The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2180 - Jordan Peterson

00:00:13.000 You don't use headphones, huh?

00:00:16.000 Messes up my hair.

00:00:18.000 Good to see you.

00:00:19.000 What's going on in your coat today?

00:00:22.000 Every day is a new one.

00:00:24.000 Yeah, well, I've got this suit maker, LGFG Dimitri, the crazy Russian, and he, you know, pays attention to what I'm doing and makes me the suits that he thinks are suitable, and I wear them. 0.99

00:00:39.000 You've gotten quite extravagant, though.

00:00:40.000 Like, sometimes, like, one half of the suit is one color.

00:00:43.000 Yep.

00:00:43.000 Like, it looks like you're getting bored.

00:00:45.000 You just want to switch it up a lot. 0.98

00:00:47.000 He sends me these damn things, and I get them, and I think, there's no way I wear that. 0.99

00:00:51.000 There's no way I'll wear that. 0.99

00:00:52.000 And then I put it on, and I think...

00:00:55.000 I like that.

00:00:56.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:00:58.000 And Tammy puts up with it. 1.00

00:00:59.000 Is it everyday suits now with you?

00:01:02.000 I'm in a suit pretty much all the time.

00:01:04.000 Is there a reason for that?

00:01:06.000 Well, the original reason was probably because of my father.

00:01:10.000 He was a teacher.

00:01:12.000 And he always wore a suit, even in the 70s when that started to become, you know, like 1950s thing.

00:01:18.000 And I asked him one time why he did that, and he said it was to show respect for his students.

00:01:23.000 And then when I was a professor, Well, when you start to be a professor, you're not that much difference in age from your students to begin with.

00:01:33.000 It's a good way of laying out a demarcation.

00:01:36.000 And that was helpful.

00:01:37.000 That's useful.

00:01:38.000 You know, people like to know how the hierarchies are delineated.

00:01:42.000 Professors like to think that they're everybody's buddy, but that's not the right relationship.

00:01:47.000 And so that was helpful.

00:01:48.000 And then when I went on tour, In 2018, I realized that I was going to speak live in front of several hundred thousand people over the course of the tour, and I thought, you've got to think when you have an opportunity like that, that if you had the least amount of sense,

00:02:04.000 you'd pull out all the stops.

00:02:06.000 So I bought some expensive suits.

00:02:08.000 And then one of the things that happened in consequence of that was that people started to come to the lectures in suits.

00:02:15.000 And so about, I'd say about 40% of the audience dresses formally.

00:02:19.000 And lots of the young guys who come, they tell me when I meet them afterwards, in the meet and greets, for example, that they bought their first suit to come to the lectures.

00:02:27.000 And so...

00:02:28.000 You know, I wouldn't have ever expected that.

00:02:30.000 And then Dimitri showed up about two years ago with this portfolio of suits.

00:02:34.000 He designed one for each of the rules for my first book.

00:02:37.000 And he put the rule underneath the collar at the back and designed the lining, custom lining on all the suits as well.

00:02:45.000 And so I gave him a crack at it because he put so much work into it.

00:02:49.000 And that worked out real well.

00:02:50.000 He's very, very creative.

00:02:52.000 Yeah, that two-color suit, there's lamb's wool on one side and goat's wool on the other, and it's a heaven and hell suit.

00:03:03.000 Yeah, no kidding, eh?

00:03:05.000 And this is covered with iconography, Christian or Catholic and Orthodox.

00:03:10.000 I've got one of each, and that's because I was out on tour with my new book, for my new book, which is called We Who Wrestle With God, which we all talk about.

00:03:19.000 Today, I hope.

00:03:21.000 How does one wrestle with God?

00:03:24.000 Do you wrestle with God?

00:03:26.000 With every word.

00:03:30.000 So what does that mean?

00:03:31.000 Well, look, man.

00:03:32.000 Well, you know, look.

00:03:35.000 Part of the reason that you're so successful, in my opinion, is because you actually say what you think.

00:03:42.000 Like, you're not putting on a show.

00:03:44.000 Actually, you have no reason to put on a show.

00:03:47.000 You put on a whole bunch of shows and they've already been successful.

00:03:50.000 And you're actually asking the questions that are genuine questions and people can trust you because of that.

00:03:56.000 And that means that you're letting the words emerge as they come to you.

00:04:02.000 Doing that with each word, that's a decision.

00:04:04.000 Because you can use your language to manipulate and you can use your language for your own, say, hedonistic purposes or to gain power.

00:04:12.000 Or you can just say what you think.

00:04:15.000 Like, all of those different choices are a decision.

00:04:17.000 That's a wrestling. 0.86

00:04:18.000 That's a moral decision.

00:04:19.000 And it shines in every word.

00:04:22.000 And so it's super important.

00:04:24.000 That's part of the reason why in the Christian canon, the word is the basis of reality, right?

00:04:29.000 It's the force that...

00:04:30.000 It's the process that generates the order that's good out of possibility and chaos, right?

00:04:37.000 And so that's...

00:04:38.000 And Israel, the word Israel, means we who wrestle with God.

00:04:43.000 So that's the chosen people, right?

00:04:45.000 And so what that means, at a deeper level even, is that If you're genuinely wrestling with your conscience, then you're someone who's chosen by God.

00:04:58.000 And I think that's right.

00:05:01.000 That's accurate.

00:05:03.000 It's interesting what you just said.

00:05:04.000 One of Terence McKenna's lectures, he talked about a very profound psychedelic experience that he had where he was given this revelation that the world is made out of words.

00:05:18.000 That everything is made out of words.

00:05:20.000 He had just some sort of a profound understanding of what words really mean.

00:05:26.000 Well, how much of the reality that surrounds you has been, what would you say, has emerged out of the realm of possibility because of what you've said.

00:05:38.000 A lot.

00:05:39.000 And you have this huge influence on the world that's all a consequence, all, all, almost all a consequence of what you've said.

00:05:47.000 And so there's an insistence in the Judeo-Christian canon that whatever, that the capacity that words have to shape possibility is akin or identical to the process that generates reality itself.

00:06:02.000 And I think that's true.

00:06:05.000 That's why in the Opening chapters of Genesis were described as formulated in the image of God, or like a microcosm of the process that gives rise to order itself.

00:06:18.000 It's a very different view than the It's a different way of looking at things.

00:06:27.000 It's the notion that what is in front of you is a field of indeterminate possibility.

00:06:33.000 It's got some implicit structure, as the scientists insist, but it's open and You grapple with it, like you grapple with your dawning conscience in the morning, consciousness in the morning.

00:06:47.000 What confronts you in the morning is a field of possibility, and you approach that with a certain kind of orientation.

00:06:57.000 And you use your words and your linguistic capacity to think to shape that possibility.

00:07:03.000 And if you do that properly, then you make, this is the Genesis 1 insistence again, you make the order that's good or very good.

00:07:10.000 And that depends on your orientation.

00:07:12.000 So in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, which is an instruction manual, Christ tells his listeners how to orient themselves in the world properly.

00:07:22.000 So he says first, Aim with all your heart at the highest good you can imagine.

00:07:29.000 Now, you'll get better at that as your vision clears, but that's the orientation.

00:07:32.000 To do what's right.

00:07:34.000 Now, you might say, like Pontius Pilate said, well, what is right?

00:07:38.000 What is truth?

00:07:40.000 Most people know the difference between right and wrong.

00:07:43.000 You know at least step by step what would move you forward and upward.

00:07:47.000 So you orient yourself to the highest possible upward place.

00:07:52.000 Then you make the assumption that other people have the same intrinsic value that you do.

00:07:56.000 So that's your initial aim and presumption.

00:07:59.000 And then you pay attention to the moment.

00:08:01.000 And that's Well, that's often the statement that gets Christ confused with the hippies, you know, to consider the lilies of the field who don't toil or spin.

00:08:12.000 But that's not the instruction.

00:08:14.000 The instruction is to aim up with everything.

00:08:17.000 And then...

00:08:18.000 Having that firmly in mind, to pay attention, as much attention as you can, to each moment, to allow the words to come to you that best suit that upward aim, not to subordinate your language to your own machinations or manipulations, or your own hedonistic desire,

00:08:35.000 but towards what's right.

00:08:37.000 And if you do that, then what emerges out of possibility is akin to the garden, to the original garden in In Genesis 1, and it's the order that's good.

00:08:49.000 Truthful language brings about the order that's good.

00:08:52.000 And that's...

00:08:54.000 Well, that's a very accurate way of portraying the role consciousness plays in bringing about reality.

00:09:04.000 And that viewpoint, by the way, isn't limited to the Judeo-Christian canon.

00:09:10.000 You see the same thing in the Taoist representation, because in the Taoist world you have a domain of order.

00:09:17.000 That's the black serpent and you have a domain of chaos.

00:09:20.000 Sorry, I haven't reversed.

00:09:21.000 The domain of order is the white serpent and the domain of chaos or possibility is the black serpent in the Taoist image, the two snakes head to tail.

00:09:31.000 And your job is to walk the line between them and you can tell when you're walking that line because that's where things are maximally meaningful.

00:09:38.000 And so that's another element of this vision which is that if you orient yourself with upward aim And you straddled the line between order and chaos, then things become maximally meaningful around you.

00:09:54.000 And Musk, you know, I just did a podcast with Elon Musk, and he talked about resolving his existential crisis, the existential crisis that he experienced when he was about 11 or 12. It was a crisis of faith, essentially.

00:10:09.000 And the way that he resolved that and then Motivated himself so intensely was by understanding that if he pursued the path of the expansion of knowledge, that that would be intrinsically meaningful.

00:10:25.000 That's the path of growth.

00:10:26.000 That's the path of adventure.

00:10:28.000 All of that.

00:10:29.000 It's aligned with what matures you and makes you more responsible and sets the world in order.

00:10:36.000 And the instinct of meaning signifies all that.

00:10:41.000 And so I've written a lot about that in this new book, We Who Wrestle with God, and that's what I've been lecturing about in 60 different cities, walking through these biblical stories one by one, partly because we have this wrestling match going on in our culture,

00:10:59.000 let's say, between the nihilists and the atheists and the true believers, you might say, and one of the faults of that war is that No one stops to elucidate or delineate exactly what it is that we're arguing about.

00:11:18.000 So you have people like Dawkins, they parody the traditional conceptions of God A superstitious being, nothing more than a defense against death anxiety or the opiate of the masses,

00:11:34.000 the old man in the sky.

00:11:36.000 The conceptualization of God in the Old Testament and the New Testament is unbelievably sophisticated.

00:11:43.000 And to reduce it to that kind of parody is a stunning disservice.

00:11:47.000 Duck is an odd duck.

00:11:50.000 He's an odd duck because I think he knows also that there is some value in psychedelic experiences, but he's scared to have them.

00:11:58.000 He won't look through Galileo's telescope.

00:12:01.000 Yeah, but he's had major health crises, right?

00:12:05.000 Didn't he have some sort of a stroke or something like that?

00:12:08.000 I don't know.

00:12:09.000 I don't know.

00:12:09.000 I believe he did.

00:12:10.000 I believe he had a major health crisis.

00:12:14.000 How much time do you have left?

00:12:16.000 What are you going to do?

00:12:18.000 Are you going to just not try it forever?

00:12:20.000 Are you just going to dismiss everything forever?

00:12:23.000 And I feel like people that dismiss things like this reductionist perspective, you're essentially saying you have the answers.

00:12:36.000 To dismiss the whole question of God or whatever you want to call it, higher power, a creator of the universe, the universe itself as a conscious entity, whatever it is, to dismiss it just because you're trying to decipher the writings of Of fairly comparatively unsophisticated people,

00:13:02.000 because we're talking about people from many, many thousands of years ago without access to the information we have today.

00:13:08.000 And then you're also dealing with the fact that many of these stories were of an oral tradition for over a thousand years before they were ever written down.

00:13:17.000 So, to just dismiss that as superstition and silliness without any curiosity about the root of these things, why they resonate with people, and to just say that this is superstitious nonsense that people choose to believe in,

00:13:35.000 and this reductionist perspective of the known reality that we currently exist in. 0.79

00:13:42.000 It's a foolish way of interfacing with something, and it's shocking when an obviously brilliant man has a foolish way of interfacing with a very complex situation.

00:13:55.000 Well, it's especially odd in his case because he's also the formulator of the idea of meme. 0.93

00:14:01.000 And a religious story is a meme that's been selected by time and crowd.

00:14:10.000 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:14:13.000 It strikes to the heart of the matter in ways that are sophisticated beyond conscious understanding.

00:14:20.000 Can I tell you a story?

00:14:22.000 Sure.

00:14:22.000 Okay.

00:14:22.000 It's a good story for the psychedelic experience, perhaps, at least as an analog.

00:14:27.000 So, in the story of Exodus, there's a number of circumstances under which Moses has an encounter with God, and they're very useful Stories to understand because they point you to how that can make itself manifest in your own life.

00:14:44.000 So the first real encounter that Moses has with God is in the story of the burning bush.

00:14:50.000 And by this time, Moses is an adult.

00:14:53.000 He's left his home.

00:14:55.000 He's gone out and he's got married.

00:14:57.000 He's apprenticed as a shepherd, which was a very, very hard job in those days because shepherds not only had to protect the weakest and serve them, but also keep the lions and the wolves at bay by themselves out in the wilderness.

00:15:10.000 It was a very hard job.

00:15:11.000 And Moses has mastered this.

00:15:13.000 So he's grown up and he's adopted a role that's like a standard social role.

00:15:19.000 You know, he's a husband, he's a shepherd, he's an adult.

00:15:24.000 Okay, and so...

00:15:26.000 Kudos to him.

00:15:27.000 But then one day he's out in the wilderness by the holy mountain.

00:15:32.000 I think it's Horeb in that story, but the holy mountain is always the place where heaven and earth touch.

00:15:37.000 And so there are all sorts of transformation stories that occur in the biblical accounts at Mount Horeb or at Mount Sinai, where God and earth meet.

00:15:46.000 And he's out near the holy mountain and something attracts his attention.

00:15:52.000 And he goes off the beaten path to investigate.

00:15:54.000 Okay, so that's the first thing, that's the first bit of wisdom to derive from the story.

00:15:59.000 You'll have your role, and you should have your role as a socialized adult, right?

00:16:05.000 So you're kind of a type that way.

00:16:06.000 You're maybe even a cookie-cutter type, but you've adopted this mature social role.

00:16:14.000 It hasn't made you a full individual, but it's better than being...

00:16:17.000 Immature and staying in your father's tent, for example, which is what Abraham does until he's very old. 0.99

00:16:23.000 So something attracts Moses' attention and he goes off to investigate.

00:16:28.000 Okay, so and then he sees that it's a burning bush.

00:16:31.000 And so what's a burning bush?

00:16:33.000 Well, it's the tree of life and life is often represented as a branching tree and it's on fire because it's compelling because fire is compelling and fire is alive and It's a symbol of life because everything that is alive burns.

00:16:46.000 That's what metabolism is and so a burning bush is like life itself intensified to the ultimate degree and that's what attracts Moses' attention and he gets closer and closer to it which means he investigates more and more deeply and as he investigates more deeply he starts to understand that he's nearing the depths.

00:17:03.000 He's on sacred ground.

00:17:05.000 He takes off his shoes and that's an indication of his willingness to transform in identity and he continues to investigate and then the voice of being itself speaks to him from the depths and it tells him that it reveals itself to him as the ground of being itself and it transforms him into the leader who He invites his people away from slavery and who stands up against tyranny.

00:17:33.000 And so that's the story of Moses' baptism.

00:17:37.000 And so what does that mean for the ordinary person?

00:17:40.000 Well, it means that you need to grow up and adopt a role.

00:17:44.000 You need to mature.

00:17:45.000 You need to become an adult.

00:17:46.000 You need to be a good man in your time.

00:17:49.000 But then you have to pay attention to see what attracts your attention.

00:17:53.000 What calls to you.

00:17:54.000 Because there's an autonomy about that, right?

00:17:56.000 You don't get to pick what interests you.

00:17:58.000 It picks you.

00:17:59.000 And you can respond to that call and investigate or reject it.

00:18:03.000 Those are your options.

00:18:04.000 And if you reject it, you stay in your box.

00:18:06.000 But if you follow it, something will call to you.

00:18:09.000 And then if you investigate that, that will transform you.

00:18:13.000 And if you investigate it deeply enough, it'll transform you into the person who can stand up against tyranny and who can lead his people away from slavery.

00:18:22.000 And that's how God is defined in that story.

00:18:25.000 God is the thing that calls to you to take you out of your role that will shape the manner in which your psyche transforms itself as a consequence of your diligent investigation into what calls to you.

00:18:39.000 And so that's the God that's portrayed.

00:18:41.000 That's one thing.

00:18:42.000 Image of the God that's portrayed in the Old Testament.

00:18:45.000 Are you aware of some of the more recent work that's been done by scholars in Israel where these guys have now come up with this hypothesis that the burning bush was actually a DMT experience?

00:19:01.000 And that the burning bush was most likely an acacia tree.

00:19:04.000 That the acacia tree is apparently rich with DMT. And they think, you know, the way you get a DMT experience is you smoke it, right?

00:19:11.000 And that they had some method of achieving psychedelic states through this.

00:19:17.000 And this is where Moses is encountering God.

00:19:20.000 Have you read any of that stuff?

00:19:22.000 I know about the theorizing, and it's certainly the case that people have been using psychedelic experiences for we don't know how long.

00:19:30.000 Hundreds of thousands of years, no doubt.

00:19:33.000 And they've had a profound cultural consequence.

00:19:38.000 One of the things that a psychedelic experience does is...

00:19:42.000 Amplify that sense of intrinsic interest, right?

00:19:45.000 So it strips your perceptions of their inhibition by memory.

00:19:49.000 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:19:52.000 So that you see what's there instead of your habits of perception.

00:19:57.000 And so it's a way of amplifying, you could think of it as a way of amplifying what's represented in the biblical corpus as a calling.

00:20:05.000 And the thing that's odd about the calling...

00:20:08.000 Well, you know, when you're...

00:20:09.000 You can think about it this way.

00:20:11.000 When you're laying out a podcast, when you're participating in a podcast, you're following a golden thread, right?

00:20:18.000 You're following where your interest takes you and your curiosity takes you.

00:20:22.000 And that's not something you can pre-plan, right?

00:20:25.000 It's something that happens in the moment.

00:20:26.000 So imagine that you're focused on your goal of having the most interesting...

00:20:33.000 Conversation possible and communicating what's derived to the broadest number of people.

00:20:38.000 So that's the overarching goal.

00:20:40.000 Okay, now you focus on the moment and a spirit arises within you.

00:20:44.000 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:20:45.000 That's the Logos.

00:20:46.000 A spirit arises within you that leads you on a pathway that's an investigation into the truth.

00:20:52.000 That's part of that calling.

00:20:54.000 The psychedelic chemicals, they heighten that They heighten the manifestation of the underlying mystery.

00:21:05.000 That's another way of thinking about it.

00:21:06.000 They do that neurochemically.

00:21:08.000 And so, now what's the association between that and religious revelation in the Bible?

00:21:13.000 We don't know.

00:21:14.000 We don't know.

00:21:15.000 Have you read any of Marco Allegro's stuff?

00:21:19.000 No.

00:21:19.000 No, no.

00:21:21.000 John Marco Allegro wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom of the Cross.

00:21:25.000 Oh, yes.

00:21:25.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:26.000 I read that back.

00:21:27.000 Oh, my God.

00:21:29.000 1974?

00:21:30.000 Like, a long, long time ago.

00:21:31.000 So you probably read it before it was bought up by the Catholic Church.

00:21:35.000 Oh, I didn't even know about that.

00:21:36.000 Yeah, it was bought up by the—like, you used to have to get old copies of it if you wanted to buy it, and then it was recently republished.

00:21:44.000 Okay.

00:21:44.000 Yeah, yeah, I read that a long, long time ago.

00:21:46.000 I had no idea what to make of it when I read it.

00:21:48.000 I thought, oh, huh, I have no idea what to do with this.

00:21:51.000 It's a problem because to really understand what he's saying, you'd have to have a deep understanding of those ancient languages.

00:21:57.000 Yeah, right.

00:21:58.000 It's a very difficult book to evaluate.

00:22:00.000 Because there's very few people that are even qualified to, like, many people have disputed some of his, like, he has one claim that the word Christ can be traced etymologically to an ancient Sumerian word that means a mushroom covered in God's semen.

00:22:20.000 Mm-hmm.

00:22:21.000 And so it was his assertion that the idea was that they thought when it rained, that rain was the giver of life and it was literally God's semen that made things grow and that these mushrooms, because they would show up so quickly.

00:22:35.000 You know, if it rains, if you go to bed, you could look out at just your lawn and it's complete grass, not a mushroom inside.

00:22:42.000 And you can go to bed and then wake up in the morning and there'll be big mushrooms there.

00:22:45.000 It's really weird.

00:22:47.000 And that these things, when they would eat these psilocybin mushrooms that would appear out of nowhere, they genuinely were referring to them as God.

00:22:57.000 That this was like a gift from God.

00:22:59.000 And that was tracing back to the origin of the word Christ.

00:23:03.000 But it's very tortured.

00:23:05.000 Like, to really understand and to be able to dispute it, you'd have to have a deep understanding of Aramaic.

00:23:15.000 You'd have to have a deep understanding of the original doctrines.

00:23:20.000 Like, what is the actual translation?

00:23:22.000 What does it mean?

00:23:23.000 You'd have to understand the ancient Hebrew version of it.

00:23:26.000 How does it differ?

00:23:28.000 All the webs of associations.

00:23:29.000 Oh, God!

00:23:30.000 It's so crazy.

00:23:30.000 When we read it in English, I mean, what was the original version?

00:23:36.000 The original version All the ancient letters in ancient Hebrew also doubled as numbers, right?

00:23:42.000 So words had numerical value, like the word God and the word love apparently have the same numerical value.

00:23:50.000 That is a bizarre concept for us to try to wrap our heads around, a language which you know that words Also have numbers in them, that your letters also mean numbers, and that there's value,

00:24:06.000 certain numerical value to certain words, and that you would use them in the context of these conversations.

00:24:12.000 You would understand where I don't understand.

00:24:14.000 I don't have that.

00:24:16.000 I have English.

00:24:18.000 It's like we have math, we have language.

00:24:20.000 They're separate.

00:24:21.000 And you're missing something in what they're trying to say.

00:24:25.000 So what John Marco Allegro is doing, he's taking the oldest version of these stories on record, right?

00:24:32.000 He's taking the Dead Sea Scrolls.

00:24:34.000 He's taking stuff that's literally written on animal skins.

00:24:38.000 And one of the ways that they deciphered it to try to put it all together, they had to take the DNA Samples of these parchments to try to figure out which ones are from which cows.

00:24:49.000 They're from different cows.

00:24:51.000 And that's part of the way they figured out how to put all the stuff together.

00:24:55.000 This guy studies this for 14 years.

00:24:58.000 And he was the only ordained minister that was a part of this deciphering committee.

00:25:04.000 I think there was 14 people.

00:25:06.000 I don't remember how many people.

00:25:07.000 It might have been 20. But it was the only one of them that was agnostic.

00:25:11.000 So he had become – when he had started studying theology, he kind of lost his faith apparently.

00:25:18.000 You know, he started realizing there's so many versions of these stories.

00:25:21.000 They're coming from different places.

00:25:22.000 He became sort of like, hey, I think I'm agnostic.

00:25:26.000 I'm just going to like step back and have this approach of not knowing, not having a doctrine, not having an ideology that I'm attaching myself to.

00:25:35.000 And so then when he goes through all of the—this is a straight-laced scientist, by the way.

00:25:40.000 This is not like some guy looking for psychedelics to be a part of everything.

00:25:44.000 Yes, it's a very serious book.

00:25:45.000 Right.

00:25:45.000 And there's a lot of those people that are doing that.

00:25:48.000 They're looking for psychedelics to be a part of everything, sort of to validate or justify their own use of these things.

00:25:53.000 He wasn't doing that at all.

00:25:55.000 And he wasn't like Wasson, where a guy who went down and experienced the psychedelic experiences in Mexico and then came back and described them for mainstream media.

00:26:04.000 Literature.

00:26:05.000 This guy was doing it like...

00:26:08.000 Like a scholar.

00:26:09.000 And his whole purpose was just to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls.

00:26:12.000 But it was so compelling to him when it was over, he, like, had to break ranks, and he had to write this book.

00:26:18.000 And then they took that book out of circulation, I believe.

00:26:23.000 Find out what happened with the sacred mushroom and the cross, how it was...

00:26:28.000 Because he published another book Shortly afterwards, that was the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth.

00:26:36.000 And I think, it felt to me when I read that one, it's almost like he has to write a book because they took the other one away.

00:26:43.000 Because it's kind of like saying most of the same stuff.

00:26:46.000 But...

00:26:47.000 He believed that what they were writing about, a lot of it was fertility rituals and psychedelic experiences.

00:26:55.000 And that they were hiding a lot of these stories.

00:26:59.000 Like, they were hiding the knowledge underneath these stories in parables and all these different ways to try to obscure it from the Romans and obscure it from the people that conquered them.

00:27:09.000 So they wouldn't know the secrets of this thing, this ritual in which they would experience God.

00:27:18.000 So why is it that psychedelic use has played the role that it's played in your interests and your pursuit of knowledge?

00:27:26.000 What do you think it's done for you that's been valuable?

00:27:32.000 I think we're in a weird place in society where the term drug...

00:27:38.000 Is a blanket, and it covers things that have vastly different effects.

00:27:45.000 It covers caffeine, it covers nicotine, and it covers dimethyltryptamine, which is crazy.

00:27:52.000 It's crazy that all those things are drugs.

00:27:54.000 Adderall's a drug.

00:27:56.000 Benzodiazepine is a drug.

00:27:58.000 Xanax...

00:27:59.000 There's a million of them.

00:28:01.000 They're all different, and they're all drugs.

00:28:04.000 And the idea that psychedelics are a drug For lack of a better term, that's what we use.

00:28:12.000 I don't think that's what they are at all.

00:28:14.000 I think they are probably why we became people.

00:28:18.000 I think they are probably why society advanced, and I think every great ancient culture probably celebrated them and used them.

00:28:29.000 It seems like there's so much evidence out of Egypt of the use of psilocybin, various different drugs, Various different psychedelic experiences, the iconography of the pineal gland seems to be a big part of multiple cultures,

00:28:49.000 not just Egyptian, but even Catholicism.

00:28:52.000 If you go to the Vatican, there's this enormous pine cone.

00:28:57.000 That is a statue there.

00:28:59.000 And I was very lucky when I went to the Vatican.

00:29:02.000 We got a guide.

00:29:03.000 We hired a private guide that was a scholar from France.

00:29:06.000 And when he's not working on the summers, he gives these tours.

00:29:10.000 And they're very thorough.

00:29:12.000 And he was a brilliant guy.

00:29:14.000 I wish I could remember his name.

00:29:16.000 I should probably find it out to give him credit.

00:29:18.000 Brilliant guy.

00:29:19.000 So he takes us through showing us all this artwork.

00:29:21.000 It's incredibly explaining why they had little penises and that it was explained the whole thing that big penises were thought to be barbaric and it was not representative of like somewhat of class and dignity and education and so we get to this pinecone and He says to me goes do you know what this represents?

00:29:40.000 And I said is it the pineal gland and he goes yes Yes. 0.94

00:29:44.000 And then we start this conversation of why these Catholics would have this enormous representation of the pineal gland, which they reference as the seed of the soul, and that this gland, which is in the center of your brain,

00:30:01.000 is thought to be literally a third eye.

00:30:05.000 And on reptiles, it actually has a cornea and a lens.

00:30:09.000 This gland.

00:30:10.000 Like, literally, it's exactly where the third eye of Eastern mysticism is.

00:30:14.000 And they've got a representation of it right here.

00:30:17.000 And it's thought to be where dimethyltryptamine is produced.

00:30:21.000 And this whole connection to it is so old that it seems like you go back to the John Marco Olegre stuff, you go back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are the oldest version of the Bible,

00:30:36.000 the only version that I believe the only version they have in Aramaic of all those stories.

00:30:42.000 And if he's right, if John Marco Allegro is right, it all kind of makes sense that these people were having these experiences much like the Greeks were with the Eleusinian Mysteries, much like multiple different cultures in the Amazon all over the world have experienced these profound ceremony Experiences that lead to these journeys into the spirit world,

00:31:09.000 these connections with higher consciousness, this something that when you're experiencing it seems very, very real, but also very preposterous when you try to explain it to people that aren't experienced.

00:31:22.000 You know, it's like Hendrix.

00:31:23.000 Like, are you experienced?

00:31:25.000 Have you ever been experienced?

00:31:26.000 Well, I have.

00:31:27.000 Like, it's that.

00:31:28.000 Like, with that Understanding that that's possible the world changes because now you know that that's possible you could live your whole life and not know that the most shocking profound thing in Existence is three hits away Three hits away and all of a sudden you're in a completely different universe in 20 30 seconds That's nuts and the fact that that is Dismissed

00:32:00.000 that people look at it as like oh you're just escaping reality and you're like it might be the source of civilization itself It might be the source of the expansion of the human mind over a period of two million years the doubling of the human brain in Over a period of two million years,

00:32:22.000 which Terence McKenna felt directly coincides with the shifting of the tropical rainforest turning into grasslands, which would force these primates to experiment with new food sources, and these undulate cows that were everywhere that would shit, 0.99

00:32:37.000 and then these psilocybin mushrooms would grow and they're shit. 0.98

00:32:42.000 Observed primates flipping over these cow patties looking for beetles and grubs and things to eat. 0.99

00:32:47.000 It's everywhere.

00:32:48.000 Like, you could see it all over Africa.

00:32:49.000 If there's something on that, they're going to try it out.

00:32:52.000 And if these things are trying it out and they're doing this over a period of two million years and they develop language and culture and weapons and they start thinking about things and they become different than every animal around them.

00:33:05.000 And this was McKenna's stone-dape theory, which I'm sure you're familiar with.

00:33:09.000 And Dennis McKenna, who is, you know, a legitimate scientist, Dennis explains it even better because he explains it with the actual mechanisms that your brain – the things that fire up when you encounter high-dose psilocybin experiences that would lead you to the development of language.

00:33:27.000 Glossolalia, the connection of sounds and objects and bringing things together in a manner of communication.

00:33:35.000 Also, they realize that in low doses, it increases visual acuity.

00:33:40.000 It makes people more amorous.

00:33:43.000 It makes people hornier. 0.65

00:33:44.000 They're going to have more sex. 0.96

00:33:45.000 They're going to be better hunters because they can see better. 0.64

00:33:47.000 They're going to be more sensitive to the environment.

00:33:50.000 They're going to be more aware.

00:33:53.000 Edge detection is different.

00:33:54.000 There's like so many different things that happen that if you're thinking about what made people people, it's a mystery.

00:34:01.000 We want to pretend that we understand things because of the fossil record and this and that.

00:34:05.000 Sure, we kind of understand, but every now and then we find a new human that we didn't even know exists, like Denisovans.

00:34:10.000 What was that?

00:34:12.000 Not even 20 years ago, I don't think.

00:34:13.000 So now there's a whole other branch of human beings that they weren't even aware of 20 years ago.

00:34:20.000 Whatever the fuck happened that took us from all the other primates that are still here and made us this, it's pretty profound.

00:34:30.000 And I have a feeling that psychedelics were at least involved in that process. 0.97

00:34:36.000 That's my belief.

00:34:37.000 And my belief is that the Sweeping Psychedelics Act of 1970 that they passed essentially to target civil rights activists and anti-war activists.

00:34:48.000 That's what they did.

00:34:49.000 They wanted to go after the hippies. 0.95

00:34:50.000 And they went after the hippies with MKUltra, with Tom O'Neill so brilliantly Outlines in his book chaos they went after it and they created the Manson family they created that family they they taught that guy how to do that so that that guy would kill people and he would be a psychopath and now hippies would be psychopaths and then all this anti-war shit would just get stopped by sensible people then schedule one everything everything psilocybin marijuana all down the 0.90

00:35:20.000 board everything becomes schedule one the most illegal of illegal things So all these people who are experienced, all these Ken Kesey people and all the LSD people of the 60s, all those people become criminals instantly.

00:35:35.000 And they just threw water on the whole movement.

00:35:38.000 And it worked.

00:35:39.000 It really worked.

00:35:40.000 It was Nixon and all the people that were in charge back then.

00:35:44.000 If you look at what happened from 1960 to 1980, this confusing era of the 70s where the effects are wearing off and then you get into the 80s and everybody's doing coke and they have makeup on and big hair and the music sucks.

00:35:58.000 It's like something happened.

00:36:00.000 Something happened and what happened was they completely removed the very thing that had changed culture so radically from the 50s to the 60s.

00:36:11.000 Like, I'm a gigantic fan of 1960s automobiles.

00:36:16.000 I love them.

00:36:18.000 There's something about The shapes of them, the way they sound.

00:36:23.000 Part of it is that I grew up in the 80s, and those are the cars we all wanted.

00:36:27.000 When we were kids, you know, if a guy drove by in a 1969 Camaro, we would all be like, whoa, look at it.

00:36:34.000 Look at that thing. 0.92

00:36:36.000 There's something about those shapes.

00:36:39.000 There's something about the designs of those cars that resonate so strongly today. 0.96

00:36:44.000 A 1990 car ain't worth shit. 0.99

00:36:46.000 Nobody wants your fucking 1990 car. 1.00

00:36:49.000 1990 Camaro, get the fuck out of here with that thing. 1.00

00:36:51.000 But if you have a 1968 Camaro, people will stop in a parking lot and stare at it.

00:36:57.000 What is that?

00:36:58.000 I think those guys were on drugs.

00:37:00.000 I think all those guys were on drugs.

00:37:02.000 I think the guy who created a Corvette had to be on drugs.

00:37:06.000 These guys felt something the same way Hendrix felt something when he was on stage playing guitar in a way nobody had ever heard before. 0.99

00:37:15.000 That guy came out of nowhere, and everybody was like, what the fuck is he doing?

00:37:20.000 It was so different that Eric Clapton watched him for the first time and was like, I should probably quit playing guitar. 0.99

00:37:27.000 Like, what the fuck am I doing compared to this guy? 0.81

00:37:30.000 Like, Jesus Christ, everybody was like humbled and confused by it. 0.98

00:37:34.000 Psychedelic, inspired, 100%.

00:37:37.000 100%.

00:37:39.000 And there's something about throwing water on that in the 1970s that I think has done a massive disservice to our civilization, a massive disservice, because it's equated these things with people that have poor discipline and bad social skills and ne'er-do-wells who fail in society,

00:37:59.000 and that's not true.

00:38:01.000 And all these people that I know that are billionaires, I know people that are like super rich people that run these financial institutions, and I know a lot of like brilliant venture capitalist guys and brilliant tech guys,

00:38:16.000 and almost all of them are enthusiasts.

00:38:20.000 Almost all of them have had these experiences, and they're all kind of quiet about it.

00:38:24.000 And it's very unfortunate.

00:38:25.000 It's very unfortunate because of these stupid laws that were passed 50 years ago We've gotten ourselves in this weird crunch where we've made things illegal that could massively help people progress in life and sort things out if we could figure out how to manage them correctly, 0.95

00:38:46.000 if we could run proper studies about what is the correct dose. 0.95

00:38:51.000 Is there a person that has a certain sort of biological Makeup that makes these drugs problematic.

00:39:00.000 Should we find out?

00:39:02.000 Maybe someone's allergic to them.

00:39:04.000 There's many medications and many different compounds and many plants and natural things that people are allergic to.

00:39:10.000 Let's avoid that.

00:39:12.000 Let's try to figure out what works for some people, what doesn't work.

00:39:16.000 Legitimate counselors that could guide people through experiences, people that have experienced it themselves and can understand how to do this with intent and possibly aid your life.

00:39:28.000 They have been shown to be hugely beneficial for soldiers, for our military men and women coming back from overseas experiencing horrific trauma to help them get past that, and yet they're illegal still.

00:39:43.000 We're both middle-aged men, right?

00:39:46.000 So who is telling us what we can and can't do?

00:39:49.000 This is preposterous. 0.98

00:39:51.000 This is other men our age that haven't had these experiences maintaining this control on them in a completely ignorant way. 0.98

00:40:01.000 They don't even know what they are. 0.86

00:40:03.000 They don't know what these things are.

00:40:05.000 They don't know what the experience is, and yet they want it to be kept out of the hands of kids.

00:40:09.000 We've got to keep it off the streets.

00:40:11.000 We've got to keep drugs away from our society.

00:40:14.000 And you don't know what you're talking about. 1.00

00:40:17.000 It might be why we're here, and it also, the absence of it, might be why we're so fucked up. 0.99

00:40:23.000 It might be why we're so disconnected, why we're so disjointed, and our society is so hypocritical. 0.98

00:40:31.000 I mean, the most pro-life people are also pro-death penalty.

00:40:35.000 It's like across the board, everything.

00:40:37.000 The people that want no crime but don't want to stop the emergence of crime by funding programs to try to fix the inner cities.

00:40:49.000 Our whole thing is disconnected, and I have a feeling that a big part of that is that we have not been given access to tools that have helped people literally become what we are today.

00:41:02.000 And if you read Brian Murrow-Rescue's work, and if he's correct, and these people that are studying the Eleusinian mysteries and the literal emergence of democracy as we know it, probably all of it came out of psychedelic experiences.

00:41:20.000 So I had Timothy Leary's old job at Harvard.

00:41:25.000 That comes with a lot of weight.

00:41:27.000 Yeah, and I knew some of the people that knew him.

00:41:30.000 And so you could say that what happened in the 1960s, and this is relevant to the psychedelic experience, let's say, is that the emergence of mushrooms in particular, and then LSD, Indicated to a swath of the population,

00:41:46.000 like Leary and like Ken Casey, that our perceptions were locked in kind of a box, in a box that we weren't even conscious of.

00:41:58.000 I suppose that's the box of conformity.

00:42:01.000 And the psychedelics released a wave of non-conformity.

00:42:06.000 And Leary crystallized that with his tune in, turn on, and drop out.

00:42:11.000 Now, there was a major problem with that, and that was partly what led to the kickback.

00:42:17.000 So you might say that the first stage of something approximating a religious revelation is the understanding that your perceptions have been constrained by forms of conformity that were so extensive that you didn't even understand them.

00:42:34.000 You didn't even know they were there.

00:42:35.000 And so you're freed from that.

00:42:37.000 And then maybe the first response to that is the celebration of an unlimited hedonistic Freedom.

00:42:45.000 But the problem with that is that freedom from constraint and hedonism is not freedom.

00:42:54.000 It's just subjugation to a kind of instinctive chaos.

00:42:59.000 And that emerged with the hippie culture.

00:43:01.000 And Leary in particular made a huge mistake when he said, tune in, turn on and drop out.

00:43:08.000 He should have said, tune in, turn on and grow up.

00:43:12.000 Dead serious about that, because there's a different form of responsibility that emerges once you realize that you...

00:43:22.000 We're constrained by a conformist box, let's say like Moses when he was being a normal shepherd, that you can step outside of that, but you don't step outside of that into worship of the golden calf like in hedonistic orgies.

00:43:37.000 You step outside of that with a more conscious upward aim.

00:43:41.000 And if the use of transformative technologies like psychedelics isn't accompanied by that framework of enhanced responsibility then it can degenerate into a kind of hedonistic chaos and that's what the Nixon types were reacting to.

00:43:57.000 They were terrified by it and they had the reasons to be terrified because as you're intimating these technologies are unbelievably, unbelievably potent and destabilizing.

00:44:09.000 Now that destabilization can be Used, let's say, for better or for worse.

00:44:15.000 And it should be used for better.

00:44:17.000 That's complex.

00:44:18.000 It's a very complex thing to manage.

00:44:21.000 And so, Carl Jung said that one of the main functions of religion was to stop people from having religious experiences.

00:44:31.000 And what he meant by that was that a direct experience of the transcendent is enough to Shake you to the foundation and to destabilize not only you, but your culture.

00:44:41.000 This is why there's another scene in the story of Exodus.

00:44:45.000 But can you explain further, like, expand on what he was meaning by that?

00:44:49.000 But to keep you from having religious experiences?

00:44:52.000 Well, if everybody goes their own enlightened way, let's say, there's no...

00:44:58.000 There's no social cohesion.

00:44:59.000 There's no unity of purpose.

00:45:01.000 There's nothing but fragmentation.

00:45:03.000 And part of the danger of the hippie movement in the 1960s was a counter-social fragmentation.

00:45:11.000 So you can imagine, you know, things get so constrained that everybody's exactly the same, and that's a complete totalitarian catastrophe.

00:45:17.000 But you can imagine the opposite catastrophe, which is that Well, everyone's letting it all hang out and doing their own thing.

00:45:24.000 And that's equally dangerous.

00:45:26.000 Right.

00:45:26.000 And so there's some balance in the middle.

00:45:28.000 Well, that's that balance between chaos and order that we were referring to earlier.

00:45:31.000 It's also an ignorance of the structure that's involved in maintaining a society.

00:45:36.000 Definitely.

00:45:37.000 You need discipline and people need to work to maintain the society that you enjoy to be so free and to be a hippie.

00:45:43.000 Yeah, well, you can imagine that...

00:45:47.000 Complex social order can be maintained by something like mindless obedience.

00:45:52.000 That's suboptimal.

00:45:54.000 What you'd really want is enlightened responsibility.

00:45:57.000 Right.

00:45:58.000 That's a great way to put it.

00:45:59.000 Right.

00:45:59.000 That's a very hard thing to pull off, though, because it means that you have to leap out of the...

00:46:06.000 The box of social constraint, and you have to take the responsibility onto yourself.

00:46:12.000 Now, that's a hell of a lot better if you can manage it, but that is definitely not what Kesey or Leary, for example, were preaching to the masses.

00:46:21.000 But what you're saying is like an admirable thing that people should aspire to.

00:46:25.000 It's the best possible...

00:46:26.000 Yes, the highest goal.

00:46:27.000 Let me give you another example of this, if you don't mind.

00:46:30.000 I'm going to use another biblical story.

00:46:32.000 Why are you biblical-ing?

00:46:33.000 The lights are flickering behind you, almost like God is interacting with us.

00:46:37.000 There's spirits in the room, Jamie.

00:46:39.000 Have you noticed the light flickering?

00:46:40.000 You haven't noticed it?

00:46:41.000 Keep an eye on it.

00:46:42.000 Hopefully they're the right spirits.

00:46:45.000 Well, I think they always are.

00:46:46.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:46:48.000 Well, so in the story of Abraham, Abraham is an old man when the story starts.

00:46:56.000 As soon as you start talking about Abraham, it starts flickering again.

00:46:59.000 It's going now, see?

00:47:00.000 It's one of my tricks, man.

00:47:01.000 I'm telling you, dude, it's never happened before.

00:47:02.000 This is wild.

00:47:04.000 So Abraham is like 70 years old when the story starts.

00:47:07.000 And we don't know anything about him.

00:47:09.000 He's completely nondescript.

00:47:10.000 He's a case of failure to launch.

00:47:12.000 So he has rich parents and he has everything he needs at hand.

00:47:15.000 So he can live the life of a satiated infant.

00:47:19.000 Like he's in the throes of, what would you say, materialistic plenty.

00:47:24.000 Okay, and the voice of God comes to him.

00:47:26.000 But it's characterized in a very particular manner.

00:47:29.000 So, God comes to Abraham as the call to adventure.

00:47:32.000 And that's a very useful thing to know.

00:47:34.000 So, in the Moses story, God comes to Moses as that which attracts his interest and takes him off the beaten path.

00:47:40.000 In the story of Abraham, God comes as the spirit of adventure.

00:47:47.000 God makes Abraham a deal. 0.89

00:47:49.000 It's a very specific deal, and it's the best possible deal.

00:47:53.000 This is the covenant, by the way.

00:47:54.000 This is the covenant.

00:47:55.000 So, God tells Abraham, if you leave your zone of comfort, if you remove yourself from your father's tent, if you move away from infantile materialistic satiation and go out into the terrible world, and you do that voluntarily,

00:48:11.000 you have the adventure of your life, this is what will happen.

00:48:15.000 You'll be a blessing to yourself that's genuine.

00:48:18.000 So instead of being racked with self-doubt and being self-conscious and taking yourself apart with guilt and shame, you'll ride the wave of adventure and you'll feel that your life is a blessing.

00:48:28.000 Not only will you feel that, it will be a blessing.

00:48:30.000 That's the first thing that will happen.

00:48:32.000 The second thing will happen is that other people will notice and your name will become renowned and that will be valid.

00:48:38.000 You'll be a blessing to other people in that regard.

00:48:41.000 Your name will be upheld.

00:48:43.000 So you'll stand out among your peers but in a justifiable manner that's a consequence of your own intrinsic merit.

00:48:50.000 The third thing that will happen is that You'll have the opportunity to establish something permanent.

00:48:55.000 For Abraham, it's a dynasty, right? 0.85

00:48:57.000 He's offered the possibility of being the father of nations.

00:49:00.000 And the fourth thing that happens is you'll do it in a way that's of cardinal benefit to everyone.

00:49:04.000 And so what happens in that story, this is so cool.

00:49:07.000 It's so remarkable.

00:49:09.000 It's the answer to the selfish gene, by the way, as well.

00:49:12.000 So what this story does is it takes the call to adventure, which is the instinct that makes children move out into the world.

00:49:20.000 It's the spirit that you encourage if you're a good father.

00:49:24.000 It lines that up and it says if you follow that and let it pull you out of your zone of comfort, your life will be a blessing to you.

00:49:33.000 Your reputation will grow.

00:49:35.000 You'll establish something permanent and you'll do that in a way that's good for everyone.

00:49:39.000 Right?

00:49:40.000 So that's a hell of a good deal.

00:49:41.000 And that's the story of Abraham.

00:49:44.000 Okay, so why is that relevant to the psychedelic debate?

00:49:47.000 Because if you're going to move into the zone of the transcendent, you have to take on the requisite responsibility or the process of transcendence turns into something like a descent into unstructured chaos.

00:49:59.000 And that's not an improvement.

00:50:01.000 It's just a movement from tyranny into the desert.

00:50:04.000 That's a good way of thinking about it symbolically.

00:50:07.000 So, what happens in the Exodus story, because it also details out how this should be structured, is that Moses has a vision of individual responsibility and social organization that's maximally responsibility-based.

00:50:23.000 So, Moses tells the Pharaoh to let his people go, but that's not the phrase.

00:50:28.000 The phrase is, God tells Moses to say this.

00:50:31.000 He says, let my people go, so they may worship me in the desert. 1.00

00:50:36.000 And so you move out of the tyranny.

00:50:37.000 That's what happens, let's say, in the throes of a psychedelic experience, is that the preconceptions are shattered.

00:50:43.000 Now you're somewhere unstructured.

00:50:45.000 Okay, well, you can't worship what's unstructured.

00:50:49.000 You have to find the proper structuring for your new freedom.

00:50:53.000 The vision that's put forward in the book of Exodus is a vision of multidimensional, responsible identity.

00:51:01.000 So you take on responsibility for your own life, You take on responsibility for the life of your Wife or your husband, you take on responsibility for your family, you're a model for your community, you serve your state, you do what you can for your nation,

00:51:17.000 and that's all united under your highest upward orientation.

00:51:20.000 And that's ordered freedom.

00:51:23.000 That's ordered freedom.

00:51:24.000 It's not the same as the hedonistic freedom that the people like Nixon and the sort of right-wing conservatives of the 1960s were terrified by, that kind of hedonistic anarchy.

00:51:35.000 It's not freedom.

00:51:36.000 It erupted.

00:51:37.000 Out of nowhere.

00:51:38.000 I mean, we're right now in 2024. I want you to imagine 2014. It's the same.

00:51:47.000 It's the same.

00:51:48.000 There's nothing different other than the threat of AI and war and socially.

00:51:52.000 The world's the same.

00:51:54.000 You go from 1956 to 1966, you have a completely different world.

00:52:00.000 Completely different world.

00:52:02.000 Everyone's going crazy.

00:52:04.000 The opposition to the Vietnam War has got people in the streets.

00:52:08.000 Ken Kesey, Tim Leary, tune in, drop out, all that.

00:52:12.000 This world is changing in this radical way.

00:52:16.000 There'd been nothing like it.

00:52:18.000 And a lot of what you're saying about these experiences happening And people just disconnecting and not having discipline and structure and just experiencing these things and just Disconnecting completely from society was the problem.

00:52:34.000 That was the problem It's a major problem.

00:52:37.000 Well, it's still a problem now, to some degree, because people who are pursuing, let's say, non-conformist freedom don't understand that the replacement for freedom isn't hedonistic anarchy.

00:52:48.000 And that's partly because it's self-defeating.

00:52:50.000 It's also pointless and meaningless.

00:52:53.000 And it's partly pointless and meaningless because, imagine, and this is part of the implication of the story of Abraham, is that The instinct of meaning comes to you when you pursue a pathway that specifies, what would you say,

00:53:10.000 the limitless development of your integrated psyche.

00:53:13.000 But it's not just the psyche, it's the integration of the psyche with all the different levels of society.

00:53:18.000 Like, for example, Insofar as you're well put together, you're gonna be a highly functional husband to your wife, right?

00:53:25.000 Like, your own psychological organization, integration, cannot be divorced from the union that you make with your wife.

00:53:35.000 They're the same thing, and then you can extend that to your kids.

00:53:38.000 For you to get your act together means simultaneously that you establish the proper relationship with your wife and with your children.

00:53:44.000 Those are the same thing.

00:53:46.000 And then if you can manage that, you do the same thing with the broader community.

00:53:49.000 It all stacks up musically.

00:53:52.000 And so then mental health doesn't become how your psyche is organized internally, which is what the clinical psychologists misled people into believing.

00:54:03.000 It's more like the harmony that obtains From the psyche upward through society when everything is stacked up properly to the highest level possible of being.

00:54:15.000 And that's another definition of God.

00:54:17.000 So one of the things I tried to do in this book is to actually define what it is that we're arguing about.

00:54:24.000 Because the old man in the sky superstition doesn't cover the territory.

00:54:27.000 So, for example, if you look at God in the story of Abraham and you say, do you believe in that God?

00:54:34.000 What you're asking, even though you might not know it is, do you believe that there is a call to adventure and that following that call will not only integrate you but serve society in the highest possible manner?

00:54:47.000 And that's a pretty straightforward question.

00:54:50.000 It has very little to do with anything that's even vaguely superstitious.

00:54:54.000 Like, is that call there?

00:54:56.000 You certainly reward it in your children if you have the least bit of sense.

00:55:00.000 And so, I've been trying to define what it is that we're arguing about.

00:55:06.000 And so, there's another definition, too, that you see this in the story of Adam and Eve.

00:55:12.000 So, in the story of Adam and Eve, one of the ways God is characterized...

00:55:18.000 is as the spirit that calls you on your pride and presumption.

00:55:25.000 So then you ask yourself, well, do you believe that exists?

00:55:27.000 It's like, how often in your own life has pride gone before a fall?

00:55:32.000 Is there some spirit that's operative in being that shows you the error of your ways when you get ahead of yourself, or not?

00:55:45.000 And if the answer to that is no, you say, well, you have no conscience?

00:55:48.000 Nothing calls you on your moral impropriety?

00:55:51.000 You're overreaching?

00:55:53.000 No one wants to be near you if you're one of those people.

00:55:56.000 That's for sure.

00:55:57.000 And is that real?

00:55:58.000 So one of the ways God is presented in the Old Testament is this dynamic between calling and conscience, right?

00:56:06.000 So there's the calling that Is indicated in the story of Abraham and Moses that pulls you forward to the adventure of your life.

00:56:12.000 And the other side of that is the constraint of conscience that tells you when you're wandering off the straight and narrow path.

00:56:19.000 That's more the voice of negative emotion and threat detection.

00:56:23.000 A calling is more like the voice of positive emotion that Pulls you forward and invites you.

00:56:29.000 But you need the dynamic between those two.

00:56:31.000 That's the pillar of light and the pillar of darkness that guides the Israelites across the desert. 0.89

00:56:37.000 Jonathan Pazio helped me figure that out.

00:56:39.000 Just flattened me when he laid it out.

00:56:42.000 Because I could see the Taoist view of the world and the ancient Jewish view of the world stack on top of each other. 0.70

00:56:48.000 And the implication of the story is very straight.

00:56:51.000 It's like you leave a tyranny and you're lost.

00:56:54.000 What guides you when you're lost?

00:56:55.000 The interaction between what calls you forward and upward and the constraints of your own conscience that warn you when you're deviating from the straight and narrow path.

00:57:05.000 That's a definition of God that emerges from Exodus.

00:57:09.000 And the balance of the mind to be able to figure out which is which and how to apply them.

00:57:15.000 And the balance of the mind, this is why you have to have the least amount of problems in your life and keep your body as healthy as possible.

00:57:22.000 So you don't have all these other things that are influencing the way you interact with the world.

00:57:28.000 You've got to have a balance of everything.

00:57:30.000 All of it has to be kind of balanced together in order for you to have...

00:57:34.000 The judgment.

00:57:35.000 Yes.

00:57:36.000 Otherwise you can't see.

00:57:37.000 Right.

00:57:38.000 Right?

00:57:38.000 Yeah.

00:57:39.000 Yeah.

00:57:39.000 You have to be able to see it.

00:57:40.000 And it's hard.

00:57:41.000 And you have to want to see it.

00:57:42.000 Yeah.

00:57:43.000 So why do you want to see it?

00:57:45.000 Me?

00:57:45.000 Yeah.

00:57:46.000 It's just my instinct.

00:57:48.000 I follow my instincts with everything.

00:57:50.000 I always have.

00:57:51.000 Why?

00:57:52.000 I don't know.

00:57:53.000 I think because I didn't have a lot of guidance when I was young and because I was a latchkey kid and parents divorced, split, a lot of moving.

00:58:03.000 I think I developed my own appreciation of my instincts.

00:58:11.000 And I had seen enough people, by the time I was a young boy, ruin their lives.

00:58:17.000 And I'd seen these poor decisions right in front of me.

00:58:22.000 I'd seen poor thinking and excuse making and laziness.

00:58:25.000 Right, so you could see the negative consequences?

00:58:27.000 Yes.

00:58:27.000 I'd seen all these things.

00:58:28.000 And because I didn't feel protected, I genuinely felt like I was on my own and I had to figure things out on my own.

00:58:37.000 Developed a very early trust and recognition of the importance of that and it's led me through my entire life Everything that I ever did that was like a big risk was like a calling to me every single thing that I ever did from getting into martial arts I Went from not doing it to doing it every day all day Seven days a week.

00:58:59.000 It was a calling like I was called it was like my My mind interfaced with whatever that was, martial arts was, and said, this is my ticket out of here.

00:59:10.000 This is my ticket to be a different person.

00:59:12.000 Was that discipline?

00:59:13.000 What was the ticket, do you think?

00:59:15.000 I don't even know if you call it discipline back then, because it was more of an obsession.

00:59:19.000 So when you're obsessed with something, it doesn't require discipline, because you can't wait to do it again.

00:59:25.000 Mike Tyson said best.

00:59:27.000 It was a real calling for you.

00:59:29.000 Mike Tyson said best.

00:59:30.000 He said, discipline is doing something you hate, but doing it like you love it.

00:59:34.000 You know like when you're in training camp like Mike Tyson was for a big heavyweight fight You're pushing the limits of your physical endurance and recovery because you're trying to achieve an adaptation You can't maintain fight ready fitness all year round one thing that people don't understand about like fight ready for like When a guy like Islam Makachev,

00:59:59.000 who is the UFC lightweight champion, the pound for pound best fighter on earth, when that guy is fighting, when he gets into the cage on the day, whatever it is, that Saturday night, this is a peak fight.

01:00:13.000 Of performance and training that cannot be maintained.

01:00:17.000 He wants to catch it right when he's right there, when the body hasn't broken down yet, the immune system hasn't broken down yet, the endocrine system isn't fried, the adrenals aren't fried.

01:00:28.000 You're getting it to right when your body can recover and is forced to maintain this insane level of fitness, and then you have to take a break.

01:00:38.000 Like, you cannot maintain fight camp all year round.

01:00:41.000 You will not be able to do it.

01:00:42.000 Your body will break down.

01:00:44.000 So you...

01:00:45.000 So it's not...

01:00:46.000 My point is, like, that requires discipline.

01:00:49.000 Right.

01:00:49.000 Because that is no longer...

01:00:51.000 You're no longer in the inspiration realm.

01:00:54.000 You're not in the obsession realm.

01:00:56.000 You are, I'm sure, as well.

01:00:57.000 But you're also... 0.90

01:00:58.000 And there's no fucking way you want to do it. 0.94

01:01:00.000 There's no way you want to do more sprints. 0.98

01:01:02.000 There's no way you want to do all this stuff.

01:01:04.000 You must do it though.

01:01:05.000 You must do the calisthenics.

01:01:07.000 You must do the live wrestling drills.

01:01:09.000 You must do the shark tank where they throw in a new fresh opponent every round for five rounds.

01:01:16.000 So you're dealing with rested killers and you're exhausted.

01:01:19.000 You have to do that.

01:01:20.000 And that's pure discipline.

01:01:24.000 And generally enforced discipline by coaches, because it's so rigid, it's so hard to do, that you need someone over you with a stopwatch.

01:01:32.000 Go, let's go, let's go, let's go!

01:01:33.000 And everybody has to get up and go at it, because even the most disciplined, their body recognizes they need a break.

01:01:40.000 So that's pure discipline.

01:01:43.000 What I had was this obsession that made that hard work easy.

01:01:48.000 Right, right.

01:01:49.000 So that's a key thing.

01:01:50.000 So that's a key thing.

01:01:51.000 Okay, so now imagine that underneath that, there's an implicit or unconscious goal.

01:01:59.000 Okay, and I'm saying this for a very specific reason.

01:02:04.000 The positive emotion that motivates people is always experienced in relationship to a goal.

01:02:09.000 Now this is a very important thing for everyone to understand because it means that if you don't have a goal, you have no positive emotion.

01:02:16.000 And it also means that the higher your goal, the more positive emotion you experience when you're moving towards it.

01:02:21.000 Because positive emotion signifies progress towards a goal.

01:02:24.000 So you need a goal.

01:02:26.000 The goal of the deepest religious traditions is the ultimate goal.

01:02:33.000 By definition.

01:02:34.000 So the idea is that You need a goal, and so you should pick the utmost possible goal.

01:02:41.000 That's another good definition of something like the kingdom of heaven or the realm of the divine.

01:02:46.000 The ultimate goal.

01:02:47.000 Now you have a goal, and every time you see movement towards it, you're going to get...

01:02:52.000 What would you say?

01:02:53.000 You're riding on the energy that's associated with movement towards that goal.

01:02:57.000 That's dopaminergically mediated.

01:02:59.000 That's the same systems that are affected by cocaine and methamphetamine and so forth.

01:03:03.000 All the positive emotion drugs.

01:03:04.000 So you need a goal.

01:03:07.000 That goal, now you can imagine this, that if you're attentive to the action of your own instincts, or the divine voice, I don't think those are distinguishable, then a goal is going to emerge that catalyzes a series of transformations.

01:03:20.000 This is what happens to Abraham.

01:03:22.000 So, he has a series of adventures after he decides that he's going to go out in the world.

01:03:27.000 And every adventure is marked by The erection of a sacrificial altar and a recommitment of his upward aim.

01:03:34.000 Now, there's two reasons for that.

01:03:36.000 One is that he reminds himself that he's aiming upward and he's on an adventure.

01:03:40.000 And the second is he admits to himself that with every transformation of character something has to be sacrificed.

01:03:47.000 So, you know, so now I'm curious about this in your own life, right?

01:03:51.000 So you started Obsessively committing to martial arts.

01:03:57.000 What did you have to give up to do that?

01:03:59.000 Social life.

01:04:01.000 Okay, what else?

01:04:03.000 That's basically it.

01:04:04.000 I was a kid.

01:04:04.000 Okay, social life.

01:04:05.000 I didn't really have responsibilities other than school, so I had to leave from school and go right to training.

01:04:11.000 Okay, so there's an emergent idea in that story of adventure-led transformation that with every Profound transformation of character.

01:04:21.000 Something that's not appropriate has to be let go of.

01:04:25.000 That's why, by the way, that's why Abraham's story culminates in the sacrifice of his son.

01:04:29.000 Because the sacrifices get higher in value as the developmental progression upward continues.

01:04:35.000 And that's basically the story of individual development.

01:04:38.000 Right?

01:04:39.000 Follow the call of adventure.

01:04:42.000 Aim upward.

01:04:45.000 Continually remind yourself of your fundamental goal.

01:04:49.000 And then let go of everything that isn't appropriate as you transform forward.

01:04:52.000 So Abraham ends up with a new name because of doing that.

01:04:55.000 That's how different he becomes in the course of his adventure.

01:04:58.000 It's like Jacob.

01:04:59.000 Jacob becomes Israel and Abram becomes Abraham because the consequence of him following the pathway of adventure, the calling, is a transformation that's so complete it's as if he's a different person.

01:05:11.000 And now those stories are maps of that transformative process.

01:05:15.000 So they culminate They culminate, in the Christian view of things, with the ultimate sacrificial offering.

01:05:24.000 So that's the idea that lurks in the New Testament, is that the ultimate in transformation is brought about by your willingness to put absolutely everything on the line, no matter what.

01:05:36.000 Right.

01:05:37.000 And that's a very different view of the religious enterprise than something like defense against death anxiety.

01:05:43.000 It's the ultimate adventure, and that's the willingness to welcome everything about life that's terrible and painful and malevolent, to welcome that with open arms, to accept that.

01:05:55.000 And that's predicated on a deeper idea even, which is that sacrifice is the basis of community, which is exactly right.

01:06:03.000 Because you have to give up something to be in relationship to the future and to other people.

01:06:08.000 Right.

01:06:08.000 Right, so the biblical corpus is an examination of What would you say?

01:06:14.000 Levels of sacrifice moving downward to the ultimate possible level of sacrifice.

01:06:20.000 So in the Abrahamic story, Abraham is requested by God to offer up his son.

01:06:25.000 Right now, he gets him back.

01:06:28.000 The threat isn't carried through.

01:06:31.000 And what does that mean?

01:06:37.000 It means, first of all, that everything in your life, no matter what it is, including your relationships, should be made subservient to the highest possible aim.

01:06:44.000 It also means that a good father sacrifices his children to what's highest.

01:06:50.000 That's the offering of your child to the world.

01:06:52.000 The faithful offering of your child to the world.

01:06:54.000 That's what Mary does. 1.00

01:06:56.000 It's a famous statue of Mary in St. Peter's in Rome.

01:07:01.000 Michelangelo made it when he was like 23, some ridiculous early age, brilliant statue.

01:07:07.000 Mary is holding the body of her son broken in her arms, looking serene.

01:07:12.000 He's an adult, off the cross.

01:07:15.000 It's like the female crucifixion, and the idea is that the good mother, the proper father, offers their children to be broken by the world in the pursuit of what's highest.

01:07:28.000 There it is.

01:07:29.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:07:30.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:07:30.000 He was 23 when he made that?

01:07:32.000 That is insane.

01:07:34.000 What were you doing when you were 23? 0.99

01:07:37.000 Telling shitty jokes. 0.99

01:07:38.000 Single block of marble. 0.98

01:07:40.000 Yeah, and so see, that's an indication of sacred femininity because, see, the psychoanalyst said in the early part of the 20th century that the good mother necessarily fails.

01:07:51.000 And so what does that mean?

01:07:53.000 Well, every woman who brings a child into the world knows that the child is going to be broken by death and malevolence. 0.98

01:08:00.000 And so motherhood, in its highest aspect, is the offering of the child to the world, to be broken.

01:08:08.000 That's what's portrayed in the Abrahamic story too, with regards to Abraham.

01:08:12.000 To get your child back, you offer them to the world.

01:08:16.000 That's a profound indication of faith, right?

01:08:20.000 That life is worthwhile despite its suffering and its evil.

01:08:23.000 And it's so good.

01:08:24.000 Like, the work.

01:08:26.000 Like, look at his foot.

01:08:28.000 Just look at the detail on the way the toe bends, the heel.

01:08:34.000 It's insane how good it is.

01:08:37.000 He was so good.

01:08:39.000 The fact that he figured out how to be that good at 23 years of age is just so shocking.

01:08:47.000 Well, also so inspiring, you know?

01:08:49.000 So inspiring.

01:08:50.000 But stunning.

01:08:51.000 Like, stunning how good it is.

01:08:54.000 Yes, and stunning what it means and where it's placed.

01:08:57.000 And the understanding of anatomy.

01:09:00.000 Did he really?

01:09:02.000 Wow.

01:09:05.000 Insane.

01:09:07.000 I mean, that guy left behind so much.

01:09:10.000 Like, what is that about?

01:09:12.000 What is it about these unique individuals like him that their work transcends time?

01:09:22.000 That's life eternal, that ability to transcend time.

01:09:26.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:09:27.000 Thousands of years later, people will be looking at those.

01:09:29.000 So what happens in the Abrahamic story, because it's relevant to your question.

01:09:35.000 God offers Abraham the opportunity to be the father of nations.

01:09:39.000 Okay, so imagine this.

01:09:40.000 Imagine this as a father.

01:09:42.000 So we use father as a generic word, right?

01:09:45.000 Everybody has a father.

01:09:46.000 So there's a generic aspect to it.

01:09:48.000 There's a role that you play if you're a father.

01:09:50.000 And then you could imagine there's a role you could play as a good father.

01:09:53.000 And if you're a good father, you're radically encouraging.

01:09:57.000 And you encourage your children to go out into the world and prevail.

01:10:01.000 You teach them to handle serpents.

01:10:03.000 You don't protect them.

01:10:05.000 You don't shelter them.

01:10:06.000 You push them out and you say, no matter what comes your way, kid, I've got confidence that you can handle it.

01:10:12.000 No matter how terrible it is, no matter how challenging or daunting or malevolent it is, you've got it.

01:10:17.000 And when you see your children doing that, if you're a good father, it fills you with what?

01:10:23.000 It fills you with...

01:10:27.000 Gratitude and love.

01:10:29.000 To see your children acting that out, even at an early age, taking the risks of their first steps, or climbing their first play structure, or going out in the playground to make new friends when they're strangers, or going off to school alone.

01:10:42.000 All of that, you think?

01:10:43.000 It's dangerous out there.

01:10:44.000 It's like, good!

01:10:45.000 Go! 0.95

01:10:46.000 I know you can handle it.

01:10:48.000 Okay, so that's what Abraham plays out.

01:10:50.000 He plays out that archetypal role.

01:10:52.000 And the idea there, this is why I made reference earlier to the idea of the selfish gene.

01:10:57.000 Dawkins characterized human reproduction as selfish.

01:11:01.000 That's wrong!

01:11:02.000 Because the human reproductive pattern is multi-generational.

01:11:05.000 And if you want to establish the pattern of fatherhood, That's going to cascade down the generations that will make your descendants successful in the multi-generational manner.

01:11:16.000 Then you follow the spirit adventure and you imbue your children with that confidence.

01:11:21.000 And that's how that pattern that establishes the dynasty, so Abraham is the father of nations, is established.

01:11:28.000 So human reproduction is way more complex than just sex.

01:11:32.000 Far more complex.

01:11:34.000 It's a multi-generational commitment.

01:11:36.000 So Now, the promise that God makes to Abraham in part is that if you fall into that pattern of maximal adventure and courageous movement forward, that your life is imbued with a meaning that...

01:11:50.000 With the meaning that transcends time.

01:11:52.000 And that you embody something like an archetypal and eternal spirit.

01:11:55.000 And that's the spirit of the Father.

01:11:57.000 That's why Abraham understands that he's made contact with the God of his ancestors.

01:12:02.000 And if you're a good father, you have that spirit dwelling within you.

01:12:07.000 And the Christian insistence is that that spirit's identical to the Logos that bears the weight of the world on its shoulders voluntarily. 0.66

01:12:16.000 And that that's what brings everything into being.

01:12:20.000 Stunning.

01:12:21.000 It's a stunning conceptualization.

01:12:23.000 And I think it's right.

01:12:25.000 It looks right to me.

01:12:27.000 And the idea that sacrifice is the basis of the community, that's just obvious.

01:12:31.000 Like, the fact that you're married, so what's the sacrificial gesture there?

01:12:36.000 Well, all other women. 0.94

01:12:38.000 That's sacrifice number one.

01:12:40.000 Then it's not about you.

01:12:42.000 It's also not about your wife.

01:12:43.000 It's about the stability of your union across time.

01:12:47.000 And it's about the stability of that union insofar as that's a reliable foundation for your children.

01:12:53.000 So that's sacrificial too.

01:12:55.000 You give up your whims in the present so that the future is stabilized.

01:12:59.000 You give up your immaturity so that your children can thrive.

01:13:03.000 That's all sacrificial gesture.

01:13:05.000 And we figured that out.

01:13:06.000 That's why we put the crucifix at the center of our society.

01:13:10.000 Because we figured out, even though we didn't know it, we figured out that the stability of the community is predicated on the willingness of the individual to sacrifice.

01:13:22.000 And the exploration in the New Testament is the limits of sacrifice, right?

01:13:28.000 So do you think that that's what people think of when they think of the cross?

01:13:33.000 It's very hard to think about—it's very hard to know what people think about.

01:13:36.000 I would say it depends on their level of sophistication.

01:13:39.000 Right, that's what I'm getting at.

01:13:40.000 I don't think it's ever been explained to me that way, and I don't think most people think about it that way when they think about it.

01:13:48.000 They think Jesus died for our sins.

01:13:50.000 There he is.

01:13:51.000 Praise Jesus.

01:13:52.000 Right, right, right.

01:13:53.000 It's a very formulaic, surface-level understanding of what it is we're talking about.

01:14:02.000 And there's a merciful element of it, and this is what Jung was referring to when he said that religion helps protect people against religious experience.

01:14:10.000 The full revelation of the significance, let's say, of the imitation of Christ, which is supposed to be the foundation of Christian belief, is in fact the demand that you walk the same pathway.

01:14:26.000 And it's the most terrifying demand.

01:14:29.000 So Jung described the Christian Passion as an archetypal tragedy.

01:14:35.000 Now, there was a reason for that.

01:14:36.000 So think about it this way.

01:14:38.000 Think about it technically.

01:14:40.000 So imagine that a hundred great storytellers told the most painful possible story.

01:14:46.000 And then imagine that you aggregated all those stories and you distilled them into one story where all the terrible elements were present.

01:14:54.000 Okay, so now you have a representation.

01:14:56.000 You have a representation of the worst life can throw at you.

01:15:01.000 Okay, so let's take that apart a bit.

01:15:03.000 So the first thing that makes a tragedy tragic is that the tragedy befalls a good person.

01:15:11.000 Because if a tragedy befalls a villain, it's just justice.

01:15:15.000 It's not a tragedy.

01:15:17.000 So it has to be a good person.

01:15:19.000 So then, to amplify that, you would not only have the tragedy befall a good person, you'd have it befall a good person that everyone knew was good, but was not only good, was the best, and that was persecuted because he was good.

01:15:32.000 So that sort of limits it out in that direction.

01:15:34.000 And then you might say, well, what does he have to face?

01:15:37.000 Well, and the answer would be, well, the worst life has to offer.

01:15:40.000 Okay.

01:15:42.000 Early death.

01:15:43.000 Early, painful death. 0.82

01:15:44.000 Early, painful, humiliating, unjust death at the hands of his friends, at the hands of the mob, under the thumb of a tyrant.

01:15:54.000 Right.

01:15:55.000 Brought about by people who knew that he was not only good, but the best of men.

01:16:01.000 That's an archetypal tragedy.

01:16:02.000 And then it doesn't limit out.

01:16:03.000 So then you have the death that Occurs in consequence of that and it's voluntary acceptance, but that's not where it ends because the mythology surrounding the crucifixion story insists that Christ harrowed hell after the crucifixion,

01:16:19.000 which meant that he confronted not only death but malevolence itself and in consequence transcended both.

01:16:29.000 And so what's the underlying psychological message?

01:16:31.000 It's something like The calling and the voice of conscience informing people that in order to thrive properly in life and to become who you could be, if you could be everything you could be,

01:16:47.000 you have to voluntarily take on the weight of the worst life has to offer, including the depths of malevolence itself.

01:16:55.000 And you think, well, obviously, Joe, you know this, like, how are you going to adapt to a situation you won't even admit to?

01:17:02.000 Right.

01:17:02.000 Well, so how could it be otherwise, then, for you to become everything that you could be?

01:17:07.000 You have to embrace all of the catastrophes that life has to offer.

01:17:12.000 How could it be other than that?

01:17:14.000 You're gonna hide?

01:17:16.000 You're gonna pretend?

01:17:17.000 Right.

01:17:17.000 How's that gonna work?

01:17:18.000 No one thinks that'll work.

01:17:20.000 Right.

01:17:21.000 And you're right, there is this defensive element to the Particularly the Protestant religious tradition, although I don't want to single out the Protestants specifically, that insists that, you know, the work has already been done.

01:17:34.000 But there's a lot of ambivalence about that in the Christian canon, because there's an equal insistence that, no, you're supposed to...

01:17:44.000 You're supposed to take all this on voluntarily.

01:17:46.000 And that not only that, it's such an interesting idea because it makes so much sense psychologically.

01:17:53.000 So imagine that as your courage grows so that you can confront more and more of the horror of life, That a spirit begins to develop within you that gives you a strength that's commensurate with your daring.

01:18:07.000 That's walking with God.

01:18:09.000 That's the same thing.

01:18:10.000 So the promise is that if you had the courage, something would be with you to...

01:18:18.000 Allow you to bear up nobly under the burden.

01:18:21.000 All the clinical evidence supports that proclamation, because what you see in people in the therapeutic transformation is that insofar as they're willing to confront what terrifies them voluntarily, they get stronger.

01:18:34.000 And then imagine that there's nothing but a metaphysical limit to that.

01:18:41.000 And I think that's right.

01:18:42.000 I can't see how it cannot be right.

01:18:45.000 It makes sense.

01:18:45.000 It resonates with how we know people that have overcome great things in their life and become these very unusual and unique people.

01:18:53.000 I've got to pause because I have to use the restroom.

01:18:55.000 But let's jump right back. 0.97

01:18:57.000 Where were we?

01:18:59.000 Well, we were kind of bringing we who wrestle with God to a close, I would say.

01:19:03.000 We've got other projects I want to talk to you about.

01:19:06.000 Okay.

01:19:06.000 All right?

01:19:07.000 Sure.

01:19:07.000 We're launching Peterson Academy today.

01:19:11.000 So, online university, we hope.

01:19:14.000 We'll see.

01:19:16.000 We've got...

01:19:17.000 We're launching with 20 courses.

01:19:19.000 Best lectures in the world.

01:19:21.000 Very, very high quality production.

01:19:23.000 We invited the best lectures I could find down to Miami, Eight-hour courses on the topic they really want.

01:19:31.000 Highest possible production.

01:19:33.000 Quality.

01:19:35.000 And we're hoping we'll make a high-level, university-level, university-equivalent education available to everyone for approximately 1 20th the cost.

01:19:47.000 So that's the plan.

01:19:49.000 You want to see the opening salvo?

01:19:52.000 Sure.

01:19:52.000 Yeah.

01:19:53.000 Put it up, Jamie.

01:19:54.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:19:54.000 Let's take a look.

01:19:56.000 I ran this before my...

01:19:57.000 Lectures in this last tour.

01:19:59.000 You gotta put the headphones on if you want.

01:20:01.000 Yeah, yeah, okay.

01:20:02.000 Why did I decide to build an online university?

01:20:06.000 Well...

01:20:06.000 There is a crisis now in higher education.

01:20:11.000 The president of Harvard University resigned today, weeks after...

01:20:15.000 Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's code of conduct?

01:20:19.000 We have a problem of affordability and cost, spiraling student loans.

01:20:23.000 We have a groupthink emerging, and that warps the entire academic enterprise.

01:20:28.000 I experimented with putting my lectures online and found that I could teach far more people at very low cost than I could at the university.

01:20:38.000 And I thought, well, why not scale that?

01:20:43.000 What I'm hoping to do is to find the best lectures in the world.

01:20:49.000 And to bring them to as wide as possible an audience.

01:20:53.000 He came to me and he basically said, I want you to do the best course that you've always wanted to do.

01:20:58.000 We want to bring you the highest quality education possible at the lowest possible price.

01:21:03.000 It's extremely high level content that anybody can use to educate themselves and it's available to everybody.

01:21:08.000 Well, that would be good.

01:21:11.000 I think it's funny because I got cancelled at the university so I could try to return the favour.

01:21:20.000 I think they're doing that to themselves, right?

01:21:23.000 Yeah, well, we couldn't have a better marketing campaign than the universities themselves.

01:21:28.000 It's similar to what's going on with mainstream media.

01:21:31.000 Yeah.

01:21:31.000 It really is kind of the same thing.

01:21:33.000 Yeah, well, it all derives from the same source, right, is the capture of higher education by this godforsaken ideology that's...

01:21:41.000 Bizarre.

01:21:41.000 Yeah.

01:21:42.000 Bizarre how successful it is and how many people just are compliant.

01:21:49.000 Yeah, that's for sure.

01:21:51.000 That's for sure.

01:21:53.000 Do you see it turning around, though?

01:21:55.000 It seems like it is a little.

01:21:56.000 It seems like more people are pushing back against it now than ever.

01:22:01.000 When you have institutions that are thoroughly captured, it's very difficult to retrieve them.

01:22:07.000 You know, we've been arguing about this.

01:22:08.000 I've been arguing about this with my team, Fort Peterson Academy.

01:22:13.000 I mean, are the Is it possible to rejuvenate the bricks and mortars institutions of higher education?

01:22:22.000 Well, one answer to that is, things that are dead rot.

01:22:27.000 And the universities seem to be rotting everywhere.

01:22:30.000 And maybe that's because they're dead.

01:22:31.000 Maybe it's because their time has come.

01:22:33.000 And it could be that that's the case.

01:22:35.000 I mean, I hope not.

01:22:38.000 I loved working at Harvard in particular.

01:22:40.000 It was an amazing institution.

01:22:42.000 I had a very good time at McGill.

01:22:43.000 I had a good time at the University of Toronto.

01:22:45.000 It's a real pain to see these institutions degenerate, but they're ideologically captured.

01:22:51.000 That's not good and thoroughly and it's a very rotten ideology.

01:22:55.000 It's the spirit of Cain, the resentful spirit of Cain.

01:22:59.000 It's not good.

01:23:00.000 They're unbelievably expensive.

01:23:02.000 They take terrible advantage of their students.

01:23:04.000 Plus The average quality of the educational experience is actually very low at most places, not everywhere.

01:23:12.000 Hillsdale College, I think, is a marked exception.

01:23:14.000 But most places, the lectures aren't good.

01:23:16.000 And we're in a situation now It's kind of like what happened with YouTube in a way.

01:23:22.000 You know, YouTube enabled you, for example, and Spotify as well, to emerge as an independent commentator.

01:23:28.000 And, you know, you've cornered the market in some ways on that.

01:23:32.000 There's no reason.

01:23:33.000 The universities could have seen this coming 20 years ago.

01:23:36.000 They could have found their best lectures, and they could have...

01:23:39.000 They've filmed their courses in the highest possible quality manner and taken advantage of this new communication technology.

01:23:46.000 And they didn't.

01:23:47.000 And that's not a good sign.

01:23:50.000 You know, it's so funny, we bring our professors down to Miami, you know, professors from Oxford and Cambridge, and they're so relieved to come there.

01:23:59.000 And the reason they're relieved to come there is because they're treated badly by their own institutions, these great professors.

01:24:05.000 They're treated with contempt.

01:24:07.000 They're paid miserably.

01:24:08.000 That's especially the case in the UK. All we have to do is Appreciate them.

01:24:14.000 I tell the professors who come to Peterson Academy, like, here's the deal.

01:24:18.000 You can say exactly what you want in exactly the way you want.

01:24:22.000 You can teach what you love.

01:24:23.000 We'll put a studio audience together that actually wants to listen to you.

01:24:28.000 That's the only reason they're there.

01:24:29.000 We'll offer you a financial deal that's better than you can get with any book.

01:24:33.000 We'll give you more reach than you could ever also hope to get with any published manuscript.

01:24:37.000 You can bring what you know to the world for next to nothing.

01:24:40.000 We figure we can offer a University quality, high-level university quality equivalent for about $2,000 over four years.

01:24:49.000 Wow.

01:24:50.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:51.000 We have a great social media platform.

01:24:53.000 So, I don't know.

01:24:54.000 You tell me what you think about this.

01:24:55.000 So...

01:24:56.000 We've been wrestling with price, right?

01:24:58.000 Because pricing something is very difficult.

01:25:01.000 And part of the problem with social media platforms is that they're free.

01:25:05.000 And you might say, well, that's not a problem.

01:25:06.000 It's like, it is a problem because things that are free get overrun by parasites instantly.

01:25:11.000 And so you get the trolls, you get the bots, you get the bad corporate actors, you get the scam artists, because there's no barrier to their participation.

01:25:22.000 Right.

01:25:23.000 We put a $450 cost on our offering per year for the early adopters.

01:25:30.000 That's available now.

01:25:32.000 And we're hoping that the fact that there has to be a bit of a financial sacrifice on the front end will make our social media network High quality and clean because there's a little bit of skin in the game to participate.

01:25:47.000 So we've taken the best elements of the popular social media networks and amalgamated that and we're hoping that we can produce a community of people who are responsible and achievement-oriented and upward-striving and intellectually curious and bring them together so they can form their own communities as well as participating in the lectures.

01:26:08.000 And so I'm extremely excited about this.

01:26:12.000 We got lucky too because we set up a production studio in Miami and we have state-of-the-art film crew and editors.

01:26:24.000 But just when we started to film, the AI illustration capacity came online and we filmed everyone against a white background.

01:26:32.000 And so we can fill the whole background with imagery and graphs and comments.

01:26:37.000 Can you run a trailer for, just pick one of the courses at random, because this is actually how the courses look.

01:26:42.000 So the trailers are very tightly edited, but so are the courses.

01:26:46.000 And so, let me show you one of them so you get a sense of what we've managed to accomplish.

01:26:56.000 A lot of fascinating questions.

01:26:58.000 Where do we come from?

01:26:59.000 Where are we going?

01:27:00.000 What is the universe made of?

01:27:02.000 How can we possibly understand the grand landscape of the cosmos?

01:27:06.000 When you look back in space, you look back in time.

01:27:12.000 It's amazing we've been able to do this, to study the properties of the cosmos, timescales of billions of years, size scales billions of times bigger than our own.

01:27:20.000 And now the question is, can we go back to time equals zero?

01:27:23.000 Can we go back to before time equals zero?

01:27:26.000 And what does that even mean?

01:27:29.000 I hope in this course to keep striving and asking these great questions, because without great questions, there can be no great answers.

01:27:35.000 And without great answers, there can be no understanding.

01:27:39.000 Wow.

01:27:40.000 Brian Keating.

01:27:43.000 Fanjo.

01:27:44.000 Pretty badass.

01:27:44.000 Yeah, well, and I was so happy when I saw the trailers, you know, because Michaela and her husband, Jordan Fuller, they've been working very diligently on this for about three years, and they basically built it from scratch, you know, and I didn't have any idea how the courses would look, you know, because that's actually a pretty difficult thing to pull off,

01:28:01.000 but I'm very happy with the trailers.

01:28:03.000 They're extremely engaging.

01:28:06.000 Every course has its own style sheet, like, so each course has its, there's an overarching style to the platform, but But every single course has its own illustration, ethos and quality.

01:28:17.000 Yeah, well, you can see them.

01:28:18.000 Now, would you be...

01:28:19.000 Is this just for personal education?

01:28:23.000 Or will you be giving degrees?

01:28:25.000 We're going to approach that in two ways.

01:28:29.000 So, we'll offer...

01:28:31.000 Certification at different time spans.

01:28:34.000 So, you know, generally it takes you four years to get a degree, but you can imagine that it would be useful to have a one-year certificate, two-year certificate, three-year certificate, four-year certificate.

01:28:43.000 There's no compelling reason why it has to be four years.

01:28:47.000 We'll keep very detailed records of our students' academic progress, and they'll be able to offer them directly to employers.

01:28:56.000 So we want to be able to assure employers that anybody who's gone through the certification process that's part and parcel of Peterson Academy has done the work and met the standards, and the standards will be high.

01:29:07.000 Now, simultaneously, we're working on technical accreditation.

01:29:11.000 Right?

01:29:12.000 So that we can pull this, so that we can have this operate as a standard university.

01:29:17.000 Now, there's trade-offs in that because the accreditation processes themselves are captured by the same forces that have captured the universities.

01:29:25.000 And we're not going to compromise the quality of the offerings by kowtowing to accreditation processes that are producing the same problem that we're trying to address.

01:29:34.000 Now, I'm in discussion with a number of different jurisdictions to move accreditation forward.

01:29:40.000 If that happens, it can also be applied retroactively.

01:29:43.000 So if we can figure out how to do it with an administration or a jurisdiction that's willing to do it, and we don't have to compromise the quality, then we'll go the classic accreditation route.

01:29:53.000 Otherwise, I'm just going to go directly to employers and say, look, we're going to be very, very careful about who we grant certification to, and you'll be able to rely on The certification from Peterson Academy as an indication of intellectual ability and also work ethic.

01:30:09.000 And we'll document that by the record-keeping process that we use as part and parcel of the platform.

01:30:15.000 So I think we can do it.

01:30:16.000 We're going to do it one way or another.

01:30:18.000 How are you going to be able to assure that these students, because it's all remote, right?

01:30:23.000 Yeah.

01:30:24.000 How are you going to be able to assure that they're actually doing the work, that they're not utilizing AI, like...

01:30:29.000 Are you going to have them write things?

01:30:30.000 I can't tell you how, but we are going to.

01:30:33.000 Oh, okay.

01:30:33.000 Yeah, well, look, I've tested tens of thousands of people online.

01:30:38.000 So I set up an online testing service that was used primarily by a company called the Founder Institute.

01:30:44.000 And we tested 50,000 people, 60,000 people over five years in about seven different languages.

01:30:50.000 And we built and developed technology to capture people who are cheating.

01:30:54.000 So they don't know how we're capturing them.

01:30:57.000 And I'm not going to tell you, but we know how to do it.

01:30:59.000 And, you know, and that's obviously a problem, but it isn't an insoluble problem.

01:31:04.000 And I think we've already solved it.

01:31:06.000 So, and then once we move towards more formal and stable accreditation, there are lots of Companies have emerged as a consequence of the COVID lockdowns to make sure that remote compliance with testing requirements can be achieved.

01:31:21.000 So there's lots of ways to solve that problem.

01:31:24.000 It's very exciting.

01:31:26.000 It's really exciting.

01:31:27.000 And it's, you know, there's all sorts of weird possibilities that emerge from this too, because the technology now exists.

01:31:33.000 And we've had some of the videos converted already to have the lectures translated into the world's major languages.

01:31:39.000 And the...

01:31:40.000 The technology that's cutting edge uses the professor's voice and intonation in the second language and matches the mouth movements to the language.

01:31:48.000 Yeah, they're going to do that at Spotify.

01:31:50.000 Yeah, it's seamless, man.

01:31:51.000 It's seamless.

01:31:52.000 They're doing it with podcasts.

01:31:53.000 I think they're initially going to do Spanish, German, and French, I believe.

01:31:58.000 Those are the first three languages, but they eventually will scale out.

01:32:01.000 Yeah, so that's just laying there.

01:32:04.000 It is unbelievable.

01:32:05.000 Have someone teach a lecture in Russian and actually make the mouth movements and everything.

01:32:11.000 Well, it's extremely exciting, especially in regard to the developing world, because there'll be more people in Nigeria by 2100 than in China, and the median age of African is 19. So there's an immense opportunity in the developing world to capture the market for higher education.

01:32:32.000 And it would be a wonderful thing to be able to bring this to the world, and I just can't see why not.

01:32:37.000 You know, the courses are very efficiently taught.

01:32:40.000 We have AI-mediated testing services, and we can use the tests themselves as educational tools.

01:32:46.000 You know, so imagine you have a test, you get a question wrong, and you get feedback that it's wrong, and it'll tell you where in the lecture or in the reading material that you made the mistake, so you can go back and review.

01:32:57.000 And so even the testing itself will be educational.

01:33:00.000 And, you know, we're hoping to develop a community that is composed of people who want to engage in lifelong learning.

01:33:06.000 And it also means that you don't have to be like 18 to 22 to attend this university.

01:33:11.000 You can stay a part of it for the rest of your life.

01:33:14.000 And we're hoping that spontaneous communities will develop and that we can bring people together for convention.

01:33:19.000 So, you know, if we can get enough people on the platform, We'll have conventions in different cities where we bring our lecturers, you know, to a stadium or to a theatre for a weekend and everybody who's part of the university can come and listen to their favourite lecturers.

01:33:33.000 And we've got educational institutions who are already interested in partnering in that regard so that they can be brought to their institution for, like, summertime three-day courses.

01:33:44.000 And so...

01:33:46.000 And it's so fun too because we can use video and audio and that's a wonderful thing as well because as you know well far more people can listen and watch than can read.

01:33:55.000 Now you have to read to partake in our courses as well but it's a great opportunity and it's so fun to have the professors come down there and be thrilled about it.

01:34:05.000 Most of like we want the professors we already have to teach multiple courses because they're very good lectures and they've They've, I think, all, without exception, enthusiastically agreed to continue participating because we took the idiot restrictions off them.

01:34:20.000 It's like, teach what you want to the people who want to listen.

01:34:23.000 No holds barred.

01:34:25.000 It's so fun.

01:34:26.000 It's so fun.

01:34:29.000 With the state of higher education the way it is today, how does it recover?

01:34:36.000 Or does it just get replaced?

01:34:38.000 Well, I guess what I'm hoping at least that the Peterson Academy will do with the production quality of our courses is up the ante.

01:34:48.000 It's like even if we fail financially because, you know, we don't know how to price this.

01:34:52.000 How the hell do you figure out something like that?

01:34:53.000 We've argued about it a lot and we don't know what the potential financial market might be.

01:34:58.000 But at minimum, you know, we'll be able to launch the courses independently if the platform itself doesn't take off.

01:35:04.000 We're going to show Harvard and Stanford and Oxford and Cambridge what's possible with regards to lecturing with the new technology.

01:35:13.000 I mean, they're stuck in like 1860. And you know, with these online large courses that places like MIT, for example, have launched, basically all they do is put up a camera and videotape a lecture.

01:35:26.000 It's like, you can't do that.

01:35:30.000 That YouTube and the technologies that allow for the dissemination of video, they're their own medium, right?

01:35:39.000 The medium is the message.

01:35:40.000 You have to use the bloody technology.

01:35:41.000 You can't stay stuck a century back, which is why we've done tight edits and filled in the backgrounds with images.

01:35:49.000 There's just no reason that that can't be everywhere.

01:35:52.000 Right.

01:35:53.000 So, and why would you pay...

01:35:57.000 Look, people probably pay $300,000 for an Ivy League education because that's where they meet their wife or their husband, when it gets right down to it.

01:36:07.000 Is that really what it is?

01:36:08.000 Well, Joe, look, you never know what an institution is doing.

01:36:11.000 Okay, so what does a university do?

01:36:13.000 Lectures, accreditation.

01:36:15.000 Okay, but that's not all.

01:36:17.000 It gives you an identity for four years while you sort your life out.

01:36:20.000 It gives you an opportunity to mature away from your parents.

01:36:22.000 It gives you the opportunity to build a new network of peers.

01:36:26.000 Not only living peers, but peers in the historical tradition.

01:36:31.000 And it gives you an opportunity to meet the person that you might be with for the rest of your life.

01:36:35.000 That's a big deal and it's a selective opportunity because you bring bright kids together who are hard-working and they get a chance to meet each other.

01:36:42.000 That might be the whole value of an Ivy League education.

01:36:45.000 It's hard to specify these things.

01:36:47.000 Now, we're trying to replicate that on Peterson Academy with the social media side.

01:36:51.000 And, you know, that's a new technology and we don't know how it'll work.

01:36:55.000 But the fact that it's selective and it won't be full of trolls and bots and bad corporate actors should mean that people will be able to build social networks that are of high value.

01:37:04.000 Because that's one of the things, obviously, that's what you do in a bloody MBA program.

01:37:08.000 You know, it's not what you learn at an MBA program that confers the value of the degree.

01:37:12.000 It's the fact that it was bloody difficult to get in because the GMAT is an IQ test, essentially, and the social network you build in the MBA program.

01:37:22.000 You carry that with you while we're doing what we can to replicate that online.

01:37:27.000 And we're going to make sure that we offer potential employees a record of our students' progress and success so that they have some sense that the person who they hire has Done the apprenticeship work on their own necessary to accredit them as, say, a valid student and a hard worker.

01:37:43.000 And I think we can do that.

01:37:45.000 And I think we can do it more effectively than universities do it.

01:37:47.000 I know how to measure these things.

01:37:49.000 It's going to be very interesting if that becomes a criteria in which people are hired.

01:37:55.000 If it really does become a thing and it becomes something where people are accepting that as an education and seeking people out in that regard, it's going to be very interesting to see if more of those emerge.

01:38:10.000 If you start a trend and then...

01:38:13.000 Well, at minimum, we can assure a potential employer of two things.

01:38:18.000 We didn't attract a woke crowd.

01:38:21.000 And we didn't indoctrinate our bloody students.

01:38:25.000 So that's not a bad minimum.

01:38:27.000 You know, you can assure intelligence, you can assure a work ethic, because they've completed the course material improperly.

01:38:33.000 We can ensure that's properly measured.

01:38:35.000 But we can also say, here's a bunch of things they didn't learn.

01:38:38.000 Right.

01:38:39.000 And the courses are subversive in the most traditional possible way.

01:38:45.000 So we have Larry Arnn, for example, who's the president of Hillsdale.

01:38:48.000 He did a lecture series on Churchill.

01:38:51.000 Where are you going to go to university to get a lecture series on Churchill?

01:38:54.000 And Arne was Churchill's primary biographer, one of his primary biographers, so that's a big deal.

01:38:59.000 You know, we've got Nigel Bigger from Oxbridge lecturing on the legacy of UK colonialism.

01:39:10.000 Well, you're not going to get that anywhere else.

01:39:13.000 And he's a great lecturer and he's a brilliant man and very, very courageous.

01:39:17.000 And Larry Arnn is in exactly the same category.

01:39:20.000 So the technology we're using is revolutionary in a variety of different ways.

01:39:24.000 The lectures are high quality, but the whole ethos of the educational offering is completely different than what It's on offer, say at the typical Ivy League.

01:39:34.000 Harvard, for example, which is such a catastrophe.

01:39:37.000 I was there at Harvard in the 1990s.

01:39:39.000 I loved that place.

01:39:40.000 It was really forward-looking and aimed at excellence, with very minor exceptions, like truly minor exceptions.

01:39:47.000 It was a powerhouse, man.

01:39:49.000 And I went back and saw a bunch of my old professor friends A month ago.

01:39:54.000 You know, and they've all joined free speech movement at Harvard, and they're fighting against their own administration.

01:39:59.000 And these were like the best professors I ever met in my life.

01:40:02.000 And that's what they've been reduced to.

01:40:04.000 When did it start?

01:40:08.000 Specifically in the universities?

01:40:10.000 Yes.

01:40:11.000 It started with the incursion of What would you say?

01:40:16.000 A modified Marxism in the 1960s and then really accelerated in the 70s.

01:40:21.000 It sort of went like this.

01:40:21.000 You know how things fail.

01:40:22.000 Gradually, gradually, gradually, then suddenly.

01:40:25.000 And it hit a critical mass in terms of failure probably around 2014, 15. Pretty much when things blew up around me.

01:40:36.000 That's why they blew up around me.

01:40:39.000 And what do you think ultimately caused it to not course-correct?

01:40:43.000 What do you think ultimately caused these universities to give in to that?

01:40:47.000 Okay, let's talk about ultimate.

01:40:49.000 So let me tell you a story, an old story.

01:40:52.000 So there's a myth from Mesopotamia called the Enuma Elish, which is one of the oldest stories that we have.

01:40:59.000 And let me just lay out the story because these ancient Myths capture the fundamental dynamics of culture. 0.64

01:41:10.000 They're winnowed to do that.

01:41:11.000 Okay, so the Mesopotamians believe that the world emerged as the interaction of two forces.

01:41:17.000 We already alluded to them.

01:41:18.000 Chaos and order.

01:41:20.000 They had a god of order, Apsu.

01:41:22.000 He was a male god.

01:41:23.000 He's the patriarchal.

01:41:24.000 Patriarchy. 0.93

01:41:25.000 You can think of Apsu as the patriarchy.

01:41:27.000 And a female god, Tiamat. 0.71

01:41:30.000 Tiamat is a dragon and a dragon of chaos.

01:41:33.000 And the word Tiamat is the same word etymologically as the word Tohu Vabohu.

01:41:39.000 And that's the chaos that God makes the world out of at the beginning of time in the Hebrew accounts.

01:41:45.000 Okay, so you have Apsu and Tiamat, and they come together.

01:41:48.000 Chaos and order come together, and they produce the first world.

01:41:52.000 And in the Mesopotamian account of things, that's a world of higher-order gods.

01:41:58.000 Now, those higher-order gods Forget their ancestors and go about their business.

01:42:03.000 And they get increasingly fractious and undisciplined and noisy and hedonistic and immature.

01:42:11.000 And at one point they kill their father, Apsu.

01:42:14.000 And they try to live on his corpse.

01:42:18.000 Right.

01:42:19.000 So you see an echo of this.

01:42:21.000 It's very complicated.

01:42:22.000 You see an echo of this in the story of Pinocchio.

01:42:24.000 You know, there's a scene in Pinocchio where Geppetto ends up in the body of a whale.

01:42:29.000 Okay, so here's the underlying biological dynamic.

01:42:32.000 It's so remarkable.

01:42:34.000 So imagine a society sets itself up according to a set of principles.

01:42:38.000 And it stores...

01:42:40.000 It creates a giant storehouse of wealth.

01:42:43.000 Okay, that's what a carcass is.

01:42:46.000 Right?

01:42:47.000 So if you're...

01:42:49.000 A primordial herder, your wealth is in the bodies of your herd animals. 1.00

01:42:56.000 Okay.

01:42:57.000 A body is a symbol of stored wealth.

01:42:59.000 In the Mesopotamian pantheon, the careless kill their father and live on its corpse.

01:43:06.000 Okay, that's what's happened to the universities.

01:43:09.000 So since World War II, the West has gathered huge storehouses of value everywhere.

01:43:16.000 Harvard's a great example.

01:43:17.000 Immense endowment.

01:43:19.000 Remarkably valuable brand.

01:43:21.000 Disney's another example. 0.88

01:43:23.000 And what's happened is, and this happens all the time, if you have an unguarded storehouse of value, The parasites come marching in, right? 0.95

01:43:33.000 And they try to live on the corpse.

01:43:35.000 Now, they can for a while because it's a storehouse of value, but they kill the spirit.

01:43:39.000 Now, what happens in the Mesopotamian story is that chaos itself comes flooding back in the form of Tiamat, who's extremely, the goddess of chaos, who's extremely angry that her husband has been sacrificed by the careless denizens of the world.

01:43:55.000 That's the death of God.

01:43:57.000 So yeah, and the saviour emerges in the Mesopotamian story.

01:44:00.000 It's so interesting.

01:44:02.000 So the saviour that emerges to set things right has eyes all the way around his head.

01:44:05.000 So he pays attention and he speaks magic words.

01:44:09.000 That's Marduk.

01:44:10.000 And so the Mesopotamian Empire was an avatar of Marduk and he's the spirit of responsibility that sets the world right.

01:44:17.000 Okay, so what are we seeing? 0.61

01:44:19.000 We're seeing the invasion of storehouses of wealth by the parasites, fundamentally. 0.99

01:44:25.000 Has that killed them?

01:44:30.000 I can't think through how you would rescue an institution, a typical upper-level university institution.

01:44:39.000 What are you going to do?

01:44:40.000 How are you going to do that?

01:44:41.000 Are you going to fire 80% of the people?

01:44:43.000 Who's going to do that?

01:44:45.000 No one's going to do that.

01:44:46.000 Now, you could say, well, we'll make DEI initiatives forbidden.

01:44:50.000 They're kind of doing that in Florida.

01:44:52.000 But all you do is change the words. 0.50

01:44:56.000 I mean, that's what the postmodernists did with Marxism in the 1970s when it no longer was fashionable to worship Stalin after everybody realized that he was a psychopathic murderer.

01:45:10.000 All that happened was the French intellectuals changed the terminology and they invented a form of Marxism that was even worse than Marxism, which was really quite the bloody achievement. 0.92

01:45:19.000 Do I think they can be rejuvenated?

01:45:23.000 I can't see how.

01:45:26.000 Well, when you have people like the president of Harvard that gets fired for plagiarism but maintains the exact same salary in a different job.

01:45:34.000 Yeah, as if demotion to a full Harvard professor was, well, you know, she's not suitable to be president, but she can still be a fully tenured professor at Harvard. 1.00

01:45:43.000 Really?

01:45:43.000 She can, eh?

01:45:44.000 With that publication record.

01:45:46.000 I just interviewed Carol Swain.

01:45:48.000 Do you know who Carol Swain is?

01:45:49.000 No.

01:45:50.000 Black law professor from whom Gay plagiarized much of her work.

01:45:55.000 Yeah. 0.69

01:45:56.000 Fun.

01:45:57.000 So what do you do with an institution that's that far gone?

01:46:00.000 You saw what those university professors did at Congress.

01:46:02.000 Yeah.

01:46:03.000 And they thought they were right.

01:46:04.000 They didn't even look put upon.

01:46:06.000 They looked, no, sorry.

01:46:08.000 They looked put upon and shocked when they were challenged by the...

01:46:12.000 Because they're not accustomed to being questioned and also to communicating outside of their bubble, in their bubble where their opinion is held in high esteem. 1.00

01:46:22.000 Yes, and everyone else is an idiot as far as they're concerned. 0.99

01:46:25.000 Well, the woman from Penn, when she was smiling every time she was answering these questions. 1.00

01:46:31.000 I'd never seen anything like that.

01:46:33.000 Like, I knew that the universities had become warped.

01:46:37.000 And the warp is very deep.

01:46:38.000 So I talked about the Mesopotamian story and there's another angle of deep warping.

01:46:43.000 So the spirit of Marx is a very old spirit.

01:46:49.000 It was alive in the French Revolution.

01:46:51.000 It was alive in the Soviet Revolution.

01:46:54.000 You can trace it all the way back to the story of Cain and Abel, as far as I'm concerned.

01:46:58.000 The story of Cain and Abel is the story of the fundamental human dynamic after the fall of man.

01:47:06.000 So, insofar as we're historical creatures, the story of Cain and Abel lays out the essential psychological conflict that characterizes human beings.

01:47:18.000 And so you have Cain on the one side.

01:47:20.000 So Cain Cain doesn't bring his best to the table.

01:47:24.000 He makes second-rate offerings and lies about it.

01:47:28.000 And then they're not accepted by him or his fellow man or women or by society or by God.

01:47:35.000 And that makes him bitter.

01:47:37.000 And instead of learning, he takes his complaints to God and he says something like, Well, what the hell's going on here?

01:47:44.000 I'm breaking myself in half, making my sacrificial offerings, and everything's being rejected. 1.00

01:47:50.000 What kind of stupid cosmos did you produce? 1.00

01:47:53.000 And God says to him something very interesting and complicated. 1.00

01:47:57.000 He says something like, You're blaming your bitterness on your failure, and you have failed, and you know it, and you didn't have to, but it isn't your failure that's making you bitter.

01:48:13.000 You've invited something in to inhabit you that's turned you against yourself and what's good.

01:48:21.000 He says to him, sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal, and you invited it in to have its way with you. 0.80

01:48:28.000 And there's a sexual metaphor there. 0.98

01:48:30.000 Oh yeah, oh yeah.

01:48:32.000 That's heavy.

01:48:32.000 It's rough, man.

01:48:35.000 It's rough.

01:48:35.000 You don't get to be a high school shooter till you've had a thousand hours of brooding over your misery.

01:48:40.000 And so that's what God tells Cain.

01:48:42.000 And that makes him violently angry and murderous.

01:48:46.000 And so he kills Abel. 0.95

01:48:48.000 He kills his own ideal.

01:48:49.000 And Abel, you have Cain who makes poor sacrifices and whines about it.

01:48:54.000 He's the perennial victim, shaking his fist at God and the world, refusing to learn from his experiences.

01:49:00.000 And he becomes...

01:49:01.000 And you have Abel who...

01:49:02.000 Makes the right sacrifices and aims upward.

01:49:05.000 That's the pattern.

01:49:06.000 Two spirits.

01:49:07.000 That's the Joker and Batman.

01:49:10.000 That's Lex Luthor and Superman.

01:49:12.000 That's Voldemort and Harry Potter.

01:49:14.000 It's Satan and Christ. 0.95

01:49:15.000 Like, it's this eternal, recurrent pattern.

01:49:18.000 And one of its manifestations is Marxism.

01:49:21.000 And another one of its manifestations is postmodernism.

01:49:23.000 And so...

01:49:25.000 This is a very old story.

01:49:27.000 It's a very old story.

01:49:29.000 And you can understand Cain's point, you know, because people do break themselves in half in life trying to struggle forward and they're not successes in their own eyes and they're rejected by other people and it undermines their faith in being itself.

01:49:43.000 You can understand that.

01:49:49.000 But you're called upon to bring your best to the table no matter what happens to you.

01:49:53.000 And to maintain your faith and your courage.

01:49:55.000 And to aim up.

01:49:56.000 There's no excuses.

01:49:58.000 Your past trauma, there's no excuses.

01:50:01.000 Doesn't matter what it is.

01:50:03.000 And so there's this battle.

01:50:04.000 And what's happened in the universities is the universities have been captured by the resentful spirit of Cain.

01:50:11.000 And so that's all...

01:50:13.000 Flowered up with postmodern language.

01:50:15.000 There's no ultimate unity.

01:50:17.000 That's the claim of the postmodernists.

01:50:19.000 There's no overarching narrative.

01:50:21.000 It's like, that's what the postmodernists claim.

01:50:23.000 Skepticism with regards to meta-narratives.

01:50:25.000 It's like, well, what do you mean by that?

01:50:27.000 You mean that everything culminates in disunity?

01:50:30.000 That's your theory of being?

01:50:31.000 So how the hell do we come together as a society then?

01:50:34.000 And around what?

01:50:35.000 Well, everyone goes their own way.

01:50:37.000 Yeah, that's called war.

01:50:40.000 So there's some, is there a higher unity in which everything participates or not?

01:50:44.000 Well, the postmodernists is like, no.

01:50:46.000 Have it your way.

01:50:48.000 Nihilism, disunity, anxiety, hopelessness, social disintegration, conflict.

01:50:57.000 That's that pathway.

01:50:58.000 And that's just where it starts.

01:51:00.000 That's just, that's the optimistic view.

01:51:04.000 So, We're trying to present at Peterson Academy and the other enterprises that I'm engaged in, we're trying to present a unified underlying vision and a traditional unifying underlying vision.

01:51:17.000 And I think that it's understandable what we talked about in the first part of this interview.

01:51:25.000 Once you understand that sacrifice is the basis of community and once you understand that there's a Ultimate form of sacrifice and that that's what's demanded of you if you're going to strive upward then the Contours of the religious story that undergirds the West fall into place and that's a very Remarkable thing to observe and I think that's going to happen I think that's I think we're at

01:51:55.000 the end of the enlightenment and something new is striving mightily to emerge Well, it's also interesting that these higher education institutes, even though they do have, you know, the way you're describing,

01:52:12.000 they're extremely wealthy.

01:52:14.000 They're extremely valuable.

01:52:16.000 The name brand to them is still extremely potent.

01:52:21.000 They have so many things going against them in terms of like an objective analysis of what's good for your education.

01:52:28.000 And what's good for preparing for your future.

01:52:30.000 And then on top of that, they're burdened with this insane financial problem.

01:52:35.000 The insane problem of first of all, student loans being something you never get out of.

01:52:41.000 Indentured servitude.

01:52:42.000 Yeah.

01:52:42.000 And the fact that we all know that the human frontal lobe, especially on males, doesn't even fully develop until you're 25. So you're kind of taking advantage of a developing mind and locking them into an insane burden of debt.

01:52:58.000 And ideology.

01:52:59.000 And ideology.

01:53:00.000 And so you're strapped with debt, so you must work, and then you must work within these structures that have been infected by this ideology, because everyone's coming out of the universities into those places, into those businesses and corporations, and they're Deeper and deeper interwoven into the structure of these businesses to the point where they're inescapable.

01:53:22.000 And then you can't leave because you have financial burdens.

01:53:24.000 You have all the student loan debt to pay off.

01:53:28.000 Something is an alternative to that if it can become effective to the term like if people can get employment.

01:53:37.000 You know, it's interesting like Well, as soon as we determine the accreditation route, like I said, I'm in active communication with a number of people who are interested in accreditation, but I have to figure out if that's the right route.

01:53:49.000 If it isn't, I'm going to work directly with interested employers to make sure that what our students obtain as a consequence of going through the...

01:53:59.000 Peterson Academy process is recognized by them as a marker of a high-quality applicant.

01:54:06.000 Yes.

01:54:06.000 And I know that that problem is solvable because I know how to do that.

01:54:11.000 Well, there's a lot of employers now that are kind of discounting the ideas of degrees.

01:54:17.000 Elon is a big one of them.

01:54:19.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:54:20.000 Yeah, there's quite a few people that you shouldn't dismiss someone as being qualified for a certain position just because they've gone through some very formal process.

01:54:29.000 Not if the formal process isn't predicated on general cognitive ability and conscientiousness.

01:54:35.000 Right. 0.99

01:54:35.000 If it's predicated on bullshit and a grift, which a lot of it is. 0.99

01:54:39.000 What do you think is going to happen with society in general, with the implementation of AI and the inevitable erosion of jobs? 0.91

01:54:52.000 I don't know if the erosion of jobs is inevitable.

01:54:55.000 Well, we've thought that before.

01:54:58.000 Well, first of all, the first thing I would say is like, all bets are off.

01:55:02.000 All bets are off.

01:55:04.000 We're going to have hyper-intelligent AI within five years.

01:55:07.000 In fact, we already have it.

01:55:09.000 Well, I'm being pessimistic.

01:55:10.000 I've used ChatGPT and Grok and some systems that my colleagues have developed.

01:55:15.000 We built our own large language models in-house.

01:55:19.000 My colleague, Victor Swift, built a large language model for me, trained on my books, and I used it to help me write this next book, because I could come across biblical passages that I couldn't understand, and I could ask this AI system For a first-pass interpretation,

01:55:36.000 and it could do a good job.

01:55:38.000 And we're gonna release that along with the book.

01:55:40.000 Yeah, so that was really something.

01:55:41.000 And I'll tell you, ChatGPT and Grok were unbelievably useful as research assistants.

01:55:46.000 So they're about as smart as high-end undergraduates.

01:55:51.000 They lie a lot.

01:55:52.000 You have to corner them like mad to get them to provide you with information that's valid.

01:55:56.000 What have you found them lying about?

01:55:58.000 Oh, they make up references that don't exist.

01:56:00.000 So, for example, for ChatGPT, about a quarter of the academic references it produces for you don't exist.

01:56:07.000 What?

01:56:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:56:08.000 Well, it doesn't know.

01:56:10.000 Like, it will produce a reference for you that's completely plausible, except that it doesn't exist.

01:56:15.000 So, if I ask ChatGPT a question...

01:56:18.000 It'll answer and it'll give me the references, because I asked for the references.

01:56:21.000 Then I have to go and look up all the references and read them, first of all, because you're supposed to read the things you refer to.

01:56:27.000 But also, I have to make sure that it's not, you know, wandered off into some hallucinatory pathway.

01:56:32.000 But that'll be taken care of in no time flat, as far as I'm concerned, and Musk has already got plans to do that.

01:56:39.000 So what will the addition of these AI systems mean to us?

01:56:45.000 God! 0.98

01:56:46.000 Well, I talked to Elon about this when we had our interview, and it's going to depend to some degree, Joe, on how we train the damn things. 0.88

01:56:52.000 So, there's this problem called the alignment problem, that's how the engineers describe it, which is, how do we know that these AI systems will have human interest in mind? 0.72

01:57:04.000 And you think, okay, how do we make machines that have human interests in mind?

01:57:08.000 And then you think, oh, well, we have the same problem with adolescents.

01:57:11.000 How do we ensure that we train our children so that they have their own interests and broad social interests in mind?

01:57:18.000 And the answer is, the answer always has been that you provide them with a classic religious and humanities education.

01:57:24.000 Because that provides an axis of stability around which all other knowledge can be organized.

01:57:31.000 Now, the problem with large language models at the moment is they're hyper-trained on modern text, and so they're ideologically addled and woke.

01:57:40.000 And so we've been experimenting with training LLMs on a more classic basis.

01:57:44.000 So we trained one on the King James Bible, and we haven't released it, because I don't know what to think about it.

01:57:50.000 It's like, you can ask the King James Bible a question, What the hell does that mean?

01:57:56.000 We're like, seriously?

01:57:58.000 What does that mean?

01:57:59.000 And before we release it, we also want to make sure that we have it.

01:58:05.000 We've developed the underlying technology properly.

01:58:08.000 Okay, so what's the answer to your question?

01:58:11.000 What AI will do will depend on the intent of the people who design it.

01:58:15.000 Here's a terrifying thing.

01:58:17.000 You tell me what you think about this.

01:58:19.000 Okay.

01:58:20.000 All right, so your thoughts are orienting phenomena.

01:58:25.000 So you think so that you can lay out a pathway to a desired destination.

01:58:30.000 And then you can evaluate the thought to see if that's a good strategy to get there.

01:58:35.000 Okay, so there's an implication that comes along with that.

01:58:41.000 A thought enters the theater of your imagination in relationship to your goal.

01:58:46.000 So you can formulate that in religious language.

01:58:50.000 The spirit that answers your prayers...

01:58:54.000 The nature of the spirit that answers your prayers will be dependent on the nature of your prayer.

01:59:00.000 Yeah, that's for sure.

01:59:03.000 Right.

01:59:03.000 So imagine that you're harboring feelings of resentment and bitterness as you're plotting your economic pathway forward.

01:59:12.000 And so you're trying to think about what you should do, but you have the spirit of resentment and bitterness sitting on your shoulder.

01:59:20.000 The thoughts that enter your mind are going to be a consequence of your possession by that bitterness to the degree that you've allowed it to shape your goal.

01:59:32.000 So here's a corollary of that.

01:59:34.000 This is stunning.

01:59:35.000 It's a stunning thing to understand.

01:59:38.000 If you orient your aim upward in the highest manner, the spirit that informs your thought will be the spirit of the highest possible aim.

01:59:49.000 And God, that's something to know, man.

01:59:51.000 So that's what a religious practice, a fundamental religious practice is for.

01:59:55.000 It's like, get rid of the corrupt motivation.

02:00:00.000 Get rid of it.

02:00:01.000 Get rid of it.

02:00:02.000 Pray for the salvation of your soul, that you're aiming right, because your aim is going to determine the content of your thoughts.

02:00:10.000 And that is how it works technically.

02:00:12.000 That's how it works neuropsychologically.

02:00:14.000 Your thoughts are the handmaiden of your aim.

02:00:17.000 Right, which is why we're always worried about sociopaths, because they never abandoned that corrupt motivation.

02:00:23.000 Yeah, well, they're basically—the best way to think about the narcissists and the hedonists and the histrionic types and the borderlines and the antisocial personalities is that they never matured cortically.

02:00:37.000 So, like, children come into the world, in a way, as a bundle of competing subcortical motivations, right?

02:00:44.000 And they're very powerful motivations.

02:00:47.000 Anger, for example.

02:00:48.000 You watch a two-year-old have a temper tantrum.

02:00:50.000 It's quite the show.

02:00:51.000 And they want short-term, immediate gratification.

02:00:54.000 Now, what happens as your cortex matures...

02:00:58.000 You transcend those lower-order instinctual motivations, that would be the Freudian id, and you start to regulate your behavior in relationship to your own future, so you stop doing stupid, pleasurable things in the moment that will compromise you, and you start to be able to incorporate the views of other people.

02:01:15.000 That's how kids at three start to develop the ability to have friends.

02:01:20.000 And the more sophisticated you get, the more other people and their perspectives are part of your perceptions and the more the future is taken into account in your actions and the cortex is actually there so that that can happen and it has to happen in a social context because you have to pick up the society of your peers obviously and so conditions like psychopathy or even power seeking for that matter are conditions

02:01:50.000 of radical immaturity and so That's how you explain their emergence.

02:01:56.000 And one of the things that's interesting about that is it provides a very powerful argument against moral relativism.

02:02:02.000 It's like there's a real difference between maturation and immaturity.

02:02:07.000 Maturation is productive and sustainable.

02:02:10.000 And immaturity is divisive and destructive.

02:02:15.000 And there's no if, ands, or buts about that.

02:02:18.000 Right.

02:02:18.000 And so, see, it's a different view of mental health.

02:02:22.000 Because the classic therapist-produced view of mental health is that mental health is sort of inside you.

02:02:30.000 You know, it's in your psyche.

02:02:31.000 It's in your mind.

02:02:33.000 But it's not.

02:02:35.000 Like, your mental health is the harmony of your existence in relationship to the future and other people.

02:02:43.000 And that sense of well-being that can infuse you if you get the balance right isn't a reflection of the proper structuring of your function of your mind or your brain.

02:02:57.000 It's a phenomenon that emerges when everything is in its proper place and operating harmoniously.

02:03:03.000 That's what you experience in music.

02:03:05.000 Music represents that.

02:03:06.000 Everything in its proper place.

02:03:08.000 That's what Adam is called upon by God to do in the story of Adam and Eve.

02:03:12.000 To subdue the world.

02:03:14.000 Subdue.

02:03:16.000 Everything in its proper place so that the whole structure operates in a harmonious manner.

02:03:21.000 It's a much more expanded view of what constitutes mental health.

02:03:24.000 Anyways, education should serve that.

02:03:27.000 Right?

02:03:28.000 And so, if you take the staff of Moses that's planted in a single place, the community grows around that.

02:03:36.000 That's the same as the magic wand of Gandalf.

02:03:38.000 That idea of a magic wand.

02:03:40.000 It's the traditional ethos Associated with transformation and sacrifice around which communities aggregate themselves and the proper humanities and religious education inculcates that center structure so that Knowledge can be organized around it.

02:04:01.000 The last time we talked, I suggested to you that we see the world through a biblical lens.

02:04:07.000 Literally see it.

02:04:08.000 I mean literally.

02:04:08.000 It structures our perceptions.

02:04:10.000 And I've investigated that far more deeply.

02:04:13.000 And what seems to be the case with a corpus of stories like the biblical library is that if you know the stories, It structures your psyche so that you have a place to put information.

02:04:27.000 And so that enables you to understand the current world and everything that's happening, but to place everything in the right context.

02:04:35.000 And so the transmission of an unbroken cultural...

02:04:39.000 Edifice, story-based edifice, is the manner in which you solve the alignment problem, unite your society, integrate your psyche, pursue what's meaningful, and protect yourself from chaos and anxiety.

02:04:55.000 Solid education has been the traditional way of ensuring that that occurs.

02:05:02.000 Well, that's what we hope we can offer with Peterson Academy.

02:05:05.000 That's the purpose of my books as well, to elucidate that.

02:05:10.000 And so, can the universities do that?

02:05:14.000 I don't think so.

02:05:15.000 I don't know if they have that That philosophy.

02:05:19.000 The philosophy and the way you're laying it out resonates with me.

02:05:23.000 I think it's accurate.

02:05:24.000 I think when I'm in harmony in my life, it all seems to make sense.

02:05:30.000 It all works together.

02:05:31.000 What you're saying, it just rings true.

02:05:35.000 I don't know if it...

02:05:37.000 If they're so infected with this ideology, that flies in the face of it.

02:05:44.000 They've rejected it wholeheartedly.

02:05:46.000 The premise of the postmodernists is that there's no uniting metanarrative.

02:05:51.000 If you had to define postmodernism in one phrase, that would be it.

02:05:55.000 And so what have they done?

02:05:57.000 Here's the association with Marxism.

02:05:59.000 Okay, so the Marxists have a counter-narrative.

02:06:02.000 It's the narrative of power.

02:06:04.000 And it is a very powerful counter-narrative because if you don't put the proper uniting principle at the pinnacle, power emerges immediately because people play power games.

02:06:16.000 You can attain a certain degree of success and a fair amount of domination by playing a power game.

02:06:22.000 And so Marx observed that one of the cardinal power games is economic.

02:06:27.000 And it is probably the cardinal power game, right?

02:06:30.000 There's economic disparity.

02:06:32.000 Those at the top do take advantage of their position at the top to stabilize their position.

02:06:37.000 In a functional society, productive people are at the top, but even among those at the top, they're still power-seeking crooks.

02:06:47.000 Now, Marx, of course, would say that, well, everyone who's economically successful is a power-seeking crook.

02:06:52.000 And, you know, that's a great thing to believe if you're a resentful Satanist like Marx. 0.89

02:06:59.000 Well, that's how the losers look at the world. 0.96

02:07:00.000 Well, that's for sure.

02:07:01.000 But there is some justification in it because among the successful there are… Yes.

02:07:06.000 Right, okay.

02:07:06.000 And a large percentage because that's the culture in which they're existing.

02:07:10.000 Yeah, well, a dangerous percentage.

02:07:12.000 A critique of power is always a valid critique.

02:07:15.000 Okay, so what the postmodernists did when Marxism became ethically unacceptable, and that happened in the 1970s, is they just, they metastasized it.

02:07:26.000 They said, okay, we've got a victim-victimizer narrative that's played out in the economic sphere, and that's basically Marxism.

02:07:32.000 We'll just multiply that until the same interpretive framework Can be applied to all possible group distinctions.

02:07:40.000 That's basically intersectionality.

02:07:42.000 So sex is a oppressor versus oppressed narrative.

02:07:46.000 Gender is an oppressed versus oppressor narrative. 0.95

02:07:49.000 Ethnicity, race, ability, attractiveness, height.

02:07:55.000 Any qualitative distinction is now recast as a battle between oppressor and oppressed.

02:08:01.000 It's an unbelievably brutal story.

02:08:04.000 It's basically equivalent to the claim that The spirit of power is the ruler of the cosmos.

02:08:11.000 How can they do all this and ignore the possibility of an oppressor, like a male, adopting the identity of the oppressed of a female and entering into female spaces and oppressing females?

02:08:30.000 You can see that it can't be dealt with because...

02:08:32.000 Wild, right?

02:08:33.000 That is wild.

02:08:35.000 One of the things you see that's very characteristic of the utopian left is the absolute insistence that anyone oppressed is a victim.

02:08:45.000 It's like, okay, we'll give the devil his due.

02:08:48.000 Some oppressed people are victims, but some people who claim to be oppressed aren't victims. 0.67

02:08:55.000 They're the worst kind of monsters that the most deranged imagination could barely conceptualize.

02:09:01.000 Utopian, naive, radical progressives Refuse their imagination for evil. 1.00

02:09:07.000 And that delivers them into the hands of the absolute bloody psychopaths. 1.00

02:09:12.000 Right? 0.99

02:09:13.000 And they just don't see it.

02:09:14.000 It's like, oh, those trans people, they're just striving to be free.

02:09:18.000 It's like, you wait, you wait until you have one of them in your house, buddy, and you're going to find out just exactly how naive you are.

02:09:29.000 So how do they protect themselves?

02:09:31.000 They just deny the existence of malevolence or attribute it to socioeconomic inequality.

02:09:36.000 All criminals are victims.

02:09:38.000 It's like, no.

02:09:39.000 First of all, lots of people who are victims aren't criminals.

02:09:42.000 In fact, poverty does not cause criminality.

02:09:47.000 That's a lie.

02:09:48.000 And it's a very damaging lie to the poor.

02:09:51.000 Because if poverty was equivalent to criminality, the logical thing to do is just to lock up all the poor.

02:09:57.000 Right.

02:10:00.000 There are many pathways from poverty forward, and one of them is criminality, but you can say the same thing about wealth.

02:10:06.000 So the idea, and that's basically a Marxist theory of causality, is like, well, those people's oppression is what's causing their lack of law-abiding conduct.

02:10:16.000 It's like, no, no, wrong, seriously wrong, and dangerously wrong, and ridiculously naive.

02:10:26.000 That's not how the world works at all.

02:10:28.000 Right.

02:10:28.000 You're also, in a sense, you're encouraging this kind of behavior because you're not punishing people for it.

02:10:33.000 Because you're saying it's not their fault.

02:10:35.000 Or you're even valorizing it.

02:10:36.000 Oh, you poor thing. 0.98

02:10:38.000 Right.

02:10:38.000 And you're allowing more of it to take place.

02:10:40.000 Well, we know that...

02:10:41.000 So the dark tetrad types, so those are the subclinical...

02:10:47.000 Psychopaths. 0.86

02:10:48.000 Okay, so they're psychopathic. 1.00

02:10:51.000 That makes them predatory and parasitic. 1.00

02:10:53.000 That's the definition of a psychopath. 1.00

02:10:55.000 Okay, they're narcissistic. 0.96

02:10:57.000 So what does that mean?

02:10:58.000 They want unearned social status.

02:11:02.000 They're Machiavellian.

02:11:04.000 So what does that mean?

02:11:05.000 It means that Their use of language is subordinated to their demand for hedonistic gratification and power.

02:11:11.000 So like you and I, in principle, we hope, we're trying to pursue a thread of conversation that leads to further development, let's say, for us and for the audience.

02:11:21.000 But I could easily be in here thinking, okay, what the hell do I have to tell Joe to increase my social media status?

02:11:28.000 And to play this situation as a game to enhance my own status, or to further my selfish desires.

02:11:35.000 That's Machiavellian.

02:11:37.000 That was the dark triad.

02:11:39.000 And further investigation revealed that you had to add an additional dimension to that to fully flesh out the picture.

02:11:46.000 Sadism.

02:11:47.000 What's that?

02:11:48.000 Positive delight in the unnecessary misery of others.

02:11:51.000 That's the dark tetrad types.

02:11:54.000 Well, dark tetrad types portray themselves as victims. 0.83

02:11:59.000 Right?

02:11:59.000 That's one of their Machiavellian strategies.

02:12:02.000 So now your question is, well, how do we segregate the real victims, so to speak, from the false victims?

02:12:09.000 And one of the answers to that is like, beware of those who claim victimization as a justification for their moral, what would you say, for their moral transgressions.

02:12:19.000 I did this because I'm a victim.

02:12:21.000 It's like, really?

02:12:23.000 Really?

02:12:24.000 That was your reason?

02:12:26.000 Poor you.

02:12:27.000 That's your story. 1.00

02:12:28.000 You monster. 0.85

02:12:30.000 There are no monsters. 0.90

02:12:32.000 It's like...

02:12:33.000 If you think there are no monsters, you're naive and willfully blind to the point of delusion and...

02:12:45.000 What would you call it?

02:12:48.000 What do they say?

02:12:49.000 There are none so blind as those who will not see. 1.00

02:12:53.000 That certainly applies on the malevolent side.

02:12:55.000 And then from the point of view, if you're looking at the people that are committing crimes, there's the unfortunate reality that people mimic their environment.

02:13:04.000 And if you grow up in an environment where there are no positive role models and you see nothing but rampant crime around you, even good people go down bad paths.

02:13:15.000 You get...

02:13:16.000 Okay, so antisocial personality is somewhat heritable.

02:13:19.000 There is some familial transmission.

02:13:22.000 There is a role played by fatherlessness in particular, and that's perhaps because fatherless boys tend to turn towards a gang orientation, and the gangs of adolescents have a short-term time horizon, so they future discount badly,

02:13:39.000 and that... 0.99

02:13:41.000 Produces a proclivity for short-term gratification and that includes like idiot criminal behavior. 1.00

02:13:46.000 Right. 0.98

02:13:47.000 So what you need in a father, you need someone who encourages intelligent upward aiming sacrifice and an orientation towards others and future development.

02:13:58.000 That's what the spirit of the father really does, that encouragement.

02:14:04.000 And that reward for delay of gratification.

02:14:08.000 So that's another indication of the relationship between, say, upward striving, moral orientation and maturity.

02:14:15.000 If you're mature, you can delay gratification.

02:14:18.000 What does that mean?

02:14:19.000 It means you've integrated the future into your perceptions.

02:14:22.000 And that has to be socially scaffolded, especially for men.

02:14:30.000 Women, they get initiated by nature. 1.00

02:14:34.000 In every society that we know of, men have to be initiated. 1.00

02:14:39.000 Because that catalyzation of maturity is a difficult thing.

02:14:44.000 Difficult and unlikely, but possible and necessary.

02:14:49.000 So how do you reach the people that are young adolescents that are trapped in that vicious cycle?

02:14:57.000 Well, I think I can tell you the answer to that.

02:15:01.000 A lot of young men have I've been watching and listening to the sorts of things that I've been writing about and producing.

02:15:08.000 And every time someone comes up to me and tells me that reading, say, 12 Rules for Life had helped them, I ask why.

02:15:16.000 It's like, okay, good.

02:15:18.000 What changed?

02:15:20.000 And the overwhelming pattern of response is something like, I started to understand the necessity of responsibility.

02:15:27.000 Now, you might then ask, well, You hear from your parents, in principle, you hear from the school system, although that's probably gone, that, you know, you should grow up and be responsible.

02:15:38.000 Why did it make a difference?

02:15:41.000 Why did it make a difference to you to read that in what I wrote?

02:15:45.000 And the answer is, I think, the answer is I didn't take the standard conservative approach.

02:15:50.000 I didn't say, you should, you must, you ought, even though those things are true.

02:15:55.000 I said, there's no difference between responsibility and adventure.

02:16:00.000 That's a killer thing to know.

02:16:02.000 The heavier the responsibility, the more profound the adventure.

02:16:07.000 And so everyone knows that, but it's not catalyzed, eh?

02:16:11.000 So, I just watched The Hobbit a while back, classic adventure story, and of course, what?

02:16:17.000 It's Bilbo.

02:16:18.000 To begin with, it's Bilbo.

02:16:20.000 He's this little hobbit, right? 0.99

02:16:22.000 Said like Abraham, he's living his comfortable life, and the wizard comes along and says, It's time for you to develop your shadow side, because, of course, he becomes a thief, and to go on your adventure.

02:16:34.000 And he agrees to do that, and it's a weighty adventure.

02:16:37.000 He has to contend with the ring of power.

02:16:40.000 Right?

02:16:40.000 That's the ultimate in temptations.

02:16:42.000 That's the temptation that Christ is offered by Satan in the desert.

02:16:45.000 The temptation of power.

02:16:47.000 And that's what...

02:16:48.000 That's the temptation that Frodo has to...

02:16:50.000 Bilbo has to contend with.

02:16:53.000 Well, he has this adventure.

02:16:54.000 Well, what's the adventure?

02:16:56.000 It's responsibility.

02:16:57.000 He has to carry that ring.

02:16:59.000 And it is one of the rings that unites everything power.

02:17:02.000 It's just the malevolent ring that unites everything.

02:17:06.000 And so I've been suggesting to young men in particular, it's like, you want to get your life together?

02:17:12.000 Take the path of maximal responsibility.

02:17:14.000 Not because you should, even though you should.

02:17:17.000 That's not why.

02:17:18.000 It's because that's the pathway of maximal adventure.

02:17:21.000 So you say, well, what's the meaning of life?

02:17:23.000 It's like, it's the meaning that reveals itself when you take the pathway of maximal responsibility.

02:17:30.000 That's exactly the message of the crucifixion.

02:17:32.000 That's precisely the message.

02:17:35.000 Pathway of maximal responsibility.

02:17:37.000 And that's a terrifying thing.

02:17:38.000 There's no difference between that and the dragon and treasure stories that are, you know, unbelievably archaic.

02:17:44.000 The greatest possible treasure is to be found where the danger is most intense.

02:17:48.000 Right.

02:17:50.000 Always.

02:17:50.000 Right.

02:17:51.000 The dragon guards the gold.

02:17:52.000 Always.

02:17:53.000 Right.

02:17:53.000 Well, and so one thing to know is that if there's a dragon, there's a treasure somewhere.

02:18:00.000 Really?

02:18:01.000 Right.

02:18:02.000 Really?

02:18:02.000 Right.

02:18:03.000 You know, my family and I have really learned this in the last six years because we were subject to continued assaults in the public sphere that were designed to be deadly.

02:18:18.000 What do you mean by that?

02:18:20.000 Designed to be deadly.

02:18:22.000 Oh! 0.60

02:18:22.000 Interviews with journalists in particular, snake journalists whose every single utterance is designed to entrap the person being interviewed into saying something that will devastate their reputation personally to enhance the status of the interviewer. 0.60

02:18:39.000 Like the Kathy Newman conversation.

02:18:41.000 Well, Kathy at least had a bit of a sense of humor.

02:18:45.000 But the intent.

02:18:46.000 Oh, the intent.

02:18:48.000 That's the serpent, man.

02:18:49.000 That's the intent.

02:18:50.000 It's like, well, Nellie Bowles, who interviewed me for the New York Times, now part of the Free Press, she admitted that.

02:18:56.000 She said that her job at the New York Times, like the job of many of the reporters, was to find someone, demolish their reputation by any means necessary, and elevate their status in consequence.

02:19:07.000 Wow.

02:19:08.000 Yeah.

02:19:08.000 What a terrible job.

02:19:11.000 Brutal.

02:19:11.000 Isn't it terrifying that that's the old gray lady?

02:19:17.000 That's the most trusted and respected source of news?

02:19:21.000 And that their intent was just to destroy?

02:19:25.000 Yeah, it's quite something.

02:19:27.000 It wasn't the news.

02:19:27.000 It wasn't real journalism, the nuanced news.

02:19:33.000 Various elements of what a human being is, the pros and cons, the goods, the bads, the ugly, the battle that they have.

02:19:42.000 Not that.

02:19:43.000 No, no, no.

02:19:44.000 Not an accurate assessment.

02:19:45.000 Not an objective analysis of the person.

02:19:48.000 Pursuit of status.

02:19:49.000 Yeah.

02:19:50.000 And the danger is that people know that now.

02:19:57.000 Yeah, right.

02:20:12.000 It's kind of evil.

02:20:13.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:20:14.000 It's kind of fucked up. 1.00

02:20:15.000 Yeah, kind of. 0.99

02:20:16.000 I've seen quite a bit of it where I'm like, especially with people that I know the actual story and what was really going on behind the scenes, I was like, this is maddening.

02:20:25.000 This is wild.

02:20:26.000 Well, we started to learn after this had happened two or three times, like, there's kind of a process, eh?

02:20:31.000 Because you're exposed to that, and then there's an intermediary period where it looks like it might succeed.

02:20:37.000 And that's very...

02:20:40.000 Stressful.

02:20:40.000 Right.

02:20:41.000 That's usually when people come out with their apologies.

02:20:43.000 Right.

02:20:43.000 Because they're just terrified.

02:20:44.000 They're going to lose...

02:20:45.000 Well, I did lose my job and I lost my clinical practice.

02:20:48.000 Right.

02:20:49.000 So, like, the costs are real.

02:20:50.000 So your situation in Canada was that they wanted you to sign up for re-education.

02:20:57.000 Oh, no, no.

02:20:57.000 That's already...

02:20:58.000 Right.

02:20:58.000 That's the plan.

02:20:59.000 Right.

02:21:00.000 I couldn't sign up.

02:21:01.000 They said already that I have to do that.

02:21:04.000 Right.

02:21:04.000 But we have an appeal in at the moment that's blocking it.

02:21:07.000 And this is all just, what it affects is what in Canada?

02:21:13.000 I wouldn't, if I don't undergo the re-education process successfully, they'll suspend my license and, well, also say why, you know, they'll say, well, Dr. Peterson is uneducable, he's unprofessional, he's violated the ethical tenets of his profession.

02:21:29.000 Right, just because you have a different perspective on things than they do.

02:21:34.000 No, it's because I'm actually telling the truth that clinicians bloody well know and are too cowardly to admit.

02:21:40.000 So, you know, they went after me for four reasons, probably.

02:21:45.000 One of them was the entire transcript of the last conversation I had with you.

02:21:49.000 Whoops.

02:21:50.000 Right, that was submitted as a complaint because I was talking about the climate lies. 0.95

02:21:55.000 They went after me because of the comments I've made about the trans butchers and liars, the surgeons and the therapists who are enabling them. 0.99

02:22:04.000 That's a major part of it. 0.96

02:22:05.000 That's a major part of it.

02:22:07.000 They went after me because I went after Trudeau and his former chief of staff and what else?

02:22:14.000 Those are the major three.

02:22:15.000 There's probably four complaints aligned with each of those dimensions.

02:22:20.000 And so that's cost me about a million dollars in legal fees so far.

02:22:24.000 So it's a very hard battle to fight.

02:22:26.000 It's very annoying because the accusations continue to flow in, even though that's a choice of the college.

02:22:34.000 And I've already been sentenced to re-education of indefinite duration.

02:22:40.000 Right?

02:22:40.000 Till they're satisfied that I've learned whatever the hell lesson I'm supposed to learn.

02:22:45.000 So, the only reason that isn't happening is because we now have an appeal in front of the Supreme Court in Canada.

02:22:51.000 And so, I don't think it'll succeed, but we'll see.

02:22:55.000 Is it important to you to maintain your license, or is it important to you to win this?

02:23:02.000 There's two things that are important to me, likely.

02:23:04.000 One is, I'm not going to let a pack of ideologically addled Moralists, lying moralists who are facilitating the butchery and sterilization of children take away my license, not without a war. 0.95

02:23:21.000 So that's one thing. 0.94

02:23:22.000 The second thing is, I'm likely...

02:23:26.000 I'm in a prime position in Canada to undertake this battle against the woke licensing boards because I have the money and what the hell are they going to do to me?

02:23:39.000 I'm not practicing.

02:23:41.000 They can't take away my income and likely they can't blacken my reputation except among those who are willing to assume that the licensing colleges are playing a straight game.

02:23:52.000 So really there's nothing they can do to me. 0.94

02:23:54.000 Plus, If it was only a personal thing, apart from the fact that I'm not letting my license be taken by a pack of intellectually addled hypocrites, I don't really... 0.91

02:24:06.000 There's a part of me that's deeply ashamed to be a psychologist at the moment. 0.95

02:24:11.000 I'm so appalled by my compatriots.

02:24:14.000 They know that this gender dysphoria pathology is a lie. 0.99

02:24:21.000 They all know it.

02:24:23.000 And they won't say anything.

02:24:25.000 Now, partly they won't say anything because the consequences for saying something are not trivial.

02:24:29.000 But the consequences for not saying anything is that people like Chloe Cole end up with their breasts cut off when they're 15. Right? 0.99

02:24:37.000 Well, that actually matters.

02:24:41.000 So practically speaking, in a sense, the battle doesn't mean anything to me because I'm fighting to remain a member of a club that I don't really want to be part of.

02:24:49.000 But is there a principle at stake?

02:24:55.000 Well, there's a variety of principles at stake.

02:24:58.000 And so if I stop or lose all of the woke licensing enterprises, they'll just have their sway. 0.84

02:25:09.000 All the physicians in Canada are terrified to say what they think.

02:25:13.000 Anybody who's governed by a professional college, they censor themselves like mad.

02:25:18.000 And it's really appalling for psychologists because all of the psychologists who are properly trained, they know That all of this is a lie, and not just a lie, a malevolent, vicious, and destructive lie.

02:25:29.000 Everything about it's a lie.

02:25:31.000 You know, Musk revealed the other day that the professionals that were interacting with him in regard to his transitioning son told him that if he didn't abide by their dictates, that his son was much more likely to commit suicide.

02:25:47.000 That's a lie!

02:25:49.000 No one who's educated, as a psychologist, believes that to be true.

02:25:53.000 No one.

02:25:53.000 At minimum, if you're educated, what you understand is that underneath gender dysphoria is something more substantial, which is a proclivity towards depression and anxiety.

02:26:05.000 If you're depressed and anxious, you have a higher risk of suicide.

02:26:09.000 Account for that before you attribute any of the remainder to gender dysphoria as such.

02:26:15.000 And everyone who's a psychologist also understands that body-focused discomfort for women at puberty is normative.

02:26:25.000 Because when women who have a higher probability of being depressed and anxious do become depressed and anxious, it preferentially takes the form of bodily discomfort. 0.72

02:26:36.000 That's been known forever.

02:26:40.000 So Chloe Cole, for example, no one explained that to her.

02:26:43.000 No one sat her down and said, well, you're not very...

02:26:46.000 She told me that the reason she decided to transition was because she kind of had a crush on Kardashian and that body type, you know, hyper curvy, hyper feminine.

02:26:56.000 And Chloe realized when she entered puberty that she was probably going to have a boyish figure.

02:27:01.000 And Chloe's a very attractive person. 1.00

02:27:04.000 She would have had no trouble attracting the attention of men.

02:27:08.000 But, you know, she was 11, 12. What the hell does she know? 0.80

02:27:12.000 And she wasn't going to be the woman she had envisioned.

02:27:14.000 She didn't really understand that, you know, there's a variety of female forms that men find attractive. 1.00

02:27:19.000 That's for sure.

02:27:20.000 And she certainly would have fallen into that category.

02:27:23.000 She didn't know that it was typical for girls to undergo a fair bit of confusion when they hit puberty and that that would take the form of negative emotion.

02:27:34.000 No one told her that.

02:27:35.000 They just rushed her down the puberty blocking and surgical pathway. 1.00

02:27:39.000 That's inexcusable.

02:27:40.000 It's evil.

02:27:41.000 Yeah, it is.

02:27:41.000 It's the worst thing I've seen professionals do, not only in my lifetime.

02:27:46.000 I've studied atrocity for 40 years.

02:27:48.000 I've never seen anything worse than what's happening right now.

02:27:51.000 And that includes the sorts of things that were done in the camps in Germany. 0.99

02:27:56.000 At least the goddamn Nazis admitted what they did was wrong. 0.99

02:27:59.000 They tried to hide it. 1.00

02:28:00.000 We trumpet it as a moral virtue.

02:28:02.000 We're freeing the children!

02:28:03.000 It's like, no, I don't think so.

02:28:05.000 Mothers, I think what you're doing is sacrificing your child to the parading of your moral virtue. 0.97

02:28:10.000 Oh, my son, he's so confused.

02:28:12.000 He thinks I's a girl, but I still love him.

02:28:15.000 That's how wonderful I am.

02:28:17.000 Jesus Christ, Joel.

02:28:20.000 You have no idea how dark that is.

02:28:21.000 It's dark.

02:28:22.000 It's unbelievably dark.

02:28:23.000 Then it's attached to an industry now.

02:28:25.000 Yeah, that's for sure.

02:28:26.000 Which is very scary.

02:28:27.000 An industry and an ideology.

02:28:29.000 There was an article that was recently released where this person admitted that they said it was...

02:28:34.000 What was the exact phrase?

02:28:37.000 That the way they described gender transition as life-saving medical care in order to get insurance for it.

02:28:45.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:28:46.000 Because otherwise, insurance won't pay for it.

02:28:48.000 So they were willing to describe it in that way to ensure that people would profit off of it, which is wild.

02:28:55.000 It's...

02:28:58.000 It's terrifying.

02:28:59.000 And it's so strange because I never would have believed that this could happen.

02:29:02.000 If you had asked me 20 years ago if this was going to be a main concern, that people were worried about their children being roped into this ideology and convinced that they're...

02:29:12.000 And then sterilized and mutilated.

02:29:13.000 Yes, exactly. 0.65

02:29:14.000 Yes.

02:29:15.000 I know.

02:29:16.000 I know.

02:29:16.000 Well, it's no wonder people...

02:29:18.000 See, even Michael Schellenberger, who broke the WPATH files, when we talked about The role the W-Path played in establishing their own ideology-addled butchery as the standard of care for the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, 0.91

02:29:34.000 the American Psychological Association.

02:29:36.000 Schellenberger said that after he had listened to Abigail Schreier and I talk about this transmutation, he was so appalled that he literally couldn't believe it.

02:29:46.000 He just shelved it.

02:29:47.000 He said, there's no way this can be true.

02:29:49.000 And I can understand that because the more you look into it, the worse it gets.

02:29:53.000 It's unbelievably bad.

02:29:55.000 These surgical procedures are so brutal and so experimental that they're...

02:30:00.000 I'm going to say it again.

02:30:05.000 They're worse than what the Mengele types did in the concentration camps in the 30s and 40s. 1.00

02:30:14.000 And that's a pretty goddamn low bar. 0.76

02:30:16.000 And it's no wonder people don't want to believe it. 0.94

02:30:19.000 And people say, the lefties I've talked to, the centrists, well, it doesn't happen very often.

02:30:24.000 It's like, oh yeah, how often is too often?

02:30:28.000 Like once is too often.

02:30:31.000 And it's not once.

02:30:33.000 That's for sure.

02:30:34.000 No, it's happening a lot.

02:30:35.000 It's policy.

02:30:35.000 In fact, you're punished by your governing boards if you don't go along with it.

02:30:40.000 And what about the recent law that they passed in California where the schools don't have to tell the parents that the child has transitioned at school?

02:30:49.000 They hide that information from the parents.

02:30:52.000 Well, they're just letting those children be free, you know?

02:30:55.000 Those ignored children who are looking desperately for a pathway to, what would you call it, Inclusion and celebration.

02:31:04.000 Oh, you're so brave.

02:31:05.000 And then they're encouraged.

02:31:07.000 That's for sure.

02:31:08.000 And then they're given positive feedback.

02:31:09.000 Yes, definitely.

02:31:09.000 Which is a real thing.

02:31:10.000 Especially if they're alienated kids to begin with.

02:31:13.000 Yeah.

02:31:13.000 And who are unsettled in their identity.

02:31:15.000 Yeah.

02:31:16.000 Right.

02:31:16.000 And aren't being guarded by anyone.

02:31:18.000 And are vulnerable.

02:31:20.000 Right.

02:31:21.000 Right.

02:31:22.000 Oh, yeah.

02:31:23.000 And the parents are indoctrinated into this whole woke ideology as well.

02:31:26.000 Or terrified.

02:31:27.000 Right.

02:31:28.000 Indoctrinated or...

02:31:30.000 The Munchausen by proxy types who get off on the fact that they have a child that's such a burden but are still really, you know, what would you say, bearing up nobly under the weight.

02:31:39.000 And that is a very dark inclination that is well documented.

02:31:44.000 Yeah, well that's the devouring mother for you. 1.00

02:31:47.000 That was what Freud warned about back in like 1880. Yeah, she's a little too close.

02:31:54.000 You remember the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story?

02:31:57.000 Mm-hmm.

02:31:57.000 Yeah.

02:31:59.000 Gingerbread house.

02:32:00.000 That's a little bit too good to be true when you're lost.

02:32:02.000 What's inside it?

02:32:03.000 The witch that wants to fatten you up for her own delectation. 1.00

02:32:07.000 That's the devouring mother. 1.00

02:32:10.000 That's the maternal instinct gone mad, right?

02:32:13.000 Everything good has the potential for pathology in proportion to its goodness.

02:32:19.000 So Lucifer is the intellect gone mad, right?

02:32:22.000 The devouring mother is the mother who's a little too close to her kids, right? 0.79

02:32:28.000 Yeah, a little too close.

02:32:30.000 Jesus, brutal, Joe.

02:32:33.000 It's just so stunning how widespread it is.

02:32:36.000 At least the UK is pulling back on this stuff, but they have socialized medicine, so they actually have to go on data.

02:32:43.000 Canada hasn't pulled back.

02:32:44.000 Which is wild.

02:32:46.000 Yeah, and entirely predictable.

02:32:48.000 Yeah.

02:32:50.000 Yeah, most of the European countries have woken up, but I don't think it's going to slow it much because there's a huge underground market in puberty blockers.

02:32:59.000 You know, I've talked to experts who figure that the ratio of people on black market puberty blockers to medically prescribed puberty blockers is at least 10 to 1. Oh, God.

02:33:12.000 So they're just self-administering this stuff?

02:33:14.000 Yeah, right.

02:33:15.000 Oh, God.

02:33:16.000 And it's essentially chemical castration drugs that they used to use on pedophiles.

02:33:22.000 Oh, God.

02:33:24.000 Yeah, that's for sure.

02:33:26.000 That's what it is.

02:33:27.000 And when you tell people that and they deny it because they don't know and then they find out, it is so stunning.

02:33:32.000 They also don't want to know.

02:33:34.000 Right.

02:33:34.000 And no wonder.

02:33:37.000 Yep.

02:33:39.000 Anyways, that's why we're trying to educate people.

02:33:41.000 Well, Jordan, I'm very happy you're doing this.

02:33:44.000 I really am.

02:33:45.000 It looks amazing.

02:33:46.000 I think it's fantastic.

02:33:47.000 I'm going to try some of them.

02:33:48.000 I'll try some of your courses.

02:33:50.000 It looks exciting.

02:33:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:33:52.000 Well, let's go down a bit and I'll show you some of them.

02:33:54.000 So we've got Brett and Heather Weinstein.

02:33:57.000 So that's fun.

02:33:58.000 Jonathan Paggio on symbolism and Christianity.

02:34:00.000 That's excellent.

02:34:02.000 James Orr, he's from Cambridge, lecturing on...

02:34:06.000 On Plato, Marian Tupi, on the Economics of Human Flourishing, that's a very optimistic course.

02:34:11.000 There's Brett and Heather, Evolutionary Inference.

02:34:13.000 Is this available currently?

02:34:15.000 It's up now, man.

02:34:16.000 It's up now.

02:34:18.000 The Greatest Leaders of History, that's a great course.

02:34:21.000 That's very inspiring.

02:34:22.000 John Verveke, I really like John.

02:34:24.000 He's so damn smart.

02:34:25.000 The Boy Crisis with Warren Farrell.

02:34:27.000 I did a course on Nietzsche, on Beyond Good and Evil.

02:34:29.000 Do you want to run that?

02:34:30.000 That's a fun preview.

02:34:31.000 Sure, let's run that. 0.93

02:34:32.000 We'll wrap it up with this.

02:34:34.000 Okay, okay.

02:34:36.000 I write in a single sentence what it takes other men a book to write, that it wasn't egotistical because it happened to be true.

02:34:48.000 Beyond Good and Evil is a cardinal work, a prodroma to the entire intellectual and political history of the 20th century.

02:34:56.000 Brilliant, romantic, insightful, deep, psyche-shattering.

02:35:06.000 Dancing bit of literary genius.

02:35:10.000 He's had a remarkable impact on thought over the last 140 years.

02:35:15.000 It's reasonable to say that he philosophized with a hammer because his thought is extraordinarily condensed.

02:35:21.000 To read Nietzsche is daunting psychologically.

02:35:24.000 He's like a motivational speaker.

02:35:26.000 He's practical in the way that philosophers seldom are.

02:35:29.000 Nietzschean philosophy is a call to arms.

02:35:31.000 To familiarize yourself with him is to arm yourself against a sea of troubles.

02:35:38.000 And since you will encounter a sea of troubles, you better pray that you're armed.

02:35:42.000 And this is one way to do it.

02:35:46.000 Alright.

02:35:48.000 How to philosophize with a hammer.

02:35:51.000 Jordan, thank you very much, my friend.

02:35:53.000 Hey, man.

02:35:54.000 It's always a pleasure to see you, Joe.

02:35:56.000 It was very fun watching you on Kill Tony, too.

02:35:58.000 Oh, thank you.

02:35:59.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:36:00.000 That was fun, and that was a good opportunity.

02:36:02.000 You were great, too.

02:36:03.000 I can't wait for that to come out, because it's fun.

02:36:06.000 Well, thank you, sir.

02:36:07.000 It's always a pleasure to be on your show.

02:36:08.000 Always a pleasure to see you.

02:36:09.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - July 25, 2024

Joe Rogan Experience #2180 - Jordan Peterson

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript