I suspect that's true wherever you go.

02:31:33.000 Yeah, so it's so interesting, you know, because there are people who...

02:31:38.000 Are motivated, at least in part, and sometimes almost completely by envy.

02:31:42.000 But most people aren't like that, and even the people who are like that mostly aren't like that 100%.

02:31:48.000 Right, that's the thing, right?

02:31:50.000 Is that people are different depending upon the circumstances.

02:31:52.000 And I think most of the people that you would even interact with negatively online, if you choose to interact with them at all, But most of the people that will post things negatively about you online, if you could be alone with them and have a conversation with them, just a one-on-one conversation where you could find common ground.

02:32:08.000 Yeah, like most student activists, if you went to their parents' house for dinner with them, you'd think, well, that kid's like 85% like every other kid.

02:32:19.000 That's a good way of thinking about it, too, you know, because if you don't understand this, you get conspiratorial.

02:32:25.000 Yeah.

02:32:27.000 Imagine there's a system of ideas.

02:32:28.000 We're talking about the system of ideas that might motivate some of the WEF, you know, top-down shenanigans.

02:32:34.000 And we talked about the religious substrate and the idea that the planet has too many people on it. 0.88

02:32:38.000 It's not like there's anybody there who's fully possessed by those ideas.

02:32:44.000 The ideas have a relationship that's part and parcel of the set of ideas.

02:32:50.000 And each person is a partial carrier of those ideas.

02:32:53.000 But if you get 200 people in a room who are partial carriers of that set of ideas, you've got the whole set of ideas there.

02:33:01.000 And that's an animating spirit.

02:33:02.000 Then it acts like a conspiracy.

02:33:04.000 And that isn't to say that there aren't sometimes also actual conspiracies.

02:33:09.000 But it's very...

02:33:11.000 Interest useful to separate out the conspiratorial nature of a set of dynamic ideas from the people who are partial carriers of the ideas.

02:33:23.000 So Carl Jung said at one point, people don't have ideas.

02:33:27.000 Ideas have people.

02:33:29.000 And there's a religious idea that's reflective of that, that the cosmos is a battle between principalities.

02:33:35.000 So that'd be like a battle between spirits.

02:33:38.000 And there's a real truth in that because the culture war we're in right now is a battle of systems of ideas.

02:33:47.000 This is why what's happening on the conservative front, say, in Florida has some danger.

02:33:51.000 It's like, well, we want to ban CRT. It's like, well...

02:33:57.000 That's a war that has to be raged in the realm of the abstract.

02:34:02.000 It has to be raged in, you know, metaphorically in heaven.

02:34:06.000 As soon as you concretize it, you fall prey to the same pathology.

02:34:12.000 You'll end up enabling censors.

02:34:15.000 It has to be debated.

02:34:17.000 Yeah, it has to be discussed.

02:34:18.000 It has to be thrashed out in the realm of ideas.

02:34:21.000 Absolutely.

02:34:22.000 You can't defeat bad ideas.

02:34:24.000 I don't think you can defeat bad ideas with law.

02:34:28.000 You have to defeat bad ideas.

02:34:30.000 I think you have to defeat bad ideas with a better vision, actually.

02:34:33.000 I don't even think you can defeat bad ideas, in some sense.

02:34:58.000 Right.

02:34:59.000 That will adopt these ideas because they seem the most attractive at the time.

02:35:04.000 And it doesn't necessarily mean that that person will hang on to that their whole life.

02:35:08.000 And oftentimes people shed terrible ideas that they've adopted early in their life because they've recognized the flaws.

02:35:15.000 And the only way to recognize the flaws...

02:35:17.000 Well, everyone's like that who doesn't get ossified, you know?

02:35:19.000 Right.

02:35:20.000 And the only way to recognize those flaws is to have those flaws exposed to you.

02:35:25.000 You have to have conversations.

02:35:27.000 You have to think.

02:35:29.000 Yeah, they have to be honest conversations.

02:35:31.000 And you have to have the ability to analyze them.

02:35:33.000 Well, what happens when you have an honest conversation that's engrossing?

02:35:39.000 Is that you're actually optimizing abstract death. 1.00

02:35:42.000 So, you know, maybe your head's full of stupid ideas. 1.00

02:35:46.000 Why are they stupid? 1.00

02:35:48.000 Go act them out and you die. 1.00

02:35:49.000 That's why they're stupid. 1.00

02:35:50.000 Or you suffer. 1.00

02:35:51.000 And so, what you hope happens is you can kill off those ideas before they possess you to the point where you act them out.

02:35:58.000 So what do you do?

02:35:59.000 You go test them in conversation. 0.99

02:36:01.000 And hopefully, you know, you and I, we've been talking all day, and hopefully the consequence of that is that we both come away from this discussion somewhat less stupid and blind than we were. 0.97

02:36:13.000 And the reason that that happened is because each of us have let go of some presumptions that were tyrannical. 0.95

02:36:20.000 You know, not enough to, you know, if you lose your whole system of belief, it just takes you out.

02:36:25.000 You're in the desert.

02:36:26.000 But you can do that optimally.

02:36:27.000 So just the right amount of you is dying.

02:36:30.000 Then you have to do that to sustain your life because to sustain your life biologically, parts of you are dying all the time.

02:36:36.000 Like unrestricted growth is just cancer, right?

02:36:40.000 So you have to optimally die all the time to live.

02:36:43.000 And it's the same on the idea front.

02:36:45.000 And you experience optimal death and growth in meaningful conversation.

02:36:50.000 You know, you can do that while thinking too, but most people think by talking.

02:36:54.000 In fact, thinking is internalized talking.

02:36:57.000 Yes.

02:36:58.000 So most people think by talking.

02:37:00.000 That's one of the dangers of podcasts.

02:37:02.000 You're thinking out loud.

02:37:03.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:37:04.000 Well, but it's also one of the things that makes it exciting, right?

02:37:07.000 Because if it's real, then people are long for the...

02:37:09.000 And it's cool because I kind of do the same thing in my lectures.

02:37:12.000 I don't prepare my lectures.

02:37:15.000 I have a question in mind that I'm trying to answer.

02:37:18.000 Then I go on stage and I try to answer the question or investigate the question at least, you know, and as I've got better at it.

02:37:26.000 Usually what happens is I go a bunch of different places, and then I can snap it together at the end.

02:37:31.000 And that's fun.

02:37:32.000 It's like all these plates are in the air, and you just bring them all together at the end.

02:37:36.000 It's like the final punchline of a comedian set.

02:37:39.000 Exactly like that.

02:37:40.000 Yeah, it is.

02:37:40.000 It's exactly like that.

02:37:41.000 When bits are constructed.

02:37:42.000 It's like a callback.

02:37:43.000 Yeah, and that's what you're trying to do when you're constructing bits.

02:37:46.000 You're trying to figure out how to tie it together optimally.

02:37:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:37:49.000 Well, to dispense with what's unnecessary, right?

02:37:51.000 To get to the gist and to tie it together.

02:37:53.000 And it's so fun.

02:37:54.000 When you can land on your feet.

02:37:56.000 I've been watching Tammy do this when she's learning how to tell a story on stage, you know, and her stories are about 10 minutes long.

02:38:02.000 She has an opening.

02:38:03.000 Here's the problem set.

02:38:05.000 And then she lays out some narrative and says, well, here's, you know, how we could explore this.

02:38:09.000 And now and then she can go and...

02:38:12.000 Snap! 0.99

02:38:13.000 It's nice.

02:38:13.000 Oh, it's so nice.

02:38:14.000 Yeah.

02:38:15.000 It's like, you got to the point.

02:38:16.000 Yeah.

02:38:17.000 And the point, eh?

02:38:18.000 That's the direction.

02:38:19.000 Yes.

02:38:19.000 That's the moral of the story.

02:38:21.000 Yeah.

02:38:21.000 Jokes do that all the time.

02:38:22.000 Yeah.

02:38:23.000 So...

02:38:23.000 That's the goal.

02:38:24.000 I think the closest thing to what I do on stage is probably what stand-up comedians do.

02:38:29.000 You know, although you guys usually run through a prepared set, but you have a universe of potential jokes, right?

02:38:35.000 And my suspicions are that you're watching how the audience is reacting and crafting what you're selecting to, you know, to bring everybody on board.

02:38:45.000 And you want to tell a story that has a narrative arc.

02:38:48.000 It comes to a conclusion.

02:38:49.000 Have you noticed in your podcast that if you're really paying attention to the dialogue that the podcast has a narrative arc all by itself?

02:38:57.000 Yes.

02:38:57.000 It's so cool, eh?

02:38:58.000 Yeah.

02:38:59.000 You'll see, oh, we're halfway done.

02:39:01.000 And then, well, now here's the natural ending.

02:39:04.000 Yes.

02:39:05.000 And that's cool that that narrative emerges just as a consequence of focused attention, but it's definitely the case.

02:39:11.000 Yeah.

02:39:12.000 So...

02:39:13.000 Yeah, it's a very fascinating way to explore life publicly.

02:39:21.000 It's a very fascinating way to explore life publicly and allow other people to take in some of these thoughts and form their own.

02:39:31.000 Because that's what a lot of people are doing.

02:39:33.000 They're listening to this and they're actually thinking about various aspects that resonate with their own life and then applying their own unique view of the world to that.

02:39:46.000 Yeah.

02:39:46.000 And, you know, and seeing how they could maybe use it to enhance them or whatever they disagree on, why they disagree on it, and solidify that position in their mind as well.

02:39:56.000 Yeah, well, and a good podcast does two things at least.

02:40:00.000 It's...

02:40:01.000 It presents people with some new information, which is part of why I love doing podcasts.

02:40:05.000 It's such a privilege, and you know this perfectly well, to call anybody in the world up and say, I'm pretty curious about this, and you look like you know more about that than anyone else in the world.

02:40:15.000 Would you like to talk about it?

02:40:16.000 Then they say yes.

02:40:17.000 It's like, oh, that's a pretty good deal.

02:40:19.000 And so you get to have that experience of learning, but at the same time, You can model the exploration of ideas.

02:40:28.000 And so then people, they learn two things.

02:40:31.000 They learn whatever the facts of the matter are, let's say, but they also learn how to conduct an exploratory dialogue.

02:40:39.000 And both of those, if you can learn those both at the same time, that's perfect.

02:40:43.000 You're basically using the Socratic method of instruction, right?

02:40:48.000 Because the Socratic method was all inquiry.

02:40:51.000 It's like, what do you think about that?

02:40:52.000 What do you think about that?

02:40:53.000 Like, you're not asking the audience, but you are essentially, because you're a proxy for the audience.

02:40:58.000 It's like, I don't know what this means.

02:40:59.000 Do you want to explain it?

02:41:00.000 Well, oftentimes I am too, because I might know what the answer is, but I have to ask it anyway, because I want other people to know it.

02:41:08.000 So instead of saying it, I have to ask.

02:41:11.000 And also, it's like, I want to know how people think and how they come to these conclusions, which is really fascinating.

02:41:17.000 In and of itself, because everyone's path to whatever their own conclusions are are very different.

02:41:23.000 Yes, yes.

02:41:24.000 Well, one of the things you learn in therapy, as a therapist, is you can't really provide people with the answer.

02:41:30.000 So maybe, you know, someone will come to me with a set of problems and I'll think, well, I know how to solve that.

02:41:35.000 I could just tell them.

02:41:36.000 But what happens if you tell them is they just don't do it.

02:41:39.000 So what you want to do is you want to ask them a bunch of questions about the problem and about what they might view as a hypothetical solution.

02:41:46.000 And then they develop the intermediary steps along the way to the conclusion.

02:41:52.000 Then they're actually likely to act it out.

02:41:54.000 Same thing happens with kids.

02:41:56.000 You have to walk people through the process.

02:41:58.000 And, you know, a lot of what we both do, I think, in our podcast is we invite people along for the ride, right?

02:42:05.000 Instead of presenting a package of pre-programmed options.

02:42:10.000 Yeah, of course.

02:42:11.000 You get that a bit because you select the people you talk to, but, well, you can't talk to everyone and you're going to have a viewpoint.

02:42:17.000 So that's, you know, as long as you're not playing games with that or any more than you, you know, than you can avoid.

02:42:24.000 Yeah.

02:42:26.000 Yeah, for me, this has been like an unexpected education in a very bizarre way.

02:42:33.000 When I first started doing it, I didn't think I was going to get educated. 0.98

02:42:36.000 I thought I was just going to have fun with my friends and fuck around. 0.95

02:42:39.000 And then along the line, bringing guests on, then it just sort of evolved on its own. 0.99

02:42:44.000 Yeah, right.

02:42:45.000 I often think that this thing made itself.

02:42:48.000 Yeah.

02:42:49.000 As bizarre as that sounds.

02:42:51.000 Well, okay.

02:42:52.000 Yes and no.

02:42:54.000 It made itself in some way, but you followed the golden thread of what was meaningful and interesting.

02:43:02.000 And that is a spirit.

02:43:05.000 That's the golden thread that leads you out of the maze.

02:43:08.000 You know, and something, you'll be conducting a podcast and something will grip you.

02:43:12.000 And you think, oh, there's something there.

02:43:14.000 And then maybe if you're awake and aware, then you start doing more of that, you know?

02:43:18.000 And that has a life.

02:43:19.000 So that's what happens in the story of Exodus, when Moses encounters the burning bush.

02:43:24.000 Because it's a bush, eh?

02:43:25.000 It's not an oak tree that's 300 feet tall.

02:43:28.000 It's just a bush.

02:43:29.000 And so the story goes, Moses is walking along and something catches his eye.

02:43:33.000 He didn't have to go over and look, but he catches his eye and he thinks, what the hell is that?

02:43:38.000 And then he goes over and he starts to pay attention.

02:43:40.000 And the more he pays attention, the more the voice of God manifests itself to him.

02:43:47.000 That's what that story means.

02:43:48.000 So something catches your interest and glimmers, then that's the gold beckoning in the distance.

02:43:54.000 It captures your interest and then if you pursue that, it leads you into the depths.

02:43:59.000 I don't know if we've talked about this before, but what do you think about those scholars in Israel that believe that the burning bush was some sort of a psychedelic experience?

02:44:10.000 Oh, well, I think we have no idea how psychedelic experience shaped religious presumption.

02:44:18.000 Have you read Brian Murarescu's work?

02:44:20.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:44:20.000 I interviewed him.

02:44:21.000 Oh, yeah.

02:44:22.000 Amazing.

02:44:22.000 Look, we know that the shamanic tradition, which is God only knows how many tens of thousands of years old.

02:44:31.000 You know, it might be, is it millions of years old?

02:44:34.000 Maybe.

02:44:35.000 You know, human beings have been using fire for two million years.

02:44:38.000 Like, it could be really, really old.

02:44:40.000 And the shamanic tradition is definitely a psychedelic tradition.

02:44:47.000 And one of the things Morescu did was show quite clearly that all of Greek culture was Embedded in what looks like a collective psychedelic experience and so Yeah, I think that I think the evidence like Mircea Eliade a great religious scholar studied shamanism and he thought that the use of psychedelics was a Degeneration of the original tradition,

02:45:09.000 but I don't think that's true at all I think that the psychedelic tradition is part and parcel of the universal religious heritage of mankind and like I don't know what that means You know, I've talked to people like Robin Carhart-Harris, who studies the neurology of psychedelic experience,

02:45:25.000 and he said that what it does is produce something akin to a hyper stress experience.

02:45:33.000 So imagine you're extremely stressed, like your life's in danger.

02:45:36.000 And so you have to open yourself up to the possibility of radically new ideas.

02:45:40.000 Well, a psychedelic substance puts you in that state of mind.

02:45:43.000 And so that can be hellish, because you can collapse into, like, a catastrophic fight-or-flight defensive response and magnified by the hallucinogen, and you're just in hell.

02:45:54.000 But that isn't the only necessary outcome.

02:45:57.000 And so the psychedelic experience definitely mimics something like radical learning.

02:46:02.000 And it also seems to...

02:46:05.000 Reduce the effect of memory on perception.

02:46:08.000 Because most of what you see in the world is memory.

02:46:11.000 It's just a short...

02:46:12.000 That's why, you know, when you look at a word, printed word, you read the word.

02:46:15.000 You can't not read the word.

02:46:17.000 That's because you're seeing the memory.

02:46:19.000 You're not seeing...

02:46:20.000 Like when I look at the sign behind you, I'm not lost in the yellow in the details.

02:46:24.000 I see the Joe Rogan experience, right?

02:46:27.000 It's part and parcel of perception.

02:46:28.000 It's all memory.

02:46:29.000 What a psychedelic does, in part, is remove the inhibition of memory from perception.

02:46:35.000 That re-immerses you in the complex world and shows you how remarkable and beyond comprehension everything really is.

02:46:43.000 That's real.

02:46:44.000 But the question is what to do with that.

02:46:48.000 You know, Timothy Leary, his doctrine was turn on, tune in, turn on, tune in, drop out.

02:46:54.000 And that devastated the whole culture, that idea.

02:46:57.000 Well, if we just shed our presuppositions and the whole industrial nightmare, we'd all be freedom-loving hippies wandering around in Eden.

02:47:05.000 It's like, no.

02:47:06.000 I wanted to do a line of psychedelic products.

02:47:10.000 Turn on, tune in, grow up.

02:47:13.000 Right.

02:47:15.000 I think that's much, much, much funnier, much better.

02:47:18.000 Yeah, and that's also possible.

02:47:20.000 That's a possible path through this sort of quest for spiritual enlightenment.

02:47:26.000 The Timothy Leary thing was dismissed by a lot of other psychedelic pioneers of the time.

02:47:34.000 They saw the flaws in that thinking.

02:47:36.000 Oh yeah, definitely.

02:47:37.000 The people who were already experimenting with ideas of proper set, They knew that back in the early 60s.

02:47:42.000 Yes.

02:47:43.000 And also the people that had no desire to run a group of like-minded people, which Leary did.

02:47:50.000 Yeah.

02:47:51.000 He wanted to...

02:47:51.000 He fell into that hippie culture, that hippie counterculture.

02:47:54.000 Also, I think he fell into the cult of personality.

02:47:57.000 He fell into this thing that happens when too many people are paying attention to you.

02:48:01.000 Yeah.

02:48:02.000 And you think you have all the answers.

02:48:03.000 Yeah.

02:48:03.000 It's very dangerous.

02:48:05.000 Yeah, especially if you combine that with psychedelic experience.

02:48:07.000 Yes, yes, yes.

02:48:09.000 That turns out to be a problem.

02:48:11.000 Right, and the intoxicating grip of that, the power that you have over these people, which is very, it's unavoidable.

02:48:19.000 And if you are a guru, you know, air quotes, and you're the person doing that, like, how many of them just start cults?

02:48:26.000 And how many of them, you know, it winds up being sexual?

02:48:29.000 Well, Jung was asked once to comment on psychedelic experience.

02:48:32.000 I think he was asked about what Huxley was doing, and Jung's answer was, beware of unearned wisdom.

02:48:39.000 Right.

02:48:40.000 Very smart.

02:48:41.000 Very smart.

02:48:42.000 Very, very smart.

02:48:43.000 Yeah.

02:48:43.000 Unearned.

02:48:44.000 Unearned wisdom.

02:48:45.000 Almost all wisdom comes at a price and a long, long road to get to that.

02:48:50.000 Yeah, right.

02:48:51.000 Yeah.

02:48:51.000 It's not a quick fix.

02:48:53.000 There's no quick fixes.

02:48:54.000 This idea that you're just going to trip balls and figure it all out.

02:48:57.000 Yeah, and then you've got it.

02:48:59.000 No, that's...

02:48:59.000 No.

02:49:00.000 And everyone that I know that thinks they've figured it out are the most lost.

02:49:03.000 Yeah.

02:49:05.000 Especially the ones that are espousing it to other people.

02:49:06.000 Yeah, if you're lucky, you can come out of an experience like that knowing that, you know, like Socrates, and Socrates may have learned this from psychedelic experience.

02:49:13.000 Seems quite probable because he participated in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

02:49:17.000 Yes.

02:49:17.000 He said, I know that I don't know.

02:49:20.000 You know, he was radically open to the revelation of his own ignorance, and certainly psychedelics can provide that.

02:49:27.000 It's like, oh, I see.

02:49:28.000 I don't have a clue.

02:49:30.000 Yeah.

02:49:31.000 Yeah, that's the first step.

02:49:32.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:49:33.000 That's the first lesson you learn is you don't know shit. 0.98

02:49:36.000 And also just the overwhelming understanding that this is available, that this experience is available, and it's so alien to modern experience, just an average everyday experience. 0.99

02:49:50.000 Behind the veil, man.

02:49:51.000 Yeah, and it's right there.

02:49:54.000 It's so scary for people.

02:49:56.000 Yeah, well, maybe this time, you know, there are wise people working on that front, like Roland Griffiths, who unfortunately is very sick at the moment.

02:50:04.000 And, you know, he's approached this with a lot more reverence and respect than more casual experimenters like Leary.

02:50:13.000 And maybe this time, you know, God willing, we'll get it right and introduce these strange ancient chemicals back into our culture without blowing the lid right off it.

02:50:22.000 Right.

02:50:23.000 And I think one of the best gateways to that is dealing with people who have trauma.

02:50:29.000 Soldiers with PTSD where they're doing MDMA therapy and also other people that have had violent experiences in their life with MDMA. It's helped them to overcome that.

02:50:41.000 Deal with, you know, paralyzing death, anxiety, consequential to cancer diagnosis.

02:50:46.000 You know, and those studies, they're very dry.

02:50:49.000 You know, we gave psilocybin to a group of people who were suffering from cancer and their relationship with death radically transformed.

02:50:57.000 You know, the implication is somehow that's a chemical transformation.

02:51:00.000 And of course, to some degree it is because it was induced by a chemical.

02:51:03.000 But there's a mystery there.

02:51:04.000 It's like...

02:51:05.000 Well, what happened to those people in that six hours that transformed their vision of death?

02:51:14.000 There's a bit of a mystery there.

02:51:16.000 During the most profound psychedelic experiences, are you actually in the presence of God?

02:51:21.000 I mean, are there moments during those things where you kind of see it, you know, that the veil does get lifted and you do briefly for a moment?

02:51:32.000 Well, I think the same thing happens to you to some degree when you fall in love.

02:51:36.000 You know, like when you're in love with your kids, well...

02:51:40.000 You see them better than you've ever seen anyone.

02:51:44.000 You see deeper into them than you've ever seen into anyone.

02:51:46.000 So love is the partial lifting of that veil of ignorance.

02:51:51.000 And I think that's true of romantic love too.

02:51:53.000 You see into the soul of the other person, so to speak.

02:51:56.000 You see what they could be.

02:51:58.000 And they see what you could be.

02:52:00.000 And you fall in love with that possibility.

02:52:01.000 And that's not a delusion.

02:52:03.000 It's not a chemical delusion.

02:52:05.000 It's the basis of life itself.

02:52:07.000 It's real.

02:52:08.000 I think it also applies to all love.

02:52:10.000 Just love for your fellow human being.

02:52:12.000 If you can manage it.

02:52:14.000 Yeah, if you can manage it.

02:52:15.000 But approaching people in that way, even people that have wronged you, even people that are lost, apply...

02:52:23.000 Yeah, it's really good to remember that.

02:52:25.000 You know, one of the things I try to do with my family when we get, you know, sporadically attacked often by people who really would like to, let's say, take me out and along with me, my family, we sit and talk until we find a pathway forward that is characterized by the least amount of,

02:52:43.000 you know, desire for revenge and anger possible.

02:52:47.000 After contemplating the anger and the revenge quite deeply, Because you have to let that voice have its say, too.

02:52:54.000 Yeah.

02:52:55.000 There's no positive outcome in revenge.

02:53:00.000 No.

02:53:00.000 It's a horrible path to go down.

02:53:02.000 Fun as it might be in the moment.

02:53:04.000 Also, there's an extreme desire to feed that monster.

02:53:09.000 Yeah.

02:53:10.000 And that's what's dangerous with people.

02:53:12.000 Yeah, that's for sure.

02:53:13.000 I mean, that's a narrative that's been going on.

02:53:15.000 I mean, it's such a satisfying narrative, too, like the revenge film or the revenge novel.

02:53:20.000 Well, yeah, and it's hard to distinguish that from justice, because you don't want the wrongdoer to escape scot-free.

02:53:26.000 Right.

02:53:26.000 You know, so it's a very thin line, but with regards to your enemies, it's like, well...

02:53:33.000 What do you hope maybe for your enemies?

02:53:35.000 Well, you hope they wouldn't be enemies.

02:53:37.000 That would be good.

02:53:37.000 Wouldn't it be better if they were allies?

02:53:39.000 That would really be good.

02:53:40.000 Would it be okay if they only suffered enough to learn?

02:53:44.000 You know, assuming they're wrong and you're right.

02:53:46.000 And I would be careful about that assumption.

02:53:48.000 But sometimes, you know, you do get attacked by people who are clearly bad actors.

02:53:52.000 It'd still be better if you could have what you really wanted.

02:53:55.000 It'd still be better if they could be transformed into people who could see the light.

02:54:00.000 And oftentimes their suffering is their knowledge that they were wrong.

02:54:03.000 Yeah.

02:54:04.000 And when people have wrongly attacked you and then realize it, they have to realize in themselves this flaw that they have in their personality.

02:54:11.000 Yeah, that's rough.

02:54:12.000 That's hard.

02:54:12.000 Yeah, that's why tyrants double down, man.

02:54:14.000 Yes.

02:54:15.000 That's another thing that's so cool about the Exodus story, isn't it?

02:54:18.000 You know, even when God himself reveals himself to the Pharaoh, essentially, all he does is double down.

02:54:25.000 And you might say, well, that's what tyrants do. 0.99

02:54:28.000 It's like, no, no, that's what people do.

02:54:31.000 When we're talking about groups like the World Economic Forum, don't you think there's also a draw to that point?

02:54:40.000 I don't know if it's people like Trudeau or people that go there.

02:54:44.000 You're with the people that are the big decision makers that are going to be in power.

02:54:52.000 You're with the people that know where the bunker is if the nuclear bombs drop.

02:54:56.000 You're with the people that are making the decisions that are shaping Politics behind the scenes that are manipulating the relationships between corporations and politicians and lawmakers and across the board.

02:55:12.000 And so there's this desire that people always have to be a part of the in-crowd or the part of the secret group that's running things, which is why groups that are running things are so dangerous.

02:55:24.000 Yeah.

02:55:24.000 Well, this is also something that we're concerned about with regard to this new organization.

02:55:28.000 That's what I wanted to bring up.

02:55:29.000 Oh, yeah, man.

02:55:30.000 Absolutely.

02:55:31.000 I mean, the last thing that we're hoping is that we create a new thing that just turns into another WEF in 20 years.

02:55:38.000 Right.

02:55:38.000 You know, regardless of what we want.

02:55:40.000 Right.

02:55:41.000 And it's a tricky problem because there has to be some degree of international communication and consensus, right?

02:55:50.000 We all do live on the same planet and we're pretty integrated now and so there has to be something approximating, well, like I said, an international conversation.

02:55:58.000 But the danger is the Tower of Babel. 0.95

02:56:00.000 And the danger is that even engaging in that conversation, let alone leading it, leading it, you know, just ends up producing exactly the same outcome.

02:56:10.000 And that's, hopefully, we have people who are wise enough To, first of all, not want that for themselves because they know about the danger.

02:56:20.000 You know, the danger is you lose yourself in a real sense.

02:56:23.000 And also who are humble enough with regard to their conception of their own ignorance that they actually do genuinely want to hear what other people have to say.

02:56:39.000 So you need extraordinary people to be a part of this.

02:56:43.000 Then you get looped right back into that problem.

02:56:46.000 You're surrounded by the extraordinary people.

02:56:48.000 I think what you partly want to do is remind yourself that part of the endeavor is to Help everyone reveal what's extraordinary within them.

02:56:59.000 That's there in everyone's job is to call it out.

02:57:02.000 And I've seen extraordinary people in the worst possible circumstances.

02:57:09.000 People who are laboring under lives that were so bloody dreadful that it would take you a year just to describe it, who were still doing everything they could to aim up.

02:57:20.000 Right.

02:57:20.000 Poor people, psychotic people, alcoholic relatives, devastated community, ill, brutalized, horrible childhood, no friends, and still looking around to see if they can find something good to do.

02:57:38.000 And you would never wish those circumstances upon anyone because most people don't survive them.

02:57:44.000 But a few people get through those with incredible character.

02:57:49.000 Yeah, that's for sure.

02:57:50.000 Like Yeonmi Park.

02:57:51.000 Yeah, she's a good example. 0.88

02:57:53.000 An amazing example.

02:57:54.000 Like her childhood, her life experience in North Korea is one of the most horrific stories I've ever heard in my life.

02:58:00.000 But because of that, because of the horrific nature of the experiences that she had, she came out of this with this extraordinary character.

02:58:08.000 I had a friend, Charles Joseph, a native carver from the West Coast.

02:58:12.000 He was in a residential school in Canada and it was one of the ones that were genuinely bad and it was like, it was bad.

02:58:18.000 It was like Auschwitz level bad. 0.90

02:58:20.000 It was really bad.

02:58:21.000 And he was brutalized, man.

02:58:23.000 You can't listen to him talk for 10 minutes without like the tears rolling down your eyes.

02:58:27.000 And, you know, he was devastated when he emerged.

02:58:31.000 But he put himself together.

02:58:33.000 You know, he was on the street for a while, quit drinking, quit mucking about, started carving, like turned himself into quite the stellar creature, you know, amazing.

02:58:43.000 Again, you would never wish that on anyone.

02:58:45.000 But it's incredible how through that adversity you create this extraordinary person.

02:58:51.000 And that extraordinary person could be a great light to so many other people that are going through terrible times and define themselves by the terrible circumstances that they find themselves in, which is a real problem with people.

02:59:02.000 Yeah, well, that's part of that victim narrative.

02:59:04.000 Yeah.

02:59:05.000 You know, and one of the things that's so comical about the Exodus narrative is that that's really what happens to the Israelites when they're in the desert, is they turn into whiny, backbiting victims.

02:59:15.000 That's what happens.

02:59:16.000 And it's like, it's the same thing 3000 years ago.

02:59:19.000 It's like, we don't know where we are.

02:59:20.000 We're lost.

02:59:20.000 We're resentful about it.

02:59:22.000 We wish the tyranny would return.

02:59:24.000 And aren't we hard done by and gossipy?

02:59:31.000 Same old story, man.

02:59:33.000 It really is the same old story.

02:59:34.000 And this constant quest for meeting and understanding and fulfillment and a life worth living.

02:59:42.000 I think the thing that's really been catalyzed for me You know, over the course of my life, but particularly in the last five or six years, is that I don't think there is anything more real than that meaningful story.

02:59:55.000 And I mean real in every way.

02:59:57.000 I mean real as a manifestation of the central structure of the material world, real metaphysically, real psychedelically, real practically, like real.

03:00:09.000 And I think that instinct that orients you towards meaning That's the deepest connection you have to what is most real.

03:00:18.000 You know, because people say, well, life isn't meaningful in its essence.

03:00:21.000 That just means you're a reductionist, materialist atheist in your initial presuppositions.

03:00:27.000 It's easy to flip that and say, no, no, the instinct that orients you towards engagement and meaning, that is the most real thing there is.

03:00:34.000 Yes.

03:00:34.000 And I believe that.

03:00:35.000 It's also what helps you stay on the straight and narrow when you're in pain.

03:00:41.000 So, how can anything be more real than that?

03:00:43.000 You know, what orients you when you're suffering?

03:00:45.000 There's a definition of real.

03:00:47.000 Real is that which orients you properly when you're suffering.

03:00:51.000 So, you know, that's not the same claim as, you know, the object's real.

03:00:57.000 It's a different idea.

03:00:59.000 But it's still real.

03:01:00.000 It's more real.

03:01:01.000 It's very real.

03:01:02.000 Yeah.

03:01:03.000 And we are, I mean, the thing that we have in common is we're all just human.

03:01:08.000 And if we're all human, there's always going to be this weirdness to existence and trying to figure out why and what it is.

03:01:16.000 And also recognizing that some of the people that have defined why are so inherently flawed and they're very selfish in their definitions.

03:01:23.000 And, you know, you have to kind of sort that out and parse through it.

03:01:28.000 And one of the things that's been amazing about having a podcast is to present people with these different minds that have found their own way through it.

03:01:39.000 Yeah.

03:01:40.000 Yeah, that's funny.

03:01:41.000 Yeah.

03:01:42.000 That's what I loved about being a clinician, too, is to see how different and crazy and strange and interesting people really are if you listen to them.

03:01:51.000 It's like, you know, I had lots of clients in my practice who were pretty They weren't people who would ever be put on a pedestal.

03:02:03.000 You know, they were people who were in the dirt suffering away.

03:02:06.000 But man, if you listen to them, they were so interesting that you just could hardly stand it.

03:02:11.000 So that was a good thing to learn.

03:02:14.000 And that you see, you know, you find gold in very unexpected places.

03:02:19.000 Like I learned a lot from some of my most damaged clients.

03:02:22.000 I would imagine that.

03:02:25.000 Just what's possible.

03:02:26.000 Yeah, well, and how much people could still strive towards what was good, even if they had every reason to be...

03:02:33.000 You know, I had clients whose lives were so terrible, you'd think no matter what they did, you'd think, yeah, it's no wonder you did that, because look what you went through.

03:02:40.000 Right.

03:02:40.000 But they didn't turn out to be serial sexual slayers.

03:02:45.000 Our prisons are filled with people like that, right?

03:02:47.000 Yep.

03:02:48.000 Yeah.

03:02:50.000 Well, Jordan, we just did another three hours.

03:02:52.000 It flew by in ten minutes.

03:02:53.000 Yep.

03:02:54.000 Good to see you, Joel.

03:02:55.000 It's great to see you.

03:02:56.000 Thank you very much for the invitation, man.

03:02:58.000 It's always a pleasure to come see you.

03:02:59.000 The moment that that was happening, I had to reach out to you because I'm like, this is just so bizarre and crazy and it just needs to be discussed.

03:03:07.000 Well, like I said, it was your fault.

03:03:08.000 Yeah, it's my fault, so I had to have you on.

03:03:10.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

03:03:11.000 Alright, let's go get something to eat.

03:03:12.000 Alright, man.

03:03:13.000 So, when this does launch, and when it's official, and we can talk about it further, we will.

03:03:18.000 Yep, good, good.

03:03:19.000 Thank you, my friend.

03:03:20.000 You bet.

03:03:20.000 Appreciate you.

03:03:21.000 Good to see you.

03:03:22.000 Bye, everybody.

03:03:22.000 Bye, everyone.

The Joe Rogan Experience - January 28, 2023

Joe Rogan Experience #1933 - Jordan Peterson

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