Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, he provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let s be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Today s guest is Alex Story. Alex was born in France to an English academic, Professor Jonathan Story, and an Austrian artist, Heidi, who was expelled from three schools for being turbulent. Alex left home at 17 at 17 to pursue his rowing ambitions, and was an Olympian in 1996 and a World Champion in the World Championship in 92, 94, 95, and 96. He won the European Parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber in 2016, although he didn t take the seat. Today, Alex works in finance as head of sales at a U.S. broker. And so, while we ve a bit of a biographical account that will lead us into the topic of Alex s early life and how he became a political activist. when he was introduced to his father, Alex s father. So, while he s growing up in France, Alex has a father who has Down syndrome. and a son with Down syndrome, and so on. And so on that s why he s a little bit of biographical accounts of his father has a first son, a son who s got his name in the title. I m talking about Alex s first son. In this episode, we ll be talking about how he s had Down syndrome and how his father s got Down syndrome and how it s a lot of his first son has a lot to do with it, and how that s going to be a bit more about it. It s a bit about that. We ll talk about it, too. That s a good one, right? And a lot more . Thank you for listening to this episode of Daily Wire plus now. Subscribe to our new podcast, Dailywire plus now! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe at anchor.fm/Dailywireplus
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:01:15.760Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:01:23.240In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury. It's a fundamental right.
00:01:28.660Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:01:37.980And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:01:41.180With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:01:48.560Now, you might think, what's the big deal? Who'd want my data anyway?
00:01:51.920Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
00:01:56.840That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.
00:06:15.780But accidents sometimes can be very good for somebody, in the sense that Joshua, I think, may be a much, much better person than I was before.
00:06:22.960Simply because I realized that in that day, on the day that I learned about his condition, I thought the most important thing is living and life.
00:06:39.160And it doesn't matter whether he goes to Cambridge or not, and it doesn't matter whether he can speak a few languages, and any of that actually became irrelevant.
00:06:49.680And as my wife was crying, she discovered this.
00:06:55.200I tried to not cry, because I am the man of the family, so it's really important that I don't, and I stay stoic about these things.
00:07:03.020But I said to her, look, he's not going to be very good at maths.
00:07:14.160And I think that really brought our relationship even closer.
00:07:21.000And so, this discovery that suddenly my son was the subject of speculation about whether he ought to remain alive or not, made me think very, very profoundly, in my view.
00:07:34.520Well, perhaps not profoundly, because I'm thinking, but it felt profound.
00:07:39.180Because I had to really go into the nooks and crannies of the thinking process.
00:07:42.900So, this thing, this question, which keeps coming back even now, I think was the seed of some kind of thought process that started and that led me to the field of eugenics and the study of eugenics, or at least trying to understand where this ideology comes from.
00:08:05.640You said that one of the consequences of Joshua's birth is that you became a better person and that your relationship with your wife deepened.
00:08:16.960And you mentioned that that was the benefit of the trouble, let's say, or the unexpected occurrence.
00:08:22.600And so, in what way do you think, more particularly, in what way do you think, having had this experience, having had your son, has made you a better person?
00:08:34.880And why specifically do you see that it steepened your relationship with your wife?
00:08:40.960Because suddenly I had to man up and I had to take responsibility.
00:08:45.480And I had to, I had to be there for her, you know.
00:08:50.420And for her in a way that was different than before.
00:10:34.740My point is simply that when my wife and I tried to have a child, the first two were miscarriages.
00:10:41.080And I just realized how little I knew and how helpless I was to help her.
00:10:47.120And so, when Joshua was born, the third birth, I was determined to be a good, old-fashioned, old-school father.
00:10:58.180And I thought that that was much, much more important than what people thought about me or my political views or anything else.
00:11:04.480But I think it did determine a great deal about what I became afterwards.
00:11:10.680And so, when you said you wanted to become an old-fashioned, old-school father as a consequence of this challenge, how did that manifest itself to you?
00:11:22.860What was it that you said you strove to take on more responsibility?
00:11:27.200And you also regard the decision to take on that responsibility as something that was transformative morally, but also intellectually.
00:11:33.900Which is what we're going to get into.
00:11:35.620And what did it mean to you to become an old-fashioned, old-school father?
00:11:39.760As opposed to, let's say, as opposed to what?
00:11:43.540Well, by that, I mean the thing that did rescue me was sports.
00:11:48.320I got kicked out of a few schools, mainly because I was always challenging authority.
00:11:53.960And I think if you speak to a lot of my peers, in fact, one of the friend of mine, David, I won't say his surname because I might be upset if I tell you.
00:12:01.860But I was with his son and his son asked a question about me.
00:12:07.780And we'd been drinking a lot of really good wine at the time.
00:12:12.540And David just said, Alex is just unmanageable.
00:12:17.200And I think that this is something that had led me into lots of problems at school.
00:12:21.740And my father did the old-fashioned thing of saying, you need some boundaries.
00:43:12.740He said, well, it's predicated on the idea that the fundamental process that arranges the hierarchies of social order is the expression of power.
00:43:22.560And I thought, oh, my God, that's true.
00:43:25.100And I thought, really, that that strain of Marxism had invaded biology to such a degree that that became an axiomatic presumption.
00:43:32.960And then I started talking about hierarchies of competence and more recently of hierarchies of voluntary play.
00:43:39.600Now, De Waal, and this isn't just an arbitrary reconfiguring of my thought.
00:43:46.520There was a man named Yak Panksepp who studied play behavior in rats.
00:43:51.060And he showed quite clearly that if you paired juvenile rats together and allowed them to play because they wrestle, that in the first contact, the bigger rat could win over the smaller rat.
00:44:03.08010% weight advantage would be enough to guarantee victory.
00:44:05.760So if you just studied one play bout, you could derive the conclusion that the bigger, stronger, and more dominant animal won, and the play was based on domination.
00:44:15.660But he paired them together repeatedly, and this is key to the issue of reciprocity.
00:44:21.860And rats live in social groups, so they interact repeatedly.
00:44:25.520Once they have established that initial hierarchy of ability, let's say in the wrestling ring, it's incumbent on the little rat to invite the big rat to play.
00:44:36.760But the big rat, if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win at least 30% of the time across repeated bouts, even though he could win every single time, if he doesn't allow the little rat to win 30% of the time, the little rat will stop asking him to play.
00:44:49.960That's a stunningly brilliant observation.
00:44:52.840And then De Waal has shown, you know, you have this notion of the alpha chimp, right?
00:44:57.420And everybody has kind of a caricature in their mind of the alpha chimp.
00:45:00.300It's like chest bumping, playground bully thug, rises to the top, has preferential sexual access, and thus is more reproductively fit.
00:45:10.120And De Waal has taken that idea completely apart.
00:45:14.420The first thing he's demonstrated, or one of the things he's demonstrated, is that some chimps do rise to positions of sexual predominance and social authority through the use of physical intimidation.
00:45:29.700But they tend to have short-lived rules.
00:45:33.200Their troops tend to be very fractious and emotionally unstable and rife with conflict.
00:45:39.120And they tend to meet a very sudden and violent end.
00:45:43.100Because if they ever weaken, then two of the chimps that they've intimidated will band together and tear them into pieces.
00:45:50.920And he's documented that quite continually.
00:45:53.280And then he showed, too, that in many of the troops that he studied, sometimes the smallest male has the highest social status, particularly if he's extremely good at reciprocal interactions and peacemaking.
00:46:04.000And he showed that the stable alphas are the most reciprocal animals in the troop, male or female, and that they cultivate reciprocal social relationships and mutual grooming constantly and track their friendship networks and are extremely reciprocal.
00:46:20.600And so De Waal has shown, like Panksep did, that the true basis of stable social organization is reciprocity, fundamentally.
00:47:21.640But what you see is more and more people on the Remain side of the argument denying that the vote nearly took place or attacking those people who voted in the wrong way.
00:47:33.320The idea, the notion that you should seek consent or consensus is completely gone.
00:47:41.100And the reason for this is because, as we said, humanity, if you think about this anti-human nature, you can say, my opinion is worth much more than yours.
00:47:58.360Well, and there's no reciprocity if the fundamental basis is power.
00:48:01.840Exactly, but that's the interesting thing about the alpha male, because I completely see, and I think most of us see, that without consent, there can be no stability.
00:48:11.800You cannot create stability out of perpetual warfare.
00:48:17.600But the thing about perpetual warfare is that it enables dilettantes to think that something is changing.
00:48:25.060So, in other words, they require discord in order to have meaning for themselves.
00:48:30.200So, hatred is a powerful emotion that replaces everything.
00:48:35.840That's, in my view, one of the things that we're witnessing at the moment, where you have one group that's hoping, it doesn't matter how many they are or represent, the numbers they represent, but they are quite happy to impose their worldview because they're righteous.
00:48:50.020So, your theory is something like the generation of chaos produces a landscape where the narcissists are more likely to thrive.
00:50:17.560So, you know, there are two fundamental personality traits.
00:50:21.920So, there's five dimensions, but they clump.
00:50:23.940And one clump is stability, and the other clump is plasticity.
00:50:28.680And people who are higher in plasticity tend to be the entrepreneurs and the artists and the entertainers.
00:50:33.640And so, they are agents of transformation.
00:50:36.180But both of those personality elements working in tandem are necessary for, let's call it, the most stable solution to emerge across the longest span of time.
00:50:46.200And so, you have the proper elements of order and stability with an interleaving of necessary transformation as the environment transforms.
00:50:57.380So, imagine that during the day, when you're conscious and awake, the parts of your brain that are responsible for that operation are imposing a stable order on the world, despite its aberrations.
00:51:10.280Because, of course, you don't know everything, so you don't map everything accurately.
00:51:13.220There's another part of your brain that sort of keeps track of the things that don't fit in.
00:51:17.880And then, when you go to sleep at night, you become more plastic.
00:51:21.360And your brain starts to try to make order and sense out of the things that don't fit in.
00:51:25.660And the monstrosity of your dreams and the, what would you call it, the cherubic and monstrosity-like imagery in dreams is an attempt to aggregate those aberrations.
00:51:40.660And to start feeding updates slowly into the system that regulates stability.
00:51:47.220Artificial intelligence engineers have found, too, that in order to build a system of apprehension that doesn't collapse, you need part of the system to impose something approximating regularity.
00:51:59.120And then you need a separate system to keep track of deviations and slowly update the first system, because otherwise it will precipitously collapse.
00:52:09.600And here's another, this is something very cool, too.
00:52:12.040So imagine that there's a balance that needs to be maintained constantly between the forces of stability and the forces of transformation.
00:52:21.640And then it's an open question, how much stability you need and how much transformation, because it depends to some degree on how rapidly things are changing around you.
00:52:33.460And so you need to be able to mark the shifting boundary.
00:52:37.360Well, one hypothesis that I think is a very good hypothesis is that the spirit of play emerges when the balance between stability and transformation is attained properly.
00:52:48.660So imagine, so if you're in a team, or you're even competing against yourself, you're pushing yourself to the edge of transformation, right?
00:52:56.980And if you're playing properly, you're pushing yourself so you're transforming as rapidly as you can without exhausting or undermining yourself.
00:53:05.880And that manifests itself as a sense of deep, and maybe as the sense of deep engagement that you found when you decided to start rowing instead of misbehaving, right?
00:53:15.720So you hit that point of optimal play, and that also catalyzed your development.
00:53:21.060And you could say that play is reciprocal in the most fundamental sense, to play with other people, or to play against yourself in some sense.
00:53:31.060And the sense of meaning that emerges is a signal that you've balanced the necessity for transformation with the necessity for stability.
00:53:38.980It's a lovely idea, right? Because it gives some real deep grounding to the notion of existential meaning.
00:53:45.660Yeah. And I think also, in order to, the stability presupposes something else as well.
00:53:54.040So the modulation, the way that things modulate, in other words, you've got new technologies, new technologies don't necessarily mean that we as human beings are better or worse.
00:54:02.980Mm-hmm. I mean, we have more expanse for trouble and opportunity.
00:54:08.900So it's not, technology is obviously changes all the time. We can see it.
00:54:12.540But actually, the reason why you and I can read the Odyssey and feel for Helen is that we can read a story from 2,000 or 3,000 years ago,
00:54:26.900and the arc of the story remains the same, and the tragedies are better.
00:54:31.920Well, that's sort of the fundamental religious claim, in some sense, is that the arc of the story remains the same.
00:54:37.440Exactly. And so there's the eternal and there's the ephemeral.
00:54:41.680And that's the, so what is immovable is the thing that I think a lot of our leaders refuse to accept.
00:54:49.100So what they're trying, so in order to, what presupposes stability is the desire to keep something as it is.
00:54:57.260It's your respect for something. If you keep selling the change story, what you're essentially saying is that you want to dismantle what is there,
00:55:06.520because obviously in this particular context, because it's bad.
00:55:09.660Well, if you're low status, let's say, within the current hierarchy, one medication is to advance yourself according to the rules of the current game.
00:55:19.960And maybe you can't because you can't fit in, but maybe you can't because you're unwilling to be able, let's say.
00:55:26.200And then you take the path of false presumption, and that's a narcissistic path.
00:55:31.040But then your best bet under those circumstances is to destabilize things, because that way you destroy the order that implies that your particular contribution,
00:55:40.720well, that there is a contribution at all, and that implies that your contribution isn't appropriate.
00:55:46.680So I hadn't thought through exactly the idea that the sowing of chaos by, what would you say, overvaluing transformation
00:55:56.160is another trick of narcissists and psychopaths and Machiavellians to gain the upper hand.
00:56:02.160But that's highly probable. You know, I've seen, for example, I've had a lot of demonstrations levied against me, a lot.
00:56:08.680And some of them were very intense and unpleasant, like very intense and unpleasant.
00:56:13.660And they were often, they were mounted against me by people of the left, although that happens on the right as well,
00:56:21.320and it's happened to people I know by radical right-wingers.
00:56:24.780It was very interesting for me as a clinician to observe the people who are fomenting the protests.
00:56:34.100In my case, a lot of them were female, about 60%, probably 70%.
00:56:39.800And a lot of them were left-wing activist types, university students.
00:56:45.200And so, but intermingled with those women were a handful of men.
00:56:49.820And in Toronto in particular, and in Ontario, I encountered a lot of protests.
00:56:56.440And at a number of the protests, the same men showed up.
00:56:59.940And as a clinician, I could just spot who those people were immediately.
00:57:03.400Like one of them, for example, stood with a girl about two feet behind me at, I think it was, University of Western Ontario.
00:57:12.240It's one of the worst protests that I was in.
00:57:40.940And it's like, he was 100% a predator.
00:57:44.120And I saw him and his ilk at all sorts of different demonstrations.
00:57:47.860And so he's the sort of person, if he sows chaos, it gives him opportunities that he wouldn't otherwise have because he had no competence in any real sense.
00:57:58.780Those sorts of men are so appalling that you can hardly even imagine what they're like unless you're very unlucky and have had the opportunity to get to know someone like that.
00:58:08.280So that notion that chaos can be sowed so the narcissists and the Machiavellians can flourish, that's a very interesting idea and highly probable.
00:58:19.640You certainly see it on the protest front.
00:59:13.580Tell us a little bit about Keynes and the figure and the position that occupies now among economists.
00:59:20.020Keynes is the cornerstone of the Western economic thinking infrastructure in a way, because GDP is essentially the way that we calculate our wealth across the world is an equation that he came up with.
00:59:41.220What was interesting about Keynes is that he is the one that negotiated the reparations that Germany had to pay with the French after the First World War.
00:59:53.020So he was a very, very influential character already in the 30s and 40s.
00:59:59.120He obviously was an asset manager, but he was also very involved in politics and in the field of think tankery.
01:00:07.040In other words, he was very close to Mosley, interestingly enough, which he was our fascist leader.
01:00:42.860I'm just explaining the kind of groups that you had.
01:00:46.920So Keynes was part of the Bloomsbury group, but it was very close intellectually to characters like Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, Bernard Shaw, and all these people.
01:02:43.460So we should do a sidebar quickly so that everybody understands what the field of eugenics proposes.
01:02:49.120And the idea is, it's an offshoot of a pathological streak of Darwinism that claims that it stems in some sense out of the claim that the fittest survives.
01:03:01.260But then there's a twist on that to imply that the fittest are therefore morally and physically superior in some moral sense.
01:03:10.040And then, which is not an implication, by the way, of standard modern biological evolutionary theory.
01:03:16.860And then more that you can identify those who are fit, let's say, by looking at those who are currently successful in society.
01:03:27.440And you can infer their moral and physiological superiority.
01:03:31.380And then you can rank order people by that superiority.
01:03:34.340And you could improve the race by not allowing those who were substandard, let's say, to use the Nazi terminology, to multiply.
01:03:43.800And that's technically wrong from the perspective of evolutionary biology, because it's a tenant of modern evolutionary biology that you cannot select for fitness.
01:03:56.660So you can select for a given attribute, and you can presume that that attribute is associated with fitness, but you have no, there's no justification whatsoever for that claim.
01:04:07.100Because what constitutes fitness in some real sense varies unpredictably as the underlying landscape transforms.
01:04:18.880And so there's no basis for eugenics claims in modern, in the tenets of modern evolutionary biology.
01:04:26.360But that didn't stop hypothetically biologically oriented thinkers who were saying, follow the science to lay forth a eugenics movement that did capture much of the left wing and the right wing in very many ways.
01:04:41.200All from about 1890 to about, well, until 1945.
01:04:46.620Well, no, actually, I'd go much further than that.
01:04:50.400Eugenics is now the core of our modern societies.
01:04:59.680I think it's eugenics has seeped through.
01:05:01.640Don't forget that Keynes was one of the drivers of the formation of the United Nations,
01:05:07.840and giving the pound sterling's supremacy to the American by allowing the dollar to be the only currency pegged to gold.
01:05:20.620All the other currencies in the world would have to translate or exchange their currencies into dollars, and then from dollar to gold.
01:05:30.740So in other words, he was already going for this idea of one global government.
01:05:34.300And there are some really interesting books that you can read.
01:05:37.720I'll send them to you because they're so interesting.
01:05:40.300One of them is Fabianism and the Empire.
01:05:43.700And in there, the pamphlet states very quickly, very clearly, we start with national socialism.
01:05:51.760We will then go to international socialism.
01:05:54.180So this idea that you consolidate socialism at home nationally, and that's important because the national socialists and the international socialists, the communists, are essentially not on different sides of the equation.
01:34:48.600Class matters, race matters, or your capabilities, all of this.
01:34:55.960Your humanity is completely stripped, right?
01:34:58.600So, actually, what we see when we think about this like a stadium or an arena is that Adolf is to Stalin, like the bronze medalist, is to the gold medalist.
01:35:11.480They are standing in the same arena, competing in the same sport, facing in the same way.
01:35:16.600And so, what they have is that they are all, the recipients, whether it's Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and all these guys, have all the same ideas.
01:35:26.840So, it's that field that is so important, in my view.
01:35:30.680And what is the extreme opposite of these views?
01:35:58.440And so, there is an extreme, but the extreme is not either left or right.
01:36:02.360The, we have to, so, if what I'm saying makes sense, it's a bit long-winded, I know, but it's because, you know, sometimes we have to unpack certain ideas and everything else.
01:36:12.200I think the important thing there is to realize that whether the totalitarians themselves all operate under the same presumptions, that's what we're facing.
01:36:38.360It's just that we need to rediscover it.
01:36:40.280And we need to be very clear about the roots of these ideologies.
01:36:46.440Well, I've been talking today to Mr. Ellick's story about, well, his personal experiences on the familial front and the rabbit hole, let's say, that that led him down morally in relationship to his wife and also intellectually.
01:37:04.200And we've attempted, as a consequence of this conversation, to draw parallels both biographical and conceptual between what he stumbled across or what was placed in front of him in the, what would you say, in the form of a challenge and responsibility that he accepted and some visions he had about the part of the underlying spirit, pathological spirit of the totalitarian impulses of the present age.
01:37:31.000And so thank you very much for speaking with me and also for providing these readings.
01:37:36.040I will make a list of the books that we discussed, Fabianism and the Empire and Darwin's Descent, as well as John Maynard Keynes' biography.