PBD Podcast - Dr. Jordan Peterson | PBD Podcast | EP 123 |

Episode Date: February 5, 2022

In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson and Adam Sosnick. They discuss Why People Dress Up, Would Jordan Ever Run For Canadian Prime Minister, The Heroes Journey, Is Spotify Gonna Drop Joe Rogan, Mainstream Media Ignoring The Covid Lockdown Study, Justin Trudeau Fleeing Ottawa To Escape Freedom Convoy, Trump, Xi Jinping In Jeopardy Of Losing His Power, Jordan Peterson On Religion, and If Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro's Bastard Child. Follow Dr. Peterson on tour here: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/events/ Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list About Guests: Jordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, YouTube personality, author, and professor emeritus of psychology. He began to receive widespread attention in the late 2010s for his views on cultural and political issues, often described as conservative. Connect with him on instagram here: https://bit.ly/3ufpRtC Connect with Patrick on social media: https://linktr.ee/patrickbetdavid About the host: Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media, the #1 YouTube channel for entrepreneurship with more than 3 million subscribers. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Bet-David is passionate about shaping the next generation of leaders by teaching the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and personal development while inspiring people to break free from limiting beliefs to achieve their dreams.  To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: [e-mail]   Check out PBD's official website here: https://bit.ly/32tvEjH --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pbdpodcast/support

I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I my tour about 10 days ago. I saw Jill Rogan first and that was really good and seemed to provoke a lot of outrage in the predictable places. And we need more of that though. We need more of that outrage. Yeah, well, we're going to get more. So I don't think we're going to have to wish for that. That's just going to happen. And then I've done seven tour lectures so far and with an average audience size of about 2,500.

And they're going great. They're unbelievably positive. Everybody, almost everybody dresses up, which I think is really cool. Really? Yeah, well, when I went on tour in 2018, before I went out, I thought I wanted to do this, like 100% right, or at least as close to that as I can manage.

So I went out and bought some expensive suits. And I spent way more money on this is one of them, actually. You look great by the way. Thank you. Thank you. Way more money than I ever thought I'd spend on clothes. And I really felt quite bad about it. You know, I thought maybe it was an extravagance.

But I thought, no way, man, I'm going to see if I can nail this dead on. And I'm going to be speaking to 100,000 people. I'm going to look as sharp as I possibly can. And one of the consequences of that has been that young men in particular come to the lecture two are dressed up in suits, three-piece suits, they are, or the couples come and they're dressed up

like they're coming to a wedding. So that's really something. And that's... Why do you think that is? Is it because you set that standard? It's a sick act and like kids. Okay. Our whole culture pushes the idea that teenage life,

or even childhood for that matter, but teenage life is some sort of pinnacle. And then everybody dresses down, so they look, especially men, they look like overgrown 10-year-olds. And there's something extremely demeaning about that. And so to provide people with the opportunity to dress up in a classic manner and to look like adults

to present themselves in that manner. There's something very attractive about that because we haven't done that in our culture. That's been, I would say, downplayed in importance or or for certainly since the 1960s. Who's to blame for that? Because you recall at any time you would fly an airplane, if you see old school pictures, people would dress in three-peat suits to go on an airplane. This is in the 60s, I assume. And then now you see someone like Mark Zuckerberg

wear a t-shirt to give a speech in front of a TED talk or something like that. So who's to blame for this dress? Some of it's just fashion. I mean fashion moves around. And then it usually drifts from the top down and so when formality becomes the norm and but that drifts down to say to the working class, then the upper class thinks well we can't do that because that would you know, associate us with

the unfashionable people and then they dress down and so then that drifts down the hierarchy and so there's some of it's just fashion but a lot of it too is this idea that this sort of reflexive rebellious attitude that anything that violates traditional norms or even anything that's associated with patriarchal oppression and adulthood is to be eliminated in favor of what's hypothetically more free individuality, but it's not because everybody looks the same.

I was in Washington four or five years ago, maybe longer than that. He's probably longer than that when I first went in the summer. And one of the things that really struck me, all these people wandering around these great monuments, is all the men look like overgrown 10-year-olds. They looked exactly like their kids, except they were bigger. They looked like they've been inflated with a bicycle pump. And I thought, this is weird that adults are dressing

like children and not good. And so some of it's fashion, but some of it's also that. Is it exclusive in America? How about in Canada? What have you seen all over the world with this? No, I don't think it's exclusive to America. I think it was more noticeable to me in Washington. And I think that's when it really hit

me because Washington is in some sense a place of pilgrimage. And people from every class go there. And that's a good thing. And they should from every economic class. And so it was like a cross, it was a real cross section of the total population. And that was one of the things that struck me quite bluntly. And so anyways, it's very nice to see all these people dressed up. When you hear the argument being made, it's a follow-on argument. The argument is, look, you only have so much energy to make so many decisions throughout your day. Do you want to be in front of the closet in the morning, picking and choosing what suit

I'm on a wear to tie with, what shirt and what tie, you know what, I'd much rather not consume my energy thinking about what outfit to put together. It's a lot easier to just have a white shirt, jeans, regular tennis shoes, and go to work. And let me make the bigger decisions while I'm running a company. I've never felt bad not wearing a suit.

Every time I've had a suit on, I felt better than just walking on with a t-shirt on. Even though the t-shirt is a lot easier to do, you know, it's a lot easier, even when you were in a military. It felt good having your greens on, you know, having your BDU on. There was something very attractive about having a suit on. Not for the audience, just even for yourself. You felt good having a uniform on.

I don't know. Yeah, well, I talked to my father about this years ago because he always wore a suit when he was a teacher. He's still alive. He's a teacher. And he always wore a suit. And I asked him why one day. And he said, because it was his way of showing respect for the students. And I mean, I'm not saying that everyone who doesn't dress in the suit is being disrespectful, but there's something about outfitting yourself for the task at hand. And there's also something about attempting to put some effort into presenting your putting your best foot forward. And I don't really buy that. It takes more time in the morning argument. It takes a bit more time, but once you, like before I went on this tour, I went

through all my clothing and I tossed out everything that didn't fit and which included a number of suits that were old and I had to organize them and that took about a day to get my closet in order and but then it from then on it only is actually a pleasure in some sense because Do you do it yourself? Do I do? Meaning like you go through your closet, you do it yourself. Like Pat has a very unique way of like you don't pack anymore Pat. Do you like you have someone kind of help you out with that? Patkin is not my strength in my life.

I have a lot, that's one of my weaknesses. No, I still did that for the tour because I had to figure out what I was going to wear. And but I've had people help me make clothing decisions, let's say now what's often people who would like to make suits for me. So I have that as an advantage. But I did that pretty much on my own.

And anyway, so we were talking about the tour. It's going extremely well. And so people come and they're dressed up and they look good. Not everybody dresses up, but everybody looks pretty good. And I like that. I like when you go into a room and people are dressed up. By the way, just for the audience,

just so you know what topics we'd like to cover with you today. Number one, we'd like to cover what a fantastic job your your leaders doing through though, and I know your big fan of his will cover him a little bit with the truckers and what they got going on up there in Canada too. We'll talk about what happened with whoopee Goldberg. I'm curious to know what your thoughts on what should happen to with the comments she made about the holocaust uh... some of the stuff that's going on right now with john hopkins today report came out talking about how great of an idea was the shutdown and no one's talking about it they said it was

point two percent effective love to get your thoughts on that some uh... issues with a the governor who came out with what they're doing was trends uh... genderism governor known on the fairness bill i'd be curious in what you have to say about that and a few other topics that we got going on that's more in the personal side when does the worse make sense that's a question atoms really curious about and then uh... some other questions so today do you still live in canada today are you still full-time living in

canada right now uh... in so far as it live anywhere full-time, it's in Canada. I have a house in Toronto and we bought a new place about three hours north of Toronto on a lake which we spent a lot of time in over the last six months. Very close to it. Yeah, that is awesome up there. Yeah, it's beautiful up there and so that's been real nice. My daughter moved to Nashville, partly to escape from the COVID restrictions and for other reasons as well, because Nashville has a really burgeoning creative culture and it's a very cool place. Great city. Yeah, it's a great city. And real estate still is relatively inexpensive, certainly by Toronto standards. So yes, why are you still in Canada?

Why are you still living in Canada? Well, I'm living in Toronto because my son and his wife and their son live on the same street that we lived on. They purchased a house four years ago, I think it was four years ago, and that was before. I assumed that I would be in Toronto for the rest of my life because I assumed I would work at the University of Toronto and continue doing what I was doing until I was like 90 because I really like doing it. And there was just no reason to assume, and I had a clinical practice which I also really liked. And so that was pretty good life.

And I assumed we were there permanently. And my son liked Toronto. And so we picked up a house and they lived there. And so, but that's really the reason I'm still in Toronto. And how that'll play out over time, I don't really know. So. I'm sure you're seeing everybody that's moving. You got Joe who went from California to Austin.

You saw Shapiro who's company is in Nashville, but he's living here in Boca, right? You're seeing Rubin, who I think just moved in to, I wanna say Miami, right? You got, Elon Musk. Elon Musk goes to Austin, you got your daughter who went to Nashville, right? You got all these people that are looking at, you know,

Nashville, Florida, Texas. It seems like those three states tend to make people the most comfortable and they're all red state. What needs to happen for Jordan Peterson to say, I'm kind of leaving Canada to go to a different state. Would anything happen that would cause you to leave that place? Well, I don't think, as long as my son's there, I don't think so, because that's a big advantage to being there.

But we're doing so much traveling, my and I that in some sense we don't live anywhere. You know, I mean, we were three weeks, two weeks in the UK, and then a week in Washington, and now we've been on the road, we're going to be on the road pretty much nonstop till March of 2023, because this the tour ends in the States in, in, at the end of April, hit 40 cities and then Canada, assuming that's possible, but it looks like it probably will be. And then the UK and Europe, we're going to be back in Canada for two months in the summer. And then down to New Zealand and Australia and Southeast Asia. And then I'm going to Cambridge, I believe, in January, to do seminar on Exodus, which is what I wanted to do

at Cambridge multiple years ago before they canceled me. That's all being sorted out. It looks like there's a very high probability that that will occur. Then that's really as far out as we've looked. That'd be March of 2023. God only knows what shaped the world's going to be in at that point. There's hardly any sense in planning out past that because everything is in such flux. There's no predicting future.

I ask the question for the following reason. There are certain people who do a lot of work behind closed doors, but nobody knows them. There's a lot of smart people that are very intellectual, great teachers, great students, loyalty, a ton of strong philosophies, who maybe would make a great leader, but we don't know them, right? And very few, it's a very, very few, 0.1% all of a sudden, boom, overnight,

the world knows who they are, and they're enamored by this person. You're one of them, it's kind of what happened to you. Overnight, Jordan pushed Jordan Peterson. Well, the people who aren't Toronto would know who Jordan Peterson is. Professor teacher clinical, I think you said you had 20 patients or 20 families that you were working on.

I think that was the number. So it's not like it's in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. Overnight, the world's addicted to Jordan Peterson, who is this guy. And then you have your moment with the lady that's pushing you feminists, and then that goes off, and wow, this man's deep, and you write a book,

sells millions on top of millions of copies, so then money's being generated, money's coming in, then everybody else comes and saying, hey, speaking this, speaking that, and that adds up, that starts getting a lot of money. And then you had your moment, where I remember, when I interviewed you on stage, that event was a very

special event because it was you and then I had also George Bush. I interviewed that event as well as the late Kobe Bryant, if you remember that event. That was one event, 6,000 people and you got emotional on stage when we talked about your wife and your daughter. And I walked off the stage and I said, I think he's dealing with something. I don't know what it is, talking to my wife. I said, I think this guy's dealing with something and that was your last live event that you did and you kind of went hiatus and you know the whole

thing that you were dealing with with the medication and all that stuff but then I kind of sit and I think about you know a Jordan Peterson's okay so it makes a comeback. When you go to a dark place and you come back, I would assume you may sit there and say, you know, stuff that I thought I valued, it's not really that valuable. I valued this though, and maybe used to value that 82% and now it's 90%. You know, and stuff that used to value at 48%

they give energy to because other people care, you're down to 22%. I really don't give a shit about this. I don't know why I'm even putting so much time into it, right? And then you come out. And when you come out, you're kind of like looking around saying, God, why did I go through this? What was this all about?

So it's kind of strange. So then I see someone like you, yes, that I posted something saying, look, this whole thing was Spotify and Rogan, I'm sure we'll get until we'll talk about it because that'd be curious in what you have to say about that I really want to know your thoughts. I said, you know, in a very strange way,

I would love Spotify to drop, Rogan. And we're talking, I said, you know, in a very strange way, I would love Spotify to drop Rogan. And we're talking, I said, why would you want Spotify to drop Rogan? I said, because the first phone call Rogan would get us from Elon Musk. And Elon Musk would say, hey, don't worry about it. Let's go compete. I'm going to start something. You be the face. Let's get a bunch of podcasters come with us. And let's go do something. So I put this video out there and I got commentary people that are posting stuff. One guy said, that's just not Rogan. Rogan's not trying to be a hero. He's not trying to be a legend.

He's not trying to be that. I said, well, if you read the journey of a hero as he fights it until eventually, it's kind of like, listen, man, I know you don't want to do this, but it's kind of like, you could really address a lot of things. And you're the right guy for, I don't wanna do it. We see this in movies all the time. It's a constant fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. I asked a question with you in Canada because you know, who gets more eyeballs in Canada

than you, I don't know. And is Canada in a pretty strange place right now with the way through those handled things where he used to talk about freedom And we can never make people do anything to their bodies that they don't want to do an all of them. So okay That just kind of makes sense. Boom. No, if we have to choose between delivering food and delivering this We're gonna choose this because you're like this guy sounds like a dictator, okay? Is there any aspiration we're in a moment like this?

With all of these weird things taking place worldwide Where maybe you've set down behind closed doors with your family, with somebody and have said, you know, that, Jordan, why don't you go in there and see if you can be the leader of a great country like Canada and do something about it? Has that conversation ever taken place at this phase of your life? Yes. And? Well, I've thought about a political career at different points throughout my whole life, starting literally, starting when I was 14.

In fact, that's what I thought I would do when I was 14. I worked for a political party in Canada, it was a socialist party, as it turns out. And I had that option open to me when I was extremely, when I was very young, but I figured out when I was about 16 that I didn't really know anything. And so I had ideas and I was capable of functioning in the realm of ideas and putting them forth even then, I would say in a somewhat compelling manner, but I figured out partly because I had worked

with a lot of small business people and Also on the Board of Governors of this little college I went to these are all people who built businesses from the bottom up They were all immigrants because everybody in northern Alberta was an immigrant and they didn't share my left-wing Presuppositions, but they were very admirable people and part of what made them admirable to me Wasn't their facility with ideological but they were very admirable people. And part of what made them admirable to me wasn't their facility with ideological conceptions. So it wasn't an intellectual attraction.

It was a practical attraction. Kind of worked in restaurants in this little town I grew up in Fairview. And I liked working with the guys that built the restaurant. And I talked to them one day about the Socialist Party in Canada, and Albert at that time had a pretty good small business platform Probably better than the conservatives had in terms of what it would do for small businesses And I asked them one day

Well, I argue in favor of this small business platform because they wouldn't vote for the NDP the Socialist Party to save their lives They said well, we don't want to be small business people We want to be big business people. And so I learned then that people... What a guy to make. Well, the guy worked with, his name was Scotty Kyle and Scotty was a rough guy. He was about 35. I was about 15 at that time and Scotty had been an alcoholic and he had like all his teeth

knocked out in fights and like, he was a rough guy, but he has super funny and he was really smart. And he said to me one day, people don't vote the reality. They vote their dreams. And I thought, hey, man, that's a good phrase. That stuck in my mind for the rest of my life. And so in any case, when I went to college, I went to take political science and literature, and I wanted to go into law school.

I wrote the LSAT, and I was set to go to law school. I wanted to take corporate law. And the reason that I wanted to do that was to understand my enemy. That was the idea. And who was your enemy in that one? Well, I was still a white social party. Yeah, yeah, the big corporations, essentially, big corporations, you know. But I realized about a year into my college education for a variety of reasons that, partly

reading George Orwell, but that was not all of it. I also didn't like, I went to a lot of the NDP party and it's a new Democratic party. It's not the NDP party. New Democratic party, conventions, provincially and nationally. I had access to the leadership for a variety of reasons. A lot of the leaders were reasonably admirable people or maybe even completely admirable people who had worked with labor unions.

And they were really, they were advocates for the working class in a real sense. But that party level activists, I never liked them from the beginning. I thought, I don't trust you guys. You just seem to be driven by resentment, not genuine care for the working class. So that didn't sit well with me.

Any case, I started to get interested in psychological motivations for political behavior, especially as I went through my political science degree, because there was an increasing emphasis as we moved away from the classics, which is what I studied in the first couple of years, to more modern political thinking, let's say. It was all quasi-Marxist in that the political scientists believed intrinsically that people were only motivated by economic concerns. And I just never believed that. I thought that's which economic concerns and why?

Well, those questions weren't asked by political scientists. They took economic determinism as a starting point, and that never sat well with me. I thought there was a mystery there because it wasn't obvious to me what motivated people. And we're not ruled by our bellies as far as I'm concerned. So the idea of pure economic determinism was a non-starter. And that's really when I started to get interested in psychology.

And I've made a choice all the way through my life. The choice has always been, say, political, sociological, versus psychological, or perhaps spiritual. And I've always chosen the psychological work at the level of the individual. And I don't think I'm going to stop doing that. I mean, I have had discussion, serious discussions with people about a political career.

And first of all, in my current situation, it is obvious to me at all that that wouldn't be less effective than what I'm already doing. You know, so. That wouldn't be less effective. Yeah, yeah, it would be less effective for me to. What do you mean by that? Well, I mean, I know what you mean by that, but what do you mean by that? You mean to tell me you're having the same amount of impact as you would as the PM?

No, I think more. You get more impact. You're having more impact? Look, those are hard jobs. And you get boxed in very quickly. And they're also brutal jobs. And it isn't obvious to me that I have the stomach for it. I don't really like fights. In fact, I don't like them at all. Part of the reason that I said what I said back in 2016 when I first stood up and voiced opposition

to what the universities were doing, and also what my government was doing, was because I could see where that was going. I could see that it was gonna generate conflict of all sorts. I knew, for example, that all this pronoun foolishness was going to confuse thousands, particularly, of young women, because there's a whole, there's a very large clinical history of that sort of thing happening for 350 years.

So that's detailed in a book called The History of the Unconscious, which is a great book by a man named Henry Ellen Berger, who wrote the best book on the history of psychoanalytic thinking. And so I knew that in any case, part of the reason I spoke up, and this was a hallmark of my clinical practice, and also of the manner in which my family was organized, is like, we're going to have that fight right now. And we're going to make peace because I don't want to have this fight every day for the rest of my life. And so it's going to be a pain to fight through it because it's always a pain to fight through a conflict. But if you can fight through it, you can make peace and then you don't have the conflict. And I really don't like conflict. So I don't like it deferred because I know what happens if conflict is deferred. You get weaker because you backed off

and the conflict gets more intense because it's tentacles grow in a sense. It's like not paying a utility bill. It's like for the first month, it's not that big a problem. But I don't know. I'm trying to think to say that you think you're making a bigger impact right now than being a PM.

I don't have a hard time with that. Let me unpack my question and challenge me on this. Sure. So, okay, so let's just say, who is Jimmy Fallon? He is, you know, hey, I'd like to be like a Johnny Carson hypothetically, like that's the Fallon Carson, right? Who is, I don't know, Tucker Carlson, maybe he's trying to be a orrily or maybe,

whoever it is that the lineage that you're going through, right? Okay, who's this latest person trying to have a show? She's trying to be the next Oprah Winfrey, right? Who would you say what Jordan Peterson is doing in history? Who would you have been in the 16th or whatever, you know, the century would go to? Who is Jordan Peterson? Like if you would have give a a hundred years from now, what are people going to say who Jordan Peterson was? They're not going to say, oh, he was a professor. Oh, he was a clinical psychologist. Oh, he was an author. I don't think they're going to

say that. What do you think people going to correlate you to a hundred years from that? I really have no idea. So, let's just say is it like a philosopher play do you say you're more of a philosopher? Would you say you're more like an Aristotle? Do you see yourself more as that? Do you see yourself as, look, I'm just somebody that's sharing my thoughts and my life experiences and I think I'm a clinical psychologist. Okay, so that's kind of how you see yourself. Yeah, yeah. There's a great lineage of great clinical psychologists. I'm not saying that I'm in that lineage, but I would say that people who are the most similar to me are people like while Carl Rogers might be an example.

Okay. I mean, he didn't have the same social media platform, but of course no one did, but that's how I see myself intellectually, really, really as a psychologist, as a clinical psychologist. And I think that the work I'm doing on my lecture to her is a hybrid of being a professor and being a clinical psychologist. But is it fair to say that's who you were, but you've evolved into something way bigger than just being a clinical psychologist? I think that's what Pats, yeah, I know what I'm getting at. I mean, he's comparing you to an Aristotle of some capacity. Yeah, well, I don't know because my focus is still on the individual, even when I'm lecturing

in front of large audiences. And I don't exactly lecture. I explore ideas in front of audiences, which is what Rogan does. And I do that even when it's a monologue, you know, and you think, well, how can you be exploring ideas with the audience when it's a monologue, you know, and you think, well, how can you be exploring ideas with the audience when it's a monologue?

And the answer is, well, you're attending to the audience, you're watching them to see if they understand and if they're nodding and what they're responding to, like there's a dynamism about it, but it's all focused on the individual. And there's been some unbelievably influential clinical psychologists or psychiatrists,

I mean, Freud was unbelievably influential and so was Carl Jung and there's a half-dozen up there. So I see that I'm in that tradition. Now, the fact that this information now can be disseminated in audio, form, and video form makes the playing field radically different. And so I was also a very early adopter of those technologies. So when I blew up, let's say it happened overnight, it's not not exactly like because most of these things don't happen exactly.

That takes 20 years to old. Well, yeah, yeah. Well, the first doubleings are invisible, right? Yeah, but that live outside of the university. Yeah, well, that was, that's, that's, listen, everybody's a who is the sky. Yeah. He makes sense. So that was a concept of, yeah.

Well, sure, there was a tipping point there. That was when there was a free speech rally outside my office at the University of Toronto. It wasn't organized by me, but I was invited to speak as was anyone who wanted to speak by the way at that event. And then a bunch of radical types tried to shut it down with white noise. And they were very annoying. And some of them were clearly psychopathic. Some of the people, I watched them because I have pretty good eye for that and some of the men that came out, they were bad, bad actors. In any case, I got Shanghai on the way back into my office by these, these

hypothetically trans activists, mostly young people, what do you mean Shanghai? Well, they just surrounded me. Got it. That's all I mean. Ganged up on. Well, kind of, they were disrespectful, which I wasn't very thrilled about, because I think that it's not a good... Students, if students are being disrespectful

to professors, something's wrong. That's not what happens at a university. I had no tolerance for that in my classes. If you were out of line, you are more than welcome to leave now. And that didn't mean you couldn't challenge me intellectually. That was absolutely fine. If you had a smart question, you were paying attention. I didn't care what your opinion was, but maybe when you're a junior high teacher or

an elementary school teacher, you have to put up with misbehavior. As a professor, I put up with this zero misbehavior. No misbehavior. We're adults. We're not doing that at all. Did you set the tone for that day one in the first class? Absolutely. This is how I roll.

Yeah, I never had trouble with students in my classes. Well, a handful of students would pretty much always leave the first lecture I gave, particularly my personality class because a lot of them didn't who I was. In my smaller classes, people already knew who I was, so that never happened, but in my personality class, there'd always be six or seven people in the first lecture who'd make a show of leaving.

And it was because of the tone I set, which was, don't mock about in this class at all. You're here to listen or not. You can leave if you don't want to listen, but this is a serious endeavor. In any case, these students surrounded me, and they filmed it, and then they put it online. And the object was to discredit me, but that didn't work.

And, but the reason it didn't work in part, and this is why this wasn't only overnight, was I already had 100 hours of lectures on YouTube, and I basically recorded everything I ever said to students in any professional capacity. And what I said in my classes was exactly the same as what I said when I wasn't in my classes. So there's no show there. And so people came to look to see what was going on.

They came to my YouTube channel. And it had like 35,000, 50,000 subscribers at that point, which wasn't none, especially that early on in YouTube development. And they found out that what I was saying was not only completely unlike what I was accused of saying, but it was exactly the opposite, partly because I was accused of being this radical right-wing figure. And I'd lectured about the evils of national socialism at Harvard and at the University of Toronto for like 20 years.

So the idea that I was somehow radically right-wing was not only a lie, there's lies where you bend the truth, right? That's one kind of lie. I think what those lectures did is a way for people to not be able to taint your name by saying, I actually like what this guy has to say. 35,000 subscribers, not a lot of subscribers. No, but this is where I'm going with this.

So you're saying you see yourself as a clinical psychologist, right? Okay, great. You know, sometimes the challenge I have is to follow. Like, I sit down and say, why is he still in Canada? Maybe there's bigger aspirations to stay in Canada because he loves his country. Okay, great. You know, sometimes the challenge I have is to follow. Like, you know, I sit down and say, why is he still in Canada? Maybe there's bigger aspirations to stay in Canada

because he loves his country. And he'd like to see Canada become the country that he chose to live when he was a kid growing up and he's got memories, mom, dad, family, all this stuff. So maybe to him, because some people don't want to leave a country because they want to make a political contribution to that country. Some people are like, listen, what country is going to give me

the best tax benefits and freedom I'm gonna go there. I'm totally calling I'm gonna go to Singapore, I'll do my Bitcoin, I'll go to Puerto Rico, pay 4% in taxes, this is what I'm gonna be doing, right? You seem like a very deep guy. Here's where I go with this. In my life, I've experienced a lot of weird things. Iran, war, divorce, parents, politics, military,

you know, all this weird things that are business, you see coming up and hey we're so supportive of you, we want to see you win Patrick and then I start kind of getting big and all of a sudden we're getting big, it's like, well we don't like you anymore, what happened? You like me when I was small, you don't like me when I'm big? I'm the same person, what's the problem here, right? Here's what I've noticed, those who are driven by force are more ambitious, unimposing, and having control than those who are driven by choice. Let me unpack this. Meaning, sometimes people that are driven by force are more inspired to get involved in

politics and create laws than those who are driven by choice. Choices kind of like, listen, let me leave me alone. Let me go live my life, right? But I think sometimes it's kind of like, you know, you made this one example, you know, who made this example. Somebody was on yesterday saying, look, you know, the way I look at foreign relations, my critlin is if I go to a bar and if a fight's breaking

into a bar and I go in there, no matter what, if I go in there and fight, I'm gonna piss off one side whether I fight defend the girl or the guy someone's gonna be upset with me because I chose to fight right says America's kind of like that you're getting into a lot of these fights and you're getting involved in these there's a fight going on your country right now yours and people are still listening to this guy he's still got influence and you got you know you know these truckers that are coming out there are saying listen you can you can't make us do this. It's a 5,500 mile America. This you want us to get vaccinated. You want us to, we don't want to do it.

We want to spread them. Don't you think, you know, this may be a good time for you to throw your name in the, you know, and say, hey, you know what, I'm going to go and here's why? Because I think a hundred years from when we sit here and talk about who was the main philosopher when Lincoln was president, only people in that world are going to know who that person is but everyone's going to know who Lincoln is and what Lincoln did and the impact he made, right? Do I think his life was a you know a peaceful life if you've read about Lincoln and his marriage and that one friend he would travel with and when you go to to to Smithsonian, then they show the evolution of how much he aged. It's a pretty, it's a lot of burden on what this guy went through, right?

But he was chosen, and he was a right guy for it. Do you don't at all feel like, you know? No, it's again, I think, I can detail out some of the reasons, I think I'm more effective doing what I'm doing. Well, I'm working with a lot of political people in the United States, both on the Republic and then the Democrat side, all the time. And I couldn't do that if I was involved formally and technically in politics and Canada. I'm working with a bunch of people in the UK as well. And so, and I'm working with people in Canada, it's

just more effective for me to do what I'm doing. I don't know about that. I don't know. Well, I can give you an example with the truckers, you know, so a couple of examples. Sure. So we can have, the former premier of Newfoundland, so equivalent of the governor of a state. He was the premier in the 1980s. And he was one of the drafters of the Canadian Charter of Rights. So we actually wrote it with a bunch of other people, but he was one of them. And he's a mainstream, solidly admired politician across the spectrum, regarded as a decent guy. And he mounted a constitutional challenge to the vaccine mandates, announced it a week ago, stating that, see, they put an emergency provision

in the charter, saying that under certain emergency conditions, true emergencies, that charter rights could be suspended in the case of a national emergency, but he's not convinced, in the least, that the COVID epidemic, even at its height, constituted such an emergency. He said that was not the intent of the drafters and certainly doesn't constitute that emergency now. And so he talked me through this, and I thought, well, isn't this interesting? We have a person who actually drafted the charge of rights saying that the and a former premier of a major province saying that the government is acting in an essentially unconstitutional manner.

I don't think that's ever happened in the history of a Western democracy. And I said, well, okay, that's something. He's 82 now, sharp as a tack. Why do you want to announce this on my podcast? Because that's preposterous. And he said, well, our team has talked it over and we don't think there's one new source in Canada that will handle this credibly. I thought that's not good. So we released that. We could have go, which was timed very nicely as it turned out with the trucker's protest, because people are saying, well, are the truckers breaking the law? And the question is, well, just exactly who's breaking the law here? And that's by no means obvious. And so that was extremely helpful. And then

about a few days after that I released another video calling on the conservative types in Canada to seize the moment given this popular uprising and the fact that countries all over the world are dropping that COVID mandates to seize the moment and drop the mandates at a provincial level. It's enough is enough. And somebody's got to be the first actor. And so that got million and a half views in no time flat. And so I'm able to play a useful role

as a, well, on the media front, weirdly enough, but also as someone who's standing apart from the details of the political fray. I mean, I get that, but you know, it's like saying if Reagan would have stayed being the B-Actor or a GE going, getting paid a million dollars a year to go around the world and talking about its political philosophies and how great GE is, or President of SAG, would he have been able to tell Gorbachev to take that wall down? I don't think so. Would he have influenced the country like Russia to become a little bit more free where people are staying? They're not leaving. They're a little bit more

comfortable staying there because now there's a capitalistic opportunity. It's no longer communism, car marks and angle and those guys don't have the influence that they had before because Stalin and Lenin and what travesty they did to people. does that credit go to Gorbachev? Does it go to, it goes to Reagan, right? So if you think about Churchill and Chamberlain, it was to Solzhenitsyn, too. I totally get that. And he was a writer, obviously a writer. And so it's, look, I mean, it's not like, there isn't, it's not like the political domain doesn't have its purpose and its function. But there's a lot I would have to stop doing if I did that. And it isn't obvious to me that that's the right thing for me to do.

Partly again, because I started doing what I'm doing back in, say, probably 1985, because I realized that one of the pathways to totalitarian catastrophe was deceit at the individual level. This is something that Soljinitson made very much of Orwell as well, Huxley as well. These great thinkers concluded in aftermath of these totalitarian catastrophes that there was an integral link between pathology at the individual level, which was fundamentally the willingness to use to seat in an instrumental manner. I'll lie to you to get what I want and authoritarian catastrophe,

and that it was a direct causal link and actually by that argument, I think that's literally true. And so partly what I'm doing, I hope, is helping people walk through thinking about why telling the truth is a good idea. Not only for them, not as a top-down, shake your finger, moral injunction. Don't lie, you shouldn't lie. But in a detailed manner, to explain the relationship between the instrumental use of

deceit and the collapse of civilizations, and that connection is way closer than people think. So one person is influenced as a thousand people for sure in their lifetime. And sometimes a lot more than that. And a thousand, you know, the next rung out from that, a thousand times a thousand is a million. And the next rung out from that is a billion. And so you're always at the center of a concentric circle that two rungs out contains a billion people.

Well, it turns out that what you do matters. And basically what I'm doing, I hope, is touring and talking to people face to face in these lectures, for example, and making the case that it's a terrifying case. Everyone says, well, we want meaning in our life. It's a... Do you now? Do you now? Because you might ask yourself, what's the more threatening possibility that nothing you do matters, which means you can pretty much do whatever you want. That's the upside of that nihilistic claim, no responsibility, right? And why not pursue narrow focused hedonism since nothing matters. Anyways, so that's the shadow of nihilism or everything you do matters. And it's a lot more terrifying to contemplate that is that you

will be held accountable for everything you do. And I believe that firmly, partly as a consequence of my clinical experience, I never saw any one of my clinical clients ever get away with anything even once. And you think, well, people get away with things all the time. It's like, no, they don't. They might gain a narrow advantage in one dimension in the short term. But you know, let's say that you dimension in the short term. But, you know, let's say that you're used to see, your business practices. First of all, that doesn't work very well because people will figure you out. So, as a long-term strategy, it's terrible. It just doesn't work. No one is going to play with you if you're a cheat. But let's say that someone asked me the other day, well, what about these dictators that, you know, ruled their whole life and they were at the top of the hierarchy, let's say, and they had all the power.

Stalin's a perfectly good example. It's like, didn't he win? Well, everyone's still and ever talked to lied to him because they were absolutely bloody terrified of him. His country was a nightmare. It was a hell or as close as we've been able to produce with the possible exception of the Nazis and the Maoists, but it was up there in terms of hell. And did he rule? Yes, but he ruled hell. And if you think that's a victory, well, go ahead and try it and see how much of a victory it is. Milton Satan said, I'd rather

rule in hell than serve in heaven. It's fair enough. Go ahead. Use deceit, use instrumentality, rule in hell. You'll be the rooter. See how much good it does you. See where that takes you. It takes you somewhere terrible. And so I'm much more interested in talking those things through with people.

And I do do political work, but it's not the right thing for me. I got the last question for you on this, and we can move on to the next topic. So Churchill, his writing, what he did, kind of started like you at a very young age. He's not, he's a guy that if you follow his writing, the guy's done a lot of stuff, right? And eventually, last minute, hey, we can't figure this guy out from Germany. We need your help. Chamberlain on the step the way, hey the way he goes and recruits the guy that he hates the most. And we know how historians are. We speak in English today big part of it

because of Churchill. But this is the last question. You know how you said, at this phase of my life, this is what I'm doing. Do you think the right thing to do is what's always what we want to do? Or sometimes we have to do things that may be the world or family or somebody else's reliant on us to make a decision that's more impactful

to the world than what would be more fruitful to us. I think that happens a lot. I have a I don't know fantasy, I suppose, and I don't know how well thought through it is. But one of the things I've been thinking about doing is I'm writing another book at the moment, which I plan to publish in the next year and a half for something like that. It's called We Who Wrestle With God. And perhaps there'll be a tour associated with that.

And I want to do a public lecture series on Exodus. But I've been pursuing more artistic endeavors recently, again, in detail. I did some of that in when I first went to graduate school. I made a variety of paintings and so forth that I really liked doing that. And I really liked doing this. I've been working on a musical project

with a friend of mine and with my family, which is really, it's really fun. I really like it a lot. And I wrote friend of mine and with my family, which is really, it's really fun. I really like it a lot. And I wrote a screenplay that's a musical, which I really enjoyed doing. I have seemed to have somewhat of a gift for writing verse, weirdly enough, especially amusing verse. I think it's amusing and some other people have thought so. And it's really playful and fun. And I think I could do that. I could do a lot of that, and it would be, in many ways, less demanding than what I'm doing now. And I've talked to my family about that, but they seem to think that, you know, when

my wife and I planned this tour, I was unbelievably ill still, and it just seemed like a pipe dream that this was ever going to occur. But if we were going to try it, we had to do it months in advance. So, but, you know, I outlined the tour for her with my agents and she said, I asked her, when we got off the phone, I said, do you want to do this? And she said, yes. And I was quite surprised at that. Actually, I mean, Tammy had been unbelievably ill for months and months and months.

Like a death doorstep every day for like eight months. It was awful. And yet she was on board. And you know, it's got this great adventurous element to it. And it seems to your point that the time is right for it, whatever it is. And so away we go and that's what we're doing and it would be possible, in principle, for me to be in my cabin up north and record music and engage in artistic activities and be with her and my family in a more private way. Now I don't know if I'm suited for that, So that's why I'm saying, well, maybe it's a pipe dream because I really like being as busy as I can possibly

be all the time. And I kind of train myself for that. I started training myself for that really when I went to graduate school because I wanted to find out how much I could do. And I like running at top speed all the time. And so maybe I wouldn't be suited for that, you know, and although the days we've spent, the weeks we spent engaged in it, I have

an art book coming out, a strange art project is going to cost all sorts of trouble. Coming out probably in September or October, and a bunch of music that'll accompany that, which is also going to cause a lot of trouble, I believe. I really enjoyed doing it. It's really engrossing and fun and playful. And I liked working on this screenplay. We've got a bunch of music being recorded for it. And that's called the Water of Life. The screenplay, it's a great old fairy tale. So, but to your point, sorry, you have a responsibility beyond the narrow confines, let's say,

of a particular interest, even if it's an artistic interest, a valid interest. And you play the role that is set in front of you that constitutes the best path forward. And there's obviously a market for what I'm discussing, a market, let's say an interested audience. And so, and I say an interested audience. And so, and I love doing that too.

That's the other thing. I love doing it. Pat, can I ask you a question? Yeah. Because I think the line of questioning that you're asking Dr. Peterson is overall, you're talking about being the reluctant hero. That was the sort of the initial analogy that you gave with Joe Rogan. Where, like, the guy said,

that's not what Joe is. Joe is not trying to be a hero. And you're like sometimes, you know, it's not who you want to be. It's who people need you to be. I mean, it's like the Joe isn't trying to be here. He's just being a hero. No, okay, screw it.

Yeah. But, you know, it's almost like Neo from the Matrix. It's like, we need you. You're the chosen one. It's like, what are you talking about? So chosen one. It's like, oh, what are you talking about? So Pat, essentially what he's asking you is like, Lincoln, Churchill, Trump even, these are people, whether they were reluctant heroes or not,

these are people that have changed the world. And you're more saying, like, look, Sigmund Freud, Gandhi, more the philosophical line. But ultimately, what I think Pat is getting at is like, who changes the world more? Dignitaries, presidents, prime ministers, or thinkers, and you say it's thinkers. So that's all for shirts. Okay, so that is ultimately, and that's even why someone is right now. Both Churchill and Lincoln are good examples. I mean, they're a melding of the two. That's a good, an elite.

That's a good, an elite. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's ultimately what you're lying about. Yeah, I know all I'm saying is, listen, all I'm saying is the following. I'm sitting there looking at a lot of guys that should throw their name into and go out there and compete and they're not.

Yeah, that's a problem. Okay, so we could have done with that. Well, look, a lot of the people I know who would make, excuse me, who would make extraordinarily competent political leaders. So these are people who've built exceptionally complicated enterprises from the bottom up in an extremely creative and diligent way

and who mastered that. They won't throw their hat in the political ring, partly because they have other things they're doing that are, they regard as more significant, and often they are. This is a big problem because what it means is that perhaps is that the pool of qualified political candidates is much narrower than it might otherwise be. That's something you're obviously wrestling with ethically. When you call the bond to throw your hat in the ring in

In some sense despite your own personal interests. I don't have any Contempt for the political arena, you know, I think it's a big mistake for people people go from naive to cynical And then they think cynicism is wisdom and it is compared to naivety But it's not compared to what comes after cynicism, which is something like courageous trust. And that's the right attitude towards the political sphere. And often people don't want to take the risk of courageous trust, and so they justify that avoidance with their cynicism. I'm not like that. I know the political realm is valuable and necessary. And I don't have contempt for it it and I don't think anyone should

It's a mistake because it's your system man and your sovereign you're in it sovereign individuals your system if it's corrupt That's on you again I can have definite sense and people say well there isn't anything I can do is one person It's like Joe Rogan's one person. And he didn't, his success is really remarkable. First of all, you can't just push it aside as chance because Rogan was a good fighter and that's hard. And then he was a good comedian and that's really hard, maybe no harder than being a fighter, but hard.

And then he had a pretty good TV career and that's hard too. I forgot he was on news radio, which was like that. Yeah, I mean, it was good. Rogan's established his, yes exactly. He established his credibility in three different domains. And then it's also extremely difficult to be a good interviewer.

You actually have to listen. And he listens. And so, and so Rogan's, Rogan's a very good example of someone who, as an individual, stayed closely allied with the truth and has had, well, his, we have no idea what his impact is going to be because Rogan has 11 million listeners per episode now. I see absolutely no reason why he won't have 20 million listeners per episode any year, especially if people keep trying to take them out.

And it's so funny, especially watching CNN go after them. You know, they're all treating the mainstream media. They keep treating Joe like he's the fringe. I think, are you people, well, I know these legacy news media sources are dying. All their really competent people have already gone off to do other things because they could. They're living in like 1975, which is a very weird place to live at the moment. And they look at Rogan and they think, what does he say? And that guy who was criticized the other day said, we have all these departments devoted to

news analysis. I believe that. I believe that. Yeah, Rogan is just winging it. It's like you try winging it, buddy, in front of 11 million people and see how successful you would think that's easy dancing on a tight rope where any word you say that's false is going to result in, well, complete and utter pillering of you from multiple news media sources all over the world every day, which is what's happened to Joe nonstop in the last month, despite the

fact that he hasn't said anything stupid. So, wing it. You think that's so easy. It's not so easy. And look what he's done. It's like, it's amazing. And all he's done, all... What do you think is going it happened with him spotify

all spotify won't remove rogan you don't think so what if they are not if they're mind that they dropped from sixty billion auto evaluation to thirty six that's twenty four billion you think the board is sitting there their die hard joe rogan fans or do you think their profit margin top line revenue fans well Oh, I hope that I would rather that they were the latter, the profit margin types, because

that's what a corporation should do, and I trust them more if they were doing that with you. But I also think that if they have any sense, and I know how this is going to turn out, it's turned out in my life like 50 times this way. The heat goes on, the pressure's on, you're in the desert, it's unpleasant, you wait it out, you wait it out, you wait it out, you haven't done anything wrong, you wait it out, you don't apologize, you don't back down, you wait and things viciously turn into your favor. Now, waiting it out while you're roasting, that's not pleasant. And if the Spotify types have any sense, they think, yeah, well, that's a drop,

but it's part of the death throws of the legacy media, and once all the dust settles, CNN will have half the viewers they have now, and Joe Rogan will have twice the viewers, and we'll be doing just fine. And Rogan, as long as he keeps doing what he's doing, he came out on Instagram, this is so funny, he came out on Instagram to talk about all this a few days ago and I thought you nailed it Joe

He come out and he said It's a paraphrase and I'm gonna do it a bit comedically He basically said well everyone knows I'm kind of a lung cat And I have lots to learn and I probably haven't managed this like perfectly because I do my own Scheduling and I just talked to people I'm interested in and so possibly I could have presented a more balanced view some of the time and I'll try to do better in the future. So all the legacy media said Joe Rogan apologizes, which is not really the case.

And then he talked about how much he liked Neil Young and none of this was for show and none of this was was. He's a since years of gets. Absolutely. And what all the story when he was at a New Young concert this was was. He's a since years of gets. Absolutely. And what old the story when he was at a new young concert? I mean, he's just by the fan. And I wear it in my neck. That was great, man.

And so as long as Rogan keeps doing that, and he's been doing it for five years, and he's not like he hasn't faced pressure before, it's clear to me that he's, I just can't see any scenario short of his assassination that ends up in Roggan not having 20 million viewers an episode in a year. And so as long as he's careful, like he is, I don't think rogan can be canceled. So even if Spotify dumps him, it's like who's dumping who here?

Rogan, he's on Spotify. It's not necessarily Spotify might be on Rogan. It's not so clear. And so what's going to happen? They kick them off. Well, he'll just have another platform like tomorrow immediately. Yeah. And he'll have all the money Spotify gave him, which was actually quite a lot of money. He'll have a way more exactly. So did you see what Pat had to say about this topic yesterday? I think Rogan is a billionaire guy. I think Elon needs to sign a 20 year, 50 million dollar, your contract with Rogan and start a company, like a social media company. Choose which route you wanna go direct competitor

to YouTube, to Google, to, it's not like Elon hasn't done it. He didn't create a company that was revolutionary. He went against cars. Cars have been around for a while. He didn't invent cars. Yeah, but what I'm saying is cars and rockets have been around. So it's not like you wouldn't invent a rocket or invent a car. You don't need to invent something.

Just go direct against you to go directing a spot. If I go and Elon and Rogan could pull it off with the help of Peter Thiel, it'll work itself out and they recruit the right people. They'll make a few phone calls and the world's going to come say, Hey, if you like to have a platform for free thinkers and where you're not going to be censored, give us a call or you know, do this and it would take off. But going back to the question with you,

you're not going to watch you when you get interviewed and I say this to myself, I'm like, okay, here's a clinical psychologist, okay, what does he do for a living? You, you are in the, you listen to every, you know, prop, you know, whatever primes you hear people tell you, right? If you really don't want to entertain an idea and you want to push it away, you'll do it in your own creative way. You're a heavyweight, heavyweight type of guy that's gone up against everybody and you know

how to handle a topic that you don't wanna talk about or give the answer to. You're a pro, you've been around the block for a while. I just think for you to think about like right now when we're talking about I think as an individual, we can make more impact on being a PM or being a president or somebody like that. Canada is in shambles right now because of true those policies. Canada's shutles right now because of Trudeau's policies. Canada's shut

down right now because of Trudeau's policies. Not just Trudeau, you know, there's lots of conservative premiums in Canada. Well, it's done exactly the same thing. I'll flip it. If Trudeau's philosophies were different, the other guys wouldn't be able to do what they're doing. If Trudeau had the influence at the top, it would have been open. Can you pull up the mark, the John Hopkins article?

I just want to get Jordan's... jordan's that article yeah so here's a cnn ms mc new york times wapo washington post completely avoid john hopkins study finding uh... covid lockdowns ineffective f.y.i. would you say john hopkins is a conservative organization like Hoover institute no or heritage no john's hopkins is one of the most reliable medical scientific research enterprises universities in the world bar none. That's very important for me because sometimes you're like, extremely reliable. So it's not like it's a CNN or a fossil, you know, this is Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, level. John Hopkins, especially in the medical domain.

So watch this, ABC, CBS, NBC also ignored the anti-lockdown study. So go up, let me read this. So here we go. There has been a full on media block out of the study online, and if ineffective, the next of lockdowns to prevent COVID deaths. According to John Hopkins University, Menon-Lalas analysis of several studies,

lockdowns during first COVID wave and spring of 2020 only reduce COVID mortality by 0.2%. That is not a lot. In US and in Europe, while the menon- men analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. The researcher wrote, in consequence, lockdowns policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument. If you can go a little

higher, I want to read the next two and I'll get Jordan thoughts. However, the Johns Hopkins study received no mention on any of the five liberal networks this week. According to a Grabian, a transcript, CNN, MSNBC, ABCCBS, NBC, all ignored anti lockdowns findings after having spent much of the pandemic shaming red states with minimal restrictions and events deemed by critics as super spreaders. It wasn't just the networks avoiding the study. The New York Times, much of the pandemic shaming red states with minimal restrictions and events deemed by critics as superspreaders it wasn't just the networks avoiding the study the new york times the washington post the sociatress roiders u.s.a. today axiots political amongst other outlets also tuned a black a blind eye to the findings according to search results jord how important is this research like

how important is is this analysis that we're reading here right now? What is this tell? I should tell you what a meta-analysis is. Please. Well, imagine there's a group of studies done on a particular topic, and you write a review, and you try to interpret the findings. That was called a narrative review.

You use your opinion, in some sense, to wade through the data and try to understand what the compilation of studies reveals. Well, there were techniques developed 25 years ago that are statistical where you can aggregate the statistical results from studies statistically. So you do a statistical analysis of all the statistical analysis. And that's a meta-analysis. And hypothetically, it's more objective.

And there's some truth to that claim. You still have to select which studies to include, but I don't believe that that was a detriment in this particular case. And so solid methodology, and it's basically something approximating a cost-benefit analysis. And that has its, that's tough too, because it's not that easy to assign costs and benefits in a quantitative manner. Having said all that, it's what's an amazing study, not only because of what it reveals, which is a 0.2 percent decline in overall mortality, but also in that the researchers felt so strongly about their findings that they came right out and said that this was

ineffective policy. And that isn't that common for researchers who generally hold off on drawing that sort of conclusions. They kind of lay out the facts. Not a black and white. They're typically not going to come out as black and white is what you're saying. Yes, yes, exactly, exactly. And so that's really something we rush to imitate a totalitarian state in panic. And the consequence of that, according to this study, was there's zero, there's nothing positive about it. Now, I've talked with some Democrats about this study because they were paying attention to it.

And their response is something like, well, it did help control hospital overrun. And time will tell whether or not that's true. I think the data suggesting that COVID vaccines decreased the seriousness of illness when people contracted COVID who were vaccinated, I think that data is credible. I could be wrong about that because things are being done in a rush and it's very difficult to draw appropriate scientific conclusions in a rush,

but I think the bulk of the information suggests that. But I also think that is not how they were marketed and that was not the initial intent to merely reduce severity of the illness. It was to reduce transmission and so forth. And then, of course, this is a cost-benefit analysis, which says, yeah, there was some gain on that front conceivably, maybe, although all-cause mortality doesn't seem to have gone down much at all, but the economic, the secondary consequences were devastating. And, well, we don't even know what the secondary consequences are yet.

You know, the collusion, here's one secondary consequence, which is revealed in what you just read, the collusion of the press and the government. Like how do you know that's not worse than the epidemic? It could easily be worse than the epidemic or the idea that now we've been coerced into having to share our medical information with people all through the bureaucratic hierarchy, all the way down to servers and restaurants. So we train people that that's okay to ask and also to offer. Is that worse than the pandemic? Well, these are arguably all of this involves violation of our fundamental rights. Where's the evidence that that's not worse? Well, we're

going to see it play out while the collusion between the press and the government. That's so intense in Canada, as already said, when the Premier of, when the premiere of Newfoundland wanted to launch his constitutional challenge, he couldn't use a mainstream news source. I mean, that's a bloody catastrophe, much as I dislike CBC, which is a lot, by the way. I think that it's an absolute catastrophe that it's come to that. And that's just one of, you know, two consequences of the lockdown. There's the supply chain problem. That's a big one. You know, my publisher, Penguin, told me week and a half ago, we're talking about putting out a two volume set

of my last two books, which I would really like to do. They're gonna do that in Great Britain. I think that people would turn to it as a gift for graduations and so on. That would be a nice set for that. They told me they can't get paper. This is Penguin Random House, right? And it's paper.

Paper isn't that complex given how complex everything is. The fact that there are paper shortages, that's a big deal. I was in a Mazda dealership in Canada, a couple of, be a couple of months ago now, that one car, one isn't very many cars. And so we have no idea what the supply line crunch is going to produce in terms of economic capacity.

And then the next issue is, well, how about all the money we've been printing? You know, we've already seen that produce a massive bubble expansion in housing prices that's being driven by other factors. How do we know that's not worse than the pandemic? You know, it could easily be. I'm not saying that it is because I don't know, but that's the issue. I don't know.

And this is partly why this mad rush to impose top-down solutions to complex problems. This is, in some sense, what makes me a conservative in so far as I am. It's part of the caution I learned as a social scientist. Social scientists are giving an example. This is a good example. I worked with this woman named Joan McCord, and she was one of America's great criminologists and a woman who was involved as a faculty member when very few women were. She participated in a study in Boston, in Somerville, which is a working class community, back in the 30s, they did the first large scale intervention to deflect children from a criminal pathway. So they're looking at deprived inner city kids,

thinking they have a higher probability than average to become criminal and to suffer all sorts of other negative consequences as well, or to inflict them. And perhaps you could intervene at an early age and stop that or slow it down at least. And so they put together very comprehensive set of interventions, parental lessons for the parents, lessons for the kids, health and nutrition interventions, a whole broad spectrum of all the things you think this was in the United States.

In some of you will misuse it. Famous study, some are a little bit of a study. One of the first large scale psychological public health interventions, I would say. And targeting a problem that was troublesome for left wing people and right wing people. Unlike the right wingers would think, well, fewer criminals, that's good and the left wingers would think, well, let's do some remediation at the root of the cause. So everyone was hoping this worked. And everyone was happy about it.

The kids thought it was good. Parents thought it was good. The researchers thought it was good. They also put kids, they took the kids out of the inner city in the summer and put them out in camp because of nature and all of that. And wouldn't that be a nice break for them and Then they did the analysis And the kids in the intervention group did worse on virtually every measure worse

Like substantially worse And so they were all shocked and seriously shocked in a major way In fact, Joan McCord was so shocked. She spent the rest of her life going around talking about what had happened. Turns out that it's a really bad idea to group antisocial prone kids together in camps in the summer because they learn to compete with each other in terms of the manifestation of antisocial behavior and they get better out. It's like criminal camp. in terms of the manifestation of anti-social behavior, and they get better out. It's like criminal camp.

And so that single consequence of one part of the intervention was so negative that it overwhelmed the entire study and produced negative results. So McCord, she was part of a group of very, very able social scientists that I worked with when I was in Montreal, a broad group, and it was an international group. And they beat the drum all the time, never, never, never, never,

do a large scale intervention without building in an evaluation. 25% of your intervention budget should be evaluation because you do not know that your stupid intervention, which you think will do what it, you think it will do. That's just a guess. It's a guess. And it could go wildly wrong in 10 ways you don't predict. And if you've ever run studies in lab trying to predict

how people are going to behave, you figured this out real soon because they don't behave the way, what was the old idea? Put a lab rat in a cage under controlled conditions and the rat will do exactly what it damn well chooses to do. And that's true for rats. It's even more true for people. And so these large-scale interventions, which the pandemic locked on, was certainly one of those, is like, and this is the conservative objection. The iron law of unintended consequences. Do something large-scale to systems. You don't understand at all. Not a bit.

You know, we have just in time supply now, right? And you think about how efficient an economy has to be to rely on just in time supply. So it used to be that if you ran an industry and maybe you're making your car manufacturer, you have a warehouse full of parts. But the parts are just sitting there, and so that's like money invested, that's not accruing any interest, it's a cost, and you have to store it, that's cost. And so that's an expense. And so maybe you want to just have your parts supplier, supply the parts exactly when you need them. And then maybe the parts supplier has to get the metal just exactly when they need it, and so on all the way down to the miners. And maybe that's in China. Then you think there's 30 steps there.

And every bloody thing has to work absolutely perfectly on time for that to work at all. And then you throw a lock down into that. It's like, well, you've never run a business. You have no idea how complicated things are. You think electricity comes out of plugins in the wall. That's not a complicated problem. You just put the plugin and there's the electricity.

And you mock things up in 50 different directions and that's what we've done. And God only knows what we've done. And then this issue that the, you know, the mainstream press won't cover this. You think the reason they're not as just purely embarrassed the fact that this is going to lose even more credibility with the audience that what we've been saying this entire time we've been wrong.

We haven't done real true investigative journalism. No, I don't think that's it. I think no, I don't think that's it. If that was the reason I could understand that reason, I think it's part of this implicit and explicit collusion. It's like this isn't the story and so we're not going to report it. And I think that economically, even that's a foolish decision,

because I've been reading Newsweek recently. Newsweek has some journalists. They actually have some real information again, which is quite interesting. It's still a liftold, it's still a liberal magazine. Yeah, but my experience has been in the last couple of months. I thought, oh my god, there's some actual news in Newsweek. And so that was really cool.

But I see all this not only as collusion, which is absolutely appalling. So that's the death of journalism, because journalists are colluding with politicians. It's like, well, they're not journalists anymore. And they're also not politicians. Because if they were politicians and journalists, they wouldn't be colluding. Whatever they are, as a consequence of this collusion, is not politicians and journalists. It's some completely new thing. Now, I'm less worried about it than I might be,

because I also see it as part of the inevitable death spiral of the legacy media. They're dead, and why? Well, they don't have a monopoly over the dissemination of information at all. YouTube, for all of its flaws, which are manifold, is an unbelievably powerful and accessible technology where the cost of entry is zero.

It's like no TV station can compete without, period. They're done. And then these print media sources, especially when they're great people, Barry Weiss might be example, leave because they can't say what they want to. They don't have to lose much of their talent before all they've got left is hacks. And then everyone can publish to an international audience instantly online. So part of what we're seeing in the mainstream media is a technologically fuel death spiral.

And I know how large corporations die. So there's this principle, pre-do principle, which is that the square root of the number of people in a given creative enterprise do half the work. And so if you're a news organization with a thousand people, 30 of them do half the work. And you think, no, and you can think that all you want, but you're just wrong because this is one of the most well-established findings in social science, period. So you got 1,000 people, and 970 of them are putting in time

and 30 of them are doing half the work. And then something shifts. Those people can't say what they want to say, let's say. The 30. The 30. What do they do? Well, they leave. Why?

Because they can. Right? These are people. These are competent people. They're really smart. They? These are people. These are competent people. They're really smart. They're on the edge. They're tough. They have immense networks of connections.

As soon as the ship rocks, they think, child, you think I need you. It's like you got your priorities wrong. You need me. They go off like Barry Weisted and start their own thing. And so then you're left with the 970 that was only doing half the work. And then the next 30 competent people leave. And soon all you've got is people who run the legacy media. And they just, and they say things like, well, Joe Rogan, people

shouldn't listen to him because he just wings it. It's like, how clueless can you possibly be? Or, or, or you have people like at CNN who treat Rogan like he's an outsider, despite the fact that he's pulling in numbers that are at least five, five to eight times their average viewership. Joe is fringe. It's like, really? We'll see who's fringe here. And so, and part of this is purely technological.

It's like, there's no way these legacy Apparatuses can compete How can they printing is printing with universal distribution is free video with universal distribution is free How can a network possibly compete it can't so? Spiral death and as they die they lose their editors. They lose their fat fact checkers They lose their good journalists. they lose everybody with courage, and then they put out Pablo and they're tempted by clickbait because that's what you have to do while you're dying.

It's like, Christ, we have to attract attention somehow. So you say, well, Joe Rogan apologized and everybody clicks on it and they read it and they think, that's a lie. And so you've lost another 5% of your viewers. CNN is probably sitting in their board meetings saying, God, please, we need Trump to be president again, because when he was president, we were making money.

We need somebody like that to be president. They're begging this guy to come back. Can you imagine if CNN ends up like putting him on left and right to, and then, you know, to be right in him, but at the same time, they're getting more eyeballs. But going back to it, okay. So, Jordan, let's just say you are the PM of Canada. Let's just play this, let's just say game, okay.

And you watch the decisions Justin made, he's your PM, you're living that country, how he handled truckers, how he handled vaccine, how he handled lockdowns, how he handled everything. How would you have handled some of those things if you were the PM of Canada? How would you have handled some of those things if you were to PM of Canada? Well, I'd have to say that I don't know because those decisions are extremely complicated. You know, and it's very hard to speculate. I do have something to say about that though,

that I think is relevant. When I watch Mr. Trudeau through the lenses that I've developed over the years, I see someone who never, ever says a true word. And so I've met lots of people like that. They're all persona and everything they do is crafted in a sense to obtain what they think is appropriate in the situation, whatever that might be. It's all instrumentality.

And so when Mr. Tudot comes out and addresses his audiences, it's all a game. It's all an act, all of it. And so what I would hope I would have done differently if I was in that position is I would have said what I would hope I would have done differently if I was in that position is I would have said what I thought. And hope that that I always think that's the way that carries the day. It doesn't mean you're right because what the hell do you know, but at least it means you're engaging in the process that might make you right. If you opened up your eyes and your ears and listened, right? And so what to do isn't in a complex situation in some sense isn't as important as how you do it.

What approach do you take when the chips are down and things are tense? The good politicians that I've met and this is relevant to this, they listen. They go out among their people, actually go out and they listen to them and that way they learn what to do. And that's not opinion polls. Opinion polls are, and my country and yours to a large degree, is ruled by opinion polls to a degree. You can't possibly imagine because the politicians won't take responsibility for saying what

they think. And so then they default to their handlers and their handlers rely on opinion polls. And opinion polls provide a bad short-term sample of people's careless thoughts. And you think while you're following the public, it's no you're not. The entire parliamentary system is set up to follow the public in an intelligent way. It's not easy to figure out what people think or what they want. It isn't even easy for individuals to figure out what they themselves think or want. It's really hard.

And these traditions that we've set up of representative democracy are ways of listening to the people that are measured and thoughtful and long term. And they're being supplanted by idiot opinion polls that are run by people who have instrumental desires. They want to win the next election. And I know you have to win the damn next election, you know. But pandering to a mob who's frightened because you scared them, that doesn't constitute leadership. It's certainly not democracy.

There's a reason we don't have direct democracy. There's a reason for that. It's like rule by impulse. It's not a good structure, it's not a good strategy. Well, we figured that out a long time ago, our organizations are way too large in complex for anything like direct democracy to work. We're gonna have a vote on every issue.

Like obviously not. People just don't have the expertise for that. And it's not like they shouldn't be consulted. They absolutely should be. The voice of the people is the sovereign master of the political enterprise. But what a leader does is aggregate that voice. I'll give you an example. This is a good example. What a leader does is aggregate that voice. I'll give you an example. This is a good example.

What a leader does is aggregate that voice. Yes, yes, yes. Collect it, collect it. So I interviewed Jimmy Carr, the bridge comedian. He's very, very smart Carr, and I asked him how he did. What he did, and I kind of knew this from other comedians I've talked to. He said, the comedy, stand up comedy,

is the most dialogical of all the artistic enterprises. I thought, well, what do you mean up by that? Because you actually, you have a monologue. What do you mean it's dialogical? He said, well, before I go out on a tour and he's had a couple of successful world tours. So that's pretty good when you're that funny. That's amazing. He said, he go out and do 100 shows. Rogan does the same thing. All the comedians do the same thing. Louis C.K. does this. They all do it. They go to small clubs.

And they try out their material. So they're sitting at home trying to be funny and sometimes they are and sometimes they're not. And then they go to an audience and they lay out some jokes and sometimes people laugh a lot and sometimes they don't. And so the comedians who do this repeatedly listen and then they collect all the things that people think are funny.

And so isn't it so cool? Is that you don't even have to be that funny in some sense to be a comedian. You have to be a little bit funny and then you really have to listen. And so if you go out to your audience and you tell them jokes and they tell you what's funny, then you can collect all the things

that everyone thinks is funny and then you can go on a world tour and just say things that everyone thinks are funny. It's so cool, that that's the pathway for that. That's aggregate. Exactly, exactly. So when the comedians are doing what a political leader who is functioning properly does.

They're doing exactly the same thing. I talk at length to a Canadian politician, Preston Manning, he's on the right of the political spectrum. And he built a political party from scratch in Canada and became the leader of the opposition, which is no trivial thing to do in the span of a single lifetime or even in the fraction of a career, which is what he did. And he told me that what he really liked was going up to make a speech, but that wasn't a party really liked. He really liked the question period, because people would just tell him what they were concerned about,

and then he derived the policies for his party as a consequence of addressing those concerns. So it was really a bottom-up enterprise. And so I would hope that had I been in that position, I would do what I'm doing when I'm on my tour, which is watching people and listening to them and then responding. And this happens, first of all, when I lecture, which isn't exactly the right word. When I explore ideas in front of people, I'm watching them like a hawk, blinded as I am by the lights, you know?

But I'm watching to see if people are following and modifying what I'm saying to make sure that everybody's staying on the track. And then I have thousands of people, I have had thousands of people meet me in meet and greets after the talks and then on the street. And I always listen to them. And so then I can address those concerns.

And then that keeps the situation dynamic, right? And so in the UK, in the House of Parliament, there's this great dome at the center of the building, and it's the lobby, and that's where the word lobbyist comes from, by the way, and the citizens of the UK have the right to enter the lobby and petition their their member of parliament at any time, essentially. And so the lobby is where the voice of the people meets the voice of their representatives, and it's the center of the British House of Parliament, and it's built that way architecturally, which is so brilliant, it's stunningly brilliant, the way that that's laid out. And that's exactly right, because the people are somewhat inarticulate, like the truckers,

like they're not making an argument in some sense, they're bringing their trucks to Ottawa. Right, that's showing, not telling. Yes, exactly. And people who aren't primarily intellectual, let's say, they have to act out their moral presuppositions in a more concrete manner. But that doesn't mean they're wrong at all. It doesn't mean that at all. they're wrong at all. It doesn't mean that at all. And so then the job of a leader is to note that inarticulate expression and to give it voice publicly in speeches, let's say, but also to have that voice manifest itself in the body of laws that governs all of us. That's how the system works. laws that governs all of us. That's how the system works. And so, and the alternative is to dismiss that. And that's not a good alternative. Or to demonize it, which is... I want to read this to you because it goes kind of based on what you're saying. Here's

a Yahoo new story. Trudeau flees as trucker con voice enters Ottawa. Thousands of protesters enter Ottawa. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his family were moved from their home to an undisclosed location somewhere in the city on Saturday afternoon due to security concerns a Freedom Comma with some 2700 truckers entered the Canadian capital of Ottawa Saturday to protest through those security concerns. This is a PM. So COVID-19 policies According to the independent around a hundred bigs, blockade, blockade it, a Main Street running past the Canadian Parliament building. So that's going on.

He just tested positive for COVID. Now it's coming into US. They froze the Gulf Army account, which raised over $10 million and nearly $130,000, $140,000 people that donated. And now American truckers are kind of getting involved and saying, listen, we're kind of... Can I see his book, kick them off yesterday? Can I see his book, kick them off in the morning?

Yeah, 137,000 subscribers to that group, they kick them off. Yeah, you wait till you see your election this year, you're gonna see plenty of that, that's for sure. How bad do you think the consequences are gonna be? And you're like, you really think, you know, some people I talk to, some people like, who are professionals in my community, like, what do you think the consequences are gonna be? And you're like, you really think, you know, some people I talk to, some people like, who are professionals in my community, like, what do you tell my truckers?

I haven't seen anything on the news. I'm like, you haven't seen anything. I've haven't seen anything on the news. Do you don't know what's going on with truckers? No, I read Wall Street Journal in New York Times. I know nothing about what's going on in Canadian truckers. So they don't watch obviously Fox, and maybe they don't watch podcasts, right?

But it's not the same thing with the John Hopkins. Yeah, same exact thing. Exactly. Like, how did you not see it? The point of it, I would. Yeah, so he said, he says, you really think these truckers are gonna have any kind of an influence on anything. It's truckers.

You think they can have any influence? It's truckers. The way he said it, he said it for truckers. Yeah, that's what kind of looking down on them because they can't express it with intellectual thought. Well, the leader of the socialist party in Canada, so hypothetically, on the side of the working class, the people who are most opposed to the truckers in Canada

are the people who vote NDP, the socialist, about 20% of the population, stable in Canada. And now, and then, we have a socialist provincial government. And they've done some good. I don't want to get into that. But like I said, there are people on that side of the equation, who for example, were fostered in the labor movement, and they had, they had things to say. The working class needs to have their say, but the vast majority

of people who vote NDP in Canada are opposed to the truckers. It's like, I thought you guys were on the side of the working class. It's like, what's happened? Well, not them. It's like, hey, man, welcome to the working class. Those truckers. Well, they're all white supremacists and racists. It's like, really? In Canada, are they now white supremacists, really? Or Nazis?

In Canada. There aren't any of them. There was some dimwit, a confederate flag at the rally and that truckers he was mass the truckers stripped of his mask and chased him away but all the mainstream press reported confederate flags at the trucker rally as if that matters it's like it's not like there are a lot of Canadians by the way flying the confederate flag first of all that's not our

country exactly and second, most Canadians, I would say, don't really know in any deep sense what the Confederate flag stands for. I mean, you know, people aren't that informed and I'm not being condescending. They have other things to concern. It's comments like what you just said that validate some people how much of a role people like George Soros plays to get protesters out there that are actors and they're not real and they're trying to instigate to say, dear, this is how people are feeling because you know, the biggest mover and shaker emotion is what? Anger. Anger is the way you get people to say, you know what, these guys are white supremacists, these

guys are this. And so this validates how some people have that argument. It also validates how Facebook does their algorithms. They want people arguing in the comics section because anger basically begets more comments and more and basically more eyeballs and more shoulders and more. Like how many Canadians even know what the hell to confederate flag even means?

Right. And there's one, like there's 50,000 people, we don't even know how many people are in a lot of wild, I've seen wildly different numbers. The idea that there was a hundred trucks, that's just completely insane. There's like 10 times that number minimum. And so that's another thing that's so appalling is you can't actually get accurate information. And then yeah, well, this Trudeau flees issue, that's...

I don't like that. It's not like I view that with any sense of satisfaction or delight. I'm not a fan of Trudeau because I don't think he's capable of saying an honest word. And I truly mean that. And I've watched his speeches over and over watching to see what's going on with him. And all I see is acting. But despite that, why would I be happy that the leader of my country ran away from a protest

citing security concerns, which is a very bad move to begin with, it's like, well, I have to leave because you people are so dangerous. It's like it shows weakness. Well, no, it's worse than that. It's an instigation. It's an instigation because he said that the reason he had to leave was because of security concerns, which means you people are dangerous and not to be trusted. And I don't think the truckers so far are dangerous and not to be trusted.

And I've been watching them handle this. They're playing this. It's been very peaceful for the number of people who are involved in the demonstration. And that's despite the potential effect of instigator types. And that's a real threat. So even with that, it's been peaceful.

And they've set up food camps to feed the homeless and they're shoveling the snow in front of the war monument. And now they have a guard around the Terry Fox statue. Terry Fox was a man, one-legged Canadian who ran across the country raising money for cancer. And he's a Canadian hero. And his statue was desecrated in the language of the mainstream press. They put a upside down Canadian flag on it and put some clothing on him, which was desecration, which, okay, have it your way.

In any case, the truckers set up a guard around the statue, so that's not going to happen again. They seem to be not taking the bait. And so I hope that that continues and that this proclivity to instigate, which would be extraordinarily convenient for Mr. Trudeau, and which is an easy out for him, I'm praying that that doesn't happen. Is there a reason why you wouldn't show up to something like this? Like to support the truckers or at least lend your voice?

No, the reason I'm not there is because I have other commitments, right? I'm on this tour and people have bought tickets and there's thousands of them and that's what I'm doing and You know, I put out videos in support of them and in which I think in some sense is yeah Well the video I put out last week which was a message to the conservative Premiers essentially and the conservative leader who lost his position last week because there was a revolt at the federal level and so our his position last week because there was a revolt at the federal level. And so our main opposition party transformed leadership last week in no small part as a consequence of the trucker convoi. I put out this video calling on these conservative primers to drop the damn mandates.

And so it's, I said I mentioned earlier, it's got about a million and a half views. It's called Seize the Day. And that's as if, that's as effective or more effective than me being there. So as far as I can tell, and besides, it's the best I can do under the current circumstances, give and everything. So.

You know, it's crazy while this is happening. I was listening to Charlemagne God. You know, Charlemagne God, I don't know if you know who he is. He breakfast club, he's big time radio. He got a hip-hop guy. Yeah, in a hip-hop world. Very, very well known. He's a fan at this point. I you know, I think he's necessary. It's not about a fan. I think he's necessary. Anybody that's pushing the envelope and you're fair and you push your own side salute. That's off to you. Live respect that guy. He said something the other day on the podcast, which pissed a lot of people off. He says, you know what at this point i miss trump

we said let's get that you know back here because at least you knew he would say some shit and he meant it and you're like you could say i disagree with the sky uh... he's crazy and he's not a fan of trump no he's not the zero the interview comaharris he's a supporter of comaharris and the support of

comaharris and yeah and and is not a fan of he asked the question, said, who's run this country? Is the president, Joe Manchin or the president, Joe Biden, who's really the, but anyway, he said, yeah, to Kamala, he said, then, you know, Kamala act the like she got pissed off, but so Trump, hey, maybe we need this guy back, right?

Maybe we need somebody like that to come, and he saw Shaq the other day, can you pull up Shaq, what he said? I don't know if I want to play the video to be honest with you. If you can find what he says and maybe do this, maybe do this, press unmute on the video. You see that button on the audio, bring it all the way down, but they're going to pick up the algorithm. So go and say Shaq vaccine force.

Just Google Shaq vaccine force. I don't know if you saw this or not Jordan. Did you see this? This was just yesterday. Did you see this or no Adam? Did you read? No, I know he did say something. So watch this. Go shack rips COVID vaccine mandate. You shouldn't be forced to make something. You don't take something. Take something. Yeah. Now go all the way down because I want to read to exactly how he said it. Because if they have the whole back and forth, go a little lower, go a little lower, go a little

lower. I wish I could show it to you. So the lady's like, well, no, they're not really forcing us to take anything. Says, no, no, they are. No, they're not. No one's forced me. So what are you talking about? If you don't take it, do you have a job? She says, no, you don't have a job.

But they're not forcing you to take it. So that's forcing you. That's forcing you. So what it starts to happen is some people, Charlemagne is like, listen, maybe this guy that we hated on as much as we hated on Maybe he took positions. Maybe he came out there and talked to us. Maybe at least we had, you know Something to say took a position on what we had to do rather than hey, what are we doing today? Hey, you know, how do we handle the situation here? Do you think there's certain people right now?

Because we're in Florida. So in Florida, it's the Sanctus entrum. It's a very competitive There's a lot of people that want the Sanctus and there are a lot of people that don't want the Sanctus to run for office because they like Him as a governor. They're worried who would replace them But there's still you know, let's go brand and flags outside of a you know all these boats that you see everyone's got some kind of a Let's go brand on flag which I'd like to get your feedback on how you feel about brand, and if you like this brand, the guy or not. But Trump, your thoughts, next election coming in US with everything that's going on, you think there's a white deal.

Well, we're not going to watch what happened in the United States with Trump and Clinton, I thought. People liked, they liked the unscripted impulsive lies of Trump better than the scripted instrumental lies of Clinton. What do you think about that? Well, Trump gave a different speech generally when he went from audience to audience. He kind of shoots from the hip kind of a lot.

And it isn't obvious to me that shooting from the hip is really the right way to lead a country. But calculating everything beforehand for maximum impact on your political future, that is not also not a way to run a country. And that's how you get pulled into politics by handler, by PR, by opinion poll, by image. You you know you see politicians we have to protect our image. It's like really do you you have to protect your image do you what what's your image exactly. Well it's what we want people to think we are. Well how about you be that instead of being the image of that and this you see this dialogue take power. People don't even notice it. It's like we have to protect our image.

It's like, Rogan doesn't protect his image. He doesn't have an image. He's actually there, which is why people are listening to him or come up with some other excuse. He's a gateway to the alt-right. It's like really, this left-leaning person with a high degree of sympathy for socialist views on the working class site whose psychedelic

experiment or hippie countercultural person is a gateway to the alt-right. Really. That's your story. Yeah. Of all the stupid stories. It's so ridiculous. The only way you could possibly believe that is if you knew nothing about it because that's just not who he is at all.

It's preposterous. But the only other explanation is that people are listening to him because they trust him, because he's trustworthy. Well, God, could that possibly be, and all the media forces of their rate against him aren't trustworthy? It's like, well, a lot of that, as we already talked about, that's a consequence of rapid technological transformation. How much of that is based on the conversations he has regarding the Vax?

Because prior to COVID or even vaccine mandates, nobody thought that he was center right? Nobody. Oh, yeah. It was for sure. He was getting that because he was before COVID. Yeah, he was hypothetically, you know, a founding father of the intellectual dark web. And that was going back five years ago.

And everybody reviewed, you know, viewed everybody who had a mainstream view, let's say, viewed all the people who are in the intellectual dark web for lack of a better term as gateway to the alt-right, you know, Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather, you know, those terrible right wingers. It's so preposterous. And Sam Harris as well. Another, you know, hyper conservative person. So not that at all. Well, it's just not that at all. Not at all. Are these people actually tuning in and listening?

No, they just making assumptions. Oh, no, they don't listen. No. People who criticize, well, what happens often, and this is why Rogan keeps growing in poverty. It doesn't happen with me to some degree, is that people come because they're curious, and then they do listen, and then they think, oh, this is nothing like what I've been told. It's, in fact, the, and I think this was particularly true, in my case, in relationship to accusations of, say, far-right sympathies. It's like, well, what about all the lectures I gave on Nazism for like 30 years? Two of the biggest educational institutions in the world.

What about those? And then what about this? What about the fact that I had a now-half, like 300 hours of things I've said online? And you haven't been able to find one phrase, even taken out of context, that online and you haven't been able to find one phrase, even taken out of context that was enough to dam me in any serious sense, not one.

So now you can take some of the things I've said maybe about gender differences in personality and clip them and then put them in the most like abysmal interpretive context possible and warp that seriously and kind of make an argument that I'm a misogynist, but even that's incredibly ineffective. First of all, because I'm not the fact that I think there are differences between men and women and that I actually appreciate the differences makes me the opposite of a

misogynist. Because if you're a misogynist and you don't like femininity, then you deny that it exists, and it does exist. And so, and all the data support that. Men and women are broadly more similar than they are different in terms of their personality structure. There's no doubt about that, but the differences aren't trivial. They have major influence on occupational choice, for example. And the data on that's absolutely clear from, and it's all being generated by left-leaning psychologists because the entire psychological research community, the academic community in general, is left-leaning. So all this data is showing that there are differences between men and women at a personality level, has been generated by people who are antithetical to that idea politically.

So yeah, yeah. Did you used to get an argument with your colleagues? Meaning I think 90 plus percent of professors are left leaning. Is that the number pat? I want to say? It's 13 to 1 according to watch. I see more than 90 percent. So meaning if you're in a room and there's 13 professors

and you're more to the right conservative, and you're in the break room, having a coffee, having a cake or whatever, are you arguing with your colleagues? How did that work? I didn't argue with my colleagues much. Now, and then it's actually, did they want to argue with you?

Okay, faculty. People were irritated at me from time to time because I worked with the business school and you know how repransable they are. And so that was annoying because my attitude to that was you think all the sins on the side of the business school is like what the hell is wrong with you? That's your view point. You think you're sophisticated. And so what I didn't argue about that because it just was pointless. I didn't. I argued very seldomly with my colleagues. And I spent most of my, I had lots of colleagues who were friends of mine, although at the University of Toronto, they tended to be people who eventually went elsewhere.

And that was more a matter of happenstance than anything else. But I had colleagues who were close friends of mine at Harvard and we got along just fine. And they weren't, I wouldn't say they were also that they were particularly left leaning. But I would also say, I'm not particularly right leaning. You know, the fact that I was branded conservative or right-wing for that matter really came as quite a shock to me because temperamentally, I'm kind of halfway

between liberal and conservative because I'm very conscientious, but I'm also very high in this trait openness, which is a creativity dimension. And so the openness tilts me more in a liberal direction, and the conscientiousness tilts me more in a conservative direction. So I kind of, so I suppose in some ways, the easiest political slot for me is something like libertarian.

But in so far as I would put myself in the political slot, but I ever thought myself as a conservative. So, apparently, well, I'm conservative in some ways. Now, partly from being a social scientist, as I said, I'm a firm believer in the law of unintended consequences. I also believe the conservative dictate that the best level of government is the level most proximal to the problem.

And that's a really good principle, even for running an organization, right? Is you want to devolve power, distribute it as much as possible, facilitate local autonomy, and you want the decision makers to be as close to the people that the decisions are affecting as possible. And that's actually why I thought Brexit was a good idea.

You know, it's like two tower of Babel, the European Union. It's like, no, that representatives got too far away from the people, very, very dangerous. And so I think the UK made a good choice. It's like, no, we're not, especially the UK. It's like center of free speech in the world. All things considered, historically considered. Americans and Canadians differ on this to some degree, but in Canada we kind

of view the American Revolution as Englishmen standing up for their rights. As Englishmen standing up for the rights? Yeah, well, the UK had a very well developed tradition of belief in intrinsic human rights long before the American Revolution. I'm not saying the American Revolution was trivial because it wasn't trivial, but it's an extension and elaboration of a set of principles that were there long before the American Revolution occurred. And so, as a Canadian, do you think America is the greatest country in the world?

It's probably, yeah, probably. I mean, I was every time I go to the UK, or Europe in general for that matter, I'm stunningly impressed. The UK is an amazing place, and its institutions are so remarkable. Oxford and Cambridge, they're so, I mean, I was at Harvard for a long time. The depth of history there, the weight of that tradition, the commitment of people to free speech, the UK is an amazing country. The United States has the advantages of the UK, and then it's much bigger.

You have a huge population, it's incredibly diverse. Your political institutions also allow for a diverse range of experiments at the state level. That really seems to be working out well, much better than in Canada. For example, the United States has this amazing theatricality that's such a potent force. It's so obvious when you come here from Canada because everything in the United States is like a movie set. I was at this Gala week ago, DeSantis spoke out at a common sense society. That was a European organization set up

to foster free speech. And they had an ex-military guy, a black guy, seeing the National Anthem before the formal dinner started. And he just belted it out, you know, with this kind of gospel undertone and this whole culture, your whole culture is saturated by this unbelievably powerful pop culture that just has its tentacles out everywhere in the world. And so he belted out the National Anthem, make Al Capel, and away you'd never hear

a Canadian belt out whole Canada. And then they had another guy who was also black has turned out get up and do the prayer before dinner and you could just see him channeling that kind of gospel evangelism that's a big part of Southern US culture. And so that was amazingly theatrical. And you want to attempt to reenact that?

No, no, no, no, I couldn't do it justice. And then they showed this video about freedom that was all theatrical. And the Americans, you Americans, are unbelieved. You're unbelievably good at that. And it shows a culture that has this immense belief in its dream. And that manifests itself, especially in pop culture.

It just manifests itself everywhere in pop culture. And American pop culture clearly dominates the world. And so, and part of it is that, that dream of a better future that's accessible to all that is given voice through all of that pop culture. I mean, including the automobile for that matter, because that's an expression of pop culture. And it's certainly not obvious to me at all that it wasn't the automobile that doomed the communists, because nothing says freedom and individual sovereignty, like a 16-year-old with a 400-horsepower Mustang. And I know perfectly well if the automobile was invented today, the no ordinary person

would be able to have one because they'd be too dangerous. You have to take a 10-year course and then get a million dollars a month for insurance and and be encased in Styrofoam and the car or that's a bloody miracle. It's like, well, why don't we let people go wherever they want in these unbelievably dangerous contraptions? What a point. There's almost nothing more dangerous than driving, right? And you let kids do it.

It's like 16, yeah, you can drive why not? It's like, well, because you run people over. You can't drink. You can't have a beer. But it's so wonderful. And you have all this autonomy in a vehicle. It just yells out individual liberty. So then you export those to communist countries.

It's like, you think you're exporting cars. You don't think there's a political message embedded in the existence of an automobile? So you haven't thought about it. It's crazy you're saying that because yesterday we had a guest, your mic, who said he asked about a car that I own, he says, hey, you know, is it true about this car? And I said, if you want to go drive it. And allegedly yesterday, he drove it.

Allegedly, keywords of cops are listening to this. Allegedly, he went 170 yesterday. That's the car. That's the car. It's an SF90, it's the fastest street car for Ari, it's got a thousand horsepower. He was shocked when you're like, yeah, here's the case. He's like, what? I could have you matched it against a Tesla. Well, zero to 60 Tesla would destroy. Yeah. But two, like, 210 miles an hour, you're just, it's just going to destroy the Ferrari's going to drive the car.

Yeah. After the show. No, I mean, by the way, you know, for one of our suddenly came to Dallas, I think I took you, you did. I drove you to your hotel and you were to meet your wife, right? Cause you guys would always travel to get a very good conversation with the other guy. And what did you have? What car was that? That was a, what did I, I drove you know,

Bentley? Oh, that was a blue Rolls Royce convertible. That was a Rolls Royce. It was a Red Light. Guy into the car next to us. He's like, that's charter Peter! He went crazy. You know, I have a, what kind of car do you drive right now?

I have no Sadies S L 550. You got so many cars you want. Why do you pick that one? I have no CDs, it's L550. You got so many cars you want. Why do you pick that one? It's a pretty legit car, but... Yeah, it's a nice car. Well, I bought it five years ago. My brother-in-law had one, which I used to drive in California. I really liked it. I really liked the way it felt. It's got great acceleration. It's cool, too. And so I bought one, second-hand one.

It's like eight years old, this thing, or nine years old, but it's in great shape. And I like it. It's two-seater, zoom around with my wife in it, and it has a really good sound system. And so we put in whatever we're listening to. Yeah, what do you think when you're driving? What's your music?

I can see him as well. I like classic rock. I have about an eight-hour playlist of old jazz and blues standards, Kruners. That's more on the romance side of things. I have a really good playlist of old country and blues music. It's about seven hours long, which I really love. My wife and I listen to that a lot.

The car cranked right up. Do you have a particular car? Carter family, I really like. I think that was a great excuse as there are particular names that you listen to more than anyone. Neil Young, come to life. Neil Young, yeah, yeah, yeah, but, but, and so he's in my classic rock collection or he was because it's on Spotify so. I don't know if he's going to be there much longer. I don't like what John Stewart's been doing.

My son did a real good cover of Harvest Moon that's on Spotify and so, you know, we're a Neil Young fans. I liked his music and I still like his music and and and artists if they had any sense would stay out of that political debate because there are just and that's way better creative farce rice and came out and said that yesterday that she's going off of a spotifies but but john stuart said it best john stuart's like first of all we need to keep rogan on there and i think john was on rogan about a year ago you're and a half ago uh when he was on but he said he was the biggest surprise.

When I heard, look, I listened to Neil Young, I think his music's great. I've listened to my entire life. But I didn't think Spotify was gonna lose $4 billion because of Neil Young. It's heavy. He was kind of shocked by it. But let me ask a couple stories.

One, do you follow anything with China? Are you somebody that's okay? So, Soros, which we know the name soros here's what soros said recently i'm curious to get your take on uh... this soros is a guy that's worth i don't know twenty billion out of guy he's a guy that is hated by the right and a lot of people on the right think he is manipulative deceptive and he wants to inject this philosophy is politically to this country but here's what he said he He says that this is Bloomberg article,

Soros's China's real estate crisis, Omicron, threatened Xi rule. Billion of philanthropists, George Soros and China's Xi Jinping may fail to extend his rule of the country later this year in contrast to what most observers expect, Soros' side of Xi enemies, within the party, real estate crisis, ineffective vaccines, and a failing birth rate

as factors working against him. Internal divisions in China are so sharp that it has found expression in various party publications, Soros said, G is under attack from those who are inspired by Deng Xiaping's ideas and want to see a greater role for private enterprise. What do you think is going to happen with Xi and China? Well, my sense of it, and I'm definitely no expert, is that it's not easy for the Chinese

to maintain internal unity. And so they tend to focus on that. And perhaps that's partly why China hasn't been as expansionist of power as it might have been. Maybe that's changed to some degree in recent years. But it's a very large country. It has an incredibly diverse population. And so they have their own problems, their own internal problems, which are significant

and preoccupying. And so I hope that they stay focused on their internal problems and that they stay focused on solving them. China has been forward looking enough, thank God, to allow the free market enterprise to flourish despite the proclivity for implementing top-down radical-left state solutions. And the consequence of that is being, first of all, now China is a player in the international scene for better or worse. I think mostly for better, I know that a lot of that was accomplished on the backs of the American working class.

And that's catastrophic in many ways. But the fact that there aren't tens of millions of Chinese people starving, that's really good thing for international security and stability, and that's of no trivial benefit to the American working class as well. And the fact is that China makes a lot of cheap stuff that works mostly, and that people who are more stressed economically have also benefited to that, to a tremendous degree. So it seems that all of that has been good. The twist towards a more totalitarian mode of governance in the last 10 years, that's

obviously extremely worrisome. The fact that China is a totalitarian state has had a very negative consequence on us in the West, especially in the immediate, what would you call it, in the immediate emergence of the pandemic, because what we did was we rushed to imitate a totalitarian state. We thought Chinese lockdown, we better do it. It's like, really? Really, we better do what the CCP did. Well, that's what we did. And we'll see, we don't know what the consequence of that

is yet. We'll see, not good, not good in my estimation. And certainly the Johns Hopkins studies study seems to, it's only a partial study, in some sense, they've done the cost benefit analysis, costs so far. We have no idea what the costs are of having kids in masks for two years.

We have no idea what the consequences are. What that's done, especially to introverted kids who are high negative emotion, because they're going to be looking for a reason to hide anyways. And who knows what that's done to their psychological development, both as children and out of adolescence. We'll find out over time, but we haven't paid the price for the pandemic, lockdowns, even a little bit yet. Did we destroy our economy? Like these things take a long time. You know, they say if you're piling an oil tanker and you detect a nice burg in your path,

you can see it. You've already hit it because it takes so long for you to turn that it's too late. Well, in some sense, these huge systems that were a part of her like that is that you can't tell when they're broken because they take a long time to fall over. And I don't know if our system is broken, but we're going to find out. And I don't know if the pandemic lockdowns broke it. And maybe they didn't. And hopefully they didn't.

I mean, I was in New York City in Manhattan month ago. And it was the first time I'd really gone out anywhere other than Toronto. And I'd been to New York a few years before. And it's a bouncing place, Manhattan. I love New York. It's such an amazing city. You know, the fact that Manhattan can even exist is just an ongoing, absolute miracle.

Seven million people compressed onto that island and it's pretty damn clean and it's pretty safe and it's really cool and there's something to do all the time and you can walk around free and like that bloody place is a miracle. That's for sure. And it looked pretty good. I thought, isn't this something these people have been locked down for like 18 months and this place isn't on fire. It actually was pretty clean and most of the businesses are still open and isn't that a bloody miracle, and which it most definitely is. And so let's pray and not be too resentful about all the foolishness. Let's pray that we wake up and we treat the pandemic

like the flu and we get back to something resembling the normality of Florida. And we put this behind us and we don't get too upset about January 6th and we don't get too vengeful about the Democrats and the radical left. And we let someone have sensible to run the Republicans and we carefully weave our way through to a peaceful future.

We let's pray for that because the alternative is pretty damn dismal. And I don't think we have to have the alternative You know one of it we talked about Trump earlier Here's my dilemma with Trump. One of many He's beating the election was stolen drum pretty damn hard and I look at that as an outsider again because I'm Canadian and I think Well you Americans you've been split 50, 50 for like five decades, like right down the middle, and there's always election trouble, because no system is 100%

perfect. Maybe there's like a 1%, 2% margin of crookedness, something like that. And you're probably really not going to get rid of that. Maybe you can maneuver carefully to keep it so that it's never any more than one or two percent, but to get rid of that last bit of malfeasance and deception and corruption would take such a heavy hand that that would become worse than the problem. And that's a real problem when you're split 50-50 because small election irregularities can throw the whole election. Okay, so it isn't obvious precisely

what can be done about that. But the election was stolen narrative. I think it's weak for a variety of reasons. The first is it's pretty whiny. Like, why didn't you win with 5% margin then? So, how do you know this isn't your fault? And you think the Republicans aren't gerrymandering congressional districts? Because they are.

And so it's not obvious that even if it is the case that there is substantive election fraud that it's all from one side. And so there's that. And then you're sure that's the message you want to be sending people that they shouldn't have faith in their most fundamental institution. You might be right, but it's in your interest for that to be true.

And so that's a moral hazard. And then, well, what happens when you retake the house? Because that's what's going to happen, I think, the Democrats are going to get stomped in the upcoming election. Are those elections somehow valid, but yours wasn't? And so, why, magically, when the Republicans get elected, that's honest, but when they don't, it's not. And so, it doesn't take the wind out of your story. It's like, well, it was stolen while you have the house and the Senate. How do you come for that? So that, to me, that that's going to weaken that narrative. Trump is capitalizing on anger. He's using the election issue as a means to an end. And he may believe it,

but it doesn't matter because it's a weak story, especially when the Democrats lose the house. It's a weak story. It's not going to, it doesn't have any momentum, but then it's worse than that because I also think, and I've talked a lot of Republicans about this, is that the best story you've got? You've got tradition on your side. You got the truth as an adventurer on your side. You got belief in truth on your side. That got the truth as an adventurer on your side. You got belief in truth on your side.

That's been abandoned by the radical left. You've got belief in science on your side. You've got responsibility on your side. You've got the fundamental purpose of higher education on your side. You can't conjure up a better story for Americans than the election was stolen. With all that on your side That's just not

very impressive and I have sympathy for politicians in general in the United States Congress people have very hard jobs. It's not a job I would like. I don't think it's a pleasant job They spend a lot of their time fundraising 25 hours a week on the phone out of their congressional offices because otherwise they're not supported by their party leadership. 40% of them sleep in their offices when they go to Washington. They don't even have apartments. Those that do usually have little bitty apartments. Their families aren't there because it's hard to get families to move to Washington now with dual career families. They don't have much

of a social group. They have to run for their job every two years. This is not a plus they're under attack all the time and they're micromanaged and micrisceduled. So. Well, here's what point are you trying to make? Are you trying to make a point with Trump saying the fact that election was stolen? Because that's exactly what Hillary Clinton's position

was for four years. That elections were stolen from her. No better when she does it. Oh no, I'm not even, what I'm trying to say is I looked at it as a weak position. You're a weak position. It is a weak position. She was taken, I think. Okay.

But that's the worst of it. But it's like, really? Where are you going with this? Are you going with the fact that? Tell a better story. Tell a better story if you want to get reelected. Is that... No, no, no, no, no. The way to re-election is through a better story, but that's not the reason to tell it.

The reason to tell it is because you believe it and for the first time in my life, really, I believe this to be the case, conservatives really have something to sell to young people. And they have the, they can sell the meaning of responsibility. Because young people are bereft of meaning. And most people find meaning in responsibility. And when the right talks about responsibility, they kind of do it in that finger wagging way that makes conservatives unpopular among young people.

You should be responsible. It's like, yeah, you should. Why? Well, because your life is chaotic and meaningless, and you're stuck in this juvenile seriality, and it's really painful for you and you're anxious and aimless and goalless, and then you look at people who have a life, because maybe you could have a life, and you think, well, what does that life consist of? It's like, well, you have a committed intimate relationship. There's one. You have friends that you're honest with and playful with.

So you have a group of friends, you have a job or a career. You know, you learn how to use your life, your time outside of work in a productive, engaging way. You regulate your susceptibility to the multitude of hedonistic temptations that are in front of you. You pace some attention to your mental and physical health. You make a goal, some goals for the future that are concrete. Well, there's seven things you can do.

They're all responsible things. Why? Because then your life will have some meaning. Now, you might say, well, what's the ultimate meaning? It's like, get those things straight first. They're not nothing. And maybe you won't be so damn miserable and bitter and resentful and angry and aimless and anxious and frustrated and disappointed and then ashamed if you had five of those seven things going well. And the conservatives

can make that case. No, bloody left isn't making that case. It's like for them responsibility is pretty much equivalent to totalitarian patriarchal oppression. The conservatives could just take that, say, no, no, our institutions, they're pretty solid. Maybe if you don't like what's happening on the political front, you join a group, a church, the Elks, the Rotary, some civic organization. Get in there and do your part.

Why? Because you should, even though you should, but because why not meet some people who are like minded and have a social group? You think Biden can have the kind of impact to push people away from the political party to the opposing side, similar to how Goa water and what they did back in the days on how civil rights was handled when Barry Goa water did what he did in the next thing, you know, African Americans went from only 60% of them voting Democrat to 92% four years later.

They went from 60% to 92% four years later in the next election. And Republicans haven't had a chance on the African American vote since 1964. Do you think the current climate is that big of a climate where the conversion from one side to the other side to say, listen, I don't agree with you guys on sense-rank. If the guys want to talk, leave them alone. Do what you handle COVID by shutting everybody down. I don't agree with that. Constantly printing

money. I don't agree with that. Do you think it could be something where it could flip that big? I don't know, because the next presidential election in this climate is a long way away. Because who can predict the future even a year out, especially given the rate of technological change that we face now? I mean, you don't even know what's happening today. There's so many technological transformations just today, many of which have world-shaping consequences. God only knows where we're gonna be

by the time of the next presidential election, but it certainly does seem to me the case that the Democrats are gonna lose big in the fall. And so, you know, that's what we'll focus on for the time being. We'll see what happened there. We'll see what happened. Couple other topics before we wrap up here. So remote work, it's a conversation everybody's having.

I'm gonna read the Vox story on remote work and we'll talk a couple of other stories here on the wrap up. So Vox comes out with this article, remote work isn't the problem. Work is, okay? Executives are nearly three times more likely than non-executives to say they want to return to office full-time according to Slack survey. The report found that while nearly 80% of knowledge workers want flexibility in where they work, their employer thinks that the arrangement will lead to a variety of ills diminishing the

company's collaboration, creativity, and culture. As people have quit their jobs or stepped out of workforce in what's called the great resignation you've heard that before,, the great reshuffling, those left behind have had to pick up the slack. Two-thirds of workers said their work loads has increased significantly since they started working remotely. As if increased work-related work weren't enough. Pandemic-related obstructions, the lack of childcare, smaller social support system has caused

many people to have work outside of paid work. So this whole concept of the great resignation and what's happening, you know, some people are saying, you guys got to come back to work. I'm in the financial industry. I can't say how many people are having a hard time getting their people back. Like the biggest thing CEOs will tell me is Pat, we screwed up. We screwed up, taking a position of it's okay you can work from home because now they are only looking for jobs that allow them to work from home and other companies are willing to take that position even though it doesn't work so we're in a we're cornered right now and we don't think long term this

is an effective way of running a company what are your thoughts with the great resignation? Well, one of the things I learned when I was in Washington, we were trying to understand, I went there with a collaboration with a group that runs the presidential prayer breakfast. And so there are Christians, self-admittedly, let's say, who have been operating in Washington since the Eisenhower administration. And most of what they do is bring people together congressmen and senators within parties to have some social time, a meal, some chance to talk, or across party lines. And they're trying to provide the kind of hospitality that produces social relationship. And we talked a lot about this because one of the things that's happening in Washington

that is fostering polarization is the breakdown of the social community. So it's hard to get people to move to Washington, often because their spouses have jobs, and so they're localized in their community. Hard to move the kids. And so as I said, 40% of congressmen, I believe it is, sleep in their offices. And then you can do a lot of remote meetings.

And then you can fly in and fly out. And you think, so what? Oh, and then there's cameras recording your speeches in the house. So that means you're always acting instead of saying what you think. And so there's this confluence of technological transformation that's devastating the underculture of Washington. Because what used to happen more was that while people would go to each other soccer games

with their kids, you know, their kids soccer games or baseball games, and they get to know each other a bit. And if I disagree with you, then it's easy for me to think you're bad, because I think that what I think is right, because I wouldn't think it if I didn't think it was right, if I'm a good faith player.

And you might not be bad, you might just be different. But I need to get to know you, well, what does that mean? It means I need to step out with you in the actual world and do something in the actual world that shows how much we actually have in common. And a lot of that social, like I had it lunch, I set up five years ago, four years ago. We invited, I think, eight Republican congressmen and eight Democrats, and they were all juniors.

And they didn't know most of the people within their own party organization, much less people across the aisle. And they're not exactly rewarded for talking across the aisle, either, especially when the leadership has a top-down vision of what constitutes leadership. And so instead of having them talk about anything political, we just had them talk about why are you in Washington? You know, most of these people, these snake pit dwellers, you know, in the cynical parlance, they had perfectly functional lives before they went into Congress.

They gave up a lot to seek political office, you think, while they're power hungry. It's like they were doing all right. So it isn't obvious that this was the step up for them. And so all of them, I said, take three minutes and just say why you were here. And it was the same speech. Every single one of them gave the same speech. And it wasn't nonsense. It was deeply cinematic in that American sense.

You know, they talked about their love for their country and their patriotism and the fact that they felt that they had to give back. And every single person, no, they personalized that. They talked a little bit about their own story and how they came to that realization. But there's no way you could tell the Democrats from the Republicans, not on the basis of that. And I tell you, if you were there, you could tell the Democrats from the Republicans, not on the basis of that. And I tell you, if you were there, you would have walked out thinking, that's a pretty decent group of people, and they're really trying hard.

That, that, I swear, that's certainly, I was there with people, one person in particular who's much more tilted to the Democrats side, and that was his take on the whole room. And so how old were these people? Oh, anywhere from 35 to 45 basically. And so my point is the problem with the distance work is that it's predicated on the idea that everything we do that's important is done in the abstract, right, in the domain of information exchange, explicit information exchange, and that's important is done in the abstract, right, in the domain of

information exchange, explicit information exchange, and that's just not true. So that's a danger because we don't know what that will do to cooperative organizations. Now it might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing. I often meet with my son on Zoom when we're doing business related, when we have a business related matter, because it's actually easier to share our computer screens and do what we're doing business related, when we have a business related matter, because it's actually easier to share our computer screens and do what we're doing than it is to meet in person. But that doesn't mean I don't want to meet a person. I want to meet a person for sure.

So there's that, that's beware of what your technology is doing because it's doing all sorts of things that you do not understand at all. Like it could be that the decimation of the underlying social community in Washington is enough to drive polarization to the point where the whole system will rock and crumble. We have no idea because we don't know why it worked. It worked. You know, I've been thinking about online universities.

Well, that's easy. Lectures and tests. That's what universities do. It's like, no, that might be maybe that's 5% of what universities do. 5%. Yeah, I would say so. Here, I can go. Well, here's a bunch of things universities do. They confer an identity upon you.

Who are you? I'm a student. Okay. Respectable. So, for $120,000, let's say it's more than that sometimes, less than that, you now have an identity for four years that your culture respects. And that means you have a container within which you can have intellectual freedom while you're deciding what you want to do with the rest of your life. Instead of torturing yourself about how useless you are because you don't have a productive job yet. So that's a big deal. God only knows what that's worth, but not nothing. Well, how about finding a mate? So there's evidence now coming out. I don't know how reliable it is. You know that it's about two women for every man in many academic institutions now. And that

proclivity towards female dominance seems to be increasing. However, it appears that once the men drop to one third of the population, the women stop going. Well, you think, why is that? Well, why the hell do you think it is? You go out of your little town, you wanna find a new peer group, and you're young, it's one of the things you wanna do is find a mate, so part of the reason you go to a good university is because the sorting has already taken place. It's like, well, you know, this person

has got a high school diploma, and they're clued in enough to pursue college education. Filturing system. Yeah, so that's a huge deal. And then universities also act as a filtering system for businesses because they use the SAT as an entrance requirement. So if you hire someone as a graduate

from a high-end university, you knew that they had a high IQ because the SAT is an IQ test. God only knows what that's worth. And then you shed your peer group, your old peer group, and you establish a new one, maybe when you're a bit wiser. And that's a, I mean, one of the major elements

of my college education was the transformation of my peer group, that was huge. And then there's personal relationships between you and the professors. If you're lucky enough to establish them, that's a big deal because then you get to interact with someone who's an embodiment of the academic tradition and see how they act, that's different than listening to what they say in a lecture.

And then there's the social surround, the joint meals. This is they make a big deal of this at Cambridge and Oxford because the students eat together in their colleges and god only knows how important that is. And then there's the part of being an embodied actor in that academic tradition and learning to speak and write. So that's just a handful of things universities do and that's not lectures and tests online. And to reduce it to that might destroy it completely, it could easily be. And it's the same with our political institutions they depend on these real world

substructures that likes like engagement in civic society we have no idea how important that is and the fact that that's starting to deteriorate in Washington could be fatal. You know what I would be curious about you know how in America the one school university that was pop in 20 years ago and Everybody say I can get my MBA on online. It was what Phoenix University University right and I recruited a few their sales guys and their legit sales guys because they they're selling is what they're selling I saw their sales training was great, but one of the things that be curious about is how much do they get from boosters?

Like, kids graduate from Phoenix University and they got the degree online like, I wonder, oh my gosh, I'm so loyal to the school. I got to give these guys 10 grand, you know, I want to contribute because this university changed my life. Did it though? Like, is there, you know what I'm saying? Like, because for me, there's no culture. I don't think, how do you do that? do that like you know you want me to go to church on sundays on a zoom yeah okay great fine y'all do that listen to service i mean they all every church does it now they said they'll say our service today was viewed by 73 countries because

youtube said 73 co with 73 countries right but am i sold you know am i really emotionally i don't know i i i i want you know you know you, you know, am I really emotionally, I don't know. I want to go about it. Well, you know, it's your point about the 5% lecture and, you know, well, you also don't know what people were doing when they went to church and people were cynical about that. The people who fell out of the church, they say, well, you know, they're one hour a week Christians. It's like, well, better an hour of contemplation of higher order moral virtue than zero. So zero is not much.

And you think, well, the church didn't do that good at job. It's like, okay, do better. See if you can do better. And so, but then also, what are you doing when you go to church? Well, you're singing. That's not nothing. With other people, that's not nothing. With other people, that's not nothing. You're trying to orient yourself ethically with your community, you're sacrificing a part of your weekend to indicate your willingness to do so.

Like you're in a drama, right? You're acting out something. And it's not merely fictional. It's like, we get up in the morning and you saw this in the Simpsons all the time with Marge Simpson trying to get her family to go to church, which they did. It's like, get up, put on a suit, dress up, go out there with members of your community

and show your allegiance to something higher. And the atheists are cynical about that sort of thing, because they reduce God to a set of propositions, but they don't have any real appreciation for the embodiment. It's like I was in these beautiful chapels in Cambridge and Oxford. My God, they're so beautiful.

It's just beyond comprehension. They're so stunningly magnificent. And the boys' choirs were singing, and they have excellent boys' choirs. They're like world class. Then they read these ancient words and those things ring true. And there was a bunch of ideological nonsense at one of the chapels I went to, and that

was off-putting. But you have to be there and doing that for that to work, right? It's not replaceable in any real sense by a virtual experience, because it's not just information content, or it's not abstract information content, it's the acting out of something. That's what happens when you join a civic club. It's a mark of willingness to participate. It's a mark of faith in the system. And you think, well, I'm cynical about the damn system.

It's like, good for you. You're not naive. Thumbs up for you. But you're going to top out in your wisdom at cynicism. That's pretty dismal, man. You can do better than that. Like cynicism, that's a beginner's place. How often do you go to church? That's good question. I don't attend church. And so you might think that makes me a hypocrite. And possibly it does. And possibly it does.

I would say I participate avidly in civic enterprises, however, and for me, the lectures, that's a church for me. I'm trying to make things better. And I think I'm participating with people, my audience members, my viewers and listeners, they're committed to making things better. And they're committed to, I hope, at least in some sense, they're committed to the truth. And so it's always been awkward for me to go to church because for a variety of reasons.

And some of that might just be the unwillingness to do it. But I find myself uncomfortable in them often because I always got the impression that the people who were reading the words didn't believe them. The Trudeau factor. Yes. Yeah.

And so that's not necessarily any reason to be cynical, but then again, I'm not cynical about religious matters. So quite the contrary. So quite contrary. So I had a guy, I had a guy Marvin Del Valle, you know Marvin Del Valle, of course. So you're his hero, okay. He brought you up at the event in front of 6,000 people, okay. He says Patrick, I'm begging you if you can, ask this question. He's a Catholic and he's a very, very well-read Catholic. And when I, he's from Honduras, he's done well for himself in business. And when I read this question for you, you're going to realize how technical of a question he's asking you.

Okay. And I'm curious to know what you're taking, what your take is going to be on this. It has to do with a comment you made about the Catholic Church. Right? Let me read this to you. See if I have it. Here we go. Okay. It's long winded. So just brace for impact. So in his video, who dares to say he believes in God, he criticized the Catholic Church very harshly, is not the first that he had done. And he basically compared the Catholic Church to the Protestant approach to salvation. Number one, number, and he basically compared the Catholic Church to the Protestant approach to salvation. Number one, number two.

He then had the opportunity to interview Bishop Berrin as part of his podcast name, Christianity and the modern world, and most of us expect him to ask some really tough questions about the issue. He criticized, but he never happened. He almost looked overwhelmed by the moment and the conversation. He almost looked like a man moment and the conversation. He almost looked like a man that wanted to confess. Okay. First question. He's got three of them here for you. Number one, why did he avoid the tough questions? Bishop Baron was the best person, the most qualified person

to clear what I believe is a mistaken perspective about the Catholic Church. Number two, he was also just coming back from a difficult health situation. He experienced in 2019. Did that influence his approach to the conversation? You called me the day of my birthday, September 20th, I called him, let me know that he was really not doing well. You, when you, you know, we knew kind of what you were going through. I was very emotional and was praying for him ever since. You have to realize this guy's a true believer of you. Number three, my final question is about the Catholic Church.

To which Catholic Church is he referring to the Latin American Catholic Church that was heavily influenced by liberation theology for the last 60 plus years? By the way, very poor Catholic Church be the very wealthy North American Catholic Church see the European Catholic Church that almost like Angelic Church feels like a social club the the grown missionary african catholic church also very poor and per secuted church the russian catholic church suffering persecution by the russian orthodox church the asian catholic church persecuted by the chinese government or the persecuted almost decimated catholic church at the ease

his he talking is he talking about the pre-vatican the second or the post-vatican the second church is he familiar with the current conflict that emerged from the Vatican the second he made a blanket uh... statement about the catholic church which churches he talking about this he know the difference between them between the missed opportunity with bishop baron and not being specific enough about his position with the catholic church he left a

lot of unanswered questions. Where you stand with that? Well, one of the things I learned from reading Carl Jung, I mean, this isn't a statement he made explicitly, but it emerges as a consequence of reviewing a fair bit of his thought. His proposition, in some sense, was that Catholicism was as sane as human beings could get. And it's a very interesting rejoinder to the atheist types, because they think we could be rationalist materialists. But I don't think we can be, because that isn't what we're like.

We're all going to become rational in this scientific sense. There aren't that many scientists, and even among scientists, there aren't that many scientists. It's actually really hard to be a scientist. It takes a lot of training. It's a very specific way of thinking. And it isn't how obvious, how broadly accessible that's ever going to be. And I say that as an admirer of the scientific enterprise,

Catholicism is a great drama. It's an inclusive, encompassing ritual in drama as well as the system of beliefs. And more power to it as far as I'm concerned on that regard. I don't remember what my fundamental criticism was. Unfortunately, there's many podcasts that I've done because I was so ill and sometimes well doing them,

that I don't remember them at all. I meet people that I interviewed for two hours and I don't remember meeting them. It's very distressing, but that's life. I would say, and I think the idea that a critique should be differentiated, that's a very good idea and fair enough. And I certainly don't feel like engaging in a blanket condemnation of the Catholic Church.

I've been grappling and trying to do this with Bishop Barron, too. Part of the reason Baron wanted to talk to me is because the people who are actively engaged in the religious enterprise professionally, and this is Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Protestants, Lesso, but some. They're interested in the popularity of my lecture series on Genesis. Because I did that lecture series in 2017, it was really the first public lecture series I gave. We rented a theater in Toronto privately and booked it for 15 weeks and I offered these lectures and all the tickets sold out.

And most of the people who came were young men. And that's weird, because you imagine going to a bank with this business plan. So I'm going to rent a theater. I want you to loan me some money. I'm going to rent a theater. I'm going to rent a theater. And I'm going to lecture. The first lecture I'm going to give will be two hours on the first sentence of Genesis. And my target market is young men.

It's like they're not going to lend me any money. That's a no starter, but the lectures sold out and they've been watched, I don't know, 40 million times or something on YouTube. And so the civil apparatus of many religious organizations are interested in this because I obviously tapped into something that they're not tapping into. And my criticism, if I remember, was a criticism aimed at addressing the fact that that's

not being tapped into, one of the things I talked to Bishop Barron about, and I may not be addressing your friend's concern because I don't know what specific criticism he was he was He was concerned about I Suggested to bear in that the reason the church is the church the Catholic Church is not doing as well as it might There's many reasons is that they actually in the attempt to popularize the faith Especially in the 60s. They ended up not asking enough of people So we shouldn't ask so much. No, wrong decision.

Meaning to expect? Yeah, okay. Make it more excessive. Got it. It's like, got it. Yeah. One thing I learned from reading Kierkegaard, you know, Kierkegaard said at one point, in a real comical piece of writing, that once everything has become too easy,

that there'll be a massive outcry for voluntary difficulty. And I thought that's smart. Well, he was smart. He was a Kirchegard after all. And the church can offer that. In fact, it is what it has to offer. Like, that's the straight and narrow path. This is very, very, very, very difficult. But it's difficult, but so alternative to hell. So here is that. And I think that's there's true and there's metatru and that's metatru. That's powerful because you know churches sit behind closed doors and the board will say whoever the board may be at a not the nomination church, hey pastor this last time you talked about you know pick whatever it is, transgenderism a little bit too much. We're losing our, you know, attendees. You

talked about this, don't spend too much time talking about gay marriage out of the Bible because we have to be a little bit more diplomatic. You know, don't, let's not raise the standard too much where people are doing too many Bible studies or too many, you know, whatever, you know, events at the house. You're saying no, double down and raise the standards and keep them high, expect more from people. That's what you're saying. Yeah, absolutely.

And it isn't, and not in a finger-wagging sense. It's more, I've been talking, I've been talking to a lot of Islamic thinkers, and I have a lot of people who, a lot of Muslim people have watched my biblical lectures, like a lot. And so I have a following, strangely enough, among the Muslim community, and among Orthodox Jews, and broadly among religious communities.

And you know, the Christians are often on me to come out and just profess my faith in Jesus Christ as our universal savior. Whenever I'm, let's say questioned in that manner, it's always a trap. It's like join my club. It's like, you just stay in your own club. And I've got lots of people to talk to, you know? But a huge part of, you know, the Muslims say,

it's pretty funny. Peterson doesn't realize it, but he's actually a Muslim. And I had an Orthodox Jewish fellow in New York make a comment about his friends watching my videos and seeing them in accordance with the deepest elements of their teachings. And it's a lovely thing to see. It's very surprising to me. It's quite staggering. But you know, what I'm doing is predicated on the idea that there's way more to people

than they let out. And a lot of that's to be found in their darkness. And I'm making that case, I suppose the people who've been most attracted by that case have been young man. And I think that that's because they're so actively discouraged in the expression of their possibility by our culture, actively discouraged because they're regarded as, you know, oppressive patriarchs in training or some bloody thing like that. And so caustic and so horrible. I guess the question, the question I was more asking is, you know, the ideas, if we lower the standards, attendance will go up. We've been losing attendance because

the standards have been very high. Let's lower it a little bit. Let's be more welcoming. You know, it's 10 more political, more relevant. Yeah. It's like, religion isn't politics. Religion is the structure that contains politics. It's far deeper. It's like politics, literature, religion, that's sort of the structure. So... Politics, literature, political... Yeah, politics is embedded. Well, you do Americans, I said you're all theatrical here. Well, it's because your whole polity is encapsulated in narrative. Everyone knows that. That's the American dream. It's like, what's the American dream? Well, it's hard to put your finger on it, and you guys are exploring that all the time,

not least in your popular culture. It's constant exploration of what constitutes the American dream. That's the container for the political structure, and it's the dream that unites you. The political structure does as well, but it can't unite you if the dream doesn't unite you. So the dream is, that's in the domain of literature, essentially, in storytelling and dream.

And underneath that, the deepest strata of the literary endeavor is the religious endeavor. The Bible is a story. Is it true? Well, it depends what you mean by true. And people say, well, that's weasel-y. It's like, no, it's not. If you ask a profound question like that,

is the Bible true? You can't assume true and then cram the Bible into that. You have to make both sides of the equation open to question. What do you mean by true? Well, you're not answering the question. No, I'm just not answering it the way you want me to. I'm not. This is why people like Richard Dawkins always kick the hell out of religious people

when they're debating them. It's because Dawkins comes armed with a conception of the truth. And it's not trivial. It's like the scientific conception of the truth. This is a big club. And before he even begins, the whole structure of the debate is predicated on the fundamental acceptance that that definition of true is valid and complete. And so the religious people just lose because they're up against the might of science. It's like, how are they not going to lose that? What do you mean by God? It's not great. I've read it. By the way, he's very, very influential. How you influence the world? By the way, I want to keep you on time. What would you ever want?

Smart. Yeah, very I had a conversation with him at Oxford. We're going to release that couple of weeks. How long ago was that month ago? It's very cool. Yeah, only audio. But yeah, I would have liked to have talked him for like 35 hours. I bet I can only imagine that especially so how much more time do I got to wrap up? Because it's anyways, let me show you this this neighbor mine asked me this question. He's Canadian He says can you ask Jordan Peterson this go to the picture with Trudeau what what can you say about this? This is your world. I don't know if this is this even talked about over there with the whole story of Justin Trudeau's You know related to Castro because years ago like is this is this a good show the other picture where this other guy posted it

So apparently this is Go to the picture of a Fidel the wife and the father so this is a picture of them three That's his mother that's him that's the father, but then you put Justin right next to Castro Can you go back to the other picture on Twitter? Yeah, that one right there? It's really similar. Yeah, is there any, is this even a conversation in Canada, is anybody been telling? Because this is written about many, many different places

to the point where they tweeted about it and said, no, Castro is not just in true, though, as far as- No, no, no, it's a nasty. It's a nasty bit of a new endo. And I think it's resentment-fueled fundamentally. Like in some sense, it's a satirical joke, and fair enough, but it's not helpful. Look, one of the things that happens

if you're a political leader is you're exposed to criticism of all sorts. And part of that is to stop your power from degenerating to something approximating a tyranny. So you kind of have to put up with it. This I would say is I wouldn't propagate the idea. Okay. First of all, just its speculation, clearly. It's mean-spirit-its-speculation on the part in relationship to the behavior of Trudeau's

mother. Even if it was true, then, well, what's your point? He's born a communist? That's your point, that's a stupid point. You know, or what he knows that Castro is his father, and so now he's tilting hard towards the left to please him. Well, that's not helpful and clueless. Now, the Trudeau's in some sense set themselves up for something like this,

because Trudeau played the senior, played Futsi with Castro in a way that was rather unique in the Western world. And I think that was ill. That was not a good decision. He was less stringent in drawing a line between the left and the radical communist left that he might have been. And so those chickens have come home to roost, in some sense, in terms of this assault on

his son. And just in himself, it doesn't do a very good job of drawing a distinction between his views and the views of the radical left. And so all of that's mangled around in this satirical attack. But I don't think it's the most effective. It's got an element of real gossipy innuendo and mean spiritedness about it that I think overwhelms whatever humorous satire it might also contain. So I mean they did this with Obama's, you know, when Trump came out and said, $5 million, prove to me your birth certificate, your born. These types of stories tend to do well

and they tend to go viral. But, you know, this is just, when you look at this, it looks a little too real to, you know, that's why people are giving the credibility. Anyways, we are at the end of the podcast. Jordan, I appreciate you coming out. A couple of things. Gank, if you are on Florida, that's why people are giving the credibility. Anyways, we are at the end of the podcast. Jordan, I appreciate you coming out. Couple of things. Gank, if you are on Florida, he's performing, he's speaking

tonight. If you can't even get the tickets, at Miami, Florida, Phil Moore, today the third. No, I'm sorry, seven, oh, I'm sorry. Seven, you're going to be in Houston. It's where you'll be at the Bayou Music Center, eight, you'll be in Midland, Texas, nine, you're in Irving, 10th in San Antonio, 15th in New York, 16th in New York, 17th in Providence, 21st in New York, uh... by you music center eight ub mdland texas night urn urving tenton san antonia fifteen to new york

sixteen to new york seventeen in providence twenty-first and nor nor or fault virginia then dc on the twenty-second philadelphia twenty-third Boston twenty four we're gonna put the link below if you haven't had a chance to go spend some time with the smanah highly recommend you take your family wife kids uh... and have them here from him because he's going to get everybody

thinking and at least to great conversation. And I have a feeling this will not be the last time we'll have you on again. Jordan, thank you so much for coming on. Can you see you guys again? Yes. And what we're doing is every time we get a guess, somebody signs one of these lockboxes, you pick one, sign it up there. So we know Jordan Peterson was in the house, folks.

This has been a week of us doing podcasts four times. I think we got some lineup next week's only even one time because I'm all over the country, but it's been great to have in Jordan on today. Hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel. Tyler, you look like you want to say something. I'd say we got Rollo Tomasso, Tomassi Tuesday,

and maybe a few other things in the world. We do have a lot of surprises coming up. We just can't reveal it right now. But anyways, take care everybody. Bye bye, bye, bye, bye, bye. ... you