The Joe Rogan Experience - #1933 - Jordan Peterson

Episode Date: January 28, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist, the author of several best-selling books, among them "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos," and "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life," and the host of "The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast." www.jordanbpeterson.com

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Hello, Jordan Peterson. I didn't even notice you have a two-tone suit going on. Can I tell you about this suit? You're a wild man. Please do. Okay, well... What's happening with that?

Company made this for me, LGFG. They made me a dozen suits. Yeah? One for each rule from 12 Rules for Life. The rules are printed on the back of this underneath the collar. This is a heaven and hell suit, so it's quite fun. Which one's hell? I'll show you in a sec. Hell's red, Joe.

Come on. But that's not really red. It's like a magenta. It's stylish. Yeah, okay, hell's magenta. Yeah, it's designer a magenta, right? It's stylish. Yeah. Okay. Hell's magenta. Okay. Hell's magenta. Yeah. It's designer hell. Ah, nice. So this is made out of sheep's wool and this is made out of goat's wool.

So that's pretty funny. And then in here you've got your basic heaven lining and your basic hell lining. Okay. Yeah. So. I don't think I've ever seen a man walk around with a, I think you're one up. Am I one up? Yeah, you're one up. Are you up yeah you're one up are you no

that's no you're good it's a it's double breasted double breasted yeah fancy yeah got one suit with you in the lining too oh no i was gonna wear it today i thought about wearing it it's a it's a black suit with platinum wires in it which is kind of cool And inside it's got black and white images of like a really sharp, sharp, harsh graphic images of you and Brett Weinstein and Ben Shapiro and Russell Brand and, you know, as an assortment to the Sam Harris too. Oh, that whole intellectual dark web thing. Sam's in there. Sam's in there too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I still have hope for Sam Harris.

Yeah. Me too. Me too. Yeah. I still have hope for Sam Harris. Yeah, me too. Yeah, I hope he makes a comeback. I mean, he's not really going away. He's just got some weird opinions. Yeah, well, there's plenty of that floating around. Well, you know, I think when you have complex, fascinating brains, they go off in all kinds of different directions. Don't you think? This is one of the dangers of being creative, right?

Most creative ideas are wrong, and a good section of those wrong ones are fatal. But now and then you get one that's necessary. Yeah, we were talking about Twitter files before we got rolling and what the new stuff is. So the new stuff has something to do with AI and some sort of content moderation? Oh, yeah., well Tabby released

some Twitter files today on, well, or on Twitter obviously, and they're going through the code. Now I don't understand the technical details, but you know, you don't exactly know when you see the output of a code generated system exactly what rules it's using to sort the information. I suppose that's the equivalent of shadow banning. And there's all sorts of, there was apparently all sorts of directives built into the code to amplify certain kinds of messages and, you know, de-amplify others.

And so apparently Musk is doing what he can to clean that up. Rubin reported that the other day. Then Tybee today, he was talking more about the whole Russian collusion fabrication. Yeah. So that's also real fun. Well, how about the one guy that was going after Trump, who it turned out was actually in collusion with the Russians? Oh, yeah, that's a rough one.

Yeah. Well, the best defense is a rough one. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the best defense is a good offense, you know, and so. I guess. I guess. Yeah, I guess. I know. We're in a crazy world.

But it's just like, why would anybody not think that that was going to come around to get them? It's amazing how often people don't think that, you know, what they're doing isn't going to end up aimed squarely at them. Well, this Twitter thing, right? They never suspected that someone like Elon was going to come along and buy Twitter and then, in an unheard of tactic, have a bunch of journalists review everything in all of their Slack meetings and all their emails, look under the code, look under the wiring under the machine and find out how it was actually running. And why, I mean, the fact that anyone would ever think that any of this stuff is a good idea, that people don't understand like the dangers of censorship,

they don't understand what, where this leads to. Yeah. Well, we're seeing a little bit of that emerge on the right now, you know, which is kind of frightening to me. So I'm an admirer in many ways of what's going on in Florida, you know, with DeSantis. But him and Rufo, who I also think has got a bit of a clue, are trying to, what would you say, limit or even ban critical race theory. And the problem with that is you can't define it, right? Right. So how do you control something you can't define? with that is you can't define it, right? Right.

So how do you control something you can't define? And the answer is you battle it out on the battleground of ideas. Because as soon as you start to try to define it and then try to censor it, well, first of all, that's just going to grow because that's how those things work. You know, like where does critical race theory shade into Marxism? Well, who the hell knows? Where does Marxism shade into socialism? That's an even harder question. Then where does socialism shade into, socialism that's even harder question then where does socialism shade into you know just being on the side of the working class well all that's fuzzy

beyond belief and so once you get to the point where the government has to step in and regulate say what education systems are doing you're already in deep trouble and because it can't I don't see how it can really be done because i can't define critical race theory you know i mean more or less you can get some sense of the cloud of ideas that's associated with it but but trying to draw the lines how are you going to do that and then of course you enable inevitably no matter what your goal is to begin with you're going to control a certain form let's say of pathological communication with, you're going to control a certain form, let's say, of pathological communication, misinformation. That's just going to play into the hands of people who like to censor,

and that's just as likely on the right as it is on the left. So, no, it's a real dangerous game. Isn't it a problem, like, the term critical race theory is, it's open to interpretation. Yeah, well, it's often even hard, except in retrospect, to understand a lot of what these things actually are, is it's open to interpretation. Yeah, well, it's often even hard, except in retrospect, to understand a lot of what these things actually are,

you know, because new clouds of ideas emerge and they kind of have an animating spirit and they have a set of associated, what would you say, presumptions, and you can often only see what that is in retrospect. You know, it took me a long time to understand whatever existentialism was enough to sort of define it, phenomenology,

these different schools of thought that occupied the thoughts of psychological investigators over a couple of centuries, post-modernism, modernism, you know. It's not an easy thing to extract out the gist of those and define them.

Plus, as I said, they have very fuzzy boundaries so what i saw with desantis was there was uh he had a concern that they that it wasn't just black history that they were putting into this critical race theory but that he saw that there was queer theory which was in this thing they were teaching in school like what does that have any how does that have anything to do with black history like why is queer theory inserted yeah well i think i think the way those are linked is essentially through what you might regard as well it's an implicit marxism but it's even deeper than marxism so if you're a marxist you basically you have a heuristic that simplifies

the world and that heuristic is that you can understand any social relationship from an intimate relationship all the way up to the state by just dividing the parties, let's call them the narrative partners in a discussion or an interaction into those who are oppressed and victimized and those who are taking advantage of them and profiting. That's basic Marxist theory of economics. And there's obviously some truth in that because when systems become corrupt, that's how they operate, right? It's exploitation and victimization. And every system tends towards corruption. And so,

and if your eyes are open a little bit, or if you're, let's call it, if you've moved from naivety to cynicism, then you can see every interaction as a power dynamic. And then that drives, as soon as you have that established, that idea that the basic relationship is one of power, well, then you can see, well, there's no difference between what's happened to queer people in relationship to those in power, and what's happened to black people in relationship to those in power. But it's united by that underlying. That's why I always make a case for the domination of something like postmodernism and Marxism. You know, I've been criticized for that, but I think it's an accurate association.

The postmodernists figured out, and they were right about this, that we see the world through a story. Now, that turns out to be something unbelievably complicated and I think all the top end neuroscientists like Carl Friston are, what would you call, converging on this presumption that you have to see the world through a story. And the postmodernists actually figured that out. The French postmodernists, you know, Foucault and Derrida and people like that. But then they did something that was a sleight of hand. And this all happened in the 1970s. They said, well, we have to see the world through a story. And even if you're a

scientist, you're not exactly objective because there's a narrative driving your work that you might be unaware of. That's your implicit narrative. That's what might be implicitly biasing you. But they jumped to the conclusion that the underlying narrative was one of power. It's basically that all human relationships are predicated on power. And, you know, there isn't a more cynical viewpoint than that. And it's easy to take apart, you know, if you think about it for a moment in a practical sense. If your marriage is just based on power, first of all, it's an unpleasant place because it's tyrant and slave. And second, like good luck with that because people aren't that easy to tyrannize, you know, like maybe you have a willing slave in your wife, but I doubt it. If you're just trying

to play power games with her, she's going to fight back with everything she's got. And then if you have friends, it's like, that's a relationship of mutual exploitation, is it? Then you're just a bully with henchmen and they're going to stab you in the back the first chance they get you're a mob man yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well worse than that even a dictator yeah yeah yeah you're a dictator you're a dictator you know uh and you know people say well look at how successful dictator psychopaths can be but i look at them and I think, well, that's your definition of success. Yeah. What is success?

I mean, how are you spiritually fulfilled? Yeah. Are you happy? Yeah. Right. Well, the leader of a bad place might be the person who's worst off in some

fundamental sense, right? They're the most corrupt. Isn't that funny though? The, the way we define success is power and, and money. Like those are like,

you look how successful they are. Yeah. Power and money. A complete absence of love and trust and respect and basic human dignity. Well, it's also not really how people operate. So there's an anthropological literature on the formation of elders in, say, traditional societies, because you might ask yourself, you know, who becomes an elder? And if you were a Marxist cynic, you'd say, well,

those who used exploitation to dominate, like the priestly class or something like that, and that goes along with the supposition that, you know, religion is the opiate of the masses. And some of that's obviously true, but a lot of it isn't. The elders aren't that at all. They're the people who others go to spontaneously to ask for counsel. And then you ask, well, who do people naturally gravitate towards for counsel?

And the answer is, well, productive, generous people who've managed their interpersonal relationships well. Because who the hell else would you go ask for advice if you had any sense? Like you might go ask the local dictator and kowtow to him if you need a favor to take somebody out. But if you're actually asking for counsel, you're going to ask someone who's decent and who's generous and who plays a reciprocal game. And it's also the case, this is worth knowing too, the problem with a power game is that it's not playable, not in the final analysis. So Frans de Waal, the Dutch primatologist, has showed even pretty clearly in chimpanzees, you know, you think the roughest, toughest chimpanzee rules the damn

roost and he pounds everybody flat and he gets access to the females. And there's a little bit of truth to that because female chimps aren't sexually choosy, but the male chimps will chase weaker males away from them. And so if you are more powerful physically as a male chimp, you do have preferential mating access. But the problem with being a brute, even if you're a chimp, is that you have an off day and two of the chimps that you oppressed band together and tear you into pieces. And so what De Waal found was that in chimp troops, the stable alpha can sometimes even

be the smallest male of the troop. He'll ally himself with some of the dominant females and makes networks that are essentially friendships, reciprocal friendships. And that gives him a stable position, not of power but of authority. And that's definitely the case in functional human societies. It's not based on power. Now, it's tricky because if it degenerates, then it degenerates into a relationship of power. And so that means the critics who make the claim that everything's about power are right in some sense when they're talking about nothing but corruption,

but they're really 100% seriously wrong about the idea that it's power relation that constitutes the basis for the organization of any social interaction. You know, it doesn't work in your marriage, doesn't work with your friends, doesn't work with your children, doesn't work with your business partners, doesn't work with your customers, it doesn't work with politicians, although here's another twist that's complicated. So imagine you have a population of people who basically cooperate reciprocally. So, you know, I do you a favor, you do me one, and maybe we figure out how to advance each other across time. That's a good game, right? Fair trade plus

advancement. That's a good definition for a good marriage. Okay, but now you have a community of people like that together. Okay, now it opens up an ecological niche. And the niche is psychopathy. And the psychopath comes in and pretends that he's a productive, generous reciprocator. But he's not. He's just an instrumental manipulator. But he can get away with it because there's enough wealth generated by the cooperators, you know, the honest cooperators, so that there's a space for someone to exploit the system. And that stabilizes that 4% of the population. So, you know, across the world,

4% of people are close enough to clinically diagnosable psychopaths. And that's probably better than being, you know, paralyzed by fear and anxiety and just staying in your bed. It's better in terms of reproductive success, let's say, and maybe even success in general. But it's not a good game because in the real world, most psychopaths get found out pretty quickly. So, you know, you can screw somebody once and maybe twice, but then they figure it out and then word gets around and so in the real world two things happen psychopaths have to be itinerant so they can find new people to exploit and the other thing that happens is generally non-psychopathic males

who are fairly aggressive keep the psychopaths under control and so part of the reason that women like men who have some capacity for aggression, but who are still productive and reciprocal, is that men who are productive and reciprocal, who have some capacity for aggression, can keep the real monsters at bay. So it's hard on women, because they have to navigate that really thin line between productive generosity and the capacity for aggression. That's a really tough thing to navigate. That's basically the story of Beauty and the Beast, the Disney movie, right? Because Gaston is a narcissistic psychopath. And the Beast is someone capable of aggression,

but he's not tamed into a reciprocal relationship. It's also the basis of the most fundamental female pornographic fantasy. And the Google guys figured that out, you know, 15 years ago when they analyzed billions of sex fantasy searches by men and women. Men go for visual imagery, but women go for story. And the story is the same. with a lot to offer, but kind of hidden, finds some male, five categories of men, vampire, werewolf, pirate, surgeon, billionaire. And he's, you know, kind of an aggressive guy,

but he's capable of being tamed into an intimate relationship. That's the standard female pornographic fantasy. And it's pretty much the standard fantasy of romance. And so you can see, you know, what women are trying to do in that situation is they're trying to find some guy that's got the capacity for mayhem, but that's under control, but who can integrate that into a productive, generous, reciprocal relationship. It's fascinating because the capacity for violence and the capacity for aggression is one of the things that's been actively muted in our male population. Yeah. Well, there's a bunch of reasons for that. And some of them turn into positive feedback loops, like there's sort of self-fulfilling prophecies. So there's a lot of women out there who've never had a positive relationship with any male in their life, right? And maybe not only not a positive relationship, but really a series of

pretty negative relationships. And so women like that are very leery of any expression of male ability of any sort, because they can't distinguish productive competence from arbitrary power. And because they're trying to defend themselves because they've been hurt repeatedly, maybe they come from broken families and catastrophically arranged neighborhoods, you know, one of the tactics that can be used in that situation is just to try to do everything you can to distance yourself as much as you can from any display of male ability, because it can't be distinguished from psychopathy, can't be distinguished from the use of power. It takes a sophisticated woman to be able to make that distinction So the other thing you see too is that young women are much more likely to be seduced by psychopaths than older women

Because the psychopaths mimic competence that's what a narcissist does too, they're confident and Women read confidence as a marker of competence, and that's reasonable, but that opens up the space for exploitation. Because if you can mimic confidence, that's false confidence, narcissistic false confidence, then you look competent, and that works particularly well on naive young women. And of course, they get exploited by people like that, and they think, well, that's what men are like. Right. Yeah. Then women like that, you know, they have boys and then they're afraid of the boys whenever they express anything looking like masculine competence and they basically emasculate the boys and then the boys get bitter and then they mistreat women and the whole bloody thing just spirals out of control. And so, and that's

where we are. That's where we are. What a strange place to be, isn't it? Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah. Unintended consequence of familial breakdown. That's a huge part of it. So we decided to have this conversation because of what's going on with you in Canada. Oh, yeah. And that your clinical psychology license is in jeopardy because you have opinions about politics that they disagree with, which is a very dangerous and bizarre turn of events. Well, it's your fault, actually. I told you, I think, a week or so ago when we talked about this. Okay, so let me give you some background here.

I want to know how it's my fault. I will. I'll tell you. I'll tell you. A lot of things are your fault, as it turns out. Oh, no. Yeah, yeah. So the College of Psychologists has basically levied what are equivalent to about 13 lawsuits against me simultaneously. Now, the reason I call them lawsuits is because they're actions undertaken on behalf of a complainant. Now the complainant can be anyone anywhere in the world who complains about me for any reason. They don't have to be former clients. They don't even have to be anybody I've ever met. They don't even have to have met anybody I've ever met. So, you know, so it could be someone online. It is. All this is pretty much all these complaints are someone online. None of them are my clients, although half of them claim to be, falsely.

And the college didn't throw out their complaints despite that, which is really quite interesting. And what are the complaints? Well, okay, let's see. One complaint is about the tweet I made about Ellen or Elliot Page and when I said that a criminal physician cut off her breasts and that pride was the sin. So now I'm in trouble again, because I just said the same thing. One was about Sports Illustrated cover, where they featured that overweight model. And I tweeted out not

beautiful. And I guess that was something like fat shaming. I don't remember exactly what the charge was. And then I criticized Justin Trudeau and a former staff member of Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern. I made a joke about her. I was going to New Zealand and the New Zealand leftist press was freaking out. And I made this joke about bringing my alt-right trolls to New Zealand. And then I put in parentheses, or maybe they're just ordinary people who are trying to clean up their rooms. So apparently that was casting the profession into disgrace. And then they submitted one complainant from the US, submitted the entire transcript of our last discussion. So, you know, I don't know how to defend myself against that, because apparently everything I say,

and apparently everything you say too, is bringing the profession of psychology into disgrace. And I think they're most upset in that case about my comments about the inadequacy of climate models. And so, you know, what that has to do with my clinical practice is questionable to say the least. And so anyways, does that cover it? Yeah. It seems like this climate thing is a very rigid ideology that one must subscribe to wholesale. Yeah. You can't have any nuanced opinions on it and you can't have any, there's no variation. It's a religion. Yeah.

Actually, it's a pseudo, it's a partial pseudo religion. And I mean that technically. I'm going to write about this to some degree and I'm'm writing a new book, which will come out in November, called We Who Wrestle With God, and I'll cover that in this. But Alex Epstein, who wrote Fossil Fuel Future recently, comments about this a bit. So the basic structure of the quasi-religious belief, and so this is the set of initial presumptions.

That's a way of thinking about it. You know, we were talking about how ideas are structured earlier. The Marxists believe that everything's about power. There's a narrative at the base of any belief system. And the climate pseudo-religion is based on characterization of nature as something like a hapless, what would you call, hapless, what would you call hapless defenseless fragile virgin the industrial activity of mankind is is characterized as something like a rapacious power mad yeah yeah yeah demolisher of natural virginity and beauty and then the human being is the individual is characterized as nothing but a you know a devouring mouth whose activity runs contrary to the to the untrammeled beauty of the planet and that supports the activity of the tyrannical patriarchy that's basically it. And so the reason that narrative has force is because it

draws on underlying religious archetypes. And so to characterize the world properly, you do need to characterize the positive aspect of nature, because you have to live in something approximating a reciprocal harmony with nature. Because if you just eat everything and, you know, devour everything in your local landscape well then you die so that's a bad idea so you have to have some sense of the value of nature now you also have some have to have some sense of the fact that if you were dropped in the jungle naked in the Amazon you'd be dead in about 48 hours so you also need a figure to characterize the negative element of nature and that's completely absent from the environmental myth. That's part of what makes it pathological. And then

with regard to the rapacious tyranny, let's say, well, you know, any industrial system or any human organization can exploit the natural world to the point where that's not sustainable, and it can become oppressive and tyrannical. That's the evil king, ancient part of religious mythology going back as far back as we can chase it. So you need a representation of the negative aspect of society because, you know, you send your kids to school and they kind of get turned into these cookie-cutter kids and that crushes their innate, what would you say, difference and beauty and it's all the pain of having to be socialized and you have to understand

that there is this oppressive element of culture and so but then, you know, you should also wake up and notice that you've got the wise king too and that means you put, you plug in your damn toaster in the morning and the electricity works and you go out on the street and everyone isn't rioting. And, you know, there's workmen who are knee deep in the sludge trying to keep everything going. And you're not starving to death like everybody on the planet was in 1860. And so a little gratitude for the positive end of the patriarchy is in order, too. And that's completely absent in the environmental view. of the patriarchy is in order too.

And that's completely absent in the environmental view. And then with regard to the individual, it's like, well, of course you can be a selfish, impulsive, hedonistic consumer and you can facilitate the rapacious tyranny as a consequence of that rape of the planet. But by the same token, you know, we're not a cancer on the face of the earth. We're not a virus that's mutating and taking out the planet you know and we're not trapped in a malthusian nightmare and you got to give credit where it's due and you know there's an element of people of everyone that's noble and and generous and kind and productive and capable of living in a well-ordered state in something like sustainable and productive harmony with nature.

You only get half that story. Now, if you have no comprehensive underlying cultural narrative, which is increasingly the case in our society, and someone offers you, when you're a teenager, half the religious story, that'll just snap you up in a second, because it helps you order your relationship with the world. It gives you a pathway too, eh? So Jean Piaget, great developmental psychologist, he called the last stage of adolescence the messianic period, the messianic stage. Now, most people don't talk much about that, I think, because they don't know what to make of Piaget's claim.

But he was a real genius, Jean Piaget. They don't know what to make of Piaget's claim, but he was a real genius, Jean Piaget. And he said, you know, when you're making that transition from the group identity that you're chasing as a teenager to becoming an individual, and that's not a journey everyone takes because lots of people just get lost in group identity, you're going to be looking for a pathway that's essentially heroic. And what that pathway should be is that you identify with your culture deeply. You are socialized deeply into the traditions of your culture, but you're also capable of transcending it. So then you become a culture creator as well as a disciplined member of culture.

But young people need to be offered something like a, well, a vision of destiny in order to catalyze their identity. And we're very, very bad at that, except on the ideological front. So the woke types come along and say, you know, the planet's a virgin, the great father's a tyrant, you could be a hero if you just stood up to that. And the kids think, well, I'd like to do something important with my life. And so they're just caught into that immediately. But because it's a one-sided story, it's, well, it's a one-sided religious story is an ideology. And a great representation of that is what they've done with Greta Thunberg. Yeah, exactly.

It's so funny, you know, because I thought 10 years ago, I thought, we live in the delusion of a disturbed 13-year-old girl. How did that happen? And then, you know, Greta Thunberg showed up and I thought, oh, well, there we go. Now we've got the 13-year-old. I feel sorry for her, you know, because she was chased into this apocalyptic terror that we're trying to enforce on all our kids. And then you think about her position, you know, so now she's all afraid, and her mother's facilitating that like mad. And then, you know, she announces her fear,

her neurotic fear, essentially. It's driven by negative emotion. And, you know, Macron says to her, oh, my God, Greta, you're absolutely right, and bows. It's like, what the hell is a girl to think? You know, because what she really wants is to freak out a bit, because what she really wants is to freak out a bit and for someone calm and reasonable to say hey look kid you know the apocalypse has always

been on us it's always the case that the future has the possibility of being dreadful but you know we've conquered terrible things in the past and overcome massive obstacles and there's no reason at all not to assume that we can do the same thing that's a very important point well yeah it's it's such an important point because there's never been a time ever where everything was perfect well that's for sure there's never been a time ever environmentally where the earth was stable no if you go i mean stable you know currently you can kind of like guess what the weather's going to be but if you look at like models of like thousands of years it's never been flat.

It's always been up and down. It heats up. The earth was an ice ball many times. Many times. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Well.

Randall Carlson was saying there's been times in our like distant past where the CO2 levels and the oxygen levels were so fucked up that we were close to losing all life on earth. Right. Right. And then this can happen see the the antithesis to that is to believe in something like the paradisal the intrinsic paradisal stability of well-balanced mother nature right it's like yeah a bit but no not really there's a lot of variability a lot and of course that kind of variability that's hard on people because you want a certain amount of stability so you don't die.

Right. But it doesn't deny that human beings have an impact on this either. No, no. Well, this is why I really respect Bjorn Lomberg, you know, because Lomberg's hard to grasp because he forces you to think complexly. You know, he says, well, we don't have one problem, carbon dioxide, which is, you know, I don't even think it's clear that carbon dioxide is actually a problem, but we can leave that aside. That'll get me in trouble with the College of Psychologists again. But, you know, Lomberg says, look, you know.

It's a factor. It's a factor, yeah, yeah. But there's lots of factors, and God only knows what the most pressing problems that confront us truly are. When I wandered through the ecological sustainability literature about 10 years ago, and, you know, I concluded a couple of things. One was that the best way forward to a sustainable planet is to make everyone who's poor rich as fast as you possibly can. And that's Lombard's position. Yeah, not to put limits to

growth on, because it turns out if you get people above about $5,000 a year in average GDP, they start taking a long-term view of the future instead of scrabbling around in the dirt trying to get lunch, you know. And you're going to burn everything up around you to stay alive if you have to. Right. over, you know, maybe a 20-year period, which is quite the damn luxury, then you actually start being concerned about, you know, the quality, the aesthetic quality of the local environment. And so I was so excited when I found that data because I thought, oh, this is so cool. It means that we could have our cake and eat it too. We could work really hard to provide cheap, reliable energy, you know, at the lowest cost possible to the widest number of people worldwide. And the emergent consequence of that would be the whole planet would clean itself up.

So wouldn't that be great? Because we could make our goal the eradication of absolute poverty, which we actually done pretty good at eliminating over the last 15 years, but we could really make that a goal. And then one of the consequences of that the inevitable consequences, would be a greener and healthier planet. And then you think, well, why aren't we doing that? And that's a question, all right. And I think part of the reason is I've been trying to understand the driving ideas underneath this globalist utopian tyranny that seems to be developing from the top down. And I think it's driven at least in part by this religious vision that I already described, you know, that you have to construe culture itself, especially industrial culture,

as the tyrannical father raping and pillaging everything in its way, which is unbelievably dangerous way to think, too one-sided. And the idea that you have to impose limits to growth on people in order to have a sustainable planet. And that's allied with a view that probably stems all the way back to people like Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s, who really believe, really believe, truly, that maybe the planet should only have 500 million people on it,

or a billion, you know, in relative poverty, or two billion barely scraping by, because otherwise they're going to be wrecking everything, and, you know, controlled by some top-down authority that makes bloody well sure that no one's consuming too much. And so when I look at ideas like that, that first assumption, you know, the planet has too many people on it, it's like, I don't like to hear people say that, because when I hear that, I think, okay, buddy, who exactly are you thinking about getting rid of? Oh, well, it's not like that. It's like, yeah, it's like that. It has to be like that. It is absolutely like that. And so, you know, it's easy to get all paranoid conspiracy theorist about the WEF, say, and maybe there's some utility in that. But, you know, I don't think anybody's sitting at davos going well we got we got to scrap seven

billion people but if the underlying narrative is the one i just described you know virginal planet tyrannical patriarchy and rapacious individual and you believe well we're overpopulated like paul ehrlich has believed since really literally the mid-1960s, then how is it not going to be that the policies that you craft stemming from that narrative are colored by the belief that there's far too many people? Like, I've really felt that I beat at war for the last six months. And I would say it's war because what I observed happening in Europe when I was there last was that, well, you can see this, you don't have to be in Europe to see it, but it's more direct if you're there, is that it's pretty damn clear that the globalist utopians are willing to sacrifice the poor for the sake of the planet, you know, and they're doing that by

cranking energy prices up through the roof, and that means that people die. Lomburg has estimated that three, maybe you have to turn your thermostat down by three degrees, right? Save the planet, we don't have enough energy, we'll pay you not to use your electricity between five and six, which is what they're doing in the UK. You turn your damn thermostat down three degrees, that sounds like nothing. But if you're old, that radically increases the probability that you'll get a respiratory disease and die.

You know, and if the Europeans would have had a cold winter, and that could still happen, Lombard estimated it'd wipe out 135,000 people. It's like, well, you know, we're just making energy more expensive. It's like, what do you mean you're just doing that? So imagine the economic system. It's a pyramid. There's a bunch of people at the top.

They have almost all the money. That's par for the course for any productive system. Any system that's productive ends up with a distribution like that. It's pretty, it's like a law of nature. And then you move farther down the pyramid till you get down to the bottom where most of the people are and they're barely clinging on to the edge of reality right it doesn't take much of a crisis to tip them into you know death and then you crank up energy prices well what happens is you just take a bunch of those people at the bottom of the distribution the poor that the left is so you know hypothetically concerned with and you just they're just done

they go from barely hanging on to not hanging on and their kids go from having some ghost of a chance of opportunity having none and i could see this coming you really saw it happening in germany in the uk you know where we have this absolute rat's nest of way more expensive energy. And this is where it gets extremely perverse. You know, you might say, okay, look, we have to save the future poor. And so now some of the present poor are going to have to suffer. Well, that's convenient for you if you happen not to be one of those poor people, but let's give the devil his due and say, okay. It's like, that'd be fine with me. Not really. That'd be fine with me if the consequence of your actions, raising energy prices, for example, actually

produced an improvement in those things you wanted to improve. So for example, energy is more expensive, but now the air is cleaner. But that isn't what's happening in Germany. What's happening in Germany is energy is like five times as expensive and the coal plants are back on. So it's like even by your own criteria for success you failed and you did it at the expense of the poor. And you know the World Bank estimated I don't remember how many months ago, it's probably nine months ago, that we're putting 350 million people on the brink of starvation because we're cranking energy prices up. And so for me, it's like, that's 350 million people. That's three times as many as the communists killed, you know, in their six decades of trying.

And if your cure for the planet is, well is well you know we got to put 350 million poor people in jeopardy just so that things are hypothetically better in 100 years i think yeah i don't think so buddy and also it's a little bit too convenient for me that your prescriptions to save the planet are accompanied by this insistence that the only way forward to that is to give you all the power. It's like there's a bit of a moral hazard in that, don't you think? It's like I'm just saving the planet. Give me all the power.

It's like you want to save the planet or do you want the power? And let's put the second one first because the probability that you're a saint or the Messiah is pretty damn low. So that's the danger of the Davos crowd. It's a very bizarre narrative that doesn't get challenged. And I don't hear this very nuanced, complex perspective, like what you're laying out right now. I don't hear that often.

No, I don't hear it at all. I hear it from you and maybe a couple other people that I actively seek out. But you would think that when you're dealing with such a complex issue that you would want to see the most brilliant minds think out, how does this play out? Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay.

What are the consequences? Well, so let's say, let's think about what mitigates against that. Okay, so first of all, young people are looking for a, you know, a productive and visionary pathway forward. We already covered that a bit, but then there's the dark side of that too, and the dark side of that for everyone is that our reputations are very important to us. They're our most crucial currency, you know, and what that means is that we're tempted to elevate our reputations in an undeserved manner and we do that to gain social status with very little work and and so we're tilted towards being tempted by theories that provide us with an easy way forward to that and so one is well

i'm a good person well how do i know that well i'm concerned about the planet well, I'm a good person. Well, how do I know that? Well, I'm concerned about the planet. Well, that's a complex problem, the planet, right? That's a trillion problems, not one. I'm concerned about the planet, therefore I'm good. But that's complicated. You got to take it apart. No, you don't. You just say, well, the planet only has one problem.

Well, what's that? Untrammeled industrial activity and the rapacious nature of the consumer. Okay, what's the output? Too much carbon dioxide. Okay, I'm against carbon dioxide. Well, bang, you're the messiah, you know, with no work. And then someone, Lomberg, comes along and says, hold on there, guys. We got like 30 problems, not one.

And we need to rank order the problems and we need to do a differentiated analysis and your idiot interventions are going to cause nothing but unintended consequences. And no one wants to hear that because number one, it's complicated. You got to read the damn book and you got to think through his arguments.

And number two, well, now where are you going to get your cheap moral virtue? You can't just be the Messiah by waving a banner that says, I don't like carbon dioxide. And so that runs against a very, very deep narcissism. And so that's part of what stands in opposition to people, especially people like Lomberg. And that's accentuated by social media.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Like greatly. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Like greatly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, social media is a great place to garner unearned social reputation. Yeah. I mean, it can be gamed, and it is gamed. And we also even know the nature of the people who game it. There's a whole emergent psychological literature concentrating on dark tetrad traits. So we could walk through that a little bit.

dark tetrad traits. So we could walk through that a little bit. So the standard personality models that produce the big five, extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, they were derived sort of with a primitive AI, that's a way of thinking about it, that looked for patterns of description across huge corpuses of linguistic data. How do people talk about each other? It turns out they talk about each other using five dimensions and those are the dimensions I just described. But the people who derived the big five didn't use evaluative descriptors. They threw anything out that looked like a value judgment. So for example, you might say of someone he's a good person and you might say of someone else he's a malevolent person. Those descriptors weren't included in the big five corpus because they were trying to derive a model of normative personality

okay so but that meant that the pathological personality wasn't encapsulated or well defined now this guy robert hair who worked at university of british columbia's world's leading authority on psychopathy and he interviewed hundreds and hundreds of psychopaths and was always fooled by them by the way and then he had a student Dale Paulus who works at UBC and Paulus developed a model of personality that base was based on pathology like on the dark side and he called that the dark triad Machiavellianism that means Machiavellian is someone who so let's say if I. Machiavellianism. That means Machiavellian is someone who, so let's say, if I was Machiavellian in our discussions, what I would have done was think, before I came here, I thought, well, you know, what can Joe offer me? what I'm, you know, the narrow, impulsive, selfish thing that I'm aiming at right now.

So that's how a Machiavellian operates. A narcissist, that's the next part of the dark triad, is someone who wants social status without doing any of the work. They want all the attention. If you're dating a narcissist or in a relationship with a narcissist, they'll alienate all your family members and your friends so that they get all the attention. And that'll just be the first of the games they play with you yeah then you have psychopathy and the psychopaths are parasitical predators and so the predator will take whatever you've got and the parasite will live off you and then here's a parasitical ideological statement property is

theft a classic marxist trope why would you say that well if I want to live off you the way I'm going to justify that ethically is by claiming well you know Joe look how privileged you are you've got all this money you just you just took that from the oppressed and if I'm manipulating you so that I get some of your money that's only just because first of all it's exactly what you did and second of all well why not get some of your money. That's only just because, first of all, it's exactly what you did. And second of all, well, why not spread some of that wealth around? So that's Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, dark triad. They've expanded that recently to add another dimension that was missing, sadism.

And the sadist takes positive delight in causing pain to others. And the lulz culture, L-U-L-Z, the lulz culture online, is a culture of sadistic, Machiavellian, narcissistic psychopaths. Lulz, meaning like people are joking around and shitposting. Yeah, yeah, I did it for the lulz, and it's the plural of L-O-L, laugh out loud. But if you look at the Urban Dictionary, for example, the definition of lulz is positive delight in the suffering of others. It's like, yeah, it's sadistic.

And bloody well, social media just facilitates like that. I never thought of lulls as being sadistic. In and of itself, it's not a sufficient marker, right? You have to have like six or seven things going on before it's clear that you're manifesting this underlying tetrad of personality traits. Like if you use the odd acronym and you're throwing out a joke at someone, this is a habitual pattern of doing nothing but provoking people online and using deception and lies to do it to attract attention to yourself. You know, it has to be a very consistent pattern. But Paulos, first of all, and his crew of researchers

and people who've been influenced by him, have laid out this four-dimensional structure of the dark side, let's say. And they've shown that hyper-users of social media, Instagram, for example, and people who do a lot of anonymous shitposting, are characterized by, you know, what would you call it, domination by those four traits. And part of the reason for that, this is very, very dangerous to our whole society, I think, is that you've got to ask yourself what keeps the psychopaths under control in the normal population. And the answer seems to be, especially on the male side, is that narcissistic aggressive men get put in their place by non-narcissistic aggressive men.

And that usually has to do with something like the threat of physical intervention. You know how it is if you get a bunch of guys together. I can make a joke about you. You know, and I could even make a joke that was, that sort of put you down. But the joke would have to be funny. You'd have to have the opportunity to reciprocate. And you'd have to believe that I was doing it in good spirit Because if I just used the opportunity to you know stick the knife in we're not going to get along with each other very long and We know that and men know that when they talk to each other and so part of what keeps

Dialogue among men civilized is the possibility that it won't be civilized if it goes too sideways. And everybody knows that. But there is none of that online. Because anybody can post anything about anyone, no matter how denigrating and derisive, especially if they do it anonymously. And there's zero consequence. In fact, quite the opposite. If they're good at it, they get a lot of attention.

And the social media companies will monetize it and so not only is it not inhibited it's actually facilitated and this isn't a trivial problem because if the psychopaths multiply enough they take the whole society out so i think virtualization enables psychopathy and it's worse than just the trolling bit. That's bad enough because it pollutes political dialogue and it makes everyone think that everything is more unstable than it really is. But online criminality is actually a terrible plague. You know, I don't think there's an old person in North America who isn't being targeted by some gang of psychopaths who's, you know, documented all of their interests and their locale and who knows how much money is in their bank account

and who's doing everything they possibly can at every second to leverage access to it. That's just happening continually. Well, that's certainly algorithms, right, for a lot of people that get trapped into these sort of situations where people are constantly throwing at them things that are opportunities for them to either make money or get this or avoid pain refund or yeah get a refund you bet or they befriend them you know they get they get it in and some lonely old character who's not functioning cognitively

quite like he used to you know he gets sucked in by someone pretending to be his friend and offered a great investment opportunity yeah yeah yeah and it's very very very difficult to track this sort of thing online so you get the real enabling of the criminals because how the hell if they're anonymous how the hell do you keep them you know how do you hold them to to account but and then a secondary derivation of that is something like trolling and that's really not so good either because if the psychopathic narcissistic machiavellian sadists are dominating the political discourse, then ordinary people look at that and think, oh my God, everything's going to hell. Everyone's really extreme.

And really, it's a non-random sample. And so, you know, I can really see this in my own life. You know, because if you just looked at me virtually, you'd think like I was the world's most embattled person in some way you know maybe not the world's most but I'm up in the top 10 maybe but in my real life then that like I don't have any problems you know I go around from town to town or from city to city and every interaction I have with people on the street is positive they either don't know me which is fine or they do and then we have a positive interaction and i've only had like three negative interactions with people in real life in the last six years like they stand out

because they're not fun but they're extremely rare but online it's like well 50 of the people oppose jordan peterson it's like no they don't it's not it's not even one percent So we're building a virtual world that doesn't sample the real world very well, and that's not much different from building a delusion. So not good. Very unsettling. That's Twitter. Yeah. Well, it's certainly Twitter before Elon Musk came along.

Yeah, well, Twitter's better, but it's still quite the snake pit. Yeah. You know, one of the things I think might be done about that, see, I don't think that, I've made this claim on Twitter that there's something cowardly about anonymous posting, and I'm not going to retract that because I believe that in 99% of the cases that's true. Now, people say, well, you know, if you're a whistleblower, you have to be anonymous. And what about people in totalitarian states and, or in a company? Well, same, that's the whistleblowing problem. I think, yeah, 1% of anonymous posters are heroes, but 80% of them are Machiavellians. And so. Well, there's also the

factor of people that don't want to get in trouble at work. Yeah, I know. I know. Well, that's kind of the whistleblower problem. But not even whistleblowers. I mean, people that just have opinions that vary. You mean that might get them in trouble with the College of Psychologists in Ontario, for example. Yeah, I know. So, well, I think one of the ways of handling that technically, what I'd like to see happen at Twitter, for example, you know, not that I'm in a position to know because I know it's complicated, is I think the anonymous types should be separated from the real people. So you could go visit them and see what they have to say, but the verified people, you know, their comments are either at the top or in a different place.

Because I don't think that you can, I don't think that we can set up a playable game online when the anonymous trolls have the same rights as the verified responsible people. And I also think, and I don't know what you think about this, Joe, but, you know, let's say you want to be a whistleblower.

You want to say something that's going to get you in trouble at work. So you want to do it anonymously. It's like, maybe you're shirking your responsibility because maybe you have a responsibility, you know, and I could be persuaded alternatively responsibility because maybe you have a responsibility, you know, and I could be persuaded alternatively.

But maybe you have a responsibility if you have something to say, to say it in your own voice and to put yourself behind it, you know, and maybe you're taking the easy way out by not doing that. And, you know, I don't want to say that about every single person who posts anonymously. But, you know, tyranny emerges emerges when normal honest people are now afraid to say what they think and when the tyranny is complete in a totalitarian state no one ever says what they think about anything everyone lies all the time and i see part of the pathway to that the unwillingness of ordinary people to take the consequences of their truthful speech you know and i also think that's detrimental to them because i think that you find the adventure in your life i think this is

certainly true you you find the adventure in your life by standing behind your words like that's you right those are your words if you're telling the truth that's actually you and there's going to be consequences. And sometimes they're going to be negative. But do you really think that the consequences of telling the truth in your own voice are negative? You think the world's structured like that? Jesus, that's a dismal view, man. Well, it depends on the amount of autonomy you have.

It depends on the amount of resources you have. I mean, let's take, for example, nurses. Nurses who had contracted COVID during the pandemic and had developed natural immunity. There was already studies that showed that that natural immunity was superior to the immunity that was imparted by the vaccine. But yet they were being mandated to take this vaccine. And a lot of them had some serious apprehensions about it that were logical based on people that they knew that had adverse reactions. And now we're finding out more and more how common those adverse reactions were.

Now, if these women stepped up or these men who are nurses stepped up and said something about it publicly, they would be fired. Yeah, well, look, when I was working as a clinician, I had lots of clients who were in that position. You know, they're at work and they're being tyrannized by some, well, sometimes it was DEI types and sometimes it was just diversity, inclusivity, and equity. You know, the woke ideologues who were coming for them and not letting them say what they wanted to say politically. And sometimes they're just being tyrannized by garden variety narcissists, you know, their bosses were that sort. And it was crushing them. And, you know, it's easy to say to people like that, well, just stand up to your boss, but they often were rather constrained in their

employment opportunities and they had families. And so you can't tell people, well, just go shoot off your mouth stupidly, get fired and taken out and mobbed and let your family starve. That's pretty dumb strategy. But what we would always do in the therapeutic endeavor with someone in a situation like that was to situate themselves in their life so that they could afford to abide by their own truth. And so that might mean if you're in a job, let's say, where you don't have freedom of expression, you know, you get your resume or your CV polished up so that if necessary, you could make a lateral move relatively quickly.

Maybe you send out some job applications just to test the market. And if you're not marketable, maybe you pop up your skills. And then maybe if you're in a position where you're vulnerable because someone else has got control over your tongue maybe you work real hard to put some other ground under your feet so that you can't be taken out so easily you know like when i opposed the the bill c16 in canada the mandatory pronoun bill a guy knew first of all i knew that that

would cause a psychological epidemic i told told the Senate that back in 2017. I said, you guys don't know what you're doing here. You're going to confuse a lot of adolescent young women, and for every girl you hypothetically save who has body dysmorphia, and that'll be a vanishingly small number of people who are actually saved, you're going to doom like 300. Of course, that's exactly what's happened. That's why the Tavistock Clinic shut down in the UK, you know, and so there was that. But I also had set myself up, you know, because I had three

streams of income. I had my university salary, I had a clinical practice, and I had a business. And that wasn't accidental. You know, I knew from my clinical practice that if you wanted to say what you had to say, you had to put yourself in a position where you couldn't be easily taken out by the mob or the tyrant. And then I would say, well, if you're not in a position where you can afford to say what you have to say, then that's an indication that you haven't positioned yourself optimally existentially. You haven't positioned yourself optimally in life. You're too, your fundamental, your foundation is too weak. And so, you know, maybe it'll take you three years to fix that, you know,

so that now you've, you're grounded firmly, so that a casual objection from your boss, or even being fired, isn't going to take you out. It's not like that's easy. But, I mean, abiding by the truth isn't easy. The only thing, but it's a lot more preferable than abiding by falsehood. That's the problem, right? Of course abiding by the truth isn't easy, obviously.

But, you know, what sort of devil do you let into your head if you abide by falsehood? And some of that might be just not saying what you have to say. And that's not just, you know. Mostly we regard sins of commission as more egregious than sins of omission. You know, an outright lie is worse than just failure to say what you know to be the truth. But when enough people are silent about things they know they have something to say about, something to say something about, then you have a tyranny. And so, well, we haven't sorted through all this, you know, very well in our society, something to say about something to say something about then you have a tyranny and so well we

haven't sorted through all this you know very well in our society but i think it's morally incumbent on all of us to set up our lives so that we can afford to tell the truth and if you can't well then you think no you're you're you haven't got the hat the hatch is battened down right the walls of your towers your fort aren't high enough. You're not properly armed. And you should be because, you know, the mob's coming for you. And so is the chaos of nature. And you bloody well better be prepared.

And so I think if you're anonymous, you're depriving yourself of the necessity to put yourself in a position where you can you can tell the truth now think about what happened to you now you tell me you tell me what you think about this i mean i've been watching you for a long time and it's quite remarkable seeing the impact that you've had that keeps increasing across time you know but my my experience with you is that you know you have your opinions your perspective and you'll put them forward but mostly what you do is you ask people questions that you actually have as questions right far

as i can tell you're mostly trying to figure out what the hell's going on and so that's honest it's honest exposition it's an honest it's honestly exposes your own ignorance as well and you know you can take the audience along as a consequence of that. And for you, the consequence has been, you know, you've gone from just doing this podcast, sort of a side thing for you, at least when it started, to being, I don't know if there's anybody who has more impact as a single individual on the media environment worldwide than you do.

That's all a consequence of actually truthfully admitting your own ignorance and saying what you had to say. And I know you were set up you do that's all a consequence of actually truthfully admitting your own ignorance and saying what you had to say and i know you were set up to do that because you had multiple streams of income you know and you couldn't easily be taken out you'd already accomplished things in multitude of spheres but think of the consequence of that you think well would that happen to anybody who did everything they could to ask stupid questions and tell the truth the answer is maybe you know so you don't do that you hide and you have your reasons you know your family's at risk it's like fair enough man but you you deprive yourself of the great adventure of your life and you contribute by remaining silent to path pathologization of the whole society so well that doesn't seem like a very good route to me.

You're making sense, but it's a very, very complex situation for someone who has put all their eggs in one basket, like particularly someone who's a nurse who has to work long hours, doesn't have another stream of income, and isn't really making enough money to have a nest egg saved away. Yeah, you bet. For safety net. As a single mother. Right. Yeah, absolutely. come in isn't really making enough money to have a nest egg saved away yeah you bet yeah maybe a single is a single mother and right yeah absolutely well there's a woman in in canada right now a

nurse whose name unfortunately i forget who's being hauled over the coals by her college for you know making the radical claim that there are only two sexes and so i know and and you know part of the reason i'm pursuing this action with regard to the Ontario College of Psychologists, well, there's two reasons, really. Three. One is, you know, leave me the hell alone, guys. You've been on my case non-stop for seven years, not once before that, in 20 years of practice. There's no complaints ever levied against me. It wasn't until I started to become, you know, relatively well known publicly that the college came after me. And seven years of that gets to be a bit much, especially now that there's 13 lawsuits compiled up and all of them are for political opinions and half of them have been put forward on false

grounds. But even that's not enough for me to engage in the battle. The reason I'm engaging in the battle is, well, first of all all you want me to do social media retraining so I communicate better according to your experts it's like experts by what criteria exactly what's a social media communication expert you got any documentation that that even exists as a field

how do you know that if you have that social media expert train me that I'm going to be a better therapist there's no body of data that suggests that in the least. So I'm not going down that route. We should explain that because that is one of the things. This isn't a threat by the college. This is what the situation already is.

I haven't been hauled in front of their disciplinary board yet, but they've already convicted me of disgracing the profession and sentenced me to an indefinite period of re-education. And that's the second most serious punishment that they can levy against a professional. The first is to take away the license. The second is to undergo this retraining and to publicly announce the necessity for that,

which they've already done in my case. And so now I have to sit down with these experts at my expense for an indefinite period of time until I'm trained properly, whatever the hell that means, by the criteria of the so-called experts and the college. And that isn't pending an investigation. That's already in place. It's such a wild request, too request it's retraining just even the way they phrase it it's so bizarre so orwellian yeah yeah well like i said it's your social media

the whole transcript of our last conversation i don't imagine they'll be that happy with this one so but the other reason i'm pursuing it and to the degree that i'm able to keep my head clear during this process because it definitely makes me angry and really made me angry over Christmas when I was spending Christmas going through the minutiae of all these bloody lawsuits trying to figure out what the hell they were up to instead of you know taking a bit of a break and having some time with my family and so I was very upset about that but to the degree that I'm upset about it, I'm not doing it right, because this can't be personal, can't be about me. Part of the reason that I want to pursue this, and part of the reason we're pursuing an objection to what they're doing on Charter of Rights grounds in Canada,

is because they're interfering with my freedom of conscience and speech. And again, it isn't even the case that the reason that that's a problem is because it's about me. Again, it isn't even the case that the reason that that's a problem is because it's about me. The reason it's a problem is because the colleges in general, like the regulatory boards of professionals, are doing this to everyone. Lawyers, physicians, teachers, massage therapists. There's all these licensed professions. And if you're a licensed profession, the government establishes a board of your peers to regulate

conduct of the professionals. Now, in a functional time, all that happens then is that generally the people who get in trouble get in trouble with their own clients, right, with the people they've been dealing with directly, and then the board steps in on the side of the person who's been injured by a, you know, a pathologically practicing professional, and fair enough, but now it's been weaponized, and it's now it's been weaponized as a political tool too, and it's not like activists don't know that, you know, and it's so preposterous because I have 20 million people following me on social media, you know, and God only knows how many views of my videos, for example, or the interviews you and i have done it's tens of millions and like what how many people complained 20 out of millions and then

the college didn't have to pursue those complaints they can invent they have to investigate them so i don't know what they're doing now because of course they've been inundated by thousands of complaints about their own behavior so i have no idea what they're going to do about that but they didn't have to investigate they chose to investigate and as I said they did that despite the fact that half the complainants claimed to be my clients and weren't so what we have here is we have 13 people who complained about me hypothetically doing harm to someone they didn't know, to someone who they didn't know, anyone who knew on as a consequence of things I said on social

media and that all of them not only only were they fourth-hand claims of harm, which no psychologist would ever claim that a fourth-hand account of harm constituted a valid measurement, so the bloody college is violating its own measurement standards by even pursuing this. So not only are they based on fourth-hand information, and then an outright lie, which is they were clients of mine, they're also predicated on the assumption that it's okay to go after a professional for expressing political criticism. Because like literally half of them are, well I said something about Trudeau. I said something about one of his top aides. I said something about Trudeau I said something about one of his top aides

I said something about Jacinda Ardern I said something about an Ottawa city councillor in relationship to the trucker convoy I said something about climate every single one of the complaints is political and so why is that a problem well see if you can figure it out for yourself

that would be the first answer and the second is I have a friend in Canada, very well-known physician, international reputation, and a reasonably decent secondary income stream. And when this all hit, I reached out to him. He's a very brave guy. He's done a lot of writing that could easily get him in trouble. I said, look, maybe I could get you and Bruce Party, lawyer at Queen's University who's going after the essentially the college that functions for lawyers I said we should do three letters same time saying you know that the colleges are chilling free speech in Canada with psychologists with with physicians and with lawyers and he said he didn't have his house in order enough to dare

to take on the college and the problem with that is that I don't know anybody in Canada who's a physician that's more well-situated than him or braver. And even he was loath to do it. He'll do it eventually, but not now. And so here's the situation we're in for all you who are listening. If you go to see a professional when you have a crisis, psychologist or a physician or a lawyer, let's say, you bloody well better hope those people are telling you the truth. So here's an example. Let's say you got a 13-year-old girl and she has body dysmorphia. That's very common among 13-year-old girls, especially if they hit puberty early. Because when women hit puberty, their levels of negative emotion go up. That's

very well-established clinical finding. and the reason for that likely is that when women hit puberty the world becomes more dangerous to them right because they're sexually vulnerable and that's also when you get body dimorphism developed so men get bigger than women and so you know women should be more intimidated in relationship to physical combat because they're not strong enough to prevail so they should be a little more anxious about that and so they're not strong enough to prevail. So they should be a little more anxious about that. And so they're sexually vulnerable. So they should be a little more anxious about that. And then also, they should be a little more anxious because they have to take care of infants. And if you're going to take care of an infant, you should be a little more sensitive to threat because the infant is extremely vulnerable. So anyways, that kicks into in women when they hit

puberty. It's very well documented. This is why women have three to five times the rates of anxiety and depression worldwide. It's because their baseline levels of negative emotion are higher. Okay, so now, but that also translates into something very specific for women. So anxiety and depression, shame, guilt, all those negative emotions, they make you self-conscious. And self-consciousness takes the form of bodily shame in women, much more than in men. So if you're a girl, and you hit puberty early, so you're dealing with the complexities of all that when you're still pretty immature, and you get, and your negative emotion goes up, the probability that you're going to negatively evaluate your body is virtually 100%. There's no difference, especially in women, between feeling bad about their bodies and being high in negative emotion.

It's the same thing. So I just interviewed this Chloe Cole who's detransitioning and suing her medical, so-called medical professionals who rushed her into a double mastectomy at 15 and the wounds have never properly healed by the way and so that's her life you know and i basically ran her through a clinical interview i said hey kiddo you know when you were 12 and miserable about your body what the hell was going on she said well you know i i i thought more like a boy. She's a little autistic, so she's more thing-oriented than people-oriented. And so she didn't get along with girls that well.

And then she was dreaming that she'd turn out like Kim Kardashian, but she turned out to have kind of a boyish figure. And then she thought, well, I'll never really be a good, you know, full woman. And so maybe I should be a boy. And she started to toy with that and then she went to her medical professionals with this body dysmorphia and instead of sitting her down and saying look kid you hit puberty kind of early you got a partially autistic personality style that that makes you a little more comfortable with boys than girls. And every girl there is suffers body dysmorphia at your age.

So just tap her cool. You know, the fact that you're embarrassed about yourself and feeling inadequate, it's like, that doesn't mean you're marked out as pathological. It certainly doesn't mean you're a boy. No one ever told her that. That's like basic information,

man. They just rush her along the pathway. Puberty blockers at 13 and then a double mastectomy at 15. What is causing this rush to that? Like, how did this happen, and how did this happen so quickly? Well, this is partly tied up with this issue of the college. So here's one way into it. So now, professionals are bound by law to offer gender-affirming advice.

They're bound by law. Okay, so this is what this means. If you bring your 13-year-old in to be evaluated by a physician or a psychologist, and maybe she has high levels of neuroticism, tilting towards depression and anxiety, and then that's making itself manifest in bodily discomfort. Now that's being shaped by this cultural fad that insists that if you feel uncomfortable in your body,

it's because you're of the opposite gender. That's the psychological epidemic part of it. And we can talk about that in a little bit more detail. But now you're duty-bound by law, if you're a professional, to say, oh, you think you're a boy? Yeah, absolutely. You absolutely, 100%, you are. What can we do to facilitate that move forward? And that all got, what would you call, what, pushed into the law under the guise of the elimination of conversion therapy.

pushed into the law under the guise of the elimination of conversion therapy. So, unbelievable. Now, the problem with that is, you see, if you're a therapist or a physician, you don't affirm someone's identity. That's not your job. And your job is not to deny their identity either. Your job is to help them explore their identity and hopefully to develop it.

And so, someone comes to you, maybe they have body dysmorphia, and so maybe they're anorexic, that's a form of body dysmorphia. And so the first thing you do, if you have any sense, is you note that that's stemming out of an underlying more global proclivity to suffer from depression and anxiety. So that's the big elephant in the room, depression and anxiety. So if the trans activist types say, well, the body dysmorphic types are more likely to have suicidal thoughts, it's not because they have body dysmorphia, it's because they're prone to depression and anxiety, and depressed and anxious people are more likely to have suicidal thoughts. And maybe body dysmorphia

adds a bit to that, but nobody really knows. Probably adds some, but the fundamental issue is one of depression and anxiety. So now you're suffering from, you know, unspecified self-consciousness, and the culture twists around to offer you a narrative, and the narrative is, oh well, you're in the wrong body. And then that carrot is, and this is part of it gets extraordinarily pathological a lot of these kids who are suffering from this alienation are unpopular and so and now they're being enticed like yeah well you're not unpopular you're interestingly special so if you just take this carrot you know you're the opposite sex all of a sudden you're not a victim you're a brave carrot, you know, you're the opposite sex. All of a sudden, you're not a victim. You're a brave, what would you call, you're a brave seeker after your redemptive identity.

And now you can be elevated and you can be treated specially. And my God, you know, if you're an unpopular teenager, how could anything be possibly more attractive than that? And then you also think, well, why are teenagers gullible in that way? You know, why do they go along with the crowd? And the answer to that is, that's what you're supposed to do when you're a teenager. That's your job, right? Because first of all, you're with your parents, and you're not yet a fully fledged individual. And so what you have to do is you have to become part of the group. And if you're not part of the group, well, maybe you're a stellar, you know, creative genius, and you're

exceptional in that matter. But more likely, you're just a loser who couldn't fit in. And that sucks. That's for sure. So your job when you're a teenager is to fit in, as every teenager knows, you know, and maybe not just to fit in, but, you know, to fit in in a positive way that elevates the community. But we could just settle for fit and in. And so teenagers are wired to go along with the crowd. And then if the crowd is offering something pathological, that happens all the time. You get a psychological epidemic. And I knew that.

I told you. I told the Senate this in 2017. And did I know well I knew the literature that we've tracked psychological epidemics going back 300 years 300 years here's some of them multiple personality disorder it cycles in society disappears then there's one case then it spreads like mad then there's multiple personality disorder everywhere teenage girls girls mostly. Then people get skeptical about it, and it dies, and maybe it disappears for a whole generation or two. Then a case pops up, just does this. That's happened for 300 years. Cutting was a psychological epidemic. Bulimia was a psychological epidemic. Anorexia was a psychological epidemic. The

satanic daycare ritual abuse accusations that came out in the 1980s, that was a psychological epidemic. And the rule basically is, is that if you confuse people about a fundamental element of their identity, then those who are already so confused they're barely hanging on are going to fall prey to that and all hell's going to break loose and that's exactly what's happened in the you know in the trans in the trans situation but the difference between this one as opposed to the other ones like multiple personality disorder is that this one is being reinforced culturally like you you are rewarded yeah well the multiple personality disorder that happened there too because you'd get a lot of attention from media especially the early

the people who who are the first who display the first symptoms of multiple personality disorder you know you get a psychologist or a psychiatrist or an alienist if you go back far enough who reports this fascinating case of multiple personality. And, you know, there are people who are dissociative. So they kind of have multiple personalities. They're united by memory. They're usually creative people because creative people have multiple personalities. That's what makes them creative. They're not the same from day to day. You could even say they have fluid identities, identities you know and so the claims of the gender types that some people have fluid identities it's like yeah creative people do they're the purple haired types with like nose rings and tattoos

that's all part of trade openness you combine that with high neuroticism negative emotion then you get people who are fluid in their identity who are also prone to depression and anxiety. So that's also crystal clear. And so, well, so look, if you're an outsider, will you want to be a dull and contemptible outsider? Or do you want to be an interesting and compelling and nouveau, exciting outsider? Well, you know, if you're a teenage girl and you've been unpopular that's brutally because you know you get tied up with those mean girls they shun you and exclude you it's absolutely brutal you know you're just living a peripheral existence you got

no friends everyone's contemptuous of you you know and maybe that's partly because you have some something that marks you out from the norm, like a tilt towards autism. Because a lot of the people, it was just released with the Tavistock staff, you know, the Tavistock closed down in the UK. That was the big gender surgery performing institute in the UK. How was that closed down? What happened? Government closed it down. What happened?

Government closed it down. Yeah, because they knew that they figured out in the UK that, wow, the rates of transgender transformation requests were skyrocketing. And even the people at the clinic knew that they were rushing people along the transformation pipeline way faster than they should have without proper clinical evaluation. There's a thousand lawsuits out against the TAF stock in the UK now. Wow. A thousand. Yeah, out of, I thinket stock in the UK now. A thousand. Yeah, out of, I think, 30,000 transition processes. So what is the difference between the way the UK is processing this versus the way we are?

Well, we're still where the UK was three or four years ago. We haven't woken up to the fact that, you know, all hell's going to break loose on this front with people like Chloe Cole, you know, launching lawsuits. That's the only thing that's ever going to stop this. Lawsuits. Lawsuits, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Or jail sentences. So, like, it's absolutely appalling.

This is part of the reason that I've also part of the reason that I felt like I've been at war for like six months. It's so crazy that this, what you're saying here, although's backed by the literature it's it's obvious you have an expertise in this area this is this is labeled as transphobic yeah this is a transphobic well it's even worse than that you know because the data and this was known let's say 10 years ago before this all became an issue ken zucker in in toronto he was the world's leading authority on transgenderism you know he divided it into two parts. There's the autogynephilic types. Those are the guys who get sexual kicks from dressing up in women's clothing and then go do drag queen story hour. Say, well, we're just,

you know, pristine and pure. It's like, no, you're not. You're getting a sexual kick from dressing up in women's clothing. And let's not bloody well forget it. And you can't even say that now, but every clinician worth his salt knew that for decades. And then there's another subpopulation. And those are usually gender non-conforming kids. And, you know, like a conservative skeptic might say there's no such thing. It's like, no, there is. So your typical gender non-conforming kid would be, this would be the perfect target for this,

would be feminine boy or a masculine girl who's high in trade openness so has kind of a mutable identity who's also high in neuroticism and there's lots of kids like that and so they don't fit in that well with their peer group you know they're tomboy girls

or feminine boys and then if you track a lot of them some of them develop body dysmorphia they're not very happy with themselves at puberty because they don't fit in. But Zucker showed very clearly. He ran the transgender treatment clinic at CAMH in Toronto for decades.

And he was one of the world's leading authorities in terms of publication. I think he was the editor of the lead journal for years. They just took him out in Canada, fired him and disgraced him. And he battled on the lawsuit front for like 10 years and was eventually vindicated but he didn't have a political bone in his body he was a clinician through and through you know he wasn't playing political games documenting autogynephilia that was just clinical reality now it's become verboten to even suggest such a thing oh there's nothing sexual about this it's like yeah right you're dressing up in lingerie before your mirror at home tucking your dick between your legs imagining you have a vagina for sexual kick oh there was

nothing sexual about that yeah right bloody absolute liars now then you have the kids who don't fit in on the gender front that's a different pathway with them, if you leave them alone, so do no harm, leave them alone, 90% of them accept their body, their sex, by age 18 or 19. And 80% of them are gay. So what that also means is, and the gay community is going to wake up to this sooner or later, is that most of the kids being sterilized and mutilated are gay. 80% of them. So I don't see how the LGBT alliance is going to hold up under that sort of reality. Yeah, that's for sure, man. What a crazy situation.

And here, let's add something equally ugly to it. Since we haven't gone far enough yet. So here, we'll do a little bit of arithmetic. So a while back, Disney executive mentioned on video, this is when Florida went after Disney, was all when this was happening. She came out and said, I think she was head of domestic programming for Disney.

She said, well, I have two children, five and seven. One is trans and the other is pansexual. And I just thought mathematically right away, it's like the chance you have a trans kid is one in 3,000. That's not a very high chance. And let's say the chance that you have pansexual kid is the same, whatever pansexual means. I don't even know

how to calculate those odds, but whatever that is, is rarer than trans, because no one ever even heard about it until five years ago. So the joint probability that you have a trans kid and a pansexual kid is one in nine million. The odds that you're a pathological narcissist sacrificing your own children to the glorification of your compassion is eight million nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine to one so like do you have a trans kid and a pansexual kid or are you a devouring mother well you can look at the odds and decide for yourself. Jesus. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No kidding. Look, man, Freud was no dummy when he pointed to the fact that the devouring mother

was one of the major impediments to proper human development. He knew that, looking deep into the darkest families and seeing this proclivity of the overprotective mother to destroy the developing integrity of the child, to keep the child infantile, to cling to that relationship instead of developing a life for herself and letting the child go flourish. That's Hansel and Gretel, right? You're lost in the woods. Why? Well, your family's broken up.

You have an evil stepmother. So now you're lost in the woods. What's your abuse rate if you have a step-parent? 100 times normal. So you're lost in the woods. What's your abuse rate if you have a step-parent? 100 times normal. So you're lost in the woods. Well, what happens? Well, you come across a gingerbread house. Well, that's pretty damn convenient.

You need a house. It's a little, it's more than you could even hope for. It's not just a house. It's a house made out of candy. Well, what's inside a house made out of candy a witch who wants to fatten you up and eat you and that's the devouring mother you know and that's an old fairy tale yeah no kidding yeah and so you know we could we could dwell on that for a minute too one of the things we won't honestly discuss in our society one many, is the fundamental nature of female

political psychopathology. You know, and there's male political psychopathology, obviously. That's what the feminists complain about all the time when they talk about the oppressive patriarchy, you know, toxic masculinity. There's no shortage of toxic masculinity. So is there any toxic femininity? Well, not if the feminine is just the, you goddess who's nature, but how about we don't live in that fantasy world and we know, yeah, there's female political pathology, the tendency to infantilize everyone, and the tendency to assume that everyone who doesn't go along with the infantilization is properly characterized as a predator and so you know you wonder why are the universities turning into extended daycares well a lot of the

a lot of the reason for that is that women who don't have anything better to do are turning the university students into the infants they never had so. I don't know when we'll be able to be mature enough to have that conversation, you know, 20 years from now. What is a path to bring this back to some sort of rational, logical way of discussing these problems? Okay, so I tweeted out, I don't know if you saw this, that I was going to make an announcement on your show today.

And so I set up an international consortium based in London. I can't tell you all the details yet. But we're trying to put together something like an alternative vision of the future, say an alternative to that kind of apocalyptic narrative that's being put forward, at least implicitly, by organizations like the WEF, you know, and that's the virginal planet, rapacious tyrant, you know, all-devouring consumer religion. And it's more like something like, well, we want to ask people six key questions.

Okay, so how do we get energy and resources at the lowest possible cost as rapidly as possible to the largest number of people around the world that's one question and so there's a presumption in the question and here's one of the presumptions you don't get to save the planet by making energy prices so expensive that no one poor can afford them that's off the table so if you want to develop alternative energy sources no problem you know because hey man develop alternative energy sources, no problem. You know, because, hey man, the more energy sources we have, the better. But you don't get to impose your utopian vision in the service of your narcissism on the poor. We're going to try to make the poor rich.

We're going to try to alleviate absolute poverty. Pro-human view on environmental stewardship front. That's the next question. What are the major problems that are confronting us? How do we take a sophisticated, multidimensional view of that? How do we prioritize our attempts to establish our states and our international relationships properly so that we prioritize human well-being,

you know, in harmony with nature to the degree that's possible, but human-focused and not predicated on the idea that there are too many goddamn mouths on the planet to feed and that you're evil human focused and not predicated on the idea that there are too many goddamn mouths on the planet to feed and that you're evil if you just think about having children so then on the governance front this is where it gets kind of more left wing i would say is none of the people involved in this consortium so far are very thrilled with global corporate fascist government media and and corporation collusion. You know, and we're seeing this at the

high end, it's like a Tower of Babel, is that the powerful players in the world are increasingly collaborating to impose a top-down vision of the future on everyone, and that's a future that's predicated on a zero growth model and the idea that, well, we need five planets really to support everyone at the current standard of living that obtains in the West. So the best pathway forward is to deny loans by the World Bank to developing countries so they can't develop, you know, energy sources.

Which all that'll mean is they're going to burn wood and coal, obviously. going to burn wood and coal obviously so so that's the third question is you know how do we arrange systems of governance to stop the march of something like pathological gigantism this is why i like people like russell brand and also you to some degree politically you know because you guys are very what would you say sensitive to the danger of that kind of corrupt collusion that regulatory capture that occurs when corporate entities and media entities and governmental entities are all in bed together, like the FDA and the CDC and so forth and so on without end. So that's the third question. The fourth question is, what do we put forward as a vision on the family policy front to facilitate the what would you call it the

encouragement and the maintenance of long-term monogamous couples who are child-centered and to make increasing the birth rate part of that policy to put policies in place that would support long-term stable monogamous families two-parent families and child-centered you know because in the west because we're very immature, we think that the purpose of a marriage is the happiness of the people who are involved in the marriage, the husband and the wife. And that's just not the purpose of marriage at all. The purpose is long-term facilitation of their psychological and spiritual development

and the establishment of an environment that's beneficial to children. That's a responsible way of thinking about it. And so we need to have a serious conversation about what that means. And, you know, it's tricky because, like, I think the ideal has to be long-term committed monogamous heterosexual relationships. And I had a big conversation with this, about this with Dave Rubin. You know, Rubin's gay and he's married and him and his partner now have two infants and we talked through how that was.

It was a very hard thing for them to arrange, obviously. Why? Well, they're both male. So that poses a severe problem on the reproductive front, right? And so they managed that. They have two infants, but it's very complex and it's obviously not a solution

to the problem of relationship and reproduction that's duplicatable across large numbers of people. It just takes too many resources. Now, I do think we have to have an ideal at the center of every concept. But the ideal can't be too rigid, you know, because people aren't perfect. You know, in my own family, there's lots of people who are divorced lots of people in lots of people's families there are people who are gay you know there are lots of people in unhappy marriages nobody attains the ideal said the ideal has to be surrounded by a fringe of tolerance but that doesn't mean you sacrifice the ideal and the ideal has to be

well we know there's a literature on fatherlessness you know it's a bloody catastrophe fatherlessness for obvious reasons you know human children are complicated you think you can maybe if you struggle madly as a single parent you could do a decent job and lots of single parents do but you're asking a lot you know for a woman to work 50 hours a week and then spend another 40 hours with her kids and to do both of those optimally with no help you know and we know perfectly well that when women get divorced especially if they have kids they tend to fall down the economic hierarchy so it's very difficult so that's another one of the policies then another question we're trying to make these into questions rather than you you know, we have the answer. The other question is, well, it's pretty clear that we have to live inside a story.

And one story is power rules everything. But that's not a very good story. It's a very pathological story. It's more like a confession, too, if that's the story you insist upon. It's like, so you think power governs everything, you okay i know what you're like so that's what you truly believe see i believe the spirit of voluntary play governs everything not the spirit of power it's like voluntary association that's what we're doing in this conversation you know we're playing towards an end and we're doing it voluntarily and we're taking everybody along for the ride no one's forced to do it so that's the other thing no compulsion here it's

got to be invitational and so we're trying to work out what the story has to be and on that front i just finished a seminar in miami and the first eight parts of it were released on the daily wire three months ago exodus seminar we walked through the story of Exodus. Exodus means ex hodos, means the way forward. So it's the archetypal narrative of progression from tyranny and chaos into the future. That's what the story is. And we did half of it, released it on the Daily Wire, eight episodes, two hours long. And we just recorded the last eight sessions

two weeks ago. And that was an absolute blast. I had really stellar people participating. Man, I learned so much. I learned so much. It's going to take me like two years to digest it. But the Daily Wire is going to release it all on YouTube for free, starting in two months, one episode a week for 16 weeks. And then we're going to keep it on YouTube and the Daily Wire for free for four months. And so, and it lays out a vision of appropriate governance that's an alternative to tyranny and to chaos. So in the Exodus story, so here's, this is very germane to the notion of what might constitute a proper story. So the question that you put forward in your life is something like, what spirit should guide you as you move ahead? And you might say, well, I don't need a spirit to guide me. It's like,

yeah, you don't have that option. Some spirit guides you. Might be your stomach. Might be, you might be a worshipper of the god Priapus, right? He's the god of giant erections. That's what happens if your whole identity is staked on your sexuality. It's like,

some spirit is going to guide you. That's life. The question is, what is the highest spirit that could guide you? So, in the Exodus story, the proposition of the story is the highest spirit that could guide you. So in the Exodus story, the proposition of the story is the highest spirit that could guide you is the spirit that objects to tyranny and that calls the enslaved to freedom.

And that's the representation of God in Exodus. So that's what God is in the Exodus story. Now, that's not all that God is in the biblical stories, but that's God in the Exodus story. that God is in the biblical stories, but that's God in the Exodus story. And so that is the God that if you abide by that God, then you believe that tyranny is implicitly wrong, even if you tyrannize yourself, and that there's something implicitly virtuous about striving for freedom, especially if you're enslaved. So anyways, that's the voice that speaks to Moses. And the voice tells Moses to tell the Pharaoh, the tyrant, to let his people go. That's that famous line, let my people go. But the line is actually, let my people go

so that they may worship me in the desert. Okay, so anyways, God, through Moses, calls the Israelites out of tyranny, and he punishes the tyrant. And so if you believe that fate punishes tyrants, you're already immersed in the Exodus story to some degree. If you believe that tyranny is implicitly wrong, of course, most Americans believe that. Okay, so now the Israelites leave the tyranny. You think, hey, man, great, freedom, because now you're out of the tyranny but that isn't how life works this is why people won't drop their tyrannical presuppositions because you go out

of the tyranny into the desert not to the promised land desert first and where it's what's the desert everyone's lost no one knows which way to go. Everyone fights. Everyone turns to the worship of false idols. Everyone wants the tyrant to reassert himself. That's the situation we're in, in the aftermath of the death of God in the West. And so that's really useful to know, because one of the things you might want to know in your life is why do people cling to their own tyrannical presuppositions? the answer is well at least they're orienting structures pathological as they might be if you drop them you're not redeemed you're just lost and the idea that being lost is freedom that's a preposterous idea no one lost is free they're

just enveloped in chaos okay so, so what happens in the Exodus story is now the Israelites are out in the desert, wandering around for like generations, and they get all fractious and fight and bitch and complain and start worshiping false idols, and they're scrapping with each other. And that's because they have the habits of slaves. They don't know how to govern themselves. And so they ask Moses to sit as a judge. And so he does for, the story's very unclear about this,

but for a long time, years and years, morning, dawn till midnight. He's judging the Israelites like mad and adjudicating their squabbles. And imagine what he's doing, eh? If you had to make peace between a thousand people who were squabbling with their wife or their friends or their enemies, you have to render judgment on that.

You know, and for judgment to work, the people who are judged have to see the judgment as just because otherwise you have to impose it by force. Right? So if I hear you arguing with someone and I try to mediate, I have to come up with a solution

that you'll both accept. That means I have to extract out of that chaos some principle of order. Imagine you do that a thousand times or five thousand times. So now you start to understand the nature of the principles of order imagine you do that a thousand times or five thousand times so now you start to understand the nature of the principles of order okay so now two things happen Jethro who's Moses father-in-law comes along he's a Midianite a foreigner he says you got to stop doing this you can't sit as judge on the Israelites. There are two reasons. They need the responsibility and you shouldn't turn yourself into another pharaoh.

So if you take all the responsibility onto yourself, you become a tyrant and the Israelites stay slaves. So he says to Jethro, this is a signal moment in the development of Western culture, by the way. He says you take the Israelites, you divide them into groups of ten, and you have each of the ten elect an elder. And then you take the groups of elders, and you have them elect a meta-elder, and you do that all the way up to ten thousands. And then you have the judgments that are necessary rendered at the lowest level of the hierarchy possible. So, you know, if I'm arguing

with you, first we go to our elder, and then if the elder can't figure it out, he gets the elders together, and maybe they render judgment. If they can't, it goes to the council of elder elders and all the way up. And if it isn't mediated by the time you have the groupings of 10,000, then Moses gets to weigh in. And that's called subsidiarity. And the idea is you have to produce a hierarchy of responsibility, distributed responsibility, as an antithesis to tyranny and to the desert. And that's the model for good governance. And that's symbolically equivalent to Mount Sinai. And it's also the model of the Ark of the Covenant and the tabernacle.

So Jonathan Paggio did a lovely job of explaining that in this. And so part of the model that we're trying to put forward in this group that I'm describing is based on this principle of subsidiarity and the idea that we want to encourage everyone to take as much responsibility as possible at the most local level possible, right?

So take responsibility for yourself until you're good enough at that so you can take responsibility maybe for a wife and then if you're good enough at that maybe you can extend that to some kids and then maybe you can serve your local community and then maybe you can serve your state and maybe if you really get good at it you could serve your nation right but you're taking the responsibility and here's the basic rule all the responsibility you abdicate will be taken up by tyrants that's the that's the cardinal rule of social organization and so we're trying to build out this story that's based on the deepest elements of western tradition that's an antidote to the, well,

to the false claim that it's only power that rules. Because it's not. That's not right. And there is a model of proper governance in there, this idea of a hierarchical structure of responsibility. It's the proper computational structure. It's not top-down tyranny with fractionated individuals. And it's not utter chaos. It's ordered top-down tyranny with fractionated individuals, and it's not utter chaos. It's ordered freedom, and that's what God tells Moses to tell the Pharaoh when he says, let my people go. Let my people go, no tyranny, so that they may celebrate me in the desert. It's ordered freedom, and it's the ordered freedom that comes along with being oriented towards the highest

possible good. And so we're trying to work all that out. Now we're going to have a conference in London, October 31st, November 1st, and November 2nd. We're going to bring about 2,000 people together. That's an invited list. We want to bring in people who are cultural figures and political figures, business figures, and invite them to this discussion. But we want to make that completely public, and we want to open up the organization to broad membership,

as broad as possible. And then, you know, if it's a success, then we'll open up the conferences as the years progress to larger and larger numbers of people. But we can't, you know, we don't have the expertise or the wherewithal to manage that first off. but we've got the venue already set up in London I've got all sorts of people on board in Australia and all through Europe and through the UK and all through the United States South America all sorts of people are interested in participating and so we want to help put forward a vision that's enticing and inviting.

It's like, imagine you could have the world you wanted. You know, none of this Malthusian limits to growth nonsense. We get our act together. Everyone can have it, can have enough, and maybe more than enough. There'll be enough educational opportunity for everyone. No one will be scrabbling away in the dirt, burning dung, poisoning themselves. Enough opportunity for everyone. No one will be scrabbling away in the dirt, burning dung, poisoning themselves. Enough food for everyone. There's also an idea in Exodus, and it's a very good idea, that if people organize themselves properly, so they're oriented on a

transcendent axis, and they're oriented towards their fellow man. So you serve what's highest and you also abide by the principle of reciprocity in relationship to other people. If we organize ourselves in that manner, there's no limit to the abundance the natural world can produce. That's the actual generator of genuine wealth, sustainable wealth, you know, that balances order and chaos properly, that balances nature and culture properly. So the core idea is something like, you get the hierarchy of social organization right, it generates unlimited wealth. And we've already seen that to a large degree, you know, we've lifted more people out of poverty in the last 15 years than really, degree you know we've lifted more people out of poverty in the last 15 years than really what it's unparalleled you know seven out of eight billion people now have either have the minimum they need

or something exceeding that and instead of you know starving to death by the billions which is what everybody who was on the Malthusian side predicted back in the 1960s. And so I've been working on this for a long time, and I've got a good group of core people who seem to be, you know, reliable and not motivated, we hope and pray, by something approaching, you know, narcissistic egotism, and everybody's sworn to try to make this as decentralized as possible on the principle that the more responsibility you can offload to people, the better everything will work. That's a fundamentally conservative principle, like a small C conservative principle, right? So you need a hierarchy of

responsibility and you offload responsibility to the local where possible. I think that's a good principle. Let's hold that thought because I've got to pee. And I want to explore that more. But I do have to use the bathroom. So back to this thing that you're doing. First of all, what are you calling this? I can't tell you that yet. So you're trying to, one of the things you were saying is you're trying to generate a story.

Yeah, we're trying to invite everybody to the table. And we're trying to get the right story. And we'll know it's the right story because people will say voluntarily, yeah, I could really go for that. What do you mean by story when you're saying the right story? Well, a vision. Okay. Well, I would say it's something, if you want to think about it archetypically, it's something like a vision of the promised land. A structure.

Yeah, yeah, well, you have to, okay, we could talk about that technically. Yeah, well, you have to... Okay, we could talk about that technically. A story is a description of a hierarchy... Sorry. A story is a description of a hierarchy of attentional prioritization. So what do I mean by that? There's an infinite number of things

to look at in the world. So perception seems technically impossible because you just drown in the complexity. That's what happens in a psychedelic trip. You drown in the complexity. It's real that complexity. Now usually that's shielded from you. It's veiled from you like God is veiled from you. It's the same thing and so it's veiled by the fact that you regard some things as more important than others and you do that implicitly. And so for example right now you're devoting most of your cognitive

and perceptual resources to my face and to what I'm saying right now there's a lot of things you could be looking at in this room or thinking about right there's an infinite number of things but you're not you're waiting some things more heavily now why well why are we having this conversation? Well, I could ask you, why are we having this conversation? Because I'm curious. I want to know how you think. Okay. I want to know what your plans are. What goal do you think your curiosity serves? A better understanding of what you're trying to accomplish. Okay. Okay. Why do you think other people are interested in that? Because they're going to watch this. Why do you think people are interested in that? Because what you're

saying makes sense. And we also recognize that there's a real flaw in the way our society is constructed. And there's a real genuine threat in allowing these power structures to sort of maintain this narrative and create this narrative that's based upon them gaining control over resources, our economics, our energy and socially what we do and what we don't do. Okay so now that serves them. Okay so do you see that partially what you're involved in insofar as you're doing it right is something like what would you say, a cautionary tale about the possibility of tyranny? Yes.

Okay. So you can see how that ties into an archetypal story, right? And I think that's the big threat. Now, that's what people are terrified of when they see Klaus Schwab standing there with a Darth Vader outfit telling people that they're going to eat bugs. Okay. And you're using the technology of free communication as an antidote to that. Yes.

Okay. So then I would say archetypally what you're doing is you're doing something like serving the divine word that makes habitable order out of chaos as an antidote to tyranny. That's a story. It's a deep story. And if you weren't acting out a deep story, you wouldn't have tens of millions of people listening to you. The fact that that's like, it's like J Rowling, it's like why is she so popular? Well she told an archetypal story, masterfully. It has a religious substructure.

It just got people, you know, like hundreds of millions of people and produced billions of dollars. You have to see the world through a story. You act out a story. And the reason we like stories is because it's actually pretty hard to see the world through a story. You act out a story. And the reason we like stories is because it's actually pretty hard to see the world. And it's really useful to see the world the way other people see it, just in case they know something you don't. And so we're telling each other stories all the time. We're acting out stories.

A description of the pattern we're acting out, that is a story. You know, and when you go to a movie, maybe you see the hero on the screen, you know, it's James Bond. And that's, well, that's the same, it's the same narrative in some sense. It's, you know, it's a bit more stereotype, but Bond is, you know, this sophisticated, aggressive guy who's got his aggression under control, who's fighting the Hydra. And it's not the Hydra and James Bond. I don't remember the name of the underground organization there but it's a Hydra for the Marvel heroes the Hydra is an amalgam of tyranny and chaos right it's Hydra with head of snakes paralyzes you when you look at it it's an archetypal

narrative and you and the fundamental question of life is what is the proper orienting narrative? That's the same question as what God do you worship? It's the reason I titled my next book, We Who Wrestle With God, because you're stuck with that no matter what. You're wrestling with one God or another all the time. God's an animating spirit. That's one way of thinking about it. It's more than that, but that's one way of thinking about it. And so I constantly look to these old stories, these archetypal stories, you know, as a student of Jung, let's say, to find out

what the proper orienting pathway is. And that's embedded in tradition. You know, the stories that have lasted. Richard Dawkins would have got to this conclusion if he would have pursued his thought far enough. Because an archetype is a stable meme propagates across time. And there's some memes, some stories let's say, that stabilize you as an individual. They restrict your anxiety. They provide you with hope. They make you productive and generous. And when they're extended, they produce a structure that unites people and produces

productive peace. And it's not by fluke, for example, that America itself is founded in no small part on the motivational force of something like the Exodus narrative. That was certainly the case for the civil rights movement. It has to be that way because Exodus is an archetypal story about the establishment of proper order as an alternative to the tyrant and the desert so everyone is always doing that in their life whether they know it or not you know and you

do it extremely well if you don't mind the insult of a compliment and i think the reason for that is that for whatever reason you are acutely aware of your own ignorance and always trying to rectify it and i would say that's a reflection of a practice of humility you know i know you're a competent guy and you're no pushover and so calling you humble is kind of a weird thing to do but one of the things that i've been very pleased about constantly when talking to you is it's a conversation man you know what are we trying to do? Trying to make things clear. Trying to figure out what the hell's going on. Trying to say what we think.

We're trying to jointly make each other wiser. You know, hopefully, to the degree we were able to manage it, and we're inviting people along for the ride. And they seem pretty happy about that. And that's partly because people aren't just oriented by power. You know, there's all these truckers out there who are listening to this podcast while they're driving their rigs across the country.

You know, what are they trying to do? They're trying to get their acts together. They're trying to understand. You know, they're trying to take their proper position in the social world. And that's a fundamentally compelling, it's not a drive, it's an orienting and integrating spirit it's the same as the spirit of yawa in the old testament it's exactly the same thing it's the same thing so one of the things i learned about the biblical narrative this is so cool this is what the next book's about so imagine there's two possible states one of disunity and and chaos you're going

in every direction at the same time. And one of relative unity. Now the unity can turn into tyranny and the multiplicity can turn into chaos. Those are the two dangers. But imagine there's a proper unity that stops you from being anxious. Anxious anxiety is a marker of internal disunity of narrative and i already talked about that with this carl friston for example who's the world's most cited neuroscientist i asked him i asked him if perceptions were micro narratives and he said yes that's quite something that isn't how we've looked at the world for the last 3,000 years. In any case, to the degree that you're not anxious, something is uniting all the directions you could take. Now, to the degree that you're not at odds with everyone else, you know, in the chaotic state of nature where everyone's at everyone's throat,

it's because there's a mode of perception and action that unites you socially. So you can be united psychologically, then you're not a house that's built on sand, and you can be united socially. Imagine there's a spirit that characterizes that unity. So the biblical corpus is an attempt to portray that spirit. And it does it using a technique called metonymy. So metaphor is something being something else. This is like that, or this is that. It's a way of taking what you know to explain what you don't know.

But metonymy is a technique where you take one story that seems to have one moral, and you juxtapose it with another, and maybe do that with a sequence of stories, and then there's an implication that there's a meta-story that emerges across all the ordered stories. And that's what the biblical corpus is, because no one wrote it, not in any real sense, and the processes by which it aggregated are mysterious. They extend over thousands and thousands of years but here's what the story the book is it's a library not a book here's what the library is there's a proclivity towards monotheistic unity that unites us psychologically and socially and it emerges out of a plurality of potential gods. It emerges from the bottom up.

Now, you could argue that it descends from the top down too, but I'm not going to get into that at the moment. The question emerges, how do you understand that unifying animating spirit? And the answer is, well, it's beyond our comprehension, and we can more or less approach it with a story. So here's some examples. So in the story of Adam and Eve, God is the spirit that you walk with when you're unselfconscious in a properly tended garden. You might say, well, do you believe in that? It's like, well, do you have a garden? Most people want a garden. They want a house.

They want a little fenced off plot. They want to be able to go back there and relax and recreate, right, unselfconsciously. Okay, so whatever's happening when you're there, that's what that is. That's that walking unselfconsciously with the spirit of the paradisal garden. So that's one picture of god then in the story of cain and abel you have another picture which is god is the spirit that punishes you if you make poor sacrifices so what does that mean it's like are you giving it your all or not are you playing both sides of the fit both sides of the fence are you just you know chipping

in when you have to and trying to go along for a free ride and that's what happens with Cain he gets all bitter about it because his sacrifices are rejected so God is the spirit that rejects false sacrifices and what happens to Cain he gets bitter and then murderous, and then his descendants become genocidal. That's the Cain and Abel story in like two paragraphs. So then you have the story of Noah. So Noah, in Noah, God is the spirit that calls the wise of his time, because Noah is portrayed as someone wise in his generations, right? So for his time and place, he's a wise man.

as someone wise in his generations, right? So for his time and place, he's a wise man. He has the sense that the storms are coming and it's time to batten down the damn hatches. And so like in your own life, maybe your eyes are open to some degree and you think a storm is coming. You have an intuition that a storm is coming. Do you prepare or do you ignore that?

Because those are your options. If you prepare, then you're manifesting faith in that spirit. So that's the spirit in Noah in the Tower of Babel. You have God as the spirit that punishes the technological pretensions of mankind. So men get together to build a tower that stretches to the heavens. That's the Tower of Babel. And they want to do that to replace the transcendence. They want to replace the mystery of being with their own presumptions.

And what happens is no one can talk to each other anymore. That's the state we're in right now. That's why Matt Walsh can make a movie that's entitled What is a Woman? We can't even agree on that. That's the Tower of Babel. And so then you have the story of Abraham and God is presented in that story as the spirit that calls the overprotected and privileged, that's Abraham, to the adventure, to the catastrophic adventure of their life. Because that's what happens to Abraham.

You know, he's 83, lives in his father's tent, eats peeled grapes. He doesn't have to do anything. And this voice makes itself manifest within him and says, get the hell up off your comfortable bed. Get out there in the world. Suffer your adventure. And you know, Abraham's life is just, just he leaves and it's not like it's it's no promised land for him it's like starvation and tyranny and war and the egyptian rulers

conspire to steal his wife and you know it's brutal life but it's life it's adventure and so then you think well all of this is an attempt to characterize Yahweh, and this is the Jewish God with whom the Jews have a relationship. All of these stories are an attempt to characterize that, and so you could say, well, what is the spirit that you walk with unselfconsciously in the well-tended garden, and the spirit that calls you to adventure, and the spirit that punishes tyranny? That would be the Exodus story. What do they have in common? Well, yawa whatever that is and so then there's an attempt to characterize the nature of that spirit and then there's a twist on that in the new testament

which is an amazing twist it's an amazing twist because the conclusion is that the spirit of Yawa, portrayed in all these different ways, is the same spirit that calls people to voluntarily bear the catastrophe of their life and that that's the union of God and man. That's the idea. So it's a hypothesis. It's like well is that the same God? So imagine that you know you're confronting your horizon of possibility and tragedy as bravely and honestly as you can. Well, that's the spirit of Yahweh making itself manifest within you. And if you do that properly, then you can bear up under that load. So that's a way better story than power you know so and it looks to me like it's

looking at it psychologically try to strip it to the degree that it's possible of its religious overtones you can't strip it completely because you know there's an open question imagine that there's a pattern of existence that you know quells your anxiety and gives you hope and unites people well then you have an open question is well how much does that reflect the structure of being itself there's a greek idea of the logos that's intrinsic in the world that there there's an order in the world, right, that we can discover, and that makes itself manifest from the bottom up. And that's the logos of the world,

the logic of the world. And it's certainly possible that the logic of the world, as expressed in human existence, is the same as this spirit of Yahweh that's transmuted in the New Testament into the Logos. And, you know, what happened, I did a lecture about this at Ephesus in Turkey. That was fun, which was where the Logos was discussed 3,000 years ago, the Greek Logos. So what you have

in Western culture is you have this Greek idea that there's an intrinsic order in the universe, bottom-up sort of, and then the Christians come along and say, well, there's also an intrinsic order in the psychological realm, and then Western culture is the juxtaposition of those two, the claim that those are the same claim as if you honestly and truthfully confront the tragic limitations of your life, you'll discover the truth of the implicit order, and that will redeem you. And that's the fundamental claim of science, for example. So even science, insofar as it's a practice, is embedded in this tradition. So, well, that's a way better story. It's the greatest story ever told, man. And this idea that you're putting together, how do you go about structuring something like this? And how do you go about getting people to agree upon the parameters and how it should be implemented?

Yeah. Well, you kind of figure out. It seems like a massive undertaking. You figure it out as you go. Well, I'll tell you what's happened. Okay. Because some of it's already happened. So I was traveling through Eastern Europe last year to all these countries that had been communist not that long ago.

And I was fortunate because I was meeting like 30 to 50 people in each country I had a team of people who were setting up meetings for me of cultural and political leaders in each country and so I'd have dinner with them or an event you know and talk to everybody and I was listening to what their concerns were and throughout eastern Europe it was the same concern. And the concern was, what the hell are you guys toying with in the West? You know, this woke neo-Marxism. They're terrified of that in Eastern Europe

because it was just 1989, not that long ago. They said, I don't know what you guys are doing. Don't you know where that goes? Very pro-American, by the way, all through Eastern Europe. Unbelievably pro-American. And everybody that I met said, like, we're really afraid of what's happening in the West. Can I pause you there for a second? When you say pro-American, what do you mean by that?

Like, what about America? They think the fundamental ethos of the U.S. is reliable. What is that fundamental ethos, you think? I think it's the logos fundamentally. But, you know, if you differentiated that, one of the things that's really quite amazing about the U.S. And I think it's unique, really, is that your society is fundamentally not envious. Now, there's plenty of envy in it because that's hard to eradicate. Now there's plenty of envy in it because that's hard to eradicate.

But one thing about you Americans is you're actually capable of admiring success and you're capable of trying to replicate it for yourselves and your children. And you actually celebrate that. Well, we think it's possible. There's not a caste system here. That's a faith. Yes. It's a faith. You believe that that's, not only do you believe that that's possible, you believe that it's appropriate. Yes.

And that's the American dream. And it's celebrated. You believe that it's appropriate. Yes. And that's the American dream. And it's celebrated. And celebrated. And that's no different than worshipped fundamentally. Like the difference between those words is like systematic. And so that is what is attractive. Well, partly too, because you remember like one of the countries I went to visit was Albania. And Albania was the worst of the Soviet countries.

And that's a hard contest to win. Like, there are caverns all over Albania that the government dug out because the whole story there was Albania was the richest, most desirable country in the world, and they were absolutely surrounded by enemies. It was like the ultimate paranoid totalitarian

states, you know, and they're not very happy about the devastation that reeked for 60 years. And, you know and they're they're not very happy about the devastation that reaped for 60 years and you know they look to the west to the best part of the west and think god don't lose that guys like we had the totalitarian utopia and it wasn't i wouldn't recommend it so i'm going through all these countries and people are telling me this concern they have and then they also say well we feel like we're voices crying in the wilderness like we're we're concerned about the direction of the culture war let's say but if we say anything about it we get taken out by the

mob and but then i went to like 14 countries and everyone said the same thing and i thought well if there's the same thing is happening in 14 countries, you're not a voice crying in the wilderness. You're just people aren't communicating very well with each other. So I thought, well, why isn't there an international organization that's really centrist, you know, that would attract traditionalist small C conservatives and classic liberals alike? You know, we don't want the ultra nationalist types because they go off the deep end in one particular way. And. You know, we don't want the ultra-nationalist types because they go off the deep end in one particular way. And, you know, the radical leftist globalist utopians who are under the grip of the Marxist idea, that's a very small minority of people. There's a huge number

of people in the reasonable middle, but they don't seem to... they've abdicated their responsibility. That's a good way of thinking about it. So then I started talking when I went through Europe. I said, well, you know, I'm thinking about organizing a convention where I could bring people together to talk about a different vision and also maybe to share specific policy ideas that worked, right? So that's more concrete. And everyone I talked to said, I'd really be interested in that. I'll change my schedule. I'll do everything I can to help. And that just happened in every country. And so I thought, well, that's weird because,

you know, this is a preposterous idea. And what should happen is that people, you know, maybe they're pleased to meet me and they give some lip service to the idea and what should happen is that people you know maybe they're pleased to meet me and they give some lip service to the idea and it just ends there that's the destiny of most ideas that isn't what happened then I went to the UK and started talking about it and exactly the same thing happened people were just like sign me up man what can I do then I went to Washington I talked to the Republican study committee about, and they make policy for the Republicans, and the same thing happened. A whole bunch of Republicans came up and said, we'll change our schedule, make sure you have the conference at some time when the House isn't sitting so we can attend. Is there anything I can do to help? And I realized then, you know,

the conservative types, they're pretty good at implementing. They're pretty good incremental movers, because they're conscientious, but they're not very good at vision. And so they get reactionary. And what happens on the Republican side is they're always pointing to the left, saying, you go too far, you go too far. But there's no vision, so it's hard for them to attract young people. But it turns out if you put forward something that approximates an invitational vision, they're just all over that like in no

time flat. So then how to implement it? Well, we got together a group of people in London twice, very diverse group of people. And we hashed out these five questions that I presented to you. And everyone basically agreed, despite a wide range of political opinions in the room said yeah those seem to be the key questions and then we we figured out that we needed to put this forward as in as an invitation and not as a top-down you know compulsion based you have to do this or the planet's going to be doomed it has to be an invitation and so and now we're trying to work out the details and well the first real move will be to open this up to public participation to figure out how to do that,

to get a dialogue going, but then also to have this conference October 31st, November 1st, and November 2nd in London. And I plan to do three lectures at night there, one on the crisis of the West, one on environmental stewardship, and one on metaphysics, a public lecture to kind of anchor the convention. We've got, I think, the that we develop a vision that people, everyone says, yeah, I'm in. I'm in. What can I do? Instead of the vision being, you're emitting too much carbon dioxide there, buddy, and enough cars and comedians for you. Yeah. So we'll see but the thing that's been striking is how

rapidly this came together and how motivated people were to participate we had people from australia for example who have lots to do the people who came they flew all the way from australia for a two-day meeting three weeks ago to discuss this they're only there for two days people came from washington and from all over europe and it's weird but i think the reason is and you know you can you know this is that what do they say the people perish for lack of vision absolutely man and this vision we're being offered is this dire bloody apocalypse. You know we have to limit our consumption, we have to make energy expensive, everyone can't have enough, we have to accept limits, there's too many people on the planet.

We have to run around like frightened tyrants to clamp everything down. It's like all that's doing is's demoralizing young men like mad, you know young people aren't even having relationships anymore Because especially the men if they're not bloody patriarchal tyrants, they're virgin raping planetary despoilers You know, it's like what kind of vision is that for young men? It just makes them sick, you know, and I've seen believe me. I've seen plenty of that their people are so grateful if you provide them with an alternative that says, you know, that ambitious striving that you have within you, that's something that's making itself manifest in the optimal way

as something that's the highest, not just a manifestation of your tyrannical, patriarchal, rapacious nature. That's what we tell young men, like non-stop from the time they're three onward. And then what? You know, then they're all timid shells of themselves, embarrassed about everything they want and do. They don't even have enough spine to approach a woman

and try to establish a relationship. You know, they're in love with Tinkerbell the porn fairy instead it's horrible and so we're hoping to put forward a vision that that's an invitation you know to the table and with the idea that if we got our act together especially given our technological power god only knows what sort of world we could build you know but definitely one where there was enough for everybody, enough of everything basic and enough opportunity, education, resources. I'm working with Bjorn Lomborg on this, so I'm very happy about that because Bjorn, like, he's the real thing, you know, he's done the work and so that's very good to have him on board.

Yeah, I really enjoyed talking to him. Yeah. I got a couple other projects underway. I can tell you about them real. How could you have time for other projects if you're doing this? Subsidiary organization. You know, like I got a lot of people around me who are doing their work, you know. So if I don't micromanage and provide people with maximal autonomy and try to get committed people can distribute the effort which you have to as much as possible and then who knows what's possible you know so so i'm working with my son we have this app called essay which we launched back in

november that teaches people how to write while they use it. He just developed Dark Mode for that. That was released this week, and we got about 8,000 subscribers on that. Dark Mode meaning? Dark Mode. You can use it at night without blinding yourself. And so it teaches you how to write while you use it. It's a word processor,

but it teaches you how to write and to think because if you learn to write, you learn to think. And it teaches you how to edit, you know, to concentrate on each word, to evaluate every phrase, to evaluate every sentence, to evaluate the organization of sentences within paragraphs and paragraphs sequenced properly within the essay, and to think about how to produce a set of thoughts and then how to critically evaluate them.

So that's fun that's going very well we have like i said about 8 000 subscribers now and about i think it's about 80 000 users and so that's a good project because we'd like to teach a million people to write i think the ordinary person if they used essay instead of a standard word processor, the first thing they wrote would be the best thing they ever wrote, right off the bat. Because we built the tools right into the software, like it steps you through the process of writing. How so?

Well, one of the features, for example, is, so imagine that you want to write about something, whatever it is, the first question is, well, what problem are you want to write about something, whatever it is. The first question is, well, what problem are you trying to solve? What's the question here? And then there's an injunction in the documentation. If the question that you're trying to solve doesn't grip you, then you're starting the whole bloody thing off with a lie. It has to be something you care about.

It has to be something that grips you. So it has to be a question you want to answer, like the questions you ask in the podcast. Then what? Well, then you write down what you think. And if you don't know enough, go read. And then write down what you think. And don't worry about ordering it.

Just get it down. And then it steps you through. It's like, okay, here's a paragraph you wrote. We'll break the paragraph into sentences. Now, here's a little box that opens up. Write five variants of the sentence. Shorten it, make it more concise. Write five variants that makes that sentence precise.

When you get a better sentence, hit click and it'll snap into the essay. Then there's another module that helps you move the sentences around. So here's your paragraph. Well, maybe there are too many sentences in it and the sentences around so here's your paragraph well maybe there are too many sentences in it and the sentences aren't in the right place order the sentences so that each paragraph is like a little coherent essay and so then do the same thing with the paragraphs if you run through the so we ask people separate production from editing get this get the question right do your researchate production from editing.

Over-produce, then edit. Edit for words. Did you use the right word? Is every word the right word? Is every phrase the right phrase? Are the phrases organized into proper sentences? Are the sentences sequenced properly? And so that's the editing. And there's no difference between that really and critical thinking. So that's the essay app. And I used that process for my students, earlier iterations of

this. And by the third draft of the essays they wrote, there was the best essays they ever wrote in their life. Like this actually works. It's how I write, by the way, for whatever utility that might be. It is how I write. I tried to formalize that. And then with my daughter, Michaela, I've started this Peterson Academy. And our plan, this is a funny plan, we want to drive the cost of a bachelor's degree down to $4,000.

And so we've got 30 professors on board so far. I've been able to identify stellar lecturers from all over the world. We bought a studio in Miami. We have the professors come there. We try to be very hospitable and to treat them well, which doesn't generally happen at universities, by the way. And

they lecture four, they give four two-hour lectures on whatever they really want to teach about. And we just, they have a lot of autonomy, you know. We're not constraining them. the rule is we'll put an audience together for you in the studio we want you to teach what you love at the edge of your ability and uh we'll offer that to as many people as we possibly can we're pursuing

accreditation with through a variety of different avenues so we hope to be able to what we'll do is take two or three of those eight hour lectures bundle them together that'll give you one university credit we want to we want to get actual credit for it and then we're planning as well we hope so imagine we sell we we have charge tuition and we'll try to keep that low cost like i said we want to knock the cost of the whole degree down to four thousand dollars that. That's 95% reduction in cost. That's the plan. And then if you're in the developed world,

we'd like to offer you the opportunity to pair yourself with a student in the developing world who couldn't afford it, and we'll give them the opportunity for free, but they'll be like your partner. So that should produce some interesting partnerships between people, but also give people who don't have access to high-quality university-level education a real in. And we are talking to some different institutions, mortar and brick institutions, about how accreditation might be pursued

and how we could partner with them to also offer people other elements of the university experience that you can't easily virtualize and we've developed a good app that is adds a social component to it so that people can discuss the lectures while they're while they're watching them and you know can make social contacts and maybe have meetup groups in different cities and so we want to universalize higher education. And then we're going to set the grading system in stone. So the grade you'll get for this university will be your performance. So there'll be no grade inflation. So what we're hoping, too, is that if we're going to also, you know,

amalgamate it with this essay program so that all our graduates will be able to write, you know, amalgamate it with this essay program so that all our graduates will be able to write. We're hoping that a degree from this university will indicate to employers a true level of competence. And so that's the plan. And we've got, like I said, we have 30 professors on board already. I recorded three lectures for it now, one on the Sermon on the Mount. So that was really fun. One on, it'll be a two-part one, but I did the first half of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, and I did an eight-hour summary of my book, Maps of Meaning. And so we have all sorts of other people who are, you know,

from Cambridge and Oxford and Stanford and MIT, and then people from outside the academy too who are brilliant. Jonathan Paggio just did a series on symbolic thought he's absolutely brilliant deepest religious thinker I've ever met old testament prophet man something to see so we're going to roll that out we hope in November and you know I'm working with the Daily Wire and that seems to be going great too they've they've been great partners they leave me the hell alone i can still do my youtube channel and offer it for nothing you know i do some extra work for them behind the

scenes i do a 30 minute interview after my my youtube interviews and put that behind the paywall and i've done a bunch of documentaries for them some on western civilization and they've been really good partners they like i said they leave me alone and they help me. That's a pretty good deal. So, and my wife and I are cruising all around the world, you know, doing these lectures all the time. That's fun. It's ridiculously entertaining. And she's getting really good at it too.

She opens the show. She usually tells about a 10-minute story about one of the rules from my latest book, ties that in with her life. She's getting to be a real good public speaker, so that's really fun. She's got a good comedic touch. And my son's going to tour with us starting on the 30th. He's a musician, and I've had a musician, David Cotter,

open my shows for the last 30 lectures, and he plays classical guitar. So he does a 20-minute set while everyone's coming in to sit down, and so that kind of sets a nice tone for the lecture and then we do this exploration of an idea and i do q a with my wife and that's the lectures but it's an amazing amount of things you're doing like how do you have this energy like where are you getting all the energy to do all this stuff it's got to be be overwhelming. Well, I'm not sick anymore. That helps. Yeah. Well, you seem better now than you were even when I saw you a while ago. Oh, definitely.

Yeah. I've never done an interview with you where I was healthy. Wow. You know, like the best I ever got with you was about 60%. And so I'm up about 80% now. You seem great. You seem like completely there. Much better.

Well, it's hard to be completely there. Whatever that means. And there are people who would debate that. Right. Sure. Yeah, but the lectures, it's such an adventure. It's so crazy. It's so positive.

You know, I don't talk about political things much at the lectures. I'll make a joke now and then. That's so it's so crazy it's so positive you know i don't talk about political things much at the lectures i'll make a joke now and then that's about it but mostly it's metaphysical exploration you know exploration of narrative i would say and people come there because for the same reason they listen to you you know they're trying to figure something out yeah well there's a deep hunger for that because there are a lot of people that don't feel served by the narrative they're being fed yeah and they also don't feel like there's anyone around them that they aspire to yeah there's no one around them that seems to be living a life that looks satisfying or rewarding or attractive. And that's more, so one of the things, so I was doing a different lecture

every night for, for about 70 minutes and then doing a Q and A and that was wearing me out because it was sort of like writing a whole book chapter every night, you know, because I want, really want to do something different. And, you know, I draw from stories that I've aggregated. It's not like a hundred percent new content, but it's, it's like variations on a theme. aggregated it's not like a hundred percent new content but it's it's like variations on a theme and that was wearing me out so tammy suggested at one point that we just try a straight q a and that doesn't take as much preparation and i kind of like the pressure of having to spontaneously answer and uh people like that just as much and so that made it a bit more sustainable but was what was also cool and we didn't we didn't realize this

people like to see her and I interacting you know and that was a real revelation to us both because we were doing it more for reasons of of Necessity you know knowing that people would like the Q&A's but it simplified things and because we're You know I don't know how many shows we did last year 200 maybe like a lot all over the place so it's it's you know it's it's man it's time to get to the next venue and be prepared so it was tiring but one of the things that happened was that people were seemed really

pleased to see us interacting and we realized that there's a lot of people out there who never really had a good model of couples communication ever and that's pretty sad you know so yeah there's there's plenty of wandering around in the desert yeah but i'll tell you something else that's cool you know when i first did this back in 2018 did a meet and greet after and i'd say a third of the people were in pretty bad emotional distress you know often when they came to meet me after the lectures they were in tears or you know they had some pretty brutal story to relate. And it's pretty emotionally grueling to see that night after night.

And now there's way more women who come. There's way more couples. And the guys are way more put together. So that's pretty cool. You know, and lots of them, especially the ones that get the meet and greet tickets, they've been listening for five or six years and they've really been trying to put their lives together, you know? And so most of the stories I hear now are stories like I was in a pretty rough place, but I started to put my life together.

And, you know, now I have this girlfriend and we're getting married or we're just having our first child. And now I have a business and here's what I'm doing that's really working. And they're all standing up and half of them are in suits or three piece suits. And that's something, man. I mean,

that's partly why we keep doing it. Tammy and I, you know, it's like, it's so positive. You think, well, why wouldn't you keep doing that?

That's an overwhelming responsibility too, right? Like the, the, the feeling behind that, that you've had this enormously positive impact on these people's lives. And then that's not something you set out to do as a person. This is almost something that was thrust upon you as an adult.

I mean, you became very famous as a professor who was, you know, fairly anonymous. You're just teaching. And then all of a sudden you've been thrust into the public conversation worldwide yeah yeah well it's some of it's it's what would you say it's utterly unpredictable and it's utterly surreal and entirely predictable both at the same time because like i knew that what i was dealing with when i was working at harvard when i was writing maps of meaning i knew that there was something about that that was core. I knew it. And I could tell partly because of the effect it was having on my students when I was teaching, because I was watching that. And the typical comment for my course evaluation was, this course changed the way I looked at everything.

And so, and that's a pretty radical claim. And, you know, I had 20 years of that, practicing doing that. And then I started lecturing on TV Ontario because my classes were popular. And that got an audience. And then, you know, I had a pretty big corpus of work online by the time I objected to Bill C-16. And then, well, that brought a huge audience in, partly for the scandal. But I had all that content. So they came for the scandal but stayed for the scandal, but I had all that content. So they came for the scandal, but stayed for the content. But it is, there is an element of predictability to it

because I am a clinician, so I'm interested in helping people. And that's a deep interest, you know. And part of that's curiosity, and part of that's fear of hell, I would say, you know, so to speak. I've always been interested in being an educator. I like lecturing. I like having students. And so, you know, I'm a clinical educator. And then I started

playing with YouTube and turned out that could scale, you know. And then there's this hunger for a uniting narrative that, well, was identified by people like Carl Jung, you know, 60 years ago. Well, it was identified by people like Carl Jung, you know, 60 years ago. So there's an element of it in some way that's inevitable. God died, you know, that's Nietzsche's pronouncement. Well, that sets up a certain kind of stage, a certain kind of hunger. You know, it's the hunger for the revivification of the dead father in archetypal terms. And that's responsibility most fundamentally.

It's discipline. That's the sort of thing Jocko thing joco pushes you know and you too to a large degree because young men they're clamoring for disciplined responsibility weirdly enough and you can't offer that if you think that all male activity is just toxic masculinity you know but you're wise enough to know that's not true. And so I saw Jocko last night, by the way. So that was last night or the night before. So that was quite fun. It's the, there's a thing that men need. Um, they need difficult tasks and they need to know that they can overcome difficult tasks. And, and through that you develop your, your human potential, you develop what you're capable of doing and if you don't encounter those things in life you you remain feeble and you may even yeah and very uh not just immature but um insecure well and not just insecure but insecure then bitter yeah then resentful then

dangerous yes right yeah yeah yeah the alternative, insecure, bitter men are not harmless. No, no. Quite the contrary. And they try to damage people. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and they try to damage people oftentimes because in comparison to those people they're trying to damage, they feel they come up short.

They don't like it. They don't like the feeling yeah and they they try to destroy the thing that makes them feel bad that's cain and abel yeah that's and it's so interesting because in the biblical story that's the first story about human beings right because adam and eve are made by god they don't count the first two human beings are fratricidal brothers engaged in a war of envy that degenerates into the flood and the tower of babel it's stunning it's stunning it's so relatable i mean if you are a person that you know strives to work hard and accomplish things and you have grand ambitions you will find so many people that try to destroy that yeah but but i mean i mean what's your life like when you go out

in public people are friendly how often mostly 99 more more than 99 but i'm friendly yeah i know i know but still it's remarkable right i mean because you mean, because you're an axis of contention online, but, I mean, you're very good at handling people. I've watched how you treat people. But it is the case that when you go out in public, I mean, how many bad encounters have you had with people in public? Very few, very, very few. Right.

Well, that's the same with me. But it's also like when I'm in public, I'm in public doing my things, you know. What if you're just walking around on the street, though? People are friendly. Yeah. And I suspect that's true wherever you go. Yes. Yeah.

So it's so interesting, you know, because there are people who are motivated, at least in part and sometimes almost completely, by envy. But most people aren't like that. And even the people who are like that mostly aren't like that 100%. Right. That's the thing, right? Is that people are different depending upon the circumstances. And I think most of the people that you would even interact with negatively online, if you choose to interact with them at all, but most of the people that will post things negatively about you online, if you could be alone with them and have a conversation with them, just a one-on-one conversation where you could find common ground.

Oh, most, yeah. Like most student activists, if you went to their parents' house for dinner with them, you'd think, well, that kid's like 85% like every other kid. That's a good way of thinking about it too, you know, because if you don't understand this, you get conspiratorial. Yeah. So imagine there's a system of ideas. We're talking about the system of ideas that might motivate some of the WEF, you know, top-down shenanigans. And we talked about the religious substrate and the idea that the planet has too many people on it. It's not like there's anybody

there who's fully possessed by those ideas. It's the ideas have a relationship that's part and parcel of the set of ideas. And each person is a partial carrier of those ideas. But if you get 200 people in a room who are partial carriers of that set of ideas, you've got the whole set of ideas there. And that's an animating spirit. Then it acts like a conspiracy and that isn't to say that there aren't sometimes also actual conspiracies but it's very interest useful to separate out the conspiratorial nature of a set of dynamic ideas from the people who are partial carriers of the ideas so jung carl jung Jung said at one point, people don't have ideas, ideas have people. And there's a religious idea

that's reflective of that, that the cosmos is a battle between principalities. So that'd be like a battle between spirits. And there's a real truth in that because the culture war we're in right now is a battle of systems of ideas. This is why what's happening on the conservative front, say in Florida, has some danger. It's like, well, we want to ban CRT. It's like, well, that's a war that has to be raged in the realm of the abstract. It has to be raged in, you know, metaphorically in heaven. It's not,

as soon as you concretize it, you fall prey to the same pathology. You'll end up enabling censors. It has to be debated. Yeah, it has to be discussed. It has to be thrashed out in the realm of ideas. Absolutely. Yeah. You can't defeat bad ideas. I don't think you can defeat bad ideas with law. You have to defeat bad ideas. I think you have to defeat bad ideas with a better vision, actually. I don't even think you can defeat bad ideas in some sense.

Right. Because there's always the danger that while fighting them, you turn into a monster. You know, what's that Nietzschean statement? If you gaze to don't forget that when you gaze into an abyss that the abyss also gazes into you and that someone who spends all their time fighting monsters can easily turn into a monster themselves well isn't it also that

there's different people at different stages of their lives that will adopt these ideas because they seem the most attractive at the time and And it doesn't necessarily mean that that person will hang on to that their whole life. And oftentimes people shed terrible ideas that they have adopted early in their life because they recognize the flaws. And the only way to recognize the flaws— Well, everyone's like that who doesn't get ossified, you know. Right. And the only way to recognize those flaws is to have those flaws exposed to you.

You have to have conversations. You have to think. Yeah, they have to be honest conversations. And you have to have the ability to analyze them. Well, what happens when you have an honest conversation that's engrossing is that you're actually optimizing abstract death. So maybe your head's full of stupid ideas. Why are they stupid? Go act them out and you die. So that's why they're stupid or you suffer. And so what you hope

happens is you can kill off those ideas before they possess you to the point where you act them out. So what do you do? You go test them in conversation. And hopefully, you know, you and I, we've been talking all day, and hopefully the consequence of that is that we both come away from this discussion somewhat less stupid and blind than we were. And the reason that that happened is because each of us have let go of some presumptions that were tyrannical, you know, not enough to, you know, if you lose your whole system of belief, it just takes you out you're in the desert but you can do that optimally so just the right amount of you is dying then you

have to do that to sustain your life because to sustain your life biologically parts of you are dying all the time like unrestricted growth is just cancer right so you have to optimally die all the time to live and it's the same on the idea front. And you experience optimal death and growth in meaningful conversation. You know, you can do that while thinking too, but most people think by talking. In fact, thinking is internalized talking. Yes. So most people think by talking.

That's one of the dangers of podcasts. You're thinking out loud. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, but it's also one of the things of podcasts you're thinking out loud yeah yeah yeah well but it's also one of the things that makes it exciting right because if it's real then people are along for the and it's cool because i kind of do the same thing in my lectures i don't prepare my lectures i have a question in mind that i'm trying to answer then i go on stage and i try to answer the question or investigate the question at least you know and as i've got better at it

usually what happens is i go a bunch of different places and then i can snap it together at the end and that's fun you know it's like all these plates are in the air and you just bring them all together at the end it's like the punch final punch line of a comedian set exactly like that yeah it is it's exactly like when bits are constructed call back that's yeah that's and that's what you're trying to do when you're constructing bits. You're trying to figure out how to tie it together optimally. Yeah, yeah. Well, to dispense with what's unnecessary, right?

To get to the gist and to tie it together. And it's so fun when you can land on your feet. I've been watching Tammy do this when she's learning how to tell a story on stage. You know, and her stories are about 10 minutes long. She has an opening. Here's the problem set. And then she lays out some narrative and says, well, here's, you know, how we could explore this. And now, and then she can go and snap. It's nice. Oh, it's so nice. It's like, you got to the point and the point, eh? That's the direction. That's the moral of the story.

Jokes do that all the time. Yeah. So that's the goal. I think the closest thing to what I do on stage is probably what stand-up comedians do. You know, although you guys usually run through a prepared set, but you have a universe of potential jokes, right? Mm-hmm. And my suspicions are that you're watching how the audience is reacting and crafting what you're selecting to, you know, to bring everybody on board. And you want to tell a story that has a narrative arc and it comes to a conclusion.

Have you noticed in your podcast that if you're really paying attention to the dialogue, that the podcast has a narrative arc all by itself? Yes. It's so cool. Yeah. That it'll, you'll see, oh, we're halfway done. And then, well, now here's the natural ending. Yes.

So, and that's cool that that narrative emerges just as a consequence of focused attention, but it's definitely the case. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very fascinating way to explore life publicly. publicly. It's a very fascinating way to explore life publicly and allow other people to take in some of these thoughts and form their own. Because that's what a lot of people are doing. They're listening to this and they're actually thinking about various aspects that resonate with their own life and then applying their own unique view of the world to that. Yeah. And, you know, and seeing how they could maybe use it to enhance them or whatever they disagree on,

why they disagree on it and solidify that position in their mind as well. And a good podcast does two things at least. It presents people with some new information, which was part of why i love doing podcasts like it's such a privilege and you know this perfectly well to call anybody in the world up and say hey i'm pretty curious about this right and you look like you know more about that than anyone else in the world would you like to talk about it then they say yes it's like that's a pretty good deal yeah and so you get to have that experience of learning and but at the same time you can model the exploration of ideas yeah and so then people they learn two things they learn whatever the the facts of the

matter are let's say but they also learn how to conduct an exploratory dialogue and both of those if you learn those both at the same time that's perfect right you know and's really, you're basically using the Socratic method of instruction, right? Because the Socratic method was all inquiry. It's like, what do you think about that? What do you think about that? And like, you're not asking the audience, but you are essentially, because you're a proxy for the audience. It's like, I don't know what this means. Do you want to explain it?

Well, oftentimes I am too, because I might know what the answer is, but I have to ask it anyway because I want other people to know it. Right. So instead of saying it, I have to ask. Yeah. And also it's like I want to know how people think and how they come to these conclusions, which is really fascinating in and of itself because everyone's path to whatever their own conclusions are very different. Yes, yes. to whatever their own conclusions are. They're very different.

Yes, yes. Well, one of the things you learn in therapy as a therapist is you can't really provide people with the answer. So maybe, you know, someone will come to me with a set of problems and I'll think, well, I know how to solve that. I could just tell them. But what happens if you tell them is they just don't do it. Right. So what you want to do is you want to ask them a bunch of questions

about the problem and about what they might view as a hypothetical solution and then they develop the intermediary steps along the way to the conclusion then they're actually likely to act it out same thing happens with kids you have to walk people through the process and you know a lot of what well what we both do i think in our podcast is we invite people along for the ride, right? Instead of presenting a package of pre-programmed options. Yeah, of course. You get that a bit because you select the people you talk to, but you can't talk to everyone and you're going to have a viewpoint. So that's, you know, as long as you're not playing games with that or any more than you can avoid.

Yeah. games with that or any more than you you know than you can avoid yeah yeah it's uh for me this has been like an unexpected education in a very bizarre way when i first started doing it i didn't think i was going to get educated i thought i was just gonna have fun with my friends and fuck around and then along the line bringing guests on then it just sort of evolved on its own. Yeah, right. I often think that this thing made itself. Yeah. As bizarre as that sounds. Well, okay, yes and no.

It made itself in some way, but you followed the golden thread of what was meaningful and interesting. And that is a spirit. That's the golden thread that leads you out of the maze, you know, and something you'll be conducting a podcast and something will grip you. You think, oh, there's something there. And then maybe if you're awake and aware, then you start doing more of that, you know, and that has a life. So that's what happens in the story of Exodus when Moses encounters the burning bush. Because it's a bush, eh?

It's not an oak tree that's 300 feet tall. Right. It's just a bush. And so the story goes, Moses is walking along and something catches his eye. He didn't have to go over and look, but it catches his eye. And he thinks, what the hell is that? And then he goes over and he starts to pay attention. And the more he pays attention, the more the voice of God manifests itself to him.

That's what that story means. So something catches your interest and glimmers, then that's the gold beckoning in the distance. It captures your interest. And then if you pursue that, it leads you into the depths. I don't know if we've talked about this before, but what do you think about those scholars in Israel that believe that the burning bush was some sort of a psychedelic experience? Oh, well, I think we have no idea how psychedelic experience shaped religious presumption. Have you read Brian Murawski's work? Absolutely. I interviewed him.

Oh, yeah. Amazing. I mean, look, we know that the shamanic tradition, which is God only knows how many tens of thousands of years old. It might be, is it millions of years old? Maybe. You know, human beings have been using fire for two million years. Like, it could be really, really old. And the shamanic tradition is definitely a psychedelic tradition and one of the things Murerescu did was show quite clearly that the all of Greek

culture was embedded in what looks like a collective psychedelic experience and so yeah I think that I think the evidence like Mircea Eliade a great religious scholar studied shamanism and he thought that the use of psychedelics was a degeneration of the original tradition but I don't think that's true at all I think that the psychedelic tradition is part and parcel of the universal religious heritage of mankind and like I don't know what that means you know I've talked to people like Robin Carhart Harris who studies the neurology of psychedelic experience, and he said that what it does is produce something akin to a hyper-stress experience.

So imagine you're extremely stressed, like your life's in danger. And so you have to open yourself up to the possibility of radically new ideas. Well, a psychedelic substance puts you in that state of mind. is. Well, a psychedelic substance puts you in that state of mind. And so that can be hellish, because you can collapse into like a catastrophic fight or flight defensive response and magnified by the hallucinogen, and you're just in hell. But that isn't the only necessary outcome. And so the psychedelic experience definitely mimics something like radical learning. And it also seems to reduce the effect of memory on perception. Because most of what you see in the world is memory. It's just a short...

That's why, you know, when you look at a word, printed word, you read the word. You can't not read the word. That's because you're seeing the memory. You're not seeing... Like when I look at the sign behind you, I'm not lost in the yellow in the details. I see the Joe Rogan experience right it's part and parcel of

the perception it's all memory what a psychedelic does in part is remove the inhibition of memory from perception that re-immerses you in the complex world and shows you how remarkable and beyond comprehension everything really is that's real but uh the question is what to do with that you know timothy leary his doctrine was turn on tune in turn on tune in drop out and that devastated the whole culture that idea it's like well if we just shed our presuppositions and the whole industrial nightmare we'd all be freedom loving hippies wandering around need and it's like no i wanted to do a line of psychedelic products uh turn on tune in grow up right i think that's much much much funnier much better yeah and that's also possible that's a

possible path through this sort of quest for spiritual enlightenment. And it's not, it's the Timothy Leary thing was, I mean, it was dismissed by a lot of other psychedelic pioneers of the time. They saw the flaws. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. The people who were already experimenting with ideas of proper set, they knew that back in the early 60s. Yes. And also the people that had no desire to run a group of like-minded people, which Leary did. He wanted to... He fell into that hippie culture, that hippie counterculture. Also, I think he fell into the cult of personality. He fell into this thing that happens when too many people are paying attention to you. And you think you have all the

answers. It's very dangerous. Yeah, especially if you combine that with psychedelic experience. Yes, yes, yes. That turns out to be a problem. Right. And the intoxicating grip of that, the power that you have over these people, which is very, it's unavoidable. And if you are a guru, you know, air quotes, and you're the person doing that, like how many of them just start cults? Oh, yeah. And how many of them, you know, air quotes, and you're the person doing that. Like how many of them just start

cults and how many of them, you know, it winds up being sexual. Well, Jung was asked once to comment on psychedelic experience. I think he was asked about what Huxley was doing. And Jung's answer was beware of unearned wisdom. Right. Very smart. Very smart. Very, very smart. Yeah. Unearned. Unearned wisdom. Because almost all wisdom comes at a price and a long, long road to get to that. Yeah, right. Yeah. It's not a quick fix. There's no quick fixes. This idea that you're just going to trip balls and figure it all out.

Yeah, and then you've got it. No, that's – no. No, and everyone that I know that thinks they've figured it out are the most lost. Yeah. Especially the ones that are espousing it to other people. Yeah, if you're lucky, you can come out of an experience like that knowing that, you know, like Socrates. And Socrates may have learned this from psychedelic experience. It seems quite probable because he participated in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Yes. He said, I know that I don't know. You know, he was radically open to the revelation of his own ignorance. And certainly psychedelics can provide that. It's like, oh, I see. I don't have a clue. Yeah. Yeah, that's the first step.

Yeah. That's the first lesson you learn is you don't know shit. Yeah. And also just the overwhelming understanding that this is available, that this experience is available. And it's so alien to modern experience, just an average everyday experience, that this thing is... Behind the veil, man. Yeah, and it's right there.

It's so scary for people. Yeah, well, maybe this time, you know, there are wise people working on that front, like Roland Griffiths, who unfortunately is very sick at the moment. And, you you know he's he's approached this with a lot more reverence and respect than more casual experimenters like Leary and maybe this time you know God willing we'll get it right and introduce these strange ancient chemicals back into our culture without blowing the lid right off it. Right. And I think one of the best gateways to that is dealing with people who have trauma, soldiers

with PTSD where they're doing MDMA therapy and also other people that have had violent experiences in their life with MDMA. It's helped them to overcome that. Griffith has helped people deal with paraly, anxiety, consequential to cancer diagnosis. Yes. You know, and those studies, they're very dry. You know, we gave psilocybin to a group of people who were suffering from cancer, and their relationship with death radically transformed.

You know, the implication is somehow that's a chemical transformation. And, of course, to some degree it is because it was induced by a chemical. But there's a mystery there it's like well what happened to those people in that six hours that transformed their vision of death right that's a yeah and what happens there's a bit of a mystery there during the most profound psychedelic experiences are you actually in the presence of god i mean is are there moments during those things where you kind of see it, you know, that the veil does get lifted and you do briefly for a moment.

Yeah. Well, I think the same thing happens to you to some degree when you fall in love. Hmm. You know, like when you're in love with your kids, well, you see them better than you've ever seen anyone. Yeah. You see deeper into them than you've ever seen into anyone.

So love is the partial lifting of that veil of ignorance. And I think that's true of romantic love too. You see into the soul of the other person, so to speak. You see what they could be. And they see what you could be. And you fall in love with that possibility. And that's not a delusion. It's not a chemical delusion.

It's the basis of life itself. It's real. I think it also applies to all love. I mean, just love for your fellow human being and just in approaching people. Yeah, if you can manage it. But approaching people in that way, even people that have wronged you,

even people that are lost apply. Yeah, it's really good to remember that. You know, one of the things I try to do with my family when we get, you know, sporadically attacked often by people who really would like to, let's say, take me out and along with me, my family, we sit and talk until we find a pathway forward that is characterized by the least amount of, you know, desire for revenge and anger possible. After contemplating the anger and the revenge quite deeply, you know, because you have to let that voice have its say too. Yeah, there's no positive outcome in revenge.

No. It's a horrible path to go down. Fun as it might be in the moment. It also, there's an extreme desire to feed that monster. Yeah. And that's what's dangerous with people. Yeah, that's for sure. I mean, that's a narrative that's been going on.

I mean, it's such a satisfying narrative too, like the revenge film or the revenge novel. Well, yeah, and it's hard to distinguish that from justice because you don't want the wrongdoer to escape scot-free, you know, so it's a very thin line, but with regards to your enemies, it's like, well, what do you hope maybe for your enemies? Well, you hope they wouldn't be enemies, that would be good, wouldn't it be better if they were allies, that would really be good. Would it be okay if they only suffered enough to learn you know assuming they're wrong and you're right and i would be careful about that assumption but sometimes you

know you do get attacked by people who are clearly bad actors it'd still be better if you could have what you really wanted it'd still be better if they could be transformed into people who could see the light and oftentimes their suffering is their knowledge that they were wrong yeah and when people have wrongly attacked you and then realize it, they have to realize in themselves this flaw that they have in their personality. Yeah, that's rough. That's hard. Yeah, that's why tyrants double down, man.

Yes. That's another thing that's so cool about the Exodus story. Yeah. You know, even when God himself reveals himself to the Pharaoh, essentially all he does is double down. And you might say, well, that's what tyrants do. It's like, no, no, that's what people do. When we're talking about groups like the World Economic Forum, don't you think there's also a draw to that?

I don't know if it's people like Trudeau or people that go there. You're at the in crowd. You're with the people that are the big decision makers that are going to be in power. You're with the people that know where the bunker is if the nuclear bombs drop. You're with the people that are making the decisions that are shaping politics behind the scenes that are manipulating the relationships between corporations and politicians and lawmakers and across the board. And so there's this desire that people always have to be a part of the in crowd or the part of the secret group that's running things, which is why groups that are running things are so dangerous. Yeah. Well, this is also something that we're concerned about with regard to this new organization.

That's what I wanted to bring up. Oh, yeah, man. Absolutely. I mean, the last thing that we're hoping is that we create a new thing that just turns into another WEF in 20 years. Right. You know, regardless of what we want. Right.

And it's a tricky problem because there has to be some degree of international communication and consensus, right? Because we all do live on the same planet and we're pretty integrated now. And so there has to be something approximating, well, like I said, an international conversation, but the danger is the Tower of Babel. And the danger is that even engaging in that conversation let alone leading it leading it right you know just ends up producing exactly the same outcome and that's hopefully we have people who are wise enough to first of all not want that for themselves because they know about the danger you know the danger is you lose yourself in a real sense. And also who are humble enough with regard to their conception of their own ignorance that they actually do genuinely want to hear what other people have to say. So you need extraordinary people to be a part of this.

Well, and then you get looped right back into that problem as you're surrounded by the extraordinary people to be a part of this. Well, and then you get looped right back into that problem is that you're surrounded by the extraordinary people. I think what you partly want to do is you want to remind yourself that part of the endeavor is to help everyone reveal what's extraordinary within them. Yes. That that's there in everyone. Yes.

Your job is to call it out. And I've seen extraordinary people in the worst possible circumstances you know people who are laboring under lives that were so bloody dreadful that it would take you a year just to describe it who were still doing everything they could to aim up right poor people psychotic people, alcoholic relatives, devastated community, ill, like brutalized, horrible childhood, no friends, you know, and still looking around to see if they could find something good to do. And you would never wish those circumstances upon anyone because most people don't survive them. Yeah. But a few people get through

those with incredible character. Yeah, that's for sure. Like Yeonmi Park. Yeah, she's a good example. An amazing example. Like her childhood, her life experience in North Korea is one of the most horrific stories I've ever heard in my life. But because of that, because of that horrific, the horrific nature of the experiences that she had she came out of this with this extraordinary character and this friend charles joseph a native carver from the west coast who he was in a residential school in canada and it was one of the ones that were genuinely bad and it was like it was bad it was like auschwitz level bad it was really bad and he was brutalized man you can't listen to him talk for 10 minutes without, like, the tears rolling down your eyes.

And, you know, he was devastated when he emerged. But he put himself together, you know. He was on the street for a while. Quit drinking. Quit mucking about. Started carving. Like, turned himself into quite the stellar creature, you know. Amazing moral development.

Again, you would never wish that on anyone. That's for sure. But it's incredible how through that adversity you create this extraordinary person. Yeah. And that extraordinary person could be a great light to so many other people that are going through terrible times and define themselves by the terrible circumstances that they find themselves in, which is a real problem with people.

Yeah, well, that's part of that victim narrative. Yeah. You know, and one of the things that's part of that victim narrative. Yeah. You know, and one of the things that's so comical about the Exodus narrative is that that's really what happens to the Israelites when they're in the desert is they, they turn into whiny backbiting victims. That's what happens. And it's like, it's the same thing 3000 years ago. It's like, we don't know where we are.

We're lost. We're, we're, we're resentful about it. We wish the tyranny would return. we are we're lost we're we're resentful about it we wish the tyranny would return and aren't we hard done by and and uh and and gossipy it's like the same old story man it really is the same old story and this constant quest for meeting and understanding and fulfillment and a life worth living yeah yeah well thing i think the thing that's really been catalyzed for me, you know, over the course of my life, but particularly in the last five or six years, is that I don't think there is anything more real than that meaningful story. And I mean real in every way. manifestation of the central structure of the material world, real metaphysically, real psychedelically, real practically, like real. And so, and I think that instinct that orients you

towards meaning, that's the deepest connection you have to what is most real. You know, because people say, well, life isn't meaningful in its essence. That just means you're a reductionist, materialist atheist in your initial presuppositions. It's easy to flip that and say, no, no, the instinct that orients you towards engagement meaning that is the most real thing there is. Yes. So, and I believe that it's, it's also what helps you stay on the straight and narrow when you're in pain. So how can anything be more real than that? You know know what orients you when you're suffering right there's a definition of real real is that which orients you properly when you're suffering

so you know that's not the same claim as you know the object's real right right it's a different idea but but it's still real it's more real it. Yeah. Yeah. And we are, I mean, the thing that we have in common is we're all just human. And if we're all human, there's always going to be this weirdness to existence and trying to figure out why and what it is. And also recognizing that some of the people that have defined why are so inherently flawed and they're very selfish in their definitions. And, you know, you have to kind of sort that out and parse through it. And one of the things that's been amazing about having a podcast is to present people with these different minds that have found their own way through it. Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah. that's what i loved about being a clinician too is to see how different and crazy and strange and interesting people really are if you listen

to them it's like you know i had lots of clients in my practice who were pretty they weren't people who would ever be put on a pedestal. You know, they were people who were in the dirt suffering away. But man, if you listen to them, they were so interesting that you just could hardly stand it. So that was a good thing to learn. And that you see, you know, you find gold in very unexpected places. Like I learned a lot from some of my most damaged clients. I would imagine. Just what's possible.

Yeah, well, and how much people could still strive towards what was good, even if they had every reason to be. You know, I had clients whose lives were so terrible, you'd think no matter what they did, you'd think, yeah, well, it's no wonder you did that because look what you went through. Right.

But they didn't turn out to be serial sexual slayers. Our prisons are filled with people like that, right? Yep. Right. But they didn't turn out to be serial sexual slayers. Our prisons are filled with people like that, right? Yeah. Well, Jordan, we just did another three hours. It flew by in ten minutes. Yep. Good to see you, Joel. It's great to see you. Thank you very much for the invitation, man. It's always a pleasure to come see you.

The moment that that was happening, I had to reach out to you because I'm like, this is just so bizarre and crazy and it just needs to be discussed. Well, like I said, it was your fault. It's my fault, so I had to reach out to you because I'm like, this is just so bizarre and crazy and it just needs to be discussed. Well, like I said, it was your fault. It's my fault, so I had to have you on. Yeah, yeah. All right. Let's go get something to eat.

All right. So when this does launch and when it's official and we can talk about it further, we will. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Good. Thank you, my friend. You bet.

Appreciate you. Good to see you. Bye, everybody. Bye, everyone.