The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy： the Dawn of Transparency ｜ Michael Shellenberger

00:00:00.000 If you don't shoulder your political obligation, then the tyrants will take the right to do so out of your hands and use it against you.

00:00:08.400 I think the last 12 years, we should think of it as a woke reign of terror.

00:00:12.820 I mean, really, it starts with Black Lives Matter, ends with the election of President Trump.

00:00:17.060 We discover, thanks to the Twitter files, the existence of this elaborate censorship industrial complex complete with government-run disinformation efforts.

00:00:25.860 How much of government spending is wasted?

00:00:27.920 You know, it's classic Elon. It was chaos. It was contradictory.

00:00:32.120 The only natural resource is trust.

00:00:34.700 You know, Jordan, I'm filled with a lot of optimism.

00:00:37.560 You need to get married. You need to have some children. Your family has to be an integrated part of your community.

00:00:43.120 You have to serve your state and your nation.

00:00:45.940 If everyone can cooperate and compete, then every desert can bloom.

00:00:57.920 Hi, everybody. I had the opportunity to speak today to Michael Schellenberger, who's, well, he was a Democrat at one point, like so many people,

00:01:14.100 and has turned more to the, well, I wouldn't say conservative side exactly.

00:01:21.220 He's turned to whatever this new emergent side is that's signified by the union, let's say, of Trump and Musk and J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz and Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, etc., etc.

00:01:33.560 Whatever that is. And I've had Michael on as a guest a couple of times on the show.

00:01:40.680 He's a journalist. He broke the Twitter files.

00:01:44.860 Elon Musk gave him access to the Twitter back end to delineate what had been occurring before Musk purchased the platform.

00:01:54.400 And Michael was also instrumental in breaking the WPATH files.

00:02:01.920 And WPATH is, well, you could call it an organization, but it's more like a cabal of perversion and incompetence, I would say.

00:02:11.420 And WPATH put themselves forward as a scientific consultation group that established gender-affirming care as the standard of care,

00:02:24.040 a standard that was immediately adopted by the lackeys and bootlickers at the American Medical Association

00:02:29.720 and the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, etc., ad nauseum forever.

00:02:36.760 And so Michael's a pretty useful journalist, and he's been assessing Elon Musk's work at Doge deconstructing USAID, for example.

00:02:51.300 And I wanted to talk to Michael about his views on Musk's efforts, on Musk himself, let's say,

00:03:03.140 on this strange collaboration between Musk and Trump and the other people that we mentioned,

00:03:10.560 and about, I suppose, his deeper insights, if any, and likely, on just exactly how to understand what's going on,

00:03:24.880 how to understand this rise of new conservative or new traditionalist populism,

00:03:31.580 how to understand the threat that's being posed to Europe in terms of mass migration and the globalist utopians,

00:03:38.840 how to understand the philosophical and spiritual basis of this revolution in governance that we see manifesting itself before us,

00:03:51.320 to understand the role that technological transformation is playing, for example, in facilitating Elon Musk's ability to do his sleuthing and uncovering work.

00:04:02.400 Well, it's all part of the attempt to get to the bottom of things, and the bottom's a long way down,

00:04:07.680 and so it's down the rabbit hole we go with Michael Schellenberger.

00:04:10.480 Well, Michael, it's good to see you again.

00:04:13.480 It's been about 10 months since we spoke, so it seems like a lot longer ago than that,

00:04:18.720 but I guess that's because, well, the world keeps turning upside down and spinning, so it's disconcerting.

00:04:27.140 I'm very curious.

00:04:28.580 We're going to talk a fair bit about USAID today and government corruption, fraud, waste,

00:04:35.260 which are hard to disentangle, and I want to dive right into that,

00:04:40.080 but I'm also curious what else you think is particularly germane that we might touch on today.

00:04:48.380 Well, I mean, look, Jordan, I think it's a huge moment.

00:04:50.540 You know, we obviously had a massively historic election that also signified a change in the media environment,

00:04:57.560 of which you've been a really fundamental part.

00:04:59.580 I think we saw today Vice President J.D. Vance give a major speech at the Munich Security Summit in Munich, Germany,

00:05:08.340 where he very strongly articulated what I think you could argue is the new national conservative case,

00:05:14.880 which included grave concerns around losing Europe to mass migration.

00:05:21.520 It included a strong defense of free speech,

00:05:24.360 and this is now the second time that I think he has intimated.

00:05:27.720 This time I think he was softer than the first time that Europe's move towards totalitarianism,

00:05:34.400 particularly this mass censorship that they want to impose on our social media companies and on us,

00:05:39.480 on our voice in Europe, that that was not only unacceptable, but that it puts our alliance in danger.

00:05:45.140 I mean, he specifically said it puts NATO in danger.

00:05:48.240 So I think the Europeans today got a sense of the depth of which America cares about free speech,

00:05:55.560 that free speech for us is a must-have, not a nice-to-have.

00:05:59.380 In Europe, it feels like it may be more like a nice-to-have.

00:06:02.240 And I think you finally got an administration that's just saying,

00:06:04.640 hey, we're not going to tolerate this censorship and totalitarianism that you're imposing on our companies

00:06:10.420 and attempting to impose on our people.

00:06:12.800 Yeah, okay.

00:06:13.500 Well, let's address that right away.

00:06:15.240 Did he meet with Scholz or did he keep him on the sidelines?

00:06:18.160 And that is a good question.

00:06:19.960 I am not sure.

00:06:20.660 He did, he did, I believe he did say at the beginning of the speech that they had met,

00:06:25.220 but I don't, some people, the audience should check on that.

00:06:29.700 He, it was a second strong, he actually gave a prior speech as well that was also strong.

00:06:36.700 But yeah, this is, this was a big speech.

00:06:38.860 Of course, there was an assault, you know, by a terrorist in Germany, I believe, less than 48 hours ago.

00:06:47.780 Very dramatic moment.

00:06:49.140 I don't have the latest in terms of deaths and injuries, but it was, you know, he opens with that.

00:06:53.600 He expressed his, of course, great concern and sympathy for the Germans and then pivoted right away to saying,

00:07:00.560 look, you've got a big mass migration problem and we have it too.

00:07:04.120 And we've got to have, we've got to get control of our countries.

00:07:07.400 And I think he also said, and I think he really spoke for Americans this way, certainly for me,

00:07:12.480 which is that we actually really love Europe.

00:07:14.580 Like, you know, Americans really care about Europe.

00:07:16.760 Like, not just as a tourist destination, we care about it as an idea, as the birthplace of the Enlightenment.

00:07:22.340 I mean, for us Americans, Europe is where our ideas that our country was founded on were born,

00:07:28.760 but they were never fully realized until you got to the United States.

00:07:32.180 And until you had Thomas Jefferson insist against Alexandra Hamilton that we were going to have 0.99

00:07:37.260 a bill of rights and that the first thing was going to be free speech and that we weren't

00:07:42.080 going to mess around about it, that this was number one, that we didn't want to have a country

00:07:46.400 without having this guarantee.

00:07:48.660 And like I said, I just think, I don't think Europeans understand the depth of our commitment 0.82

00:07:52.060 to that, that really when they start threatening our free speech rights, as they've been increasingly

00:07:56.240 doing, they need to know that they are threatening their security, that it really makes us, we're

00:08:02.060 tired.

00:08:02.460 America is tired.

00:08:03.820 Like, we're very, very tired.

00:08:06.000 It's upsetting to go 20 years of hearing stories of veterans, almost all of whom appear to have

00:08:11.020 PTSD in some way, the combat ones, the struggles they have.

00:08:14.940 I mean, I was with a veteran who lost friends in Afghanistan the day that Biden pulled out, which

00:08:19.680 was a disgrace.

00:08:21.020 So America is tired.

00:08:22.420 We love Europe, we believe in Europe, but they're testing our patience.

00:08:27.800 And I think we finally have an administration that can communicate the depth of our concern

00:08:32.320 around their push towards censorship.

00:08:35.520 And they're really, they pioneered it, they developed it.

00:08:38.300 A lot of it was, you know, we've certainly done our part to bring it there.

00:08:41.960 But, you know, they are the Western, Europe is currently the greatest threat to free speech 0.89

00:08:47.600 in the West.

00:08:48.620 And I think they need to understand that that's a big problem.

00:08:52.180 When it comes to U.S.-European relations.

00:08:54.900 Yeah, well, you know, we should differentiate this a bit, too.

00:08:58.140 I spent a lot of time traveling in Europe in recent years.

00:09:02.600 And I've made it a point in all of the countries I've visited, and that's most European countries,

00:09:09.320 East and West, to meet with thought leaders, politicians, journalists, actors,

00:09:14.780 in all the countries that I've gone to, at dinners and lunches.

00:09:19.600 And, you know, I've come to a number of realizations as a consequence.

00:09:24.120 The first is very much akin to what you're describing, which is, like, what the hell's going on in France

00:09:32.460 in Germany and Germany and the U.K., the Netherlands, Western Europe, let's say, Western Europe.

00:09:37.800 That's a consequence, in my opinion, fundamentally, of Brussels, the European Union, the pernicious

00:09:47.460 effect of Davos, the globalist utopians, the apocalypse mongers, the people who tell you that

00:09:55.200 the future's a miserable and wretched place unless you give us all the power.

00:10:00.180 But that's not Europe.

00:10:02.460 That's Western Europe. 0.59

00:10:04.460 Now, the Eastern Europeans, they're a different bunch, you know, and, well, we could walk through 1.00

00:10:09.400 them to some degree.

00:10:10.920 Let's start with Hungary, because that's a country that's been absolutely pilloried by

00:10:14.960 the legacy media in the press, in the Western press.

00:10:19.200 And, you know, that Orban has been described as, you know, shoulder to shoulder with, of course,

00:10:26.440 Adolf Hitler, because, you know, he's the guy you drag out when you don't have anything 0.91

00:10:29.680 else to say.

00:10:31.800 And I've been to Hungary a number of times, and Hungary has a very sophisticated family

00:10:37.000 policy, pro-family policy, and it's quite, it's been quite effective.

00:10:41.200 They've knocked their abortion rate down 38% with no increase in policing, so to speak,

00:10:51.760 right?

00:10:52.180 It's part of a cultural shift.

00:10:54.260 They've knocked their divorce rate down substantively.

00:10:56.640 They've increased the proportion of women who are participating in the workforce at the

00:11:01.360 same time.

00:11:02.220 They've slowed the decline in the birth rate.

00:11:05.140 And my experience in Budapest, in particular, where I, like, I got to know the Hungarian president,

00:11:13.040 that's not Orban, the previous president.

00:11:14.920 And she was the author of the Hungarian, or one of the authors of the Hungarian pro-family

00:11:21.220 policies.

00:11:22.660 And I also saw Budapest rebuilding itself.

00:11:26.060 The goal of the Orban administration is to make Budapest into the most beautiful city in

00:11:30.560 Europe.

00:11:32.180 And, you know, they have some real geographic advantages there.

00:11:36.980 It's built along the river, and it's very beautiful already.

00:11:39.320 And then Poland, Poland has a thriving economy.

00:11:44.080 They don't have an immigration issue.

00:11:46.040 And the Eastern Europeans are incredibly, incredibly dedicated supporters of the Western

00:11:54.180 tradition, and the U.S. in particular, not least because they remember what it was like

00:11:59.360 to spend 75 years under the thumb of the Soviet totalitarians.

00:12:03.700 So even the left-wingers in Eastern Europe aren't completely out of their minds, you

00:12:09.980 know, like they are in Germany in particular, right?

00:12:12.980 So it would be useful for the, and maybe this is already happening, but it would be useful

00:12:18.800 for the Trump administration people to differentiate between the Western Europeans, the Eastern,

00:12:24.640 you know, the European Union types, the globalists, the WEF, and the Eastern Europeans who

00:12:30.540 are, like I thought the last few times that I went through Europe, that the salvation of

00:12:37.240 Europe would be Eastern Europe, surprisingly enough.

00:12:39.980 Like who would have ever guessed that was going to be the case?

00:12:42.780 So, and the free speech issue, the thing is, you know, we still don't understand free

00:12:51.960 speech properly because, you know, you said that if the Europeans keep undermining free speech

00:13:00.960 and that battle's being played out in the virtual world, particularly with regards likely

00:13:07.160 to X, say, more than anything else, that their security is going to be undermined and

00:13:13.880 you are thinking about them compromising their relationship with the U.S.

00:13:17.980 But what's necessary to understand is that you do undermine your security by interfering

00:13:23.720 with free speech because there's no difference between free speech and creative and corrective

00:13:30.240 thought.

00:13:31.100 Those are the same thing.

00:13:32.580 And so any culture that clamps down on the right to free speech, which isn't just another

00:13:37.900 hedonistic privilege, they interfere with the, literally interfere with the mechanism that

00:13:43.800 keeps their country honest and innovative.

00:13:49.260 So it's a disaster.

00:13:51.840 That's right.

00:13:52.780 Well, of course, it's happening at a moment when I think Europe has started to at least

00:13:56.340 comprehend just how behind it is on technology.

00:14:00.160 The speech that J.D.

00:14:01.600 Vance gave a couple of days ago was on AI, at least ostensibly on AI and how the framing that

00:14:08.580 they want, the Trump administration wants, is of AI as possibility, as potential, as

00:14:15.160 innovation, not as apocalypse, repression, you know, the sort of the European approach

00:14:22.260 to try to gain control over the technology.

00:14:25.200 Yeah, good luck.

00:14:26.440 Yeah.

00:14:27.000 I mean, so, look, you know, America is, I mean, sounds so corny, but I mean, America's

00:14:32.600 back in just a big way.

00:14:33.860 I mean, you've just got a character there in the White House that is, they are moving

00:14:37.320 faster than anybody.

00:14:39.160 I mean, I was just there talking to folks, you know, various places and everybody's surprised

00:14:44.620 at how fast they're moving.

00:14:45.640 And of course, Elon has accelerated that, the number of things that are happening.

00:14:49.620 The thing that we were ostensibly going to talk about today, for example, not to, we

00:14:53.360 don't have to go to it right away, but just the whole reason there's a debate in the United

00:14:56.820 States right now about the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, is simply

00:15:01.900 because Elon was seeking to basically gain access to the computer systems, the servers,

00:15:08.700 the buildings themselves that these agencies occupy.

00:15:13.720 And that was the agency that they wouldn't get, that wouldn't give them access, it wouldn't

00:15:18.020 give them clearance.

00:15:18.760 So that was when, you know, Trump just, they just shut it down.

00:15:21.780 They just were like, if we can't get, we were the democratically elected, he's the democratically

00:15:26.060 elected president of the United States who has full authority, according to Article 2 of

00:15:29.980 the U.S. Constitution, over every single executive branch agency, and that includes Agency of

00:15:34.400 International Development, when they are refusing access to the representative of the president

00:15:40.860 of the United States, who happens to be our greatest technologist, they just were like, 0.99

00:15:45.900 fine, if you're going to play that, you know, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. 0.99

00:15:49.340 And the stupid prize they got was that they got shut down, including pulling back all of 1.00

00:15:53.160 their people. And I only mentioned it to say... 1.00

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00:16:58.860 What you're seeing them bringing into government, which none of us could have imagined, is first

00:17:06.580 of all, this awareness that you can't really reform institutions.

00:17:11.420 People talk about that, but really, you have to just shut them down and build something fresh.

00:17:18.000 That's the only way you can get the old guard out, and you have to have new leadership and

00:17:22.000 a new constitution or a new set of rules.

00:17:24.820 But also that you don't really know what's going on until you move fast and break things.

00:17:29.380 And so this is something that I experienced too, which is like, you just have to go out

00:17:34.080 there and sort of do things in the world to figure out what is the federal government.

00:17:39.660 You sort of think you know what the federal government is because we have lists of agencies

00:17:44.740 and employees and whatever.

00:17:45.700 But we saw with the U.S. Agency for International Development, we didn't know what they were

00:17:49.060 doing.

00:17:49.740 And what we discovered is that they were part of the blowback of U.S. counterterrorism,

00:17:55.980 counterinsurgency, counterpopulism that was pushed abroad with the Arab Spring and then

00:18:02.000 the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and came back.

00:18:04.480 And that those characters that led the censorship, disinformation, lawfare, and other dirty tricks

00:18:09.980 that they used for regime change abroad brought those tactics and strategies to the United

00:18:15.040 States and weaponized them against Trump, MAGA, Republicans. 1.00

00:18:20.420 And again, you play stupid games, win stupid prizes, and that's what they got. 0.99

00:18:24.120 And so when they broke open AID, suddenly it was available for all of us to see. 1.00

00:18:28.200 And there's been some very good research and scholarship by some of our allies on what was going

00:18:32.880 on there and making sense of it.

00:18:34.900 And so we've been in a process of sense-making as a country for about whatever it's been,

00:18:40.060 a week, a week and a half, about what exactly is this agency doing?

00:18:43.980 How did it become so deranged that it would use the weapons of regime change against our

00:18:49.600 own democratically elected president from 2016 to 2020, including many of us suspect but can't

00:18:56.860 yet prove in January 6th?

00:18:59.020 How did that happen?

00:19:00.300 And then the subsequent question is, what do we do now?

00:19:04.100 I mean, Jordan, after we've spent billions of dollars creating this elaborate foreign 1.00

00:19:07.800 policy establishment, otherwise known as the blob, which includes many academic journals,

00:19:12.460 academic divisions of universities, whole think tanks, parts of the federal government,

00:19:16.840 nobody has theorized what comes now.

00:19:19.980 Nobody has theorized what happens if the United States shuts down its main agency for soft power.

00:19:25.100 That's what USAID was, Agency for National Development.

00:19:27.640 It was just a mechanism of soft power alongside the CIA.

00:19:32.860 It was really supposed to be, you know, State Department, AID, CIA, all supposed to be run by

00:19:37.040 the National Security Council, all supposed to be run by the President of the United States.

00:19:40.460 What happens when that's not there anymore?

00:19:42.480 And I think there's some real questions.

00:19:44.020 I mean, I'm fairly anti-interventionist, anti-imperialist, have been really for all my

00:19:48.860 adult life, but there's a real vacuum that does get created.

00:19:52.860 The critics of what they've done are not wrong in being concerned about, well, what happens when

00:19:57.260 Russia and China move into those places?

00:20:00.260 And maybe that's fine.

00:20:01.240 I mean, let the Chinese get involved in trying to build nations in Africa.

00:20:05.660 But I do think it raises some existential questions about what is the United States?

00:20:12.780 What is the United States in the world?

00:20:14.300 Because we are entering, as you mentioned, 75 to 80 years of Pax Americana, where the United

00:20:20.560 States has been holding together a global system.

00:20:24.040 And people talk about multipolarity.

00:20:26.260 But China and Russia are not the United States.

00:20:29.460 I mean, we are still the center of action.

00:20:31.360 We have all the talent.

00:20:33.040 We have the AI.

00:20:33.780 We have all the energy.

00:20:35.680 We remain the most secure country in the world, not just because of our nuclear weapons

00:20:39.480 and military, but also because we're protected on both coastlines by huge bodies of water.

00:20:46.160 So, I mean, the United States is still arguably the big superpower.

00:20:50.380 Obviously, China is a superpower, but it's not playing anything.

00:20:55.200 You can't even imagine China playing anything close to the role that the United States played

00:20:59.000 after World War II.

00:21:00.520 So, we're in a moment of, you know, we're just trying to figure out what's going on.

00:21:06.420 I think everybody's trying to figure out what's going on.

00:21:07.920 And much less, we've got to spend some time figuring out what do we want the United States

00:21:11.980 to be.

00:21:13.480 And J.D. Vance and Trump are further along, I think, than anybody.

00:21:16.940 But honestly, it's not like there's a consensus, even within the Republican Party, about what

00:21:23.200 the United States' role in the world should be in this post-Pax Americana, post-Post-Cold

00:21:31.420 War period.

00:21:34.060 Okay.

00:21:34.600 Well, let's take a bunch of that apart.

00:21:36.200 Well, the first thing is, I was talking with some people well-placed in the administration

00:21:41.140 recently who are convinced that Musk has the possibility of finding like a trillion dollars

00:21:51.320 worth of waste and fraud in the next four weeks.

00:21:53.960 Now, we should just outline what's happened.

00:21:56.460 Like, I've watched the Democrats respond to Musk's group of teenagers, teenage engineers

00:22:04.340 with contempt, you know, and this is so 1960s, this mode of thinking, because Musk doesn't

00:22:12.860 have 15, 20, 100 teenage engineers.

00:22:17.940 He has, let's say, 20 to 100 teenage engineers with the most computing power that the world

00:22:27.380 has ever seen at their fingertips, and they know how to use it.

00:22:31.500 And there are some seriously smart computer engineers.

00:22:36.120 You know, I was just at a lab in Palo Alto that's doing things that are so science fiction

00:22:44.780 like you can't even imagine it.

00:22:48.520 And, you know, they're inventing revolutionary machines as a byproduct of the revolution in

00:22:54.860 technology that they're pursuing.

00:22:56.500 And these, these, and all this is augmented by AI and Musk is on top of that.

00:23:03.980 And so he's really, he's really inserted the 21st century into the 19th century in DC.

00:23:14.300 And of course, people don't know what hit them because no one knows what's hitting any of

00:23:18.720 us, and his ability to insert himself into these hidden systems is absolutely revolutionary.

00:23:28.340 You know, it's a mythological trope, an ancient mythological trope, that it's the evil brother

00:23:37.500 of the rightful king who is one of the prime enemies of the state.

00:23:42.180 It's the evil brother of the righteous king, and it's the goddess of chaos. 0.96

00:23:47.800 Those are the two enemies.

00:23:48.980 It's, it's the social structure pathologized or the natural world rebelling, right?

00:23:55.520 So historic enemies.

00:23:57.120 Well, the evil brother of the king is, is camouflage and corruption. 0.99

00:24:02.100 And what happens as a system develops is that it accretes predators and parasites.

00:24:10.540 That's a biological metaphor.

00:24:12.660 And if the load gets too heavy, the system collapses.

00:24:16.120 And the antidote to that, the Egyptians had figured this out, the ancient Egyptians. 0.99

00:24:20.700 The antidote to that was clear, honest speech and careful attention.

00:24:25.840 The god, the Egyptians actually had a god who specified that, signified that, that was Horus.

00:24:32.400 And he was the defeater, the eternal enemy of the evil king.

00:24:38.560 And Musk is playing that role with his engineers.

00:24:41.900 He's in there finding out, like, how much of government spending is wasted?

00:24:46.560 Well, you don't know.

00:24:47.860 Why do you not know?

00:24:49.240 Well, because the government itself doesn't even have the internal mechanisms to track its

00:24:53.540 own behavior.

00:24:54.100 I'll give you an example of this.

00:24:55.840 So I worked for social services as a consultant in Alberta 40 years ago.

00:25:02.840 And oddly enough, I was hired as a junior consultant.

00:25:08.900 I had demonstrated a certain amount of competence in my summer internship.

00:25:12.720 And I was hired to duplicate a audit of the social services department that had been commissioned

00:25:19.620 by a major auditing house.

00:25:22.140 I think it was Price Waterhouse.

00:25:23.740 And they had charged the government a fortune for that the year before.

00:25:28.020 And the assistant deputy minister asked me to update it, which was a pretty weird request.

00:25:34.020 But I thought, well, what the hell?

00:25:36.380 I'll give it a shot.

00:25:37.320 And so I went through the audit, kind of line by line, and then called the relevant people

00:25:44.060 who were involved to get a financial update so that it was current.

00:25:49.800 And the first thing I found out was the government had no idea where it was spending its money.

00:25:53.640 And all the numbers were estimates that could have been off by a factor of 10.

00:25:59.160 So, and the puncher, the clincher for me was the punchline was that social services literally had no idea

00:26:07.200 what proportion of the money they spent went to the end recipients.

00:26:11.280 So old people, welfare recipients, et cetera, because it's the social safety net branch of the Alberta government.

00:26:19.320 They had no idea.

00:26:20.020 And, of course, you know that the typical charity spends 90% of its money running itself.

00:26:27.440 That's if it's well run.

00:26:29.300 And I was reading a book at that time by a man named John Gall.

00:26:33.440 It's a great book.

00:26:34.340 It's a cult classic called System Antics.

00:26:37.080 Trying to make sense of this.

00:26:38.700 It's a great title, System Antics.

00:26:40.760 Very smart.

00:26:41.440 And one of his maxims, his axioms was the name of the system is not what the system does.

00:26:50.840 And so his analytical approach to the analysis of a system was don't assume that anyone knows what it does.

00:27:00.820 That's the first thing you have to find out.

00:27:02.580 Now, that's what Musk is doing.

00:27:04.000 It's called USAID.

00:27:06.000 And that's its camouflage, you might say.

00:27:08.220 It's like, we're out there making the world safe and productive for the desperately poor.

00:27:13.540 Well, no one can oppose that.

00:27:15.940 Well, then, but then the questioning starts.

00:27:18.900 Which poor people?

00:27:20.400 How much money?

00:27:21.380 And how?

00:27:22.660 And the answer to all those questions is something like, we don't know.

00:27:27.780 Or we don't want you to know.

00:27:30.760 Right.

00:27:31.280 And then, well, hasn't there also been revelations that the Treasury Department had a policy to not question its invoices?

00:27:41.140 Right.

00:27:41.480 I mean, you couldn't imagine a more insane policy, right?

00:27:44.560 Right.

00:27:45.000 That's, it, what that means is that if you set up a shell company, what it appears to mean is that if you set up a shell company,

00:27:52.120 and you sent professional-looking invoices to the federal government, that they would pay them without question forever, no matter how much they cost, just so you wouldn't complain.

00:28:04.940 So, okay, so Musk is in there, Musk is in there with this incredibly sophisticated technology, rapidly tracking down spending.

00:28:13.620 So, the first question is, like, what the hell are these agencies actually doing?

00:28:19.680 And it's not like anyone knows, not thoroughly.

00:28:23.720 Then the next question, of course, is how much of it is waste?

00:28:29.580 Okay, so the management literature indicates management and literature on productivity and creativity.

00:28:37.180 There's two indications from that literature that are germane.

00:28:40.180 The first is that 65% of managers in private companies add negative net value to their companies.

00:28:49.820 Wow.

00:28:50.980 Okay, that's in profitable, well-run private companies, right?

00:28:55.200 65%.

00:28:55.760 Okay, and then you might ask, well, how could a company survive?

00:29:00.040 And the answer to that is the square root of the number of people engaged in a given domain of effort.

00:29:10.180 Do half the work.

00:29:12.580 So, if you have 10,000 employees, 100 of them do half the work.

00:29:18.540 And so, that means that Musk can do what he did with Twitter, let's say, and fire 85% of the people.

00:29:26.660 And all that happens is profit margins go up and everything runs more efficiently.

00:29:32.540 And so, will Elon find a trillion dollars worth of waste in the next four weeks?

00:29:37.440 It's like, I guess we'll see.

00:29:40.360 And then what?

00:29:41.380 Well, then that brings the question that you raised.

00:29:45.080 It's like, well, now we have to rethink this from first principles.

00:29:49.920 And like my sense, you tell me what you think about this.

00:29:53.420 I know this woman named Magat Wade, and Magat's quite the interesting character, very charismatic, entrepreneurially oriented African, and a very fierce advocate of free markets.

00:30:11.840 And her belief, and many people believe this, is that foreign aid is actually counterproductive to the countries in question for like 50 different reasons.

00:30:23.520 Partly because it's not that easy to help people. 0.99

00:30:26.460 And it's a lot easier to do harm with stupid money than good. 0.99

00:30:31.840 It's harder to do good with money than it is to invest it wisely. 0.99

00:30:36.780 I mean, and those are kind of the same thing.

00:30:38.400 So, you can just make a case that the whole idea of foreign aid is based on a 17th century model that presumes that we have to stop the world's incompetent people from starving.

00:30:52.240 And like, we're just not there anymore.

00:30:54.300 The only reason that people ever starve in the world now is for political reasons.

00:30:58.360 There's plenty of everything to go around.

00:31:00.900 So, what's the point of foreign aid?

00:31:03.260 And how should it be distributed, if it should be distributed at all?

00:31:06.680 And then, you know, so, and you, you know, you asked what'll be the new role of the United States?

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00:32:26.920 Example?

00:32:32.640 That would be good.

00:32:35.260 Fourth right defender of free speech in the free market.

00:32:38.880 At ARC, you're going to ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

00:32:42.380 Our answer to this, because I think it's an answer to the question you posed, is that we need a rethinking on a more conscious level of the principles that have made the West free and productive.

00:32:56.920 And we need to reorient ourselves in alignment with those principles.

00:33:00.920 And that's mostly a cultural endeavor rather than a political endeavor.

00:33:05.300 So, well, okay, that's an information dump.

00:33:09.440 And so I'm curious about your take on it.

00:33:12.120 Yeah.

00:33:12.620 Well, there's a lot there.

00:33:13.580 I mean, I think, to start with, we say, we hear a lot, waste, fraud, and abuse, as though they're kind of all equal.

00:33:21.260 Waste is inevitable to any system.

00:33:23.920 You try to reduce it, but one of the things we find is that you can waste more energy trying to reduce waste.

00:33:30.980 It's often why, when you go to these studies of, like, buildings and whatever, there's a high level of energy efficiency.

00:33:35.720 You can always get more efficiency out of a building.

00:33:37.560 And they always go, well, if we put more energy and time into reducing efficiency, yeah, but then you wouldn't be running your business anymore, right?

00:33:42.780 So there's, like, you can waste time trying to deal with the waste.

00:33:45.500 Then there's fraud.

00:33:46.500 That's bad.

00:33:47.740 That shows not just a kind of, you know, I think people tend to think of fraud like, oh, the police haven't done a good enough job or the police are corrupted.

00:33:55.420 It represents a weakening and corruption of the body, of the system, that you're actually, as you said before, it's not, there's always parasites.

00:34:04.600 There's always viruses.

00:34:06.380 When the host becomes vulnerable and weakened and old and prone to disease is when you're prone to fraud.

00:34:15.980 And then you get the worst of them all by far, which is abuse, by which is abuse of power.

00:34:22.740 And we are coming out of a period of extreme abuse of powers.

00:34:28.480 I mean, we can debate the period of time that's relevant.

00:34:31.540 I think the last 12 years, we should think of it as a woke reign of terror, meaning a period of great fear.

00:34:40.420 Certainly universities, media, wokeism.

00:34:43.420 I mean, it really, it starts with Black Lives Matter, ends with the election of President Trump in 2024.

00:34:49.200 That was a period of abuse of power.

00:34:53.060 Every single major institution, medical power, educational power, media power, political power.

00:34:59.000 And what gets revealed when Elon and Trump break open, the U.S. government, as we see this agency that was always there in their peripheral vision, that we sort of knew about, but you kind of forgot about, USAID, Agency for International Development.

00:35:14.800 And what opens up is a bunch of, you know, things that you had forgotten, but are important to remember.

00:35:20.280 The first is that human economic development, prosperity, growth comes from within.

00:35:26.220 It comes from the core values of within, namely delayed gratification, hard work, saving on principle, waiting to get married until you can afford your own home and sustain your own family.

00:35:37.300 Which means, you know, healthy sublimation, that those things are the recipe.

00:35:45.380 Integration, integration, not sublimation.

00:35:48.580 Okay, thank you.

00:35:49.420 Well, I think, well, it's an important distinction, and I've been thinking about this a lot.

00:35:53.960 Because, like, you could think of sublimation as self-control, and you could think about it as a variant of the Freudian superego that inhibits, you know, but there's a power dynamic presumption there, which is that the way that you obtain control over your own impulses is by using something akin to force.

00:36:13.800 And that's not a good metaphor, because what someone who's successful on the sex and aggression side has done is integrate those, they've subdued them, they've put them in their place, and they've become an integral part of their personality, but they're not ruling, right?

00:36:34.780 So, someone who's integrated his shadow, so to speak, isn't someone who's castrated and weak, it's someone who's fully capable of being aggressive at the drop of a hat, but doesn't, or devotes it towards, you know, stalwart defense of the perimeter, let's say.

00:36:53.500 And with regard to sexuality, well, here's a funny statistic that I think is just so hilarious that it's emblematic of the times.

00:37:01.840 The people who have the most sex are religious married couples.

00:37:10.180 Now, you know, but that just says everything, doesn't it?

00:37:13.140 Right.

00:37:13.280 Because the promise of the sexual revolution was hedonistic, narcissistic, extended adolescence at best, was that if we just got rid of the Freudian superego and all the power-mad censors, let's say,

00:37:31.840 and prudes, everybody would be having sex all the time with everyone, and wouldn't the world be wonderful?

00:37:38.320 And the truth of the matter is that sex is a lot more fragile than anyone thought, and there's a lot of ways to destroy it and very few ways to foster its development.

00:37:48.440 And it turns out that long-term committed monogamous marriages are the answer to that, and also the answer that sustains civilization itself, because it's also predicated on this sophisticated integration towards a future end.

00:38:06.020 And there's something else you pointed to that's of unbelievably critical importance, and people don't understand this at all, although Adam Smith understood it.

00:38:14.700 Now, we have this idea that one of the main sources of our wealth is natural resource, and I don't even like the concept of natural resource.

00:38:25.840 I think it's a disguised form of Marxist presumption that wealth is just laying around for the taking, you know, and that some people get to the wealth first, and that's how they get rich.

00:38:38.820 It's like, Japan doesn't have any natural resources, and it's rich, and there's also a phenomena that you know about, I imagine, called the resource curse, which is the repeated empirical observation that there's, if anything, a slight negative correlation between national prosperity and the presence of natural resources.

00:39:00.060 Well, why? Well, easy money corrupts. That's one reason. But there's a deeper reason. The deeper reason is, the only natural resource is trust. And trust is dependent on honesty. And the reason that trust is the only natural resource is because if I can take you at your word, we can cooperate, and I don't have to worry about the snakes in your head.

00:39:30.060 All I have to know is you'll do what you said you'll do. That means we can make a contract. Not only that, we can make one. We'll both understand it, and we'll both keep it. And that means that we can cooperate. And if everyone's like that, then everyone can cooperate. Or even compete fairly. And if everyone can cooperate and compete, then every desert can bloom. And Japan is a great example of that. 0.57

00:39:54.620 And so, you know, Venezuelan, Argentina, great counterexamples.

00:40:00.000 The Congo.

00:40:30.000 He has the power of the manly man, but keeps it in reserve to protect his family, you know, his bride, his children, his family, his nation, civilization. But he's not going to abuse his power.

00:40:42.480 So we've seen a regression where civilization was created by gentlemen. As you said, gentlemen, they became gentlemen. In the process of creating civilization, they become gentlemen. Or in the process of becoming gentlemen, they create civilization.

00:40:55.020 Which is to say a society based on universal rules on the view of humans as all equal under first God and then equal under the law.

00:41:06.880 And that everybody has these fundamental, inalienable human rights. This is the basis of what we call Western civilization. And it's a civilization of gentlemen.

00:41:17.280 Well, we've seen a mass derangement, you know, over the last 12 years, but particularly with the election of Trump, you saw a derangement occurring in every institution.

00:41:27.460 And what happens with USAID is, and within the intelligence communities and the foreign policy establishment is a massive derangement and abuse of power where the gentlemen stop being gentlemen.

00:41:40.060 They become aggressive manly men and they become aggressive manly men and they decide that they know what's best and they can't stand all this democracy, which they call populism.

00:41:48.120 They dismiss as populism and they describe populism as its opposite.

00:41:53.320 They project onto populism, totalitarianism, and in the name of preventing totalitarianism, create a censorship industrial complex, which was already, we know, was international.

00:42:06.940 U.S., U.K., U.S., Brazil, U.S., Europe, Canada involved in it, particularly the Five Eyes, all run, all coming out of the intelligence community because they're the ones that had run the censorship and disinformation operations, again, in Arab Spring and then the color revolutions.

00:42:22.200 They turn all that back on the United States, first with the Russiagate conspiracy theory, this idea that Trump is secretly controlled through a sex blackmail operation by Putin.

00:42:32.140 Second, through the, you know, the dismissal of COVID origins, then you see it with the Hunter Biden laptop, an elaborate conspiracy theory that the laptop is a Russian information operation as opposed to, which they knew it was not because the FBI had the laptop seven months earlier and used.

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00:43:46.100 Basically, Jedi mind trick, brainwashing to pre-bunk or program the journalists and the social media companies into thinking that a future story about Hunter Biden and Burisma would be a Russian hack and leak operation and spreading disinformation in advance, programming people, and then demanding censorship on the basis of it.

00:44:08.760 And I think we're going to find out a lot more about January 6th as well as a kind of construction rather than something organic.

00:44:16.360 A clear decision was made at a minimum to not provide adequate security.

00:44:21.600 We know that for sure because the Capitol Police Chief has written a whole book on it.

00:44:27.400 And so you look at that series of events and you also look at what the U.S. security state had done in places like Brazil and the Philippines and other parts of the world.

00:44:34.320 And, of course, this goes back decades and it's a clear it's a clear counterpopulist effort run by these deep state organizations run by people who had lost their minds, you know, who have all the rational abilities.

00:44:46.980 But they had lost it.

00:44:48.020 They had Trump derangement syndrome and turned their enormous powers, their incredible psychological, sociological, political, technological powers against their own people to undermine democracy and attack free speech.

00:45:01.880 Okay, so let's go back to the first part of that, that declamation.

00:45:10.280 You talked about weak men and strong men.

00:45:14.060 And so I want to just put a little twist on that.

00:45:16.340 And gentlemen.

00:45:17.160 Yeah.

00:45:17.800 Yeah, gentlemen.

00:45:18.620 Yes, yes, yes.

00:45:19.400 There's three levels.

00:45:20.320 I want to put a twist on that.

00:45:21.700 Yeah, exactly.

00:45:22.380 Okay.

00:45:22.860 So let's look at what constitutes weak.

00:45:26.220 All right.

00:45:26.800 So if you look at the way that human beings develop neurobiologically, what you see is that from birth to the age of three, human beings are basically, you could conceptualize them as, you could conceptualize the baby and the toddler as a sequence of instinctive drives.

00:45:54.500 Now, drive isn't exactly a good metaphor because these systems aren't deterministic.

00:46:00.660 They're more like personalities than they are like drives.

00:46:04.300 But you come into the world with a set of motivations intact and a set of emotions operative.

00:46:12.720 And so the motivations are orientations of aim, let's say, towards physical contact, towards play, towards physical gratification, towards hunger, thirst, temperature regulation, the basic subsystems that orient you so that you don't collapse physically, let's say.

00:46:41.420 And the emotional systems are basically positive emotion that attracts you to things and negative emotion that freezes you or causes you to retreat.

00:46:52.140 Now, an immature person who is a weak person, let's say, because we're going to equate those.

00:47:00.320 An immature person is someone who's still dominated by those systems.

00:47:05.080 And so a two-year-old moves from the domination of one motivational system to another.

00:47:12.460 And it isn't until they're about three that they can start to integrate with other people.

00:47:17.260 That's when they start to learn to play.

00:47:20.200 Okay.

00:47:20.540 So now, the reason I'm saying that is because we can associate that weakness that you described.

00:47:27.060 Weak and immature are the same.

00:47:28.860 And they're the same as hedonistic.

00:47:31.580 And they're the same as present-oriented.

00:47:33.680 And they're the same as unable to delay gratification.

00:47:38.000 And they're the same as narcissistic and narrowly self-centered.

00:47:41.620 That's all the same.

00:47:43.460 And like a variant of that would be criminal as well.

00:47:47.900 Okay.

00:47:48.560 Now, one way of controlling that is with power.

00:47:52.960 And that's the strong man that you're describing.

00:47:59.260 Literally, the strong man.

00:48:00.820 The strong man is someone who controls the hedonists with an iron fist.

00:48:06.940 And then if you look at the postmodernists, the postmodern neo-Marxists, they would say,

00:48:11.740 that's the whole playing field.

00:48:15.040 There's just power.

00:48:16.720 There's just hedonism.

00:48:18.040 There's nothing else.

00:48:18.780 But that gentleman that you described, that's that integration that we were talking about earlier.

00:48:25.200 That's civilized integration.

00:48:27.320 And it is the basis of mental health, I believe, which is quite a radical claim.

00:48:34.560 Like, you cannot—and I think you see this, for example, in the data that show that liberal, progressive young women who are, like, fragmented and hedonistic and immature, 1.00

00:48:47.320 they're rife with mental illness, depression and anxiety.

00:48:50.620 They're dominated by negative emotion and have very little hope.

00:48:54.200 And it's because they're not integrated.

00:48:56.380 And so, the men that you described as gentlemen are actually integrated and mature.

00:49:02.740 And their ethos isn't weak hedonism or power.

00:49:08.140 Their ethos—this is something I really want to develop at ARC, and in the next book I'm writing—

00:49:12.460 their ethos is one of voluntary self-sacrifice, right?

00:49:18.120 And that it's voluntary—so the voluntary sacrifice is present to future, right?

00:49:23.840 So you sacrifice the present to the future.

00:49:26.180 That's control of—delay of gratification.

00:49:29.300 And you satisfy—and you sacrifice your subjugation to your own whims to communal stability and productivity, right?

00:49:42.500 And that's what happens.

00:49:43.300 Kids start to learn to do that at the age of three when they develop friendships.

00:49:47.200 They learn to delay gratification.

00:49:48.880 They learn to take turns and to have friends, which is very much akin to delay gratification.

00:49:54.360 And that's voluntary self-sacrifice.

00:50:01.560 That is the foundation of civilization.

00:50:03.740 That's central to the Christian ethos, for example.

00:50:06.480 And it's laid out in the Old Testament writings as well, the ethos of sacrifice, let's say.

00:50:11.580 And so, I think we're at the point where we can actually understand this.

00:50:14.540 And my sense is that a return to first principles is going to involve a conscious understanding, a conscious understanding this time of the ethos on which our civilization is founded.

00:50:29.100 And I'm curious about your ideas about that, see, because I can't see how it can be any other way.

00:50:34.020 Like, to be civilized means to be social, reciprocal, right?

00:50:41.260 And to be social means you're not selfish.

00:50:46.480 But then you might ask, well, what is selfish means?

00:50:48.840 Well, it means you're not governed by your immediate whims.

00:50:53.360 Well, then what are you governed by?

00:50:54.660 You're governed by an impulse to integrate yourself internally with the future and with other people.

00:51:07.940 And that's deeply enough embedded in human beings, so I don't think there's any difference between that and the instinct to develop and mature.

00:51:16.720 And that's part of that hero's journey path, right?

00:51:19.480 That's the pathway to maturation that produces that gentlemanly behavior upon which civilization is founded.

00:51:28.760 And I can't see, how would you argue against that?

00:51:31.960 Like, you could do what Foucault does and say, well, there's nothing but power. 0.97

00:51:35.540 It's like, well, Foucault believed that because he wanted to rape little boys in graveyards and have that be okay. 0.79

00:51:41.800 You know, I mean, he thought of power as the ultimate deity because he was trying to justify his own pathology. 0.69

00:51:50.800 And there's plenty of that on the progressive and hedonistic side of the conceptual world.

00:51:57.240 Yeah, no, I mean, I think we're, it's really, I mean, this is why I was so excited to talk to you, Jordan, because I think, well, we talked last time also about narcissism and nihilism.

00:52:04.600 And I think since that, since it's almost been a year and we've been working on our book still on this, on, on that gets at these issues, I think we have a better picture of what's happened.

00:52:14.920 And you, first of all, when you have your civilized, your liberal democratic civilization with respect for human dignity and human equality and free speech threatened, you get more grounded.

00:52:26.340 I mean, I've been, I was concerned around the ways in which the most civilized people, the elites, have been undermining civilization since my, since really my first and second book, both on the environment and on homelessness, undermining, for example, the security of a city, you know, making cities dangerous again.

00:52:47.180 And we, you know, we just saw in Los Angeles, I had always, we'd been, I've been writing about defunding the police for years.

00:52:52.840 We just learned in Los Angeles that they had been defunding the fire department.

00:52:56.480 That's how far the degradation of civilization had gone.

00:52:59.800 And I knew as soon as it happened that there would be voices right away who would say that there was nothing that could have been done about it because humans were doomed by climate change.

00:53:10.040 There's, how could we possibly protect ourselves from a fire?

00:53:12.560 I mean, who could ever imagine there being fires in the most fiery part of the United States, right?

00:53:17.600 Like, I mean, it's insane.

00:53:19.160 So, will we, but I think we have a better picture now, Jordan, too, where, you know, you get this really precious, I mean, just this tiny moment of this thing we call the enlightenment.

00:53:31.280 Of course, it comes out of 1,500 years of Christianity, but we get this period, really 17th century, 18th century, really, 18th century, where there have been all these wars and everyone's, you know, Hobbes and everybody's tired of them.

00:53:46.440 And they're like, we have to have order.

00:53:47.640 You have to have civilization.

00:53:48.880 And Locke comes in and amends that and says, you also have to protect the citizenry from each other.

00:53:55.060 But you have still a picture of what it means to be a citizen, right?

00:53:59.500 And it is tied to this idea of being a gentleman.

00:54:01.520 And we're also trying to teach this at University of Austin.

00:54:04.340 But it's a picture that a citizen, it's not just something, yes, you're a citizen by fact of being born in that nation, yes.

00:54:10.580 But there was this older idea of the citizen, which came from older Europe, which was that to be a citizen was something that was a privilege and an honor.

00:54:19.540 And it came with some intense responsibilities, and you're in service, you know, so you sort of say, what is it?

00:54:26.320 The gentleman is in service of civilization, of peace, of prosperity, of freedom, of reproduction, continuing the civilization, continuing.

00:54:35.800 There's a picture of an evolution of human consciousness.

00:54:38.700 As we've talked about before, that, you know, gets into trouble when the stories that Christians had told start to get challenged, you know, by Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, we get to the crisis of meaning, we get to nihilism, the death of God. 0.72

00:54:56.380 We had two first bad waves of a totalitarian nihilistic response to the death of God in fascism and communism.

00:55:04.220 They get repressed and we push away, but then we get this thing we call wokeism, and it develops and develops after the fall of communism, really starting in the early 90s, and then fully comes to, it's just deranged, mad power with the woke reign of terror, exercising this just wanton aggression and nihilism.

00:55:28.840 I think you can make a case, and I think this is the appropriate case, and I think it can easily be documented historically and mythologically, that when the integrating ethos collapses, that's equivalent to the death of God. 0.95

00:55:45.500 And the reason for that, specifically in the West, is because, well, here's a way of thinking about it.

00:55:51.940 There's no doubt that the passion of Christ is a archetypal representation of voluntary self-sacrifice.

00:55:59.040 I don't think that would come as a shock to anyone to say that.

00:56:02.280 But when you understand that the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice is the antidote to power and hedonism, then that takes on a new light, because then you might say, well, what happens if you kill God, so to speak, in the Nietzschean sense?

00:56:17.760 And at least in the Christian West, what that means is you remove from the central place the insistence that the drama of self-sacrifice is the altar of the divine, let's say.

00:56:33.440 And that has cascading consequences.

00:56:35.740 Now, you outlined to some degree the Enlightenment reasons for that.

00:56:40.480 It's like part of what's happened is that the rational mind did a very bad job of distinguishing mythological and narrative reality from objective reality, right?

00:56:55.840 They're not simply the same.

00:56:59.460 Sam Harris racked himself up on those shoals to some degree.

00:57:03.140 You know, Sam, one of the admirable things about Sam Harris is that Sam became convinced very early of the reality of evil.

00:57:13.800 And his response to that, being a rationalist and scientifically minded, was that we would have to ground our morality in objective fact.

00:57:24.480 And that's almost right.

00:57:27.360 Like, it's almost right, because we do need a transcendental grounding for our morality.

00:57:33.140 But it's not to be found exactly where Sam was looking.

00:57:37.220 And I think there are complex technical reasons for that.

00:57:40.320 But the consequence of the rise of the Enlightenment, and this is something that, you know, this is the time that people like Steven Pinker, too, identify as the birthplace of the modern state.

00:57:54.380 They think of that reaction of rationality against the superstitions of the underlying religious ethos as the moment of clarity that freed the West.

00:58:06.360 But they don't take into account the fact that the deposing of that central icon produces the rise of both power—that's the communists and the fascists that you described—and this nihilistic hedonism, which is equivalent to disintegration and degeneration.

00:58:26.920 Now, Nietzsche knew that was going to happen.

00:58:29.620 Like, he knew that.

00:58:30.540 He laid that out very, very clearly.

00:58:32.560 And so did Dostoevsky.

00:58:33.780 And it certainly did happen.

00:58:36.060 You know, maybe we fought off the fascists to some degree on the communist and the Nazi side.

00:58:41.360 But, you know, we fell prey to the nihilistic hedonists starting in the 1960s, and they're in a power dynamic dance anyways with the—

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00:59:09.340 Because if you're a hedonist, you have to use power, eh?

00:59:13.520 And the reason for that is that if I'm a hedonist, and it's all about me, why the hell would you associate with me?

00:59:23.900 Because if it's all about me, it's certainly not about you.

00:59:27.300 And that means that to gratify myself in the moment, I have to use force.

00:59:33.600 And so there's this—you see this dynamic, by the way, extremely brilliantly portrayed in the movie Cabaret, right?

00:59:44.140 It shows the degeneration of the Weimar state into this gender-fluid hedonism. 0.99

00:59:49.420 And all the while, the same party—what would you say?

00:59:55.760 The same people possessed by the spirit of Dionysius are just inviting the Nazis in because they want the heavy-handed fist of authority to impose some order, right? 0.82

01:00:06.840 Right, right. So then the question is, well, what's the alternative to that, right?

01:00:10.300 And the postmodernists, the neo-Marxists, say, well, there's nothing but power.

01:00:15.200 But that's not true. That's not true. It's deeply not true.

01:00:19.380 That mature, integrated ethos that you identified, let's say, with the students that you want to produce at the University of Austin,

01:00:26.860 and that's our aim at Peterson Academy as well, you know?

01:00:30.740 So, yeah, and at Ralston.

01:00:34.260 Well, yeah, I mean, I think that there was this forgetting—there was a hubris that we didn't need these thousands of years of inherited virtues and values.

01:00:47.780 The hedonism manifest—you know, it's the feeling of power is sort of the ultimate hedonistic thrill.

01:00:54.920 And as you said, it's empty, and it's also completely free of all of the wisdom of these past traditions.

01:01:03.340 I mean, every wisdom tradition, I think, by definition, has in it that lesson of the line between good and evil runs through the hearts of all men.

01:01:12.560 You know, be careful when fighting with monsters that you not become one.

01:01:16.380 You see the speck in your neighbor's eye.

01:01:18.200 Beware of the attractions of power.

01:01:19.880 Right. There's always—the true wisdom traditions are always emphasizing our mortality, warning of hubris, emphasizing humility and honesty and these really simple basic virtues.

01:01:34.740 And yes, do they change over time, of course, but yet they also mean the same thing.

01:01:38.140 That all gets forgotten, and so you get this kind of secular post-Cold War establishment.

01:01:47.360 And I mean, you know, just exactly what it sounds like, media, university, foreign policy, intelligence community.

01:01:53.720 Because remember, the intelligence community is full of very intelligent people, and they just—they're the children of light.

01:01:59.840 Just what exactly what Reinhold Niebuhr warned against in his famous lectures from the 1940s, that liberals imagine they're children of light.

01:02:09.520 They can do no harm.

01:02:10.240 We're just going to go into these countries and help them.

01:02:12.680 Just going to go in there and help them.

01:02:14.320 Then we're going to help them decide who to get elected.

01:02:17.200 And you got married to some of the darker forces, which was the CIA, and starting to try to control who gets elected in Italy and then in Greece.

01:02:24.480 And you go all the way from the 40s on, and, you know, it has a huge moral victory with the fall of communism.

01:02:33.000 You know, the U.S. foreign policy and being trying to have this huge moral victory.

01:02:37.400 We then have 9-11 and a kind of, you know, an early sense of moral righteousness, and then it descends into the horrors of Iraq. 0.94

01:02:45.100 And then, frankly, we went and overthrew a bunch of governments in the Middle East, surreptitiously, Eastern Europe.

01:02:50.540 And it was a maniacal—I think it was just a power trip, as we would say.

01:02:53.980 These guys are getting off on their power.

01:02:56.380 And so that when Trump gets elected, I mean, they just couldn't—they just couldn't allow a nationalist and populist to just rule.

01:03:04.020 They just couldn't allow it.

01:03:05.280 They had to invent this elaborate story about how he was Hitler, and it was fascism, and it was—and there was going to be—you know, this was just like—I mean, it was insane.

01:03:15.240 There was, like, no evidence to support any of it.

01:03:17.080 It was a complete projection of their own totalitarian fantasies on Trump.

01:03:20.820 And, I mean, it's just out of Shakespeare.

01:03:23.320 It's out of Greek tragedy, Jordan, where, of course, I mean, I think everybody on the right in the United States right now is secretly—they won't say it, but they're secretly happy that Trump lost in 2020 because he comes into much more power now than he would have had in 2020,

01:03:38.240 capable of eliminating, you know, basically our most important, you know, intelligence cutout, our most important, you know, covert, overt, you know, regime change agency.

01:03:52.240 And with much more authority and—hopefully much more authority and wisdom rather than power, right?

01:03:57.560 And with the moral authority that comes from popular vote.

01:03:59.020 And maybe some humility.

01:04:00.400 Yeah, and hope well is hope.

01:04:01.920 We'll hope.

01:04:02.500 Well, it kind of looks like it to me.

01:04:04.360 Like, it doesn't look to me like the new version of Trump is the same man we had eight years ago.

01:04:10.940 Like, there's a hardness about his gaze, first of all, like that—what would you say?

01:04:18.140 The—I don't want to call it clowny.

01:04:22.400 Like, there was an element of Trump that was huckstery, you know, and that's a deep tradition in the U.S.

01:04:28.800 Well, like Colonel—was it Tom Parker, the guy who ran Elvis?

01:04:33.360 You know, the huckster salesman is a pretty deep American archetype, and there was a fair bit of that about—there was a fair bit of that that was part of the drama of Trump.

01:04:44.840 But he's got a seriousness of intent that wasn't there before that I think you get from being tried in the fire.

01:04:51.560 And then, you know, I was concerned about his narcissism because Trump is very extroverted, and he's very disagreeable.

01:04:58.380 And those are the predictors of narcissism as pathology.

01:05:01.600 Like, not everybody who's extroverted and disagreeable is narcissistic, but that's the tilt.

01:05:07.200 But, you know, I've watched him share the stage, for example, with Elon Musk, and if he was genuinely narcissistic, he would be jealous of Musk.

01:05:17.360 He wouldn't share the stage with him.

01:05:19.000 Like, because, you know, you might say, well, if you're a narcissist and you're president, that's good enough.

01:05:23.880 But that's not—that just means you don't know anything about the clinical world because nothing is enough for a narcissist.

01:05:32.040 Like, there's no filling that hole because it's all about them.

01:05:36.680 And that's—the more you make it all about you, the deeper the hole.

01:05:41.520 And yet, Musk, you know, Trump has been—he pulled in Kennedy, you know, and Kennedy and Musk, I would say, and Tulsi.

01:05:50.100 But even of those three, Kennedy and Musk were probably the only people in the United States who could really give Trump a run for his money in terms of implicit fame and influence.

01:06:02.660 And yet, he invited them along, and they agreed to play, and so far it seems to be working.

01:06:09.940 And, you know, J.D. Vance is also an interesting choice because Vance is smart and competent and dynamic.

01:06:19.120 And he's not the sort of weak vice president that—

01:06:23.540 We're used to.

01:06:24.920 A narcissist would be attracted to. 0.99

01:06:27.940 That's right.

01:06:28.400 And so—

01:06:29.180 Yep.

01:06:30.360 No, I mean, look, it's an incredible story.

01:06:32.240 It's an incredible story arc.

01:06:34.080 You know, I just don't think Trump really believed in God until he almost died from a bullet.

01:06:39.320 I mean, all of which remains mysterious, unsolved.

01:06:43.480 You have maybe the greatest innovator in American history, you know, working to reform government.

01:06:49.080 You know, you have these incredible story arcs with Tulsi and Bobby coming from the left, even the radical left, really, if you're being honest, coming to this place.

01:07:00.300 Which, you know, to kind of even get that story arc of our villains in this story, you know, the characters who have been abusing power in the ways that we've been looking at.

01:07:08.940 These are people who forgot what America was.

01:07:12.560 I mean, the United States has been very reluctant to do foreign entanglements.

01:07:18.860 I mean, the rise of the media industrial complex, of the kind of mass media complex, it's so recent.

01:07:27.040 It's 100 years old in the United States.

01:07:28.920 It sort of gets created by U.S. elites in order to persuade young men to go fight in World War I.

01:07:35.480 That was when we really start with government propaganda.

01:07:38.340 By the time you get after, you know, World War II, of course, it just goes on steroids.

01:07:42.100 You get out after World War II.

01:07:43.180 But the media is very controlled after World War II all the way through the rise of social media.

01:07:48.160 But you have the people running those foreign policy institutions, Jordan.

01:07:52.840 I mean, and I mean the whole foreign policy establishment.

01:07:56.380 Just think big, you know, the elites, let's just say all of them.

01:07:58.700 They forgot what America was about.

01:08:01.200 They forgot that, like, literally free speech is number one, literally and figuratively.

01:08:05.680 Like, you don't mess with that.

01:08:06.900 That is the third rail of American life.

01:08:09.280 If you start to step on someone else's free speech rights in the United States, this is a country that defends the—it's like, as far as I can tell, I can't find another country that allows Nazis to march in neighborhoods of Holocaust survivors.

01:08:22.280 That is U.S. law from Supreme Court, from the Brandenburg decision in the 1960s, reinforced in the Skokie decision.

01:08:29.620 That's how seriously we take that.

01:08:31.180 These guys went and messed with the First Amendment. 0.79

01:08:34.320 They then went and tried to incarcerate their political opponent, making up just phony thing after phony thing about him misstating, him misdescribing the payment to the porn star, and that that was somehow five felonies, or that somehow he had some papers.

01:08:56.380 You know, even though he's the only person that can declassify, somehow he took some papers to his house and it merited an FBI raid on the house of a former president?

01:09:09.660 These are bonkers behaviors.

01:09:11.660 You look at them in retrospect.

01:09:13.040 That is a kind of madness.

01:09:15.720 These are people that forgot what the United States was, and they had got conditioned to thinking that their power—they thought that they were the United States.

01:09:25.560 They thought that in their narcissism and their nihilism and power, but they forgot that—like, you just go back to that period of 1776, the founders of our country were hardcore.

01:09:36.460 They were hardcore in their demand for democracy and free speech.

01:09:39.700 Our establishment forgot it.

01:09:41.540 They turned on their own people.

01:09:42.860 They became swept up in their power, their narcissism, their elitism, their nihilism.

01:09:47.460 And, I mean, I love this.

01:09:48.760 I mean, I'm in a great mood.

01:09:50.680 I mean, this is—by the way, I also wanted to say we're headed to ARC.

01:09:53.560 We have seen the complete destruction of the World Economic Forum.

01:10:00.080 It has no legitimacy.

01:10:01.940 It's embarrassing for world leaders to go there.

01:10:04.780 It's run by a cartoon character villain, a character who's literally in Joe Rogan's toilet.

01:10:13.200 Like, you go to do a Joe Rogan podcast, he's in the toilet. 0.98

01:10:16.180 That's how seriously, in the pop culture mind, he is a ridiculous villain.

01:10:21.800 World Economic Forum—because I know you founded ARC in part—I'm sure you had a lot of motivations—but certainly in part as a counterweight to world—you're not the counterweight.

01:10:29.400 ARC is not the counterweight anymore.

01:10:30.880 ARC is the main event for intellectual life in the West, oriented around a continuation and, first of all, a celebration of human specialness, a continuation of Western civilization as the best and only way to help all humans achieve their internal potential.

01:10:51.100 It's this—I mean, so for me, what a year for ARC.

01:10:54.900 I mean, and it's a moment to kind of—I think you look back—and it's not January, but you knew the Janus face.

01:10:59.760 You look back, you look forward.

01:11:01.680 We're clearly entering a new era, you know, and it's not totally clear what it is at all.

01:11:09.500 And look at what we've got on our table.

01:11:11.100 We're coming to a new era.

01:11:12.200 It's a new media ecosystem.

01:11:13.740 You get elected in different ways.

01:11:15.520 It's social media and podcasting.

01:11:17.520 You have to be able to sit—in 1960, you had to be able to be handsome on television.

01:11:21.920 That's what the television revolution was about.

01:11:23.700 The podcasting revolution is you must be able to sit for three hours with Joe Rogan and answer questions.

01:11:28.620 And if you are unable to do that, as Kamala Harris was, you can't be president, okay?

01:11:33.520 So you've got to have some intellectual fortitude and stamina.

01:11:38.880 And then we've got this massive technological question in front of us in terms of AI.

01:11:42.560 We have two wars that are about to be wound down, need to be wound down, big questions around NATO, existential questions around our commitment to NATO.

01:11:51.440 So I can't think of a kind of, you know, more important—I mean, I think it was pressing it to set up ARC.

01:11:57.900 I think ARC has so much gravity as a center for this.

01:12:01.740 It is the twilight—it's not even the twilight of the idols.

01:12:06.260 We are in the—you know, we are zero dark 30 of the idols, and I think we're coming to daybreak.

01:12:14.180 You know, a new dawn is coming, but it's still very dark.

01:12:18.580 We're morally obliged to presume that the future is a welcoming and abundant place.

01:12:26.780 That's a moral obligation.

01:12:29.060 Once you're not naive, once you're not naive and you've passed through the valley of nihilism,

01:12:34.520 your moral obligation is to sustain your faith in the future.

01:12:39.300 There's no difference between that and faith in civilization.

01:12:42.620 There's no difference between that and faith in the spirit of life itself, right?

01:12:48.180 And we should also point out, too, that that commitment to free speech, you know, there's—if you cease to interpret freedom of speech as a hedonistic freedom,

01:12:59.520 which is the freedom to say what you want for your own purposes, you can see it as a reflection of the particularly Christian insistence,

01:13:08.960 although not only Christian insistence, that the word is the divine mechanism by which the cosmos itself is sustained.

01:13:19.540 And at minimum, there's something deeply psychologically true about that,

01:13:24.240 is that we cast our selves and our families and our societies, we cast them into being,

01:13:33.560 especially the being that's good with truthful, forthright, honest, merciful, and just speech.

01:13:43.720 And you can't touch that because that is the dynamic principle that keeps the land of promise alive.

01:13:52.800 And so understanding the metaphysical assumptions upon which the freedom of speech is predicated is—I think it's now crucial.

01:14:01.540 And it is shocking to us at ARC how rapidly the—how rapidly things have pivoted.

01:14:10.440 And we're also praying that, you know, we don't fall prey to the same power-mad tendencies that typified the WEF.

01:14:22.300 Now, I'm—you see, you talked about the betrayal of the elites.

01:14:27.340 We should delve into that a little bit, you know, because there's a very interesting dynamic going on in the US and in Europe with regards to so-called populism.

01:14:36.940 See, and populism isn't populism.

01:14:39.580 It's rebellion of the sane and grounded, although inarticulate, working class against their elite betters, so to speak, or at least the elites who think they're better. 0.87

01:14:53.680 Now, the reason they think they're better is because they worship the intellect, you know, and that's one of the potential dangers of so-called meritocracy.

01:15:03.780 You know, the—when you go to a place like Harvard, let's say, even when it's functioning, the implicit assumption is now you're among the better people.

01:15:14.300 And the thing is, it's true that you're among the smarter people, but there's no correlation, for example, between IQ and conscientiousness, like zero.

01:15:29.020 The correlation is literally zero.

01:15:31.560 There's no indication at all that intelligence and wisdom or intelligence and morality are the same thing at all.

01:15:39.280 Partly because if you're intelligent, you can do crooked things faster, right?

01:15:45.420 So, that's not a moral—there's nothing implicitly moral about that.

01:15:49.660 Now, it's in the interest of the Luciferian intellects to assume that moral superiority—and in fact, that's like the nature of the Luciferian is to assume moral superiority.

01:16:04.000 But there's a usurping element of it, too.

01:16:07.380 And so, the problem with the intelligent, let's say, and the self-satisfied simultaneously is the problem, the eternal problem of pride.

01:16:17.200 You know, you're blessed by God, at least, so to speak, because you're, you know, your IQ is three standard deviations above the mean.

01:16:26.600 And instead of being grateful for that and attempting to use it in service, you worship it and presume that you're ordained by the powers that be to rule the world.

01:16:38.620 And look at where then the revolution comes from.

01:16:44.240 I mean, certainly there's been—I think you can argue there's been some return to some spirituality.

01:16:48.980 There's been some return to, you know, some appreciation of marriage.

01:16:52.120 But the real revolution is around the nation-state and binding us together as a nation—that is what did it and what is doing it around the world.

01:17:03.200 And nationalism, in its modern form, I'll say—there's a debate about how long it goes back—but nationalism in its modern form is fundamentally democratic.

01:17:12.780 Because what is nationalism, if I follow Leah Greenfield's definition, nationalism is, you know, a common people—you know what I mean?

01:17:24.660 A common citizen bound by a sense of equality, that we're all—you might be rich, I might be poor, you might be smart, I might be dumb.

01:17:32.900 We're all Americans, or we're all British, and that that comes with entailments.

01:17:38.700 There are consequences of your national identity, but it is fundamentally democratic.

01:17:44.240 Once you're a citizen, you have a say, you have a vote.

01:17:48.640 And so what got eroded with the snobbery, the elitism, the hubris, the pride, the arrogance of our elites—and this is out of Toynbee, and this is how civilizations fail—the creative class or the elites in a civilization start to identify with the elites in a different civilization and also sympathize and want to bring in the working people of another nation.

01:18:16.840 Well, that's exactly what we saw happen in these Western countries, where the allegiance is between—with other elites, you know, mediated by organizations like the World Economic Forum or the United Nations or any one of these elitist organizations.

01:18:30.700 And so you've seen this beautiful populist nationalist backlash to it that says, no, we have a national—we have thousands of years or hundreds of years of a national tradition that's special, that hands us a set of virtues and values that have sustained us and our families and our societies.

01:18:48.920 And no, it wasn't all oppressive.

01:18:51.260 It wasn't all colonialist or patriarchal or like it was a beautiful—

01:18:56.700 Yeah, it wasn't all just based on might makes right.

01:19:00.680 It was also based on a very strong sense of principles created by gentlemen in a civilized way.

01:19:06.640 Yes, hence the end of slavery. 0.83

01:19:09.420 Yes.

01:19:09.780 Incredible.

01:19:10.420 Incredible history of progress.

01:19:11.620 The way that we've dealt with that at ARC is by turning to the Catholic social doctrine, although it's much older than Catholicism itself, of subsidiarity.

01:19:21.140 And so in the story of Exodus, there's the emergence of civilization as an alternative to the tyranny of the pharaoh and the slavery of the Hebrews. 0.70

01:19:32.540 So imagine tyranny and slavery as two poles. 0.99

01:19:36.280 You might say, well, is there an alternative to that?

01:19:38.580 That's the same dichotomy as power and hedonistic immaturity.

01:19:44.480 It's the same thing.

01:19:46.120 Okay, is there an alternative?

01:19:47.500 Well, the alternative that's laid out in the book of Exodus, this is what's revealed to Moses, is subsidiary organization.

01:19:55.480 And so, and with an appropriately organized society, you don't need a tyrant and you're not a slave.

01:20:07.760 But what does it mean?

01:20:11.020 There's you.

01:20:12.580 You're married.

01:20:14.760 You're married with a family.

01:20:17.140 Your family are responsible citizens of your town.

01:20:21.540 Your town is responsible agent in the running of the state.

01:20:26.260 The state is a responsible agent in relationship to the nation.

01:20:30.200 Like there are levels of responsibility that are, so to speak, external to you, but that also define your identity.

01:20:39.580 Your identity isn't something you carry around in your head like the liberal psychoanalysts, let's say, presume.

01:20:48.160 The liberal psychologists, for that matter.

01:20:50.000 It's your placement in a functional hierarchy of responsibility.

01:20:54.600 But that's also where you find the meaning of your life.

01:20:57.960 And so, the hope of ARC is that we remind people of their subsidiary responsibility.

01:21:04.180 It's like, you don't want a tyrant.

01:21:06.540 You don't want to be a slave.

01:21:08.920 So, what do you have to do?

01:21:09.900 Well, you have to take up that responsibility on your own.

01:21:13.040 And that's also the adventure of your life.

01:21:15.500 You need to get married. 0.82

01:21:17.620 You need to have some children.

01:21:18.900 Your family has to be an integrated part of your community.

01:21:22.540 You have to serve your state and your nation.

01:21:25.720 And all of that under the divine.

01:21:27.980 All of that under whatever is at the top of the transcendent hierarchy of values.

01:21:32.820 And we've pointed to that already.

01:21:34.640 That's, at minimum, that's the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice.

01:21:38.640 And I believe, and I think this is part of being in this post-enlightenment age, partly a consequence of being wherever the hell we are now, that we can make all that conscious and really understand it.

01:21:54.340 And then, well, I've watched people, you know, who have made this conscious.

01:22:01.480 I've talked to so many young men who were disoriented or attracted by power, let's say, you know, that kind of toxic masculinity that's exemplified perhaps by Andrew Tate.

01:22:14.760 Yes.

01:22:15.240 Instead, they take on their responsibility.

01:22:18.500 Right.

01:22:18.660 You know, they find a woman. 0.99

01:22:20.220 They get married.

01:22:21.240 They have children.

01:22:22.120 They start to act in an adventurous and entrepreneurial manner.

01:22:27.660 And they're standing up straight.

01:22:30.660 And they're looking forward.

01:22:32.260 And away we bloody well go.

01:22:33.980 And that's the right thing.

01:22:34.880 Yeah, it's the pride of the gentleman that they've earned.

01:22:39.260 Andrew Tate's not a gentleman.

01:22:41.140 I think that's fair to say.

01:22:43.440 And the world isn't power in hedonism.

01:22:47.120 That's a sadly impoverished and spiritually shallow and existentially doomed viewpoint.

01:22:58.420 And we can dispense with it.

01:23:00.700 We're done with it.

01:23:01.280 Yeah, I mean, I think to your point of we now know that the greatest pleasures come from delaying gratification and that hedonism is actually a poor strategy to gain pleasure.

01:23:15.300 That happiness is something that comes as a side effect in pursuing your bliss, in the words of the great Joseph Campbell, or at least life's purpose, living a meaningful life.

01:23:26.380 And so what got stripped out of this globalist WEF vision was a vision that had just stripped every nation of its core meanings.

01:23:39.020 It just had basically not just disregarded.

01:23:45.060 It had started, they had all turned on their own incredible traditions as somehow as evil, that these incredible national traditions.

01:23:54.000 And I'm with you on the subsidiarity concept, by the way, I love that.

01:23:56.940 I want the French to be the most French. 0.99

01:23:59.800 I love France.

01:24:01.620 I don't want France to be like some universal monoculture, which, by the way, it's so ironic.

01:24:07.200 I mean, it's a whole other story.

01:24:08.420 We're really wrestling that in Canada.

01:24:10.580 We're really wrestling with that in Canada.

01:24:12.200 Yes.

01:24:12.880 Yeah.

01:24:13.340 Well, I hope that this prodding that the president's doing is, I hope that the prodding is actually inspiring a healthy response from Canada to say, because I think the question goes to Canada goes, great.

01:24:23.940 Under the Trudeau vision that Canada is just part of this global monoculture, well, then who cares if you become part of the United States?

01:24:31.860 That's just one step in towards becoming part of a global government.

01:24:35.420 I mean, it's a soullessness that got exposed, that creeped in.

01:24:43.980 And you realize when you get down to what is a nation, it's got a soul, it's got a culture, it's got a set of traditions, it's got a set of values.

01:24:51.980 And they're meaningful, and they give life's meaning, they give something to aspire to.

01:24:57.240 And so to just go and denigrate them, as has been done for decades, as just slavery and oppression and these singularities of singularity, evil, it's all just, you know, the modernity and civilization just culminated in the Holocaust and the atomic bomb and climate apocalypse.

01:25:16.560 I just think we have, I think that the great thing that's occurred is at least in the United States, I think that is now repudiated and that the left isn't going to find, Democrats aren't going to find any success there.

01:25:29.420 I think you're going to see a victory by AFD in Germany this month.

01:25:32.820 It won't probably be first, but they're going to make a huge victory.

01:25:35.820 It looks like Nigel Farage's party is coming very strong, certainly in France.

01:25:39.260 So I think we could be seeing a re—and I don't think it's as—I think the funny way it's manifesting is that it's very moderate, actually, you know, like this rebalancing.

01:25:50.020 I mean, they can call it radical, but what was radical, the extremist, was what the establishment was pursuing in the name of countering populism, in the name of countering the return of democracy.

01:26:01.020 So, you know, Jordan, I'm filled with a lot of optimism.

01:26:05.180 I mean, just the executive orders—last time I was here with you, we were dealing with the sterilization and mutilation of children.

01:26:11.860 I mean, that's where things got.

01:26:13.600 The elites got to the point where they said, no, no, we're going to go ahead and sterilize and mutilate your children. 0.91

01:26:19.140 And look, here's a peer-reviewed science article telling you that it's good.

01:26:23.180 I mean, that is how far things went.

01:26:25.740 And to see it snap back and the way that it snapped back, I can't help but be filled with a sense of optimism.

01:26:31.840 I do think it's—I don't think we have a lot of visibility still in terms of what comes next.

01:26:38.260 But, I mean, I'm also—I think what I'm also getting in the conversation is the sense that you do have to have this faith.

01:26:43.820 You do have to affirm human life.

01:26:47.300 You have to say humans are good.

01:26:49.420 There's something special about us on this earth.

01:26:51.800 It's a beautiful earth.

01:26:52.580 There's a lot of wonderful other species.

01:26:54.100 But there's something special about humankind.

01:26:56.120 We have a specific responsibility.

01:26:58.040 Human Western liberal democratic civilization has been the high point in that.

01:27:03.300 And that really the alternative is just might makes right.

01:27:06.960 It's an—it's the pre—it's the Hobbesian world.

01:27:09.280 And we don't want to go—I think, you know, the American people have said we don't want to go back to that.

01:27:12.920 We don't want to go live in a world where you—where every president gets put into prison by the next president or where committees of experts decide what the truth is.

01:27:21.340 Because—so for me, it's just, you know, I just kind of look at it and I go, it's a completely open plane now.

01:27:28.500 And, you know, we don't—we're not seeing these reactionary totalitarian forces able to even respond to what's been happening.

01:27:36.940 Well, amen to that.

01:27:38.680 And I guess this will be released after the second Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference.

01:27:45.080 We have 4,200 people attending, by the way, so it's maxed out.

01:27:49.400 Wow.

01:27:49.580 Yes, three times as big as the previous convention.

01:27:52.880 1,000 people from the general public this time included in the offerings.

01:27:59.520 Last time we did a public talk afterward that had about 12,000 people.

01:28:03.340 So that was our public offering.

01:28:04.680 Then it was really good talking to you.

01:28:06.320 And for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to continue this conversation for another 30 minutes on the Data Wire side.

01:28:11.260 And I think we'll delve there again, return more to the political.

01:28:14.960 I'd like to pick Michael's brain about Musk, for example, because I know Michael knows him to some degree.

01:28:21.400 And I know him to some degree.

01:28:23.220 And that gives us a chance to piece things together.

01:28:25.700 But we can talk more about—well, I'd like to hear more about your thoughts about USAID, for example.

01:28:30.620 Especially given that, you know, you did move to the more—it's not the conservative side.

01:28:38.260 It's whatever the hell side Trump and Musk make now, along with J.D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard and Kennedy.

01:28:45.140 I don't know how to conceptualize that.

01:28:46.820 But I'm also curious about your misgivings and where you see, being a keen observer of the new political developments,

01:28:54.320 where you see the risk for the victors, let's say.

01:28:57.380 And so we'll talk about that on the Daily Wire side.

01:29:00.140 Yeah, so everybody who's watching and listening, you can join us there.

01:29:03.900 Thanks a lot, Michael.

01:29:04.880 We'll see you in a couple of days.

01:29:06.160 And thanks to the film crew here in Toronto.

01:29:08.300 Where are you?

01:29:09.700 I'm in Austin for a few more hours, and then I fly to London.

01:29:13.940 I see.

01:29:14.480 Okay, okay.

01:29:15.260 So, well, thanks to the film crew in Austin and to the Daily Wire for making this conversation possible.

01:29:19.700 See you soon.

01:29:20.380 Well, in a few minutes.

01:29:21.760 But in person, we'll see you in London.

01:29:24.100 Sounds great.

01:29:24.580 See you soon.

01:29:30.140 Have.

01:29:31.320 Bye.

01:29:32.040 Bye.

01:29:32.700 Bye.

01:29:33.000 Bye.

01:29:34.180 Bye.

01:29:34.920 Bye.

01:29:36.040 Bye.

01:29:36.620 Bye.

01:29:37.180 Bye.

01:29:39.040 Bye.

01:29:39.480 Bye.

01:29:39.960 Bye.

01:29:41.880 Bye.

01:29:42.200 Bye.

01:29:42.980 Bye.

01:29:43.720 연습al.

01:29:44.120 Bye.

01:29:45.980 Bye.

01:29:46.700 Bye.

01:29:46.900 Bye.

01:29:47.140 Bye.

01:29:47.300 Bye.

01:29:48.220 Bye.

01:29:49.220 Bye.

01:29:49.800 Bye.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 03, 2025

526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy： the Dawn of Transparency ｜ Michael Shellenberger

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