In this episode, I sit down with author, speaker and author of We Who Wrestle With God, Carl Sagan, to talk about what it means to wrestle with God, why he wears suits, and why he doesn t use headphones. We also talk about why it s important to have a good relationship with God and how to speak to him in a way that is respectful to him and not disrespectful to others. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it makes you think about how important it is to wrest with God with every word you speak to Him. You can t win if you don't wrestle with Him. You can only win when you wrest with Him with everything you think, every decision you make. That s a moral decision. That's a wrestling with God. And it shines in every word. And so it's important that we all wrestle with ourselves in order to make better decisions and decisions that reflect God's voice in the best way possible. I hope that you enjoy the episode, and that you find value in what we talk about in it. I know that I did. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the podcast and for sharing it with your friends, family, and for supporting it with others. Love ya'll! Timestamps: 1:00 - Why I wear suits? 2:30 - Why do I wear them? 3:40 - What does God wrestle with me? 4:15 - What is a good decision? 5:00 6:20 - How do I think God wrestles with God? 7:30 8:40 9: What does a good word mean to you? 11:00 | What are you wrestling with Him? 12:30 | What do you think of God? 13:00 How do you wrestle with yourself? 14:00 What does he do with God in the word? 15:40 | How does he wrestle with you with the word of God in your words? 16: What is the word I think? 17: How does He speak to you in the words you can I wrestle with him? 18:20 | What does He do with me in the order of the order? 19:10: What's a good choice? 21:10 | What is He do you want me to do with the words I think I'm wrestling with? 22:00 Do you think you can gain power?
00:00:24.000Yeah, 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.
00:01:12.000And he always wore a suit, even in the 70s when that started to become, you know, like 1950s thing.
00:01:18.000And I asked him one time why he did that, and he said it was to show respect for his students.
00:01:23.000And 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.
00:01:33.000It's a good way of laying out a demarcation.
00:01:48.000And 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,
00:02:08.000And then one of the things that happened in consequence of that was that people started to come to the lectures in suits.
00:02:15.000And so about, I'd say about 40% of the audience dresses formally.
00:02:19.000And 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.
00:03:05.000And this is covered with iconography, Christian or Catholic and Orthodox.
00:03:10.000I'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.
00:04:45.000And 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.
00:05:04.000One 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.
00:05:20.000He had just some sort of a profound understanding of what words really mean.
00:05:26.000Well, 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.
00:05:39.000And you have this huge influence on the world that's all a consequence, all, all, almost all a consequence of what you've said.
00:05:47.000And 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.
00:06:05.000That'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.
00:06:18.000It's a very different view than the It's a different way of looking at things.
00:06:27.000It's the notion that what is in front of you is a field of indeterminate possibility.
00:06:33.000It'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.
00:06:47.000What confronts you in the morning is a field of possibility, and you approach that with a certain kind of orientation.
00:06:57.000And you use your words and your linguistic capacity to think to shape that possibility.
00:07:03.000And 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.
00:07:12.000So 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.
00:07:22.000So he says first, Aim with all your heart at the highest good you can imagine.
00:07:29.000Now, you'll get better at that as your vision clears, but that's the orientation.
00:07:40.000Most people know the difference between right and wrong.
00:07:43.000You know at least step by step what would move you forward and upward.
00:07:47.000So you orient yourself to the highest possible upward place.
00:07:52.000Then you make the assumption that other people have the same intrinsic value that you do.
00:07:56.000So that's your initial aim and presumption.
00:07:59.000And then you pay attention to the moment.
00:08:01.000And 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.
00:08:18.000Having 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,
00:08:37.000And 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.
00:08:49.000Truthful language brings about the order that's good.
00:09:21.000The 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.
00:09:31.000And 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.
00:09:38.000And 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.
00:09:54.000And 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.
00:10:09.000And 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.
00:10:29.000It's aligned with what matures you and makes you more responsible and sets the world in order.
00:10:36.000And the instinct of meaning signifies all that.
00:10:41.000And 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,
00:10:59.000let'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.
00:11:18.000So 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,
00:12:18.000Are you going to just not try it forever?
00:12:20.000Are you just going to dismiss everything forever?
00:12:23.000And I feel like people that dismiss things like this reductionist perspective, you're essentially saying you have the answers.
00:12:36.000To 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,
00:13:02.000because we're talking about people from many, many thousands of years ago without access to the information we have today.
00:13:08.000And 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.
00:13:17.000So, 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,
00:13:35.000and this reductionist perspective of the known reality that we currently exist in.
00:13:42.000It'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.
00:13:55.000Well, it's especially odd in his case because he's also the formulator of the idea of meme.
00:14:01.000And a religious story is a meme that's been selected by time and crowd.
00:14:10.000That's a good way of thinking about it.
00:14:13.000It strikes to the heart of the matter in ways that are sophisticated beyond conscious understanding.
00:14:22.000It's a good story for the psychedelic experience, perhaps, at least as an analog.
00:14:27.000So, 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.
00:14:44.000So the first real encounter that Moses has with God is in the story of the burning bush.
00:14:57.000He'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.
00:15:27.000But then one day he's out in the wilderness by the holy mountain.
00:15:32.000I think it's Horeb in that story, but the holy mountain is always the place where heaven and earth touch.
00:15:37.000And 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.
00:15:46.000And he's out near the holy mountain and something attracts his attention.
00:15:52.000And he goes off the beaten path to investigate.
00:15:54.000Okay, so that's the first thing, that's the first bit of wisdom to derive from the story.
00:15:59.000You'll have your role, and you should have your role as a socialized adult, right?
00:16:33.000Well, 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.
00:16:46.000That'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.
00:17:05.000He 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.
00:17:33.000And so that's the story of Moses' baptism.
00:17:37.000And so what does that mean for the ordinary person?
00:17:40.000Well, it means that you need to grow up and adopt a role.
00:18:04.000And if you reject it, you stay in your box.
00:18:06.000But if you follow it, something will call to you.
00:18:09.000And then if you investigate that, that will transform you.
00:18:13.000And 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.
00:18:22.000And that's how God is defined in that story.
00:18:25.000God 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.
00:18:39.000And so that's the God that's portrayed.
00:18:42.000Image of the God that's portrayed in the Old Testament.
00:18:45.000Are 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?
00:19:01.000And that the burning bush was most likely an acacia tree.
00:19:04.000That 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?
00:19:11.000And that they had some method of achieving psychedelic states through this.
00:19:17.000And this is where Moses is encountering God.
00:21:36.000Yeah, 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.
00:21:58.000It's a very difficult book to evaluate.
00:22:00.000Because 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.
00:22:21.000And 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.
00:22:35.000You 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.
00:22:42.000And you can go to bed and then wake up in the morning and there'll be big mushrooms there.
00:22:47.000And that these things, when they would eat these psilocybin mushrooms that would appear out of nowhere, they genuinely were referring to them as God.
00:23:30.000When we read it in English, I mean, what was the original version?
00:23:36.000The original version All the ancient letters in ancient Hebrew also doubled as numbers, right?
00:23:42.000So words had numerical value, like the word God and the word love apparently have the same numerical value.
00:23:50.000That 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,
00:24:06.000certain numerical value to certain words, and that you would use them in the context of these conversations.
00:24:12.000You would understand where I don't understand.
00:24:34.000He's taking stuff that's literally written on animal skins.
00:24:38.000And 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.
00:25:22.000He became sort of like, hey, I think I'm agnostic.
00:25:26.000I'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.
00:25:35.000And so then when he goes through all of the—this is a straight-laced scientist, by the way.
00:25:40.000This is not like some guy looking for psychedelics to be a part of everything.
00:25:55.000And 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.
00:26:47.000He believed that what they were writing about, a lot of it was fertility rituals and psychedelic experiences.
00:26:55.000And that they were hiding a lot of these stories.
00:26:59.000Like, 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.
00:27:09.000So they wouldn't know the secrets of this thing, this ritual in which they would experience God.
00:27:18.000So why is it that psychedelic use has played the role that it's played in your interests and your pursuit of knowledge?
00:27:26.000What do you think it's done for you that's been valuable?
00:27:32.000I think we're in a weird place in society where the term drug...
00:27:38.000Is a blanket, and it covers things that have vastly different effects.
00:27:45.000It covers caffeine, it covers nicotine, and it covers dimethyltryptamine, which is crazy.
00:27:52.000It's crazy that all those things are drugs.
00:28:01.000They're all different, and they're all drugs.
00:28:04.000And the idea that psychedelics are a drug For lack of a better term, that's what we use.
00:28:12.000I don't think that's what they are at all.
00:28:14.000I think they are probably why we became people.
00:28:18.000I think they are probably why society advanced, and I think every great ancient culture probably celebrated them and used them.
00:28:29.000It 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,
00:28:49.000not just Egyptian, but even Catholicism.
00:28:52.000If you go to the Vatican, there's this enormous pine cone.
00:29:19.000So he takes us through showing us all this artwork.
00:29:21.000It'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?
00:29:40.000And I said is it the pineal gland and he goes yes Yes.
00:29:44.000And 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,
00:30:01.000is thought to be literally a third eye.
00:30:05.000And on reptiles, it actually has a cornea and a lens.
00:30:10.000Like, literally, it's exactly where the third eye of Eastern mysticism is.
00:30:14.000And they've got a representation of it right here.
00:30:17.000And it's thought to be where dimethyltryptamine is produced.
00:30:21.000And 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,
00:30:36.000the only version that I believe the only version they have in Aramaic of all those stories.
00:30:42.000And 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,
00:31:09.000these 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.
00:31:28.000Like, 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
00:32:00.000that 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,
00:32:22.000which 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,
00:32:37.000and then these psilocybin mushrooms would grow and they're shit.
00:32:42.000Observed primates flipping over these cow patties looking for beetles and grubs and things to eat.
00:32:48.000Like, you could see it all over Africa.
00:32:49.000If there's something on that, they're going to try it out.
00:32:52.000And 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.
00:33:05.000And this was McKenna's stone-dape theory, which I'm sure you're familiar with.
00:33:09.000And 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.
00:33:27.000Glossolalia, the connection of sounds and objects and bringing things together in a manner of communication.
00:33:35.000Also, they realize that in low doses, it increases visual acuity.
00:34:37.000And my belief is that the Sweeping Psychedelics Act of 1970 that they passed essentially to target civil rights activists and anti-war activists.
00:34:50.000And 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
00:35:20.000board 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.
00:35:35.000And they just threw water on the whole movement.
00:35:40.000It was Nixon and all the people that were in charge back then.
00:35:44.000If 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.
00:36:00.000Something happened and what happened was they completely removed the very thing that had changed culture so radically from the 50s to the 60s.
00:36:11.000Like, I'm a gigantic fan of 1960s automobiles.
00:37:39.000And 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,
00:38:01.000And 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,
00:38:16.000and almost all of them are enthusiasts.
00:38:20.000Almost all of them have had these experiences, and they're all kind of quiet about it.
00:38:25.000It'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,
00:38:46.000if we could run proper studies about what is the correct dose.
00:38:51.000Is there a person that has a certain sort of biological Makeup that makes these drugs problematic.
00:39:12.000Let's try to figure out what works for some people, what doesn't work.
00:39:16.000Legitimate 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.
00:39:28.000They 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.
00:40:11.000We've got to keep drugs away from our society.
00:40:14.000And you don't know what you're talking about.
00:40:17.000It might be why we're here, and it also, the absence of it, might be why we're so fucked up.
00:40:23.000It might be why we're so disconnected, why we're so disjointed, and our society is so hypocritical.
00:40:31.000I mean, the most pro-life people are also pro-death penalty.
00:40:35.000It's like across the board, everything.
00:40:37.000The 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.
00:40:49.000Our 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.
00:41:02.000And 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.
00:41:20.000So I had Timothy Leary's old job at Harvard.
00:41:27.000Yeah, and I knew some of the people that knew him.
00:41:30.000And 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,
00:41:46.000like 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.
00:41:58.000I suppose that's the box of conformity.
00:42:01.000And the psychedelics released a wave of non-conformity.
00:42:06.000And Leary crystallized that with his tune in, turn on, and drop out.
00:42:11.000Now, there was a major problem with that, and that was partly what led to the kickback.
00:42:17.000So 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.
00:42:37.000And then maybe the first response to that is the celebration of an unlimited hedonistic Freedom.
00:42:45.000But the problem with that is that freedom from constraint and hedonism is not freedom.
00:42:54.000It's just subjugation to a kind of instinctive chaos.
00:42:59.000And that emerged with the hippie culture.
00:43:01.000And Leary in particular made a huge mistake when he said, tune in, turn on and drop out.
00:43:08.000He should have said, tune in, turn on and grow up.
00:43:12.000Dead serious about that, because there's a different form of responsibility that emerges once you realize that you...
00:43:22.000We'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.
00:43:37.000You step outside of that with a more conscious upward aim.
00:43:41.000And 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.
00:43:57.000They 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.
00:44:09.000Now that destabilization can be Used, let's say, for better or for worse.
00:44:21.000And so, Carl Jung said that one of the main functions of religion was to stop people from having religious experiences.
00:44:31.000And 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.
00:44:41.000This is why there's another scene in the story of Exodus.
00:44:45.000But can you explain further, like, expand on what he was meaning by that?
00:44:49.000But to keep you from having religious experiences?
00:44:52.000Well, if everybody goes their own enlightened way, let's say, there's no...
00:45:59.000That's a very hard thing to pull off, though, because it means that you have to leap out of the...
00:46:06.000The box of social constraint, and you have to take the responsibility onto yourself.
00:46:12.000Now, 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.
00:46:21.000But what you're saying is like an admirable thing that people should aspire to.
00:47:55.000So, 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,
00:48:11.000you have the adventure of your life, this is what will happen.
00:48:15.000You'll be a blessing to yourself that's genuine.
00:48:18.000So 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.
00:48:28.000Not only will you feel that, it will be a blessing.
00:48:30.000That's the first thing that will happen.
00:48:32.000The second thing will happen is that other people will notice and your name will become renowned and that will be valid.
00:48:38.000You'll be a blessing to other people in that regard.
00:49:44.000Okay, so why is that relevant to the psychedelic debate?
00:49:47.000Because 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.
00:50:01.000It's just a movement from tyranny into the desert.
00:50:04.000That's a good way of thinking about it symbolically.
00:50:07.000So, 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.
00:50:23.000So, Moses tells the Pharaoh to let his people go, but that's not the phrase.
00:50:28.000The phrase is, God tells Moses to say this.
00:50:31.000He says, let my people go, so they may worship me in the desert.
00:50:45.000Okay, well, you can't worship what's unstructured.
00:50:49.000You have to find the proper structuring for your new freedom.
00:50:53.000The vision that's put forward in the book of Exodus is a vision of multidimensional, responsible identity.
00:51:01.000So 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,
00:51:17.000and that's all united under your highest upward orientation.
00:51:24.000It'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.
00:52:18.000And 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.
00:52:34.000That was the problem It's a major problem.
00:52:37.000Well, 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.
00:52:48.000And that's partly because it's self-defeating.
00:52:53.000And 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,
00:53:10.000the limitless development of your integrated psyche.
00:53:13.000But it's not just the psyche, it's the integration of the psyche with all the different levels of society.
00:53:18.000Like, for example, Insofar as you're well put together, you're gonna be a highly functional husband to your wife, right?
00:53:25.000Like, your own psychological organization, integration, cannot be divorced from the union that you make with your wife.
00:53:35.000They're the same thing, and then you can extend that to your kids.
00:53:38.000For you to get your act together means simultaneously that you establish the proper relationship with your wife and with your children.
00:53:52.000And so then mental health doesn't become how your psyche is organized internally, which is what the clinical psychologists misled people into believing.
00:54:03.000It'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.
00:54:17.000So one of the things I tried to do in this book is to actually define what it is that we're arguing about.
00:54:24.000Because the old man in the sky superstition doesn't cover the territory.
00:54:27.000So, for example, if you look at God in the story of Abraham and you say, do you believe in that God?
00:54:34.000What 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?
00:54:47.000And that's a pretty straightforward question.
00:54:50.000It has very little to do with anything that's even vaguely superstitious.
00:56:55.000The 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.
00:57:05.000That's a definition of God that emerges from Exodus.
00:57:09.000And the balance of the mind to be able to figure out which is which and how to apply them.
00:57:15.000And 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.
00:57:22.000So you don't have all these other things that are influencing the way you interact with the world.
00:57:28.000You've got to have a balance of everything.
00:57:30.000All of it has to be kind of balanced together in order for you to have...
00:57:53.000I 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.
00:58:03.000I think I developed my own appreciation of my instincts.
00:58:11.000And I had seen enough people, by the time I was a young boy, ruin their lives.
00:58:17.000And I'd seen these poor decisions right in front of me.
00:58:22.000I'd seen poor thinking and excuse making and laziness.
00:58:25.000Right, so you could see the negative consequences?
00:58:28.000And 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.
00:58:37.000Developed 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.
00:58:59.000It 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.
00:59:10.000This is my ticket to be a different person.
00:59:30.000He said, discipline is doing something you hate, but doing it like you love it.
00:59:34.000You 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,
00:59:59.000who 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.
01:00:13.000Of performance and training that cannot be maintained.
01:00:17.000He 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.
01:00:28.000You'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.
01:00:38.000Like, you cannot maintain fight camp all year round.
01:01:51.000Okay, so now imagine that underneath that, there's an implicit or unconscious goal.
01:01:59.000Okay, and I'm saying this for a very specific reason.
01:02:04.000The positive emotion that motivates people is always experienced in relationship to a goal.
01:02:09.000Now 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.
01:02:16.000And it also means that the higher your goal, the more positive emotion you experience when you're moving towards it.
01:02:21.000Because positive emotion signifies progress towards a goal.
01:03:07.000That 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.
01:04:59.000Jacob 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.
01:05:11.000And now those stories are maps of that transformative process.
01:05:15.000So they culminate They culminate, in the Christian view of things, with the ultimate sacrificial offering.
01:05:24.000So 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.
01:05:37.000And that's a very different view of the religious enterprise than something like defense against death anxiety.
01:05:43.000It'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.
01:05:55.000And that's predicated on a deeper idea even, which is that sacrifice is the basis of community, which is exactly right.
01:06:03.000Because you have to give up something to be in relationship to the future and to other people.
01:06:37.000It 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.
01:06:44.000It also means that a good father sacrifices his children to what's highest.
01:06:50.000That's the offering of your child to the world.
01:06:52.000The faithful offering of your child to the world.
01:07:15.000It'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.
01:07:40.000Yeah, 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.
01:10:29.000To 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.
01:11:02.000Because the human reproductive pattern is multi-generational.
01:11:05.000And 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.
01:11:16.000Then you follow the spirit adventure and you imbue your children with that confidence.
01:11:21.000And that's how that pattern that establishes the dynasty, so Abraham is the father of nations, is established.
01:11:28.000So human reproduction is way more complex than just sex.
01:11:36.000So 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...
01:11:50.000With the meaning that transcends time.
01:11:52.000And that you embody something like an archetypal and eternal spirit.
01:13:06.000That's why we put the crucifix at the center of our society.
01:13:10.000Because 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.
01:13:22.000And the exploration in the New Testament is the limits of sacrifice, right?
01:13:28.000So do you think that that's what people think of when they think of the cross?
01:13:33.000It's very hard to think about—it's very hard to know what people think about.
01:13:36.000I would say it depends on their level of sophistication.
01:13:53.000It's a very formulaic, surface-level understanding of what it is we're talking about.
01:14:02.000And 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.
01:14:10.000The 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.
01:15:19.000So 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.
01:15:32.000So that sort of limits it out in that direction.
01:15:34.000And then you might say, well, what does he have to face?
01:15:37.000Well, and the answer would be, well, the worst life has to offer.
01:16:03.000So 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,
01:16:19.000which meant that he confronted not only death but malevolence itself and in consequence transcended both.
01:16:29.000And so what's the underlying psychological message?
01:16:31.000It'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,
01:16:47.000you have to voluntarily take on the weight of the worst life has to offer, including the depths of malevolence itself.
01:16:55.000And you think, well, obviously, Joe, you know this, like, how are you going to adapt to a situation you won't even admit to?
01:17:21.000And 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.
01:17:34.000But there's a lot of ambivalence about that in the Christian canon, because there's an equal insistence that, no, you're supposed to...
01:17:44.000You're supposed to take all this on voluntarily.
01:17:46.000And that not only that, it's such an interesting idea because it makes so much sense psychologically.
01:17:53.000So 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.
01:18:10.000So the promise is that if you had the courage, something would be with you to...
01:18:18.000Allow you to bear up nobly under the burden.
01:18:21.000All 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.
01:18:34.000And then imagine that there's nothing but a metaphysical limit to that.
01:19:35.000And we're hoping we'll make a high-level, university-level, university-equivalent education available to everyone for approximately 1 20th the cost.
01:20:06.000There is a crisis now in higher education.
01:20:11.000The president of Harvard University resigned today, weeks after...
01:20:15.000Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's code of conduct?
01:20:19.000We have a problem of affordability and cost, spiraling student loans.
01:20:23.000We have a groupthink emerging, and that warps the entire academic enterprise.
01:20:28.000I 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.
01:20:38.000And I thought, well, why not scale that?
01:20:43.000What I'm hoping to do is to find the best lectures in the world.
01:20:49.000And to bring them to as wide as possible an audience.
01:20:53.000He came to me and he basically said, I want you to do the best course that you've always wanted to do.
01:20:58.000We want to bring you the highest quality education possible at the lowest possible price.
01:21:03.000It's extremely high level content that anybody can use to educate themselves and it's available to everybody.
01:23:50.000You 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.
01:23:59.000And the reason they're relieved to come there is because they're treated badly by their own institutions, these great professors.
01:24:56.000We've been wrestling with price, right?
01:24:58.000Because pricing something is very difficult.
01:25:01.000And part of the problem with social media platforms is that they're free.
01:25:05.000And you might say, well, that's not a problem.
01:25:06.000It's like, it is a problem because things that are free get overrun by parasites instantly.
01:25:11.000And 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.
01:25:32.000And 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.
01:25:47.000So 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.
01:26:08.000And so I'm extremely excited about this.
01:26:12.000We got lucky too because we set up a production studio in Miami and we have state-of-the-art film crew and editors.
01:26:24.000But just when we started to film, the AI illustration capacity came online and we filmed everyone against a white background.
01:26:32.000And so we can fill the whole background with imagery and graphs and comments.
01:26:37.000Can you run a trailer for, just pick one of the courses at random, because this is actually how the courses look.
01:26:42.000So the trailers are very tightly edited, but so are the courses.
01:26:46.000And so, let me show you one of them so you get a sense of what we've managed to accomplish.
01:27:02.000How can we possibly understand the grand landscape of the cosmos?
01:27:06.000When you look back in space, you look back in time.
01:27:12.000It'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.
01:27:20.000And now the question is, can we go back to time equals zero?
01:27:23.000Can we go back to before time equals zero?
01:27:44.000Yeah, 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,
01:28:06.000Every 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.
01:28:31.000Certification at different time spans.
01:28:34.000So, 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.
01:28:43.000There's no compelling reason why it has to be four years.
01:28:47.000We'll keep very detailed records of our students' academic progress, and they'll be able to offer them directly to employers.
01:28:56.000So 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.
01:29:07.000Now, simultaneously, we're working on technical accreditation.
01:29:12.000So that we can pull this, so that we can have this operate as a standard university.
01:29:17.000Now, there's trade-offs in that because the accreditation processes themselves are captured by the same forces that have captured the universities.
01:29:25.000And 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.
01:29:34.000Now, I'm in discussion with a number of different jurisdictions to move accreditation forward.
01:29:40.000If that happens, it can also be applied retroactively.
01:29:43.000So 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.
01:29:53.000Otherwise, 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.
01:30:09.000And we'll document that by the record-keeping process that we use as part and parcel of the platform.
01:31:06.000So, 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.
01:31:21.000So there's lots of ways to solve that problem.
01:31:40.000The technology that's cutting edge uses the professor's voice and intonation in the second language and matches the mouth movements to the language.
01:31:48.000Yeah, they're going to do that at Spotify.
01:32:05.000Have someone teach a lecture in Russian and actually make the mouth movements and everything.
01:32:11.000Well, 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.
01:32:32.000And it would be a wonderful thing to be able to bring this to the world, and I just can't see why not.
01:32:37.000You know, the courses are very efficiently taught.
01:32:40.000We have AI-mediated testing services, and we can use the tests themselves as educational tools.
01:32:46.000You 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.
01:32:57.000And so even the testing itself will be educational.
01:33:00.000And, you know, we're hoping to develop a community that is composed of people who want to engage in lifelong learning.
01:33:06.000And it also means that you don't have to be like 18 to 22 to attend this university.
01:33:11.000You can stay a part of it for the rest of your life.
01:33:14.000And we're hoping that spontaneous communities will develop and that we can bring people together for convention.
01:33:19.000So, 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.
01:33:33.000And 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.
01:33:46.000And 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.
01:33:55.000Now 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.
01:34:05.000Most 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.
01:34:20.000It's like, teach what you want to the people who want to listen.
01:34:38.000Well, 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.
01:34:48.000It's like even if we fail financially because, you know, we don't know how to price this.
01:34:52.000How the hell do you figure out something like that?
01:34:53.000We've argued about it a lot and we don't know what the potential financial market might be.
01:34:58.000But at minimum, you know, we'll be able to launch the courses independently if the platform itself doesn't take off.
01:35:04.000We're going to show Harvard and Stanford and Oxford and Cambridge what's possible with regards to lecturing with the new technology.
01:35:13.000I 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.
01:35:57.000Look, 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.
01:36:17.000It gives you an identity for four years while you sort your life out.
01:36:20.000It gives you an opportunity to mature away from your parents.
01:36:22.000It gives you the opportunity to build a new network of peers.
01:36:26.000Not only living peers, but peers in the historical tradition.
01:36:31.000And it gives you an opportunity to meet the person that you might be with for the rest of your life.
01:36:35.000That'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.
01:36:42.000That might be the whole value of an Ivy League education.
01:36:47.000Now, we're trying to replicate that on Peterson Academy with the social media side.
01:36:51.000And, you know, that's a new technology and we don't know how it'll work.
01:36:55.000But 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.
01:37:04.000Because that's one of the things, obviously, that's what you do in a bloody MBA program.
01:37:08.000You know, it's not what you learn at an MBA program that confers the value of the degree.
01:37:12.000It'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.
01:37:22.000You carry that with you while we're doing what we can to replicate that online.
01:37:27.000And 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.
01:37:49.000It's going to be very interesting if that becomes a criteria in which people are hired.
01:37:55.000If 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.
01:38:51.000Where are you going to go to university to get a lecture series on Churchill?
01:38:54.000And Arne was Churchill's primary biographer, one of his primary biographers, so that's a big deal.
01:38:59.000You know, we've got Nigel Bigger from Oxbridge lecturing on the legacy of UK colonialism.
01:39:10.000Well, you're not going to get that anywhere else.
01:39:13.000And he's a great lecturer and he's a brilliant man and very, very courageous.
01:39:17.000And Larry Arnn is in exactly the same category.
01:39:20.000So the technology we're using is revolutionary in a variety of different ways.
01:39:24.000The 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.
01:39:34.000Harvard, for example, which is such a catastrophe.
01:43:23.000And what's happened is, and this happens all the time, if you have an unguarded storehouse of value, The parasites come marching in, right?
01:43:35.000Now, they can for a while because it's a storehouse of value, but they kill the spirit.
01:43:39.000Now, 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.
01:44:56.000I 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.
01:45:10.000All 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.
01:45:26.000Well, when you have people like the president of Harvard that gets fired for plagiarism but maintains the exact same salary in a different job.
01:45:34.000Yeah, 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.
01:46:08.000They looked put upon and shocked when they were challenged by the...
01:46:12.000Because 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.
01:46:22.000Yes, and everyone else is an idiot as far as they're concerned.
01:46:25.000Well, the woman from Penn, when she was smiling every time she was answering these questions.
01:46:38.000So I talked about the Mesopotamian story and there's another angle of deep warping.
01:46:43.000So the spirit of Marx is a very old spirit.
01:46:49.000It was alive in the French Revolution.
01:46:51.000It was alive in the Soviet Revolution.
01:46:54.000You can trace it all the way back to the story of Cain and Abel, as far as I'm concerned.
01:46:58.000The story of Cain and Abel is the story of the fundamental human dynamic after the fall of man.
01:47:06.000So, insofar as we're historical creatures, the story of Cain and Abel lays out the essential psychological conflict that characterizes human beings.
01:47:37.000And instead of learning, he takes his complaints to God and he says something like, Well, what the hell's going on here?
01:47:44.000I'm breaking myself in half, making my sacrificial offerings, and everything's being rejected.
01:47:50.000What kind of stupid cosmos did you produce?
01:47:53.000And God says to him something very interesting and complicated.
01:47:57.000He 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.
01:48:13.000You've invited something in to inhabit you that's turned you against yourself and what's good.
01:48:21.000He 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.
01:49:29.000And 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.
01:51:00.000That's just, that's the optimistic view.
01:51:04.000So, 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.
01:51:17.000And I think that it's understandable what we talked about in the first part of this interview.
01:51:25.000Once 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
01:51:55.000the 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,
01:52:42.000And 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.
01:53:00.000And 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.
01:53:22.000And then you can't leave because you have financial burdens.
01:53:24.000You have all the student loan debt to pay off.
01:53:28.000Something is an alternative to that if it can become effective to the term like if people can get employment.
01:53:37.000You 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.
01:53:49.000If 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...
01:53:59.000Peterson Academy process is recognized by them as a marker of a high-quality applicant.
01:54:20.000Yeah, 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.
01:54:29.000Not if the formal process isn't predicated on general cognitive ability and conscientiousness.
01:55:10.000I've used ChatGPT and Grok and some systems that my colleagues have developed.
01:55:15.000We built our own large language models in-house.
01:55:19.000My 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,
01:56:46.000Well, 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.
01:56:52.000So, 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?
01:57:04.000And you think, okay, how do we make machines that have human interests in mind?
01:57:08.000And then you think, oh, well, we have the same problem with adolescents.
01:57:11.000How do we ensure that we train our children so that they have their own interests and broad social interests in mind?
01:57:18.000And the answer is, the answer always has been that you provide them with a classic religious and humanities education.
01:57:24.000Because that provides an axis of stability around which all other knowledge can be organized.
01:57:31.000Now, 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.
01:57:40.000And so we've been experimenting with training LLMs on a more classic basis.
01:57:44.000So we trained one on the King James Bible, and we haven't released it, because I don't know what to think about it.
01:57:50.000It's like, you can ask the King James Bible a question, What the hell does that mean?
01:59:03.000So imagine that you're harboring feelings of resentment and bitterness as you're plotting your economic pathway forward.
01:59:12.000And so you're trying to think about what you should do, but you have the spirit of resentment and bitterness sitting on your shoulder.
01:59:20.000The 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.
02:00:12.000That's how it works neuropsychologically.
02:00:14.000Your thoughts are the handmaiden of your aim.
02:00:17.000Right, which is why we're always worried about sociopaths, because they never abandoned that corrupt motivation.
02:00:23.000Yeah, 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.
02:00:37.000So, like, children come into the world, in a way, as a bundle of competing subcortical motivations, right?
02:00:44.000And they're very powerful motivations.
02:00:51.000And they want short-term, immediate gratification.
02:00:54.000Now, what happens as your cortex matures...
02:00:58.000You 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.
02:01:15.000That's how kids at three start to develop the ability to have friends.
02:01:20.000And 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
02:01:50.000of radical immaturity and so That's how you explain their emergence.
02:01:56.000And one of the things that's interesting about that is it provides a very powerful argument against moral relativism.
02:02:02.000It's like there's a real difference between maturation and immaturity.
02:02:07.000Maturation is productive and sustainable.
02:02:10.000And immaturity is divisive and destructive.
02:02:15.000And there's no if, ands, or buts about that.
02:02:35.000Like, your mental health is the harmony of your existence in relationship to the future and other people.
02:02:43.000And 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.
02:02:57.000It's a phenomenon that emerges when everything is in its proper place and operating harmoniously.
02:03:40.000It'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.
02:04:01.000The last time we talked, I suggested to you that we see the world through a biblical lens.
02:04:10.000And I've investigated that far more deeply.
02:04:13.000And 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.
02:04:27.000And so that enables you to understand the current world and everything that's happening, but to place everything in the right context.
02:04:35.000And so the transmission of an unbroken cultural...
02:04:39.000Edifice, 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.
02:04:55.000Solid education has been the traditional way of ensuring that that occurs.
02:05:02.000Well, that's what we hope we can offer with Peterson Academy.
02:05:05.000That's the purpose of my books as well, to elucidate that.
02:06:04.000And 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.
02:06:16.000You can attain a certain degree of success and a fair amount of domination by playing a power game.
02:06:22.000And so Marx observed that one of the cardinal power games is economic.
02:06:27.000And it is probably the cardinal power game, right?
02:07:12.000A critique of power is always a valid critique.
02:07:15.000Okay, so what the postmodernists did when Marxism became ethically unacceptable, and that happened in the 1970s, is they just, they metastasized it.
02:07:26.000They said, okay, we've got a victim-victimizer narrative that's played out in the economic sphere, and that's basically Marxism.
02:07:32.000We'll just multiply that until the same interpretive framework Can be applied to all possible group distinctions.
02:08:04.000It's basically equivalent to the claim that The spirit of power is the ruler of the cosmos.
02:08:11.000How 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?
02:08:30.000You can see that it can't be dealt with because...
02:09:14.000It's like, oh, those trans people, they're just striving to be free.
02:09:18.000It'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.
02:10:00.000There are many pathways from poverty forward, and one of them is criminality, but you can say the same thing about wealth.
02:10:06.000So 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.
02:10:16.000It's like, no, no, wrong, seriously wrong, and dangerously wrong, and ridiculously naive.
02:10:26.000That's not how the world works at all.
02:11:05.000It means that Their use of language is subordinated to their demand for hedonistic gratification and power.
02:11:11.000So 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.
02:11:21.000But I could easily be in here thinking, okay, what the hell do I have to tell Joe to increase my social media status?
02:11:28.000And to play this situation as a game to enhance my own status, or to further my selfish desires.
02:11:59.000That's one of their Machiavellian strategies.
02:12:02.000So now your question is, well, how do we segregate the real victims, so to speak, from the false victims?
02:12:09.000And 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.
02:12:49.000There are none so blind as those who will not see.
02:12:53.000That certainly applies on the malevolent side.
02:12:55.000And 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.
02:13:04.000And 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.
02:13:22.000There 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,
02:13:47.000So what you need in a father, you need someone who encourages intelligent upward aiming sacrifice and an orientation towards others and future development.
02:13:58.000That's what the spirit of the father really does, that encouragement.
02:14:04.000And that reward for delay of gratification.
02:14:08.000So that's another indication of the relationship between, say, upward striving, moral orientation and maturity.
02:14:15.000If you're mature, you can delay gratification.
02:15:20.000And the overwhelming pattern of response is something like, I started to understand the necessity of responsibility.
02:15:27.000Now, 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.
02:16:22.000Said 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.
02:16:34.000And he agrees to do that, and it's a weighty adventure.
02:16:37.000He has to contend with the ring of power.
02:18:03.000You 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.
02:18:22.000Interviews 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.
02:18:50.000It's like, well, Nellie Bowles, who interviewed me for the New York Times, now part of the Free Press, she admitted that.
02:18:56.000She 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.
02:20:16.000I'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.
02:21:04.000But we have an appeal in at the moment that's blocking it.
02:21:07.000And this is all just, what it affects is what in Canada?
02:21:13.000I 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.
02:21:29.000Right, just because you have a different perspective on things than they do.
02:21:34.000No, it's because I'm actually telling the truth that clinicians bloody well know and are too cowardly to admit.
02:21:40.000So, you know, they went after me for four reasons, probably.
02:21:45.000One of them was the entire transcript of the last conversation I had with you.
02:21:50.000Right, that was submitted as a complaint because I was talking about the climate lies.
02:21:55.000They 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.
02:22:40.000Till they're satisfied that I've learned whatever the hell lesson I'm supposed to learn.
02:22:45.000So, the only reason that isn't happening is because we now have an appeal in front of the Supreme Court in Canada.
02:22:51.000And so, I don't think it'll succeed, but we'll see.
02:22:55.000Is it important to you to maintain your license, or is it important to you to win this?
02:23:02.000There's two things that are important to me, likely.
02:23:04.000One 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.
02:23:26.000I'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?
02:23:41.000They 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.
02:23:52.000So really there's nothing they can do to me.
02:23:54.000Plus, 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...
02:24:06.000There's a part of me that's deeply ashamed to be a psychologist at the moment.
02:24:41.000So 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.
02:24:55.000Well, there's a variety of principles at stake.
02:24:58.000And so if I stop or lose all of the woke licensing enterprises, they'll just have their sway.
02:25:09.000All the physicians in Canada are terrified to say what they think.
02:25:13.000Anybody who's governed by a professional college, they censor themselves like mad.
02:25:18.000And 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.
02:25:31.000You 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.
02:25:53.000At 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.
02:26:05.000If you're depressed and anxious, you have a higher risk of suicide.
02:26:09.000Account for that before you attribute any of the remainder to gender dysphoria as such.
02:26:15.000And everyone who's a psychologist also understands that body-focused discomfort for women at puberty is normative.
02:26:25.000Because 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.
02:26:40.000So Chloe Cole, for example, no one explained that to her.
02:26:43.000No one sat her down and said, well, you're not very...
02:26:46.000She 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.
02:26:56.000And Chloe realized when she entered puberty that she was probably going to have a boyish figure.
02:27:20.000And she certainly would have fallen into that category.
02:27:23.000She 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.
02:28:59.000And it's so strange because I never would have believed that this could happen.
02:29:02.000If 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...
02:29:18.000See, 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,
02:29:34.000the American Psychological Association.
02:29:36.000Schellenberger 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.
02:30:35.000In fact, you're punished by your governing boards if you don't go along with it.
02:30:40.000And 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?
02:30:49.000They hide that information from the parents.
02:30:52.000Well, they're just letting those children be free, you know?
02:30:55.000Those ignored children who are looking desperately for a pathway to, what would you call it, Inclusion and celebration.
02:31:30.000The 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.
02:31:39.000And that is a very dark inclination that is well documented.
02:31:44.000Yeah, well that's the devouring mother for you.
02:31:47.000That was what Freud warned about back in like 1880. Yeah, she's a little too close.
02:31:54.000You remember the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story?
02:32:50.000Yeah, 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.
02:32:59.000You 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.
02:33:12.000So they're just self-administering this stuff?