The Joe Rogan Experience - #2180 - Jordan Peterson

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

Jordan Peterson is a psychologist, author, online educator, and host of "The Jordan Peterson Podcast." His forthcoming book, "We Who Wrestle With God," will be released on November 19, 2024. Also look for the Peterson Academy online at www.PetersonAcademy.com www.jordanbpeterson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Messes up my hair. Good to see you. What's going on your coat today? Every day is a new one. Yeah. What's going on your coat today? Every day is a new one. Yeah, well, I've got this suit maker, L.G.F.G., Demetri, the crazy Russian, and he, you know, pays attention to what I'm doing and makes me the suits that he thinks are

suitable and I wear them. You've gotten quite extravagant, though. Like sometimes, like, one half of the suit is one color. Yeah, like you're getting bored You just want to switch it up. He sends me these damn things and I get them and I think there's no way I wear that There's no way I'll wear that and then I put it on I think Like that Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and Tammy puts up with it. So is it everyday suits now with you? So pretty I'm in a suit pretty much all the time. Is there a reason for that? Well the original reason was probably because of my father.

He was a teacher and he always wore a suit even in the 70s when that started to become you know like 1950s thing. I asked him one time why he did that and he said it was to show respect for his students. And then when I was a professor, well, when you start to be a professor, you're not that much difference in age from your students to begin with. It's a good way of laying out a demarcation. And that was helpful. That's useful. You know, people like to know how the hierarchies are delineated. Professors like to think that they're everybody's buddy, but that's not the right relationship. And so that was helpful.

And then when I went on tour in 2018, I realized that I was going to speak live in front of several hundred thousand people over the course of the tour. And I thought, you've got to think when you have an opportunity like that, that if you had the least amount of sense, you'd pull out all the stops. So I bought some expensive suits and then one

of the things that happened in consequence of that was that people started to come to the lectures in suits and so about I'd say about 40% of the audience dresses formally and lots of the young guys who come they tell me when I meet them afterwards in the meet and greets for, that they bought their first suit to come to the lectures. And so, you know, I wouldn't have ever expected that. And then Dimitri showed up about two years ago with this portfolio of suits. He designed one for each of the rules for my first book, and he put the rule underneath the collar at the back and designed the lining, custom lining on all the suits as well. And

so I gave him a crack at it because he put so much work into it and that worked out real well. He's very, very creative. Yeah, that two-colour suit, there's lamb's wool on one side and goat's wool on the other, and it's a heaven and hell suit. So, yeah, no kidding. This is covered with iconography, Christian or Catholic and Orthodox. I've got one of each and that's because I was out on tour with my new book for my new book which is called We Who Wrestle with God which we will talk about today, I hope. So, that's the same story. How does one wrestle with God? Do you wrestle with God? With every word. So what does that mean?

Well, look man, well, you know, look, here, part of the reason that you're so successful, in my opinion, is because you actually say what you think. Like, you're not putting on a show. Actually, you have no reason not putting on a show. Actually you have no reason to put on a show. You put on a whole bunch of shows and they've already been successful. You know and you're actually asking the questions that are genuine questions and people can trust you because of that.

And that means that you're letting the words emerge as they come to you. And each of doing that with each word that's a decision you know because you can use your language to manipulate and you can use your language to for your own say hedonistic purposes or to gain power or you can just say what you think every like all of those different choices are a decision that's a wrestling that's a moral decision and it shines in every word and so it's it's super important that's part of the reason why in the Christian canon, the word is the basis of reality, right? It's the force that, it's the process that generates the order that's good out of possibility and chaos. Right? And so that's, and Israel, the word Israel means we who wrestle with God? So that's the chosen people and so what that means at a deeper level even is that if you're genuinely

wrestling with your conscience Then you're someone who's chosen by God and I think that's That's right. That's accurate. It's interesting what you just said. One of Terrence McKenna's lectures, he talked about a very profound psychedelic experience that he had where he was given this revelation that the world is made out of words. That everything is made out of words. He had just some sort of profound understanding of what words really mean. Well, how much of the reality that surrounds you has been, what would you say, has emerged out of the realm of possibility because of what you've said?

A lot. And you have this huge influence on the world that's all a consequence, all, all, almost all a consequence of what you've said. And so there's an insistence in the Judeo-Christian canon that whatever, that the capacity that words have to shape possibility is akin or identical to the process that generates reality itself. And I think that's true. That's why in the opening chapters of Genesis, we're described as formulated in the image of God.

We're like a microcosm of the process that gives rise to order itself. It's a very different view than the bottom-up materialistic view, let's say, of the enlightenment in the scientific world. It's a different way of looking at things. It's the notion that what is in front of you is a field of indeterminate possibility. It's got some implicit structure, as the scientists insist, but it's open, and you grapple with it, like you grapple with your dawning conscience in the morning, consciousness in the morning. What confronts you in the morning is a field of possibility.

And you approach that with a certain kind of orientation. And you use your words and your linguistic capacity to think to shape that possibility. And if you do that properly, then you make, this is the Genesis 1 insistence again, you make the order that's good or very good. And that depends on your orientation. So in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, which is an instruction manual, Christ tells his listeners how to orient themselves in the world properly. So he says first, aim with all your heart at the highest good you can imagine. Now you'll get better at that as your vision clears, but that's the orientation.

To do what's right. Now, you might say, like Pontius Pilate said, well, what is right, what is truth, but most people know the difference between right and wrong. You know at least step by step what would move you forward and upward. So you orient yourself to the highest possible upward place. Then you make the assumption that other people have the same intrinsic value that you do. So that's your initial aim and presumption. And then you pay attention to the moment.

And that's, well that's often the statement that gets Christ confused with the hippies, you know, to consider the lilies of the field who don't toil or spin. But that's not the instruction. The instruction is to aim up with everything. And then having that firmly in mind, to pay attention, as much attention as you can, to each moment, to allow the words to come to you that best suit that upward aim, not to subordinate your language to your own machinations or manipulations or your own hedonistic desire, but towards what's right. And if you do that, then what emerges out of possibility is akin to the garden, to the original garden in Genesis 1, and it's the

order that's good. Truthful language brings about the order that's good. And that's a very accurate way of portraying the role consciousness plays in bringing about reality. So, and that's a, it's not, that viewpoint, by the way, isn't limited to the Judeo-Christian canon. You see the same thing in the Taoist representation, because in the Taoist world, you have a domain of order, that's the black serpent, and you have a domain of chaos, sorry, I have it reversed. The domain of order is the white serpent, and the domain of chaos or possibility is the black serpent in the Taoist image, the two snakes head to tail.

And your job is to walk the line between them. And you can tell when you're walking that line because that's where things are maximally meaningful. And so that's another element of this vision, which is that if you orient yourself with upward aim and you straddle the line between order and chaos, then things become maximally meaningful around you. So, and Musk, you know, I just did a podcast with Elon Musk and he talked about

resolving his existential crisis, the existential crisis that he experienced when he was about 11 or 12. It was a crisis of faith, essentially. And the way that he resolved that and then motivated himself so intensely was by understanding that if he pursued the path of the expansion of knowledge, that that would be intrinsically meaningful. That's the path of growth, that's the path of knowledge, that that would be intrinsically meaningful. That's the path of growth, that's the path of adventure, all of that. It's aligned with what matures you and makes you more responsible and sets the world in

order. And the instinct of meaning signifies all that. And so I've written a lot about that in this new book, We Who Wrestle with God, and that's what I've been lecturing about in 60 different cities, walking through these biblical stories one by one, partly because we have this wrestling match going on in our culture, let's say, between the nihilists and the atheists and the true believers, you might say. And one of the faults of that war is that no one stops to elucidate or delineate exactly

what it is that we're arguing about. So you have people like Dawkins, they parody the traditional conceptions of God, a superstitious being, nothing more than a defense against death, anxiety, or the opiate of the masses, the old man in the sky. The conceptualization of God in the Old Testament and the New Testament is unbelievably sophisticated, and to reduce it to that kind of parody is a stunning disservice. Dachas is an odd duck. He's an odd duck because I think he knows also that there is some value in psychedelic experiences, but he's scared to have them. He won't look through Galileo's telescope.

Yeah, but you know, he's had major health crises, right? Didn't he have some sort of a stroke or something? I don't know. I don't mean I believe he did. I believe he had some major health crisis. It's like, how much time you have left, you know, like, what are you gonna do? You're gonna just not try it forever? You're just gonna dismiss everything forever. And I feel like people that dismiss things like that, this reductionist perspective, you're essentially saying you have the answers. To dismiss the whole question of God or of whatever you want to call it, higher power, a creator of the universe,

the universe itself as a conscious entity, whatever it is. To dismiss it just because you're trying to decipher the writings of fairly comparatively unsophisticated people, because we're talking about people from many, many thousands of years ago without access to the information we have today. And then you're also dealing with the fact that many of these stories were of an oral tradition for over a thousand years before they're ever written down. So to just dismiss that as superstition and silliness, without any curiosity about the root of these things, why they resonate with people, and to just say that this is superstitious nonsense that people choose to believe in, and this reductionist perspective of the known reality that we currently

exist in. It's a foolish way of interfacing with something, and it's shocking when a obviously brilliant man has a foolish way of interfacing with a very complex situation. Well, it's especially odd in his case because he's also the formulator of the idea of meme, and a religious story is a meme that's been selected by time and crowd. That's a good way of thinking about it. It strikes to the heart of the matter in ways that are sophisticated beyond conscious understanding. Can I tell you a story?

Sure. Okay. It's a good story for the psychedelic experience, perhaps, at least as an analogue. So in the story of Exodus, there's a number of circumstances under which Moses has an encounter with God. And they're very useful stories to understand because they point you to how that can make itself manifest in your own life. So the first real encounter that Moses has with God is in the story of the burning bush. And by this time,

Moses is an adult. He's left his home, he's gone out and he's got married, he's apprenticed as a shepherd, which was a very, very hard job in those days because shepherds not only had to protect the weakest and serve them, but also keep the lions and the wolves at bay by themselves out in the wilderness. It was a very hard job. And Moses has mastered this, so he's grown up and he's adopted a role that's like a standard social role. You know, he's a husband, he's a shepherd, he's an adult. Okay, and so kudos to him. But then one day he's out in the wilderness by the Holy Mountain. I think it's Horeb in that story,

but the Holy Mountain is always the place where heaven and earth touch. And so there are all sorts of transformation stories that occur in the biblical accounts at Mount Horeb or at Mount Sinai where God and Earth meet. And he's out near the Holy Mountain and something attracts his attention and he goes off the beaten path to investigate. Okay, so that's the first thing, that's the first bit of wisdom to derive from the story. You'll have your role and you should have your role as a socialized adult, right? So you're kind of a type that way, or maybe even a cookie cutter type, and you should have your role, as a socialized adult. Right? So you're kind of a type that way, or maybe even a cookie cutter type, but you've adopted this mature social role.

It hasn't made you a full individual, but it's better than being immature and staying in your father's tent, for example, which is what Abraham does until he's very old. So something attracts Moses' attention, and he goes off to investigate. Okay, so, and then he sees that it's a burning bush. And so what's a burning bush? Well, it's the tree of life, and life is often represented as a branching tree. And it's on fire because it's compelling, because fire is compelling. And fire is alive, and it's a symbol of life because everything that is alive burns.

That's what metabolism is and so a burning bush is like life itself intensified to the ultimate degree and that's what attracts Moses' attention and he gets closer and closer to it which means he investigates more and more deeply and as he investigates more deeply he starts to understand that he's nearing the depths, he's on sacred ground, he takes off his shoes, and that's an indication of his willingness to transform in identity. And he continues to investigate, and then the voice of being itself speaks to him from the depths, and it tells him that it reveals itself to him as the ground of being itself, and it transforms him into the leader who invites his people away from slavery and who stands up against tyranny. And so that's the story of

Moses' baptism. And so what does that mean for the ordinary person? Well, it means that you need to grow up and adopt a role. You need to mature, you need to become an adult, you need to be a good man in your time. But then you have to pay attention to see what attracts your attention, what calls to you, because there's an autonomy about that, right? You don't get to pick what interests you. It picks you, and you can respond to that call and investigate or reject it. Those are your options, and if you reject it, you stay in your box. But if you follow it, something will call to you.

And then if you investigate that, that will transform you. And if you investigate it deeply enough, it'll transform you into the person who can stand up against tyranny and who can lead his people away from slavery. And that's how God is defined in that story. God is the thing that calls to you to take you out of your role that will shape the manner in which your psyche transforms itself as a consequence of your diligent investigation into what calls to you. And so that's the God that's portrayed. That's one image of the God that's portrayed in the Old Testament.

Are you aware of some of the more recent work that's been done by scholars in Israel where these guys have now come up with this hypothesis that the burning bush was actually, it was a DMT experience and that the burning bush was most likely an acacia tree that the acacia tree is apparently rich with DMT and they think you know the way you get a DMT experience you smoke it right and that they had some method of achieving psychedelic states through this and this is where Moses is encountering God well we have one of the things I know about the theorizing and certainly the case that people have been using psychedelic experiences for we don't know how long right hundreds of thousands

of years no doubt and they've had a profound cultural consequence one of the things that a psychedelic experience does is amplify that sense of intrinsic interest, right? So it strips your perceptions of their inhibition by memory. That's a good way of thinking about it. So that you see what's there instead of your habits of perception. And so it's a way of amplifying, you could think of it as a way of amplifying what's represented in the biblical corpus as a calling. And the thing that's odd about the calling, well you know, when you're, you can think about it this way, when you're laying out a podcast, when you're participating in a podcast, you're following a golden thread, right?

You're following where your interest takes you, and your curiosity takes you. And that's not something you can pre-plan right it's something that happens in the moment so imagine that you're focused on your goal of having the most interesting conversation possible and communicating what's derived to the broadest number of people so that's the overarching goal okay now you focus on the moment and a spirit arises within you that's a good way of thinking about it That's the logos a spirit arises within you that leads you on a pathway. That's an investigation into the truth that's part of that calling

the psychedelic chemicals they They heighten that They heighten the manifestation of the underlying mystery. That's another way of thinking about it. They do that neurochemically. And so, now what's the association between that and religious revelation in the Bible? We don't know. We don't know. Have you read any of Marco Allegro stuff?

No, no, no. John Marco Allegro wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom of the Cross. Oh yes, yeah, yeah, yeah I read that back. Oh my god 1974. See you probably read it before it was bought up by the Catholic Church. Oh, I didn't even know about that Yeah, it was bought up by the, like you used to have to get old copies of it if you wanted to buy it And then it was recently republished. Yeah. Yeah, I read that a long long time ago I had no idea what to make of it when I read it. I thought oh, huh I have no idea what to do with this

It's a problem because to really understand what he's saying you'd have to have a deep understanding of those ancient language Yeah, right. Yeah, it's very difficult book to evaluate because there's very few people that are even qualified to like many people have disputed some of his, like, he has one claim that the word Christ can be traced etymologically, how do you say it? Etymologically. Etymologically. Yeah.

To an ancient Sumerian word that means a mushroom covered in God's semen. And so it was his assertion that the idea was that they thought when it rained, that rain was the giver of life and it was literally God's semen that made things grow, and that these mushrooms, because they would show up so quickly, you know, if it rains, if you go to bed, you could look out at just your lawn and it's complete grass, not a mushroom in sight. And you can go to bed and then wake up in the morning and there'll be big mushrooms there. It's really weird. And that these things, when they would eat these psilocybin mushrooms that would peer out of nowhere, they genuinely were referring to them as God, that this was like a gift from God, and that that was tracing

back to the origin of the word Christ. But it's very tortured, like to really understand and to be able to dispute it. You'd have to have a deep understanding of Aramaic. You'd have to have a deep understanding of Aramaic. You'd have to have a deep understanding of the original doctrines. Like what is the actual translation? What does it mean? You'd have to understand the ancient Hebrew version of it. How does it differ? All the webs of associations. Oh, God, it's so crazy. When we read it in English, I mean, what was the original version? The original version, all the ancient letters in ancient Hebrew also doubled as numbers, right? So words had numerical value, like the word

God and the word love apparently have the same numerical value. That is a bizarre concept for us to try to wrap our heads around a language which you know that words also have numbers in them, that your letters also mean numbers, and that there's value, certain numerical value to certain words, and that you would use them in the context of these conversations. You would understand. Where I don't understand, I don't have that. I have English. It's like we have math, we have language.

They're separate. And you're missing something in what they're trying to say. So what John Marco Alegro is doing, he's taking the oldest version of these stories on record, right? He's taking the Dead Sea Scrolls. He's taking stuff that's literally written on animal skins. And one of the ways that they deciphered it to try to put it all together, they had to take the DNA samples of these parchments to try to put it all together, they had to take the DNA samples of these parchments to try to figure out which ones are from which cows, if they're from different cows. And that's part of the way they figured out how to put all this stuff together. This

guy studies this for 14 years, 14. And he was the only ordained minister that was a part of this deciphering committee. I think there was 14 people. I don't remember how many people, it might have been 20, but it was the only one of them that was agnostic. So he had become, when he had started studying theology, he kind of lost his faith apparently. You know, he started realizing there's so many versions of these stories that are coming from different places. He became sort of like, hey, I think I'm agnostic. I'm just gonna like step back and have this approach of not knowing, not having a doctrine, not having an ideology that I'm attached to myself to. And so then when he goes through all of this, this is a straight-laced scientist by the way, it's not like some guy

looking for psychedelics to be a part of everything. Yes, it's a very serious book. Right. And there's a lot of those people that are doing that. They're looking for psychedelics to be a part of everything, sort of to validate or justify their own use of these things. He wasn't doing that at all, you know, and he wasn't like Wasson, where a guy who went down and experienced the psychedelic experiences in Mexico and then came back and described them for mainstream literature. This guy was doing it like

Like a scholar. His whole purpose was just to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, but it was so compelling to him when it was over he like had to break ranks and he had to write this book and then they took that book out of circulation, I believe. Find out what happened with the sacred mushroom and the cross, how it was, because he published another book shortly afterwards that was the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. And I think, it felt to me when I read that one, it's almost like he has to write a book because they took the other one away, because it's kind of like saying most of the same stuff. But he believed that it was, that what they were writing about,

a lot of it was fertility rituals and psychedelic experiences, and that they were hiding a lot of these stories, like they're hiding the knowledge underneath these stories to try to, in parables and all these different ways to try to obscure it from the Romans and obscure it from the people that conquer them so they wouldn't know the secrets of this thing, this ritual in which they would experience God. So why is it that psychedelic use has played the role that it's played in your interests and your pursuit of knowledge? What do you think it's done for you that's been valuable? I think we're in a weird place in society where the term drug is a blanket and it covers

things that have vastly different effects. It covers caffeine, it covers nicotine, and it covers dimethyltryptamine, which is crazy. It's crazy that all those things are drugs. Adderall is a drug, benzodiazepine is a drug, Xanax, there's a million of them, they're all different and they're all drugs. And the idea that psychedelics are a drug, for lack of a better term, that's what we use. I don't think that's what they are at all. I think they are probably why we became people. I think they are probably why society advanced, and I think every great ancient culture probably

celebrated them and used them. It seems like there's so much evidence out of Egypt of the use of psilocybin, various different drugs, various different psychedelic experiences. the iconography of the pineal gland seems to be a big part of multiple cultures, not just Egyptian, but even Catholicism. If you go to the Vatican, there's this enormous pine cone that is a statue there. And I was very lucky when I went to the Vatican. We got a guide. We hired a private guide that was a scholar from France. And when he's not working on the summers, he gives these tours, and they're very thorough. And he was a brilliant guy. I wish I could remember his name.

I should probably find it out to give him credit. Brilliant guy. So he takes us through showing us all this artwork. It's incredible. He's explaining why they had little penises and that it was explaining the whole thing that big penises were thought to be barbaric and it was not representative of like somewhat of class and dignity and education. And so we get to this pine cone and he says to me, he goes, do you know what this represents? And I said, is it the pineal gland?

And he goes, yes. And then we start this conversation of what, why, why these Catholics would have this enormous representation of the pineal gland, which they, they reference as the seed of the soul. And that this, this gland, which is in the center of your brain is, is thought to be literally a third eye. And on reptiles, it actually has a cornea and a lens, this gland. Like, literally, it's exactly where the third eye of Eastern mysticism is. And they've got a representation of it right here. And it's thought to be where dimethyltryptamine is produced. And this whole connection to it is so old that it seems like you go back to the John Marco Olegro stuff, you go back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are the

oldest version of the Bible, the only version that, I believe the only version they have in Aramaic of all those stories. And if he's right, if John Marco Allegro is right, it all kind of makes sense that these people were having these experiences much like the Greeks were with the Illusinian mysteries, much like multiple different cultures in the Amazon, all over the world have experienced these profound ceremony experiences that lead to these journeys into the spirit world, these connections with higher consciousness, this something that when you're experiencing it seems very, very real, but also very preposterous when you try to explain it to people that aren't experienced. You know, it's like Hendrix, like are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have. Like, it's

that. Like, with that understanding that that's possible, the world changes. Because now you know that that's possible. You could live your whole life and not know that the most shocking, profound thing in existence is three hits away. Three hits away. And all of a sudden, you're in a completely different universe in 20, 30 seconds. That's nuts. And the fact that that is dismissed,

that people look at it as like, oh, you're just escaping reality. that people look at it as like, oh, you're just escaping reality, and you're just... It might be the source of civilization itself. It might be the source of language. It might be the source of the expansion of the human mind over a period of two million years, the doubling of the human brain over a period of two million years, which Terence McKenna felt directly coincides with the shifting of the tropical rainforest turning into grasslands, which would force these primates to experiment with new food sources and these undulate cows that were everywhere that would shit, and then these psilocybin mushrooms would grow and they're shit.

Observed primates flipping over these cow patties looking for beetles and grubs and things to eat. It's everywhere. Like you can see it all over Africa. If there's something on that, they're going to try it out. And if these things are trying it out and they're doing this over a period of two million years and they develop language and culture and weapons and they start thinking about things and they become different than every animal around them. And this was McKenna's stone-dape theory, which I'm sure you're familiar with. And Dennis McKenna, who is, you know, a legitimate scientist, Dennis explains it even better, because he explains it with the actual mechanisms that your brain, the things that fire up when you

encounter high-dose psilocybin experiences that would lead you to the development of language. Glossolalia, the the connection of sounds and objects and and bringing things together in a manner of communication. Also they they realize that in low doses it increases visual acuity, it makes people more amorous, makes people hornier, they're gonna have more sex, they're gonna be betterous, makes people hornier, they're gonna have more sex, they're gonna be better hunters because they could see better, they're gonna be a little more sensitive to the environment, they're gonna be more aware. Edge detection's different. There's like so many different things that happen that if you're thinking about what

made people people, it's a mystery. We want to pretend that we understand things because of the fossil record and this and that. Sure, we kind of understand. But every now and then we find a new human that we didn't even know exists, like Denisovans. What was that? Not even 20 years ago, I don't think? So now there's a whole other branch of human beings that they weren't even aware of 20 years ago. Whatever the fuck happened that took us from all the other primates that are still here and made us this It's pretty profound and I have a feeling that psychedelics were at least involved in that process That's my belief and my belief is that the sweeping psychedelics act of 1970 that they passed sweeping psychedelics act of 1970 that they passed essentially to target civil rights activists and anti-war activists.

That's what they did. They wanted to go after the hippies, and they went after the hippies with MK Ultra, with Tom O'Neill so brilliantly outlines in his book Chaos. They went after it and they created the Manson family. They created that family. They taught that guy how to do that so that that guy would kill people and he would be a psychopath and now hippies would be psychopaths. And then all this anti-war shit would just get stopped by sensible people. Then, schedule oneed everything.

Everything. Psilocybin, marijuana, all down the board. Everything becomes schedule one. The most illegal of illegal things. So all these people who are experiencing, all these Ken Kesey people and, you know, all the LSD people of the 60s, all those people become criminals instantly. And they just threw water on the whole movement and it worked. It really worked. It was Nixon and all the people that were in charge back then. If you look at what happened from 1960 to 1980, this confusing era of the 70s where the effects are wearing off and then you get into the 80s and everybody's doing coke and they have makeup on and they

have big hair and the music sucks. It's like something happened. Something happened. What happened was they completely removed the very thing that had changed culture so radically from the 50s to the 60s. Like I'm a gigantic fan of 1960s automobiles. I love them. There's something about the shapes of them, the way they sound. Part of it is that I grew up in the 80s and those are the cars we all wanted. When we were kids, you know, if a guy drove by in a 1969 Camaro, we would all be like, whoa, look at it, look at that thing. But there's something about those shapes, there's something about the designs of those cars that resonates so strongly today. A 1990 car ain't worth shit.

Nobody wants your fucking 1990 car. 1990 Camaro, get the fuck out of here with that thing. But if you have a 1968 Camaro, people will stop in a parking lot and stare at it. What is that? I think those guys were on drugs. I think all those guys were on drugs. I think the guy who created a Corvette had

to be on drugs. These guys were, they felt something the same way Hendrix felt something when he was on stage playing guitar in a way nobody had ever heard before. That guy came out of nowhere and everybody was like, what the fuck is he doing? It was so different that Eric Clapton watched him for the first time and was like I should probably quit playing guitar Like what the fuck am I doing compared to this guy like Jesus Christ? Everybody was like humbled and confused by psychedelic inspired 100% 100% and there's something about throwing water on that in the 1970s that I think has done a

massive disservice to our civilization, a massive disservice, because it's equated these things with people that have poor discipline and bad social skills and ne'er-do-wells who fail in society, and that's not true. So, and all these people that I know that are billionaires, I know people that are like super rich people that run these financial institutions. And I know a lot of like brilliant venture capitalist guys and brilliant tech guys. And almost all of them are enthusiasts.

Almost all of them have had these experiences. And they're all kind of quiet about it. And it's very unfortunate It's very unfortunate because of these stupid laws that were passed 50 years ago We've gotten ourselves in this weird crunch Where we've made things illegal that could massively help people Progress in life and sort things out if we could figure out how to manage them

correctly, if we could run proper studies about what is the correct dose. Is there a person that has a certain sort of biological makeup that makes these drugs problematic? Should we find out who's... maybe someone's allergic to them. There's many medications and many different compounds and many plants and natural things that people are allergic to. Let's avoid that. Let's try to figure out what works for some people. What doesn't work? Let's have legitimate counselors that could guide people through experiences. People that have experienced it themselves and can understand how to do this with intent and possibly aid your life. They have been shown to be hugely beneficial

for soldiers, for our military men and women coming back from overseas experiencing horrific trauma to help them get past that. And yet they're illegal still. We're both middle-aged men, right? So who is telling us what we can and can't do? This is preposterous. This is other men our age that haven't had these experiences maintaining this control on them in a completely ignorant way. They don't even know what they are. They don't know what these things are. They don't know what the experience is, and yet they want it to be kept out of the hands of kids.

We've got to keep it off the streets. We've got to keep drugs away from our society, and you don't know what you're talking about. It might be why we're here, and it also, the absence of it, might be why we're so fucked up. It might be why we're so disconnected, why we're so disjointed, and our society is so hypocritical. I mean, the most pro-life people are also pro-death penalty. It's like across the board, everything, the people that, you know, want no crime, but don't want to stop the emergence of crime by funding programs to try to fix the inner cities.

Our whole thing is disconnected, and I have a feeling that a big part of that is that we have not been given access to tools that have helped people literally become what we are today. And if you read Brian Murrow's rescue work and if he's correct and these people that are studying the hallucinian mysteries and the literal emergence of democracy as we know it, probably all of it came out of psychedelic experiences. R. So I had Timothy Leary's old job at Harvard.

That comes with a lot of weight. Yeah, and I knew some of the people that knew him. And so, you could say that what happened in the 1960s, and this is relevant to the psychedelic experience, let's say, is that the emergence of mushrooms in particular, and then LSD, indicated to a swath of the population, like Leary and like Ken Casey, that our perceptions were locked in kind of a box, in a box that we didn't even really, that we weren't even conscious of.

I suppose that's the box of conformity. And the psychedelics released a wave of non-conformity and Leary crystallized that with his tune-in turn on and drop out. Now there was a major problem with that and that was partly what led to the kickback. So you might say that the first stage of something approximating a religious revelation is the understanding that your perceptions have been constrained by forms of conformity that were so extensive that you didn't even understand them. You didn't even know they were there. And so you're freed from that. And then maybe the first response to

that is the celebration of an unlimited hedonistic freedom. But the problem with that is that freedom from constraint and hedonism is not freedom. It's just subjugation to a kind of instinctive chaos, and that emerged with the hippie culture. Leary in particular made a huge mistake when he said, tune in, turn on, and drop out. He should have said, tune in, turn on, and grow up. I'm dead serious about that because there's a different form of responsibility that emerges once you realize that you were constrained by a conformist box, let's say like Moses when he was being a normal shepherd, that you can step outside of that, but you don't

step outside of that into worship of the golden calf like an hedonistic orgies, you step outside of that with a more conscious upward aim, and if the use of transformative technologies like psychedelics isn't accompanied by that conscious upward aim and if the use of transformative technologies like psychedelics isn't accompanied by that framework of enhanced responsibility Then it can degenerate into a kind of hedonistic chaos, and that's what the Nixon types were reacting to they were terrified by it And they had the reasons to be terrified because as you're intimating these Technologies are unbelievably to be terrified because as you're intimating these technologies are

unbelievably, unbelievably potent and destabilizing. Now that destabilization can be used for better, let's say for better or for worse, right, and it should be used for better. That's complex. It's a very complex thing to manage and so Carl Jung said that the one of the main functions of religion was to stop people from having religious experiences. And what he meant by that was that a direct experience of the transcendent is enough to shake you to the foundation and to destabilize not only you but your culture. This is why for there's another scene in the story of Exodus. But could you explain further like expand on what he was meaning by that? But they keep you from having religious experiences?

Well, if everybody goes their own enlightened way, let's say there's no There's no social cohesion. There's no unity of purpose. There's nothing but fragmentation and part of the danger of the hippie movement in the 1960s was a counter-social fragmentation. Right. Now, so you can imagine, you know, things get so constrained that everybody's exactly the same, and that's a complete totalitarian catastrophe. But you can imagine the opposite catastrophe, which is that, well, everyone's letting it all hang out and doing their own thing, and that's equally dangerous.

Right. And so there's some balance in the middle. Well, that's that balance between chaos and order that we were referring to earlier. It's also an ignorance of the structure that's involved in maintaining a society. Definitely. You need discipline and people need to work to maintain the society that you enjoy to be so free and to be a hippie. Yeah, well, you can imagine that that complex social order can be maintained by something like mindless obedience. That's suboptimal. What you'd really want is enlightened responsibility.

Right. Right. That's a great way to put it. Right. That's a very hard thing to pull off though, because it means that you have to leap out of the box of social constraint, and you have to take the responsibility onto yourself. Now that's a hell of a lot better if you can manage it, but that is definitely not what Keezy or Leary, for example, were preaching to the masses. Right, but what you're saying is like an admirable thing that people should aspire to.

It's the best possible... Yeah that people just should aspire to. It's the best possible... Yeah, it's the highest goal. Let me give you another example of this, if you don't mind. I'm going to use another biblical story. While you were biblicaling, the lights are flickering behind you, almost like God is interacting with us. There's spirits in the room, Jamie. Have you noticed the light flickering? You haven't noticed it? Keep an eye on it. Hopefully they're the right spirits. Well, I think they always are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so in the story of Abraham, Abraham is a, he's an old man when the story starts. As soon as you start talking about Abraham, start flickering again. It's going now, see? One of my tricks, man. I'm telling you, dude, it's never happened before. This is wild. So, Abraham is like 70 years old when the story starts, and we don't know anything about

him. He's completely nondescript. He's a case of failure to launch. So he has rich parents and he has everything he needs at hand. So he can live the life of a satiated infant. He's in the throes of what would you say, materialistic plenty. Okay, and the voice of God comes to him. Now, but it's characterized in a very particular manner.

So God comes to Abraham as the call to adventure, and that's a very useful thing to know. So in the Moses story, God comes to Moses as that which attracts his interest and takes him off the beaten path. In the story of Abraham, God comes as a spirit of adventure and God makes Abraham a deal. It's a very specific deal and it's the best possible deal. This is the covenant, by the way This is the covenant so God tells Abraham if you leave your zone of comfort if you Remove yourself from your father's tent if you move away from infantile materialistic satiation and go out into the terrible world, and you do that voluntarily,

you have the adventure of your life, this is what will happen. You'll be a blessing to yourself that's genuine. So instead of being wracked with self-doubt and being self-conscious and taking yourself apart with guilt and shame, you'll ride the wave of adventure and you'll feel that your life is a blessing. Not only will you feel that, it will be a blessing. That's the first thing that will happen. The second thing that will happen is that other people will notice and your name will become renowned and that will be valid.

You'll be a blessing to other people in that regard. Your name will be upheld. So you'll stand out among your peers, but in a justifiable manner that's a consequence of your own intrinsic merit. The third thing that'll happen is that you'll have the opportunity to establish something permanent. For Abraham, it's a dynasty, right? He's offered the possibility of being the father of nations. And the fourth thing that happens is you'll do it in a way that's of cardinal benefit to everyone. And so what happens in that story, this is so cool, it's so remarkable. It's the answer to the selfish gene, by the way, as well.

So what this story does is it takes the call to adventure, which is the instinct that makes children move out into the world. It's the spirit that you encourage if you're a good father. It lines that up and it says if you follow that and let it pull you out of your zone of comfort, your life will be a blessing to you, your reputation will grow, you'll establish something permanent, and you'll do that in a way that's good for everyone. Right? So that's a hell of a good deal. And that's the story of Abraham. Okay, so why is that relevant to the psychedelic debate?

Because if you're going to move into the razon of the transcendent, you have to take on the requisite responsibility, or the process of transcendence turns into something like a descent into unstructured chaos. And that's not an improvement. It's just a movement from tyranny into the desert. That's a good way of thinking about it symbolically. So, what happens in the Exodus story, because it also details out how this should be structured, is that Moses has a vision of individual responsibility and social organization that's maximally responsibility-based.

So, Moses tells the Pharaoh to let his people go, but that's not the phrase. The phrase is, God tells Moses to say this. He's let my people go, so they may worship me in the desert. And so you move out of the tyranny, that's what happens, let's say, in the throes of a psychedelic experience, is that the preconceptions are shattered.

Now you're somewhere unstructured. Okay, well you can't worship what's unstructured. You have to find the proper structuring for your new freedom. The vision that's put forward in the book of Exodus is a vision of multi-dimensional responsible identity. So you take on responsibility for your own life, you take on responsibility for the life of your wife or your husband, you take on responsibility for your family, you're a model for your community, you serve your state, you do what you can for your nation, and that's all united under your highest upward orientation. And that's ordered freedom. That's ordered freedom. It's not the same as the hedonistic freedom that the people like Nixon and the sort of right-wing conservatives of the 1960s were

terrified by that kind of hedonistic anarchy. It's not freedom. It erupted. I mean, we're right now in 2024. I want you to imagine 2014. It's the same. It's the same. There's nothing different other than the threat of AI and war and socially. The world's the same. You go from 1956 to 1966, you have a completely different world. Completely different world. Everyone's going crazy. The opposition to the Vietnam War has got people in the streets. Ken Kesey, Tim Leary, tune in, drop out, all that. This world is changing in this radical way. There'd been nothing like it. And in a lot of what you're saying about these experiences happening and people just disconnecting and not having discipline and structure and just experiencing these things and just disconnecting completely from society was the

problem. That was the problem. It's a major problem. Well, it's still a problem now to some degree because people who are pursuing, let's say, non-conformist freedom don't understand that the replacement for freedom isn't hedonistic anarchy. And that's partly because it's self-defeating. It's also pointless and meaningless. And it's partly pointless and meaningless because, imagine, and this is part of the implication of the story of Abraham is that the instinct of meaning comes to you when you pursue a pathway that specifies what would you say, the limitless development of your integrated psyche. But it's not just the psyche, it's the integration of the psyche with all the different levels of society. Like, for example, insofar as you're well put together, you're going to be a highly

functional husband to your wife, right? Like your own psychological organization, integration, cannot be divorced from the union that you make with your wife. They're the same thing. And then you can extend that to your kids. For you to get your act together means simultaneously that you establish the proper relationship with your wife and with your children. Those are the same thing. And then if you can manage that, you do the proper relationship with your wife and with your children. Those are the same thing. And then if you can manage that, you do the same thing with the broader community. It all stacks up musically. And so then mental health doesn't become how your psyche is organized internally, which

is what the clinical psychologists misled people into believing it, it's more like the harmony that obtains from the psyche upward through society when everything is stacked up properly to the highest level possible of being. And that's another definition of God. So one of the things I tried to do in this book is to actually define what it is that we're arguing about. Because the old man in the sky's superstition doesn't cover the territory. So for example, if you look at God in the story of Abraham, and you say, do you believe in that God? What you're asking, even though you might not know it is, do you believe that there is a call to adventure? And that following that call will not only integrate you, but serve society in the highest possible manner and

That's a very that's a pretty straightforward question has very little to do with anything. That's even vaguely superstitious Because that call there you certainly rewarded in your children if you have the least bit of sense and so I've been trying to define what it is that we're arguing about. And so there's another definition too that you see this in the story of Adam and Eve. So in the story of Adam and Eve, one of the ways God is characterized is as the spirit that calls you on your pride and presumption. that calls you on your pride and presumption. So then you ask yourself, well do you believe that exists? It's like how often in your own life has pride gone before a fall? Is there some spirit that's operative in being that shows you the error of your ways when you get ahead of yourself or not? And if the answer to that is no, you say, well you have no conscience?

Nothing calls you on your moral impropriety? You're overreaching? No one wants to be near you if you're one of those people. That's for sure. And is that real? So one of the ways God is presented in the Old Testament is this dynamic between calling and conscience, right? So there's the calling that is indicated in the story of Abraham and Moses that pulls you forward to the adventure of your life, and the other side of that is the constraint of conscience that tells you when you're

wandering off the straight and narrow path. That's more the voice of negative emotion and threat detection. calling is more like the voice of positive emotion that pulls you forward and invites you but you need the dynamic between those two that's the Pillar of light and the pillar of darkness that guides the Israelites across the desert Jonathan Paz will help me figure that out just Flatten me when I when he laid it out because I could see the Taoist view of the world and the ancient Jewish view of the world stack on top of each other, and the implication of the story is very straight. It's like you leave a tyranny and you're lost. What guides you when you're lost?

The interaction between what calls you forward and upward and the constraints of your own conscience that warn you when you're deviating from the straight and narrow path. That's the definition of God that emerges from Exodus. And the balance of the mind to be able to figure out which is which and how to apply them. And the balance of the mind, this is why you have to have the least amount of problems in your life and keep your body as healthy as possible so you don't have all these other things that are influencing the way you interact with the world. You got to have a balance of everything. All of it has to be kind of balanced together in order for you to have... The judgment. Yes. Otherwise you can't see. Right.

Yeah, yeah, you have to be able to see it. And it's hard. And you have to want to see it. Yeah. So why do you want to see it? Me? Yeah. It's just my instinct. That's just I follow my instincts with everything. I always have. Why? I don't know. I think because I didn't have a lot of guidance when I was young and because, you know, I was a latchkey kid and parents divorced, split, you know, a lot of moving. I think I developed my own appreciation of my instincts, of my thought. And I had seen enough people by the time I was a young boy ruin their lives and make poor, and I'd seen these poor decisions right in front of me. I'd seen poor thinking and excuse making and laziness. Right, so you could see the negative consequences.

Yes, I'd seen all these things and because I didn't feel protected, I genuinely felt like I was on my own and I had to figure things out on my own. I developed a very early trust and recognition of the importance of that, and it's led me through my entire life. Everything that I ever did that was like a big risk was like a calling to me. Every single thing that I ever did from getting into martial arts, I went from not doing it to doing it every day all day, seven days a week. It was a calling. Like I was called, it was like my my mind interfaced with whatever that was, martial arts was, and said, this is my ticket out of here. This is my ticket to be a different person.

Was that discipline? What was the ticket, do you think? I don't even know if you call it discipline back then, because it was more of an obsession. So when you're obsessed with something, it doesn't require discipline, because you can't wait to do it again. Discipline, Mike Tyson said best. It was a real calling for you. Mike Tyson said best, he said,

discipline is doing something you hate, but doing it like you love it. When you're in training camp like Mike Tyson was for a big heavyweight fight, you're pushing the limits of your physical endurance and recovery because you're trying to achieve an adaptation You can't maintain fight ready fitness all year round one thing that people don't understand about like fight ready feel like when a guy like

Islam Makachev who is the UFC lightweight champion the pound-for-pound best fighter on earth UFC lightweight champion the pound-for-pound best fighter on earth When that guy is fighting when he gets into the cage on the day, whatever it is that Saturday night this is a peak of Performance and training that cannot be maintained you want it He wants to catch it right when he's right there when the body hasn't broken down yet The immune system hasn't broken down yet, the immune system hasn't broken down yet, the endocrine system isn't fried, the adrenals aren't fried, you're getting it to right when your body can recover and is forced to maintain this insane level of fitness, and then you have to take a break.

You cannot maintain fight camp all year round. You will not be able to do it. Your body will break down. So it's not what I'm, my point is like that requires discipline. Because that is no longer, you're no longer in the, in the inspiration realm. You're not in the obsession realm. You are, I'm sure as well, but you're also in, there's no fucking way you want to do it. There's no way you want to do more sprints. There's no way you want to do all this stuff. You must do it though. You must do the calisthenics. You

must do the live wrestling drills. You must do the shark tank where they throw in a new fresh opponent every round for five rounds. So you're dealing with rested killers and you're exhausted. You have to do that. And that's not, that's pure discipline and And generally enforced discipline by coaches, because it's so rigid, it's so hard to do, that you need someone over you with a stopwatch, go, let's go, let's go, let's go! And everybody has to get up and go at it, because even the most disciplined, their body recognizes they need a break. So that's pure pure discipline What I had was this obsession

That made that hard work easy, right? That's a key thing. So that's a key thing Okay. So so now imagine that underneath that there's a Implicit or unconscious goal Okay, so they're saying this for a very specific reason so The positive emotion that motivates people is always experienced in relationship to a goal. Now this is a very important thing for everyone to understand because it means that if you

don't have a goal, you have no positive emotion. And it also means that the higher your goal, the more positive emotion you experience when you're moving towards it because positive emotion signifies progress towards a goal. So you need a goal. The goal of the deepest religious trend, the deepest religious traditions is the ultimate goal by definition. So the idea is that you need a goal and so you should pick the utmost possible goal. That's another good definition of something like the Kingdom of Heaven or the realm of the divine, the ultimate goal. Now you have a goal and

every time you see movement towards it you're going to get, what would you say, you're riding on the energy that's associated with movement towards that goal. That's dopaminergically mediated. That's the same systems that are affected by cocaine and methamphetamine and so forth. All the positive emotion drugs. So you need a goal. That goal, now you can imagine this, that if you're attentive to the action of your own instincts, or the divine voice, I don't think those are distinguishable, then a goal is going to emerge that catalyzes a series of transformations. This is what happens to Abraham. So he has a series of adventures after he

decides that he's going to go out in the world. And every adventure is marked by the erection of a sacrificial altar and a recommitment of his upward aim. Now there's two reasons for that. One is that he reminds himself that he's aiming upward and he's on an adventure. And the second is, he admits to himself that with every transformation of character, something has to be sacrificed. So, you know, so now I'm curious about this in your own life, right? So you started obsessively committing to martial arts. What did you have to give up to do that? Social life. Okay, what else?

That's basically it. I was a kid. Okay, social life. Okay. What else? That's basically it. I was a kid. Okay, social life. I didn't really have responsibilities other than school, so I had to leave from school and go right to training. Okay, so there's an emergent idea in that story of adventure-led transformation that with every profound transformation of character, something that's not appropriate has to be let go of. That's why, by the way, that's why Abraham's story culminates in the sacrifice of his son.

Because the sacrifices get higher in value as the developmental progression upward continues. And that's basically the story of individual development, right? Follow the call of adventure, aim upward, continually remind yourself of your fundamental goal, and then let go of everything that isn't appropriate as you transform forward. So Abraham ends up with a new name because of doing that. That's how different he becomes in the course of his adventure. It's like Jacob. Jacob becomes Israel and Abraham becomes Abraham because the consequence of him following the pathway of adventure, the calling, is a transformation that's so

complete it's as if he's a different person. And now those stories are maps of that transformative process. So they culminate, they culminate in the Christian view of things with the ultimate sacrificial offering. So that's the idea that lurks in the New Testament is that the ultimate in transformation is brought about by your willingness to put absolutely everything on the line no matter what. Right? And that's very different view of the religious enterprise than something like defense against death anxiety, right? It's the ultimate adventure and that's the willingness to welcome everything about life that's terrible and painful and malevolent, to welcome that with open arms, to accept that. And that's predicated on a deeper idea

even, which is that sacrifice is the basis of community, which is exactly right. Because you have to give up something to be in relationship to the future and to other people. Right. Right. So the biblical corpus is an examination of, what would you say, levels of sacrifice moving downward to the ultimate possible level of sacrifice. So in the Abrahamic story, Abraham is requested by God to offer up his son.

Right now he does it. He gets him back. The threat isn't carried through. And what does that mean? It means first of all that everything in your life, no matter what it is, including your relationships, should be made subservient to the highest possible aim. It also means that a good father sacrifices his children to what's highest. That's the offering of your child to the world, the faithful offering of your child to the world. That's what Mary does. It's a famous statue of Mary in Saint Peter's in Rome. Michelangelo made it when he was like 23, some ridiculous early age, brilliant statue. Mary is holding the body of her son broken in her arms, looking serene. He's an adult

off the cross. It's like the female crucifixion. And the idea is that the good mother, the proper father offers their children to be broken by the world in the pursuit of what's highest. There it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was 23 when he made that? That is insane. God, how... What were you doing when you were 23? Telling shitty jokes. Single block of marble. Yeah, and so, so see that's, that's, that's, that's an indication of sacred femininity because see the psychoanalyst said in the early part of the 20th century that the good mother necessarily fails and so what does that mean?

Well, every woman who brings a child into the world knows that the child is going to be broken by death and malevolence. Right, and so motherhood in its highest, in its highest aspect is the offering of the child to the world to be broken. That's what's portrayed in the Abrahamic story too with regards to Abraham. To get your child back, you offer them to the world. That's a profound indication of faith, right, that life is worthwhile despite its suffering and its evil.

And it's so good. Like the work, like look at his foot. Just look at like the detail on the way the toe bends, the heel. It's insane how good it is. He was so good. The fact that he figured out how to be that good at 23 years of age is just so shocking. Well, also so inspiring, you know. So inspiring, but stunning, like stunning how good it is. Yes, and stunning what it means and where it's placed. And the understanding of anatomy. Did he really? Wow. Insane. I mean, that guy left behind so much. Like, what is that about? What is it about these unique individuals like him that their work transcends time? And that's life eternal. That ability to transcend time. Yeah, yeah. Thousands of years later. So what happens in the Abrahamic story, because it's

relevant to your question. So God offers Abraham the opportunity to be the father of nations. Okay, so imagine this, imagine this as a father. So we use father as a generic word, right? Everybody has a father, so there's a generic aspect to it. There's a role that you play if you're a father, and then you could imagine there's a role you could play as a good father. And if you're a good father, you're radically encouraging, and you encourage your children to go out into the world and prevail. You teach them to handle serpents. You don't protect them. You don't shelter them. You push them out and you say, no matter what comes your way kid, I've got confidence that you can handle it. No matter how terrible

it is, no matter how challenging or daunting or malevolent it is, you've got it. And when you see your children doing that, if you're a good father, it fills you with gratitude and love to see your children acting that out, even at an early age, to take taking the risks of their first steps or climbing their first play structure or going out in the playground to make new friends when they're strangers or going off to school alone, all of that you think. It's dangerous out there. It's like, good, go. I know you can handle it.

OK, so that's what Abraham plays out. He plays out that archetypal role. And the idea there, and this is why I made reference earlier to the idea of the selfish gene, Dawkins characterized human reproduction as selfish. That's wrong, because the human reproductive pattern is multigenerational. And if you want to establish the pattern of fatherhood that's going to cascade down the generations that will make your

descendants successful in the multi-generational manner, then you follow the spirit adventure and you imbue your children without confidence and that's how that pattern that establishes the dynasty, so Abraham is the father of nations, is established. So human reproduction is way more complex than just sex, far more complex. It's a multi-generational commitment. So now the promise that God makes to Abraham in part is that if you fall into that pattern of maximal adventure and courageous movement forward that your life is imbued with a meaning that with the meaning that transcends time and that you embody something like an archetypal and eternal spirit and that's the spirit of the

father that's why Abraham understands that he's made contact with the God of his ancestors and if you're a good father, you have that spirit dwelling within you. And the Christian insistence is that that's the that spirit's identical to the logos that bears the weight of the world on its shoulders voluntarily. And that that's what brings everything into being. Stunning. It's a stunning conceptualization. And I think it's right. It looks right to me. And the idea that sacrifice is the basis of the community, that's just obvious.

Like, the fact that you're married, so what's the sacrificial gesture there? Well, all other women, that's sacrifice number one. Then it's not about you. It's also not about your wife. It's about the stability of your union across time, and it's about the stability of that union insofar as that's a reliable foundation for your children. So that's sacrificial too. You give up your whims in the present so that the future is stabilized. You give up your immaturity so that your children can thrive. That's all sacrificial gesture.

And we figured that out. That's why we put the crucifix at the center of our society. Because we figured out, even though we didn't know it, we figured out that the stability of the community is predicated on the willingness of the individual to sacrifice. And the exploration in the New Testament is the limits of sacrifice. Right? So do you think that that's what people think of when they think of the cross? It's very hard to think about. It's very hard to know what people think about. I would say it depends on their level of sophistication. Right, that's what I'm getting at. I don't think it's

ever been explained to me that way, and I don't think most people think about it that way. When they think about it, they think Jesus died for our sins, there he is, praise Jesus. It's a very formulaic, surface level understanding of what it is we're talking about. It's partly, and there's a merciful element of it, and this is what Jung was referring to when he said that religion helps protect people against religious experience. The full revelation of the significance, let's say, of the imitation of Christ, which is supposed to be the foundation of Christian belief, is in fact the demand that you walk the same pathway.

And that's a ter- it's the most terrifying demand, because so Jung described the Christian passion as an archetypal tragedy. Now, there was a reason for that, so think about it this way, think about it technically. So imagine that a hundred great storytellers told the most painful possible story. And then imagine that you aggregated all those stories and you distilled them into one story where all the terrible elements were present. Okay, so now you have a representation, you have a representation of the worst life can throw at you. Okay, so let's take that apart a bit. So the first thing that makes

a tragedy tragic is that the tragedy befalls a good person. Because if a tragedy befalls a villain, it's just justice. It's not a tragedy. So it has to be a good person. So then, to amplify that, you would not only have the tragedy befall a good person, you'd have it befall a good person that everyone knew was good, but was not only good, was the best, and that was persecuted because he was good. So that sort of limits it out in that direction. And then you might say, well, what does he have to face? Well, and the answer would be, well, the worst life has to offer. Okay, early death, early painful death, early painful, humiliating, unjust death at the hands of his friends, at the hands of the mob, under the thumb of a tyrant.

Right. Brought about by people who knew that he was not only good, but the best of men. That's an archetypal tragedy. And then it doesn't limit out, so then you have the death that occurs in consequence of that and its voluntary acceptance. But that's not where it ends, because the mythology surrounding the crucifixion story insists that Christ harrowed hell after the crucifixion, which meant that he confronted not only death but malevolence itself and in consequence transcended both. And so what's the underlying psychological message? It's something like the calling and the voice of conscience informing people that in order to thrive properly in life and to become who you could be, if you could be everything you could be,

you have to voluntarily take on the weight of the worst life has to offer, including the depths of malevolence itself. And you think, well, obviously, Joe, you know this, like, how are you going to adapt to a situation you won't even admit to? Right. Well, so how could it be otherwise than for you to become everything that you could be? You have to embrace all of the catastrophes that life has to offer. How could it be other than that? You're gonna hide? You're gonna pretend? How's that gonna work? No one thinks that'll work. And you're right, there is this defensive element to the

Right. And so, and you're right, there is this defensive element to the, particularly the Protestant religious tradition, although I don't want to single out the Protestants specifically, that insists that, you know, the work has already been done, but there's a lot of ambivalence about that in the Christian canon, because there's an equal insistence that, no, you're supposed to take all this on voluntarily. And that not only that, not only that, that that's such an interesting idea because it makes so much sense psychologically. So imagine that as your courage grows so that you can confront more and more of the horror of life, that a spirit begins to develop within you that gives you a strength that's commensurate with your daring, that's walking with God. That's the same thing. So the promise is that if you had the courage, something would be with you

to allow you to bear up nobly under the burden. And all the clinical evidence supports that proclamation, because what you see in people in the therapeutic transformation is that insofar as they're willing to confront what terrifies them voluntarily, they get stronger. And then imagine that there's no, there's nothing but a metaphysical limit to that. And I think that's right. I can't see how it cannot be right. It makes sense It resonates with how we know people that have overcome great things in their life and become these very unusual and unique people I got a pause because I have to use the restroom, but let's jump right back. Okay

Where were we? Well, we were kind of bringing we who wrestle with God to a close I would say I've got other projects I want to talk to you about. Okay. All right? Sure. We're launching Peterson Academy today. So online university, we hope.

We'll see. We've got... We're launching with 20 courses, best lectures in the world, very, very high quality production. We invited the best lecturers I could find down to Miami, eight-hour courses on the topic they really want, highest possible production quality, and we're hoping we'll make a high-level university-level, university-equivalent education available to everyone for approximately one- one twentieth the cost

Mmm, so that's the plan you want to see the opening the opening salvo sure yeah puts it up put it up Yeah, yeah, I ran this before my lectures this last tour you got to put the headphones on yeah Yeah, okay. Why did I decide to build an online university? Well... There is a crisis now in higher education. The president of Harvard University resigned today... This calling for the genocide of Jews violates Penn's code of conduct. We have a problem of affordability and cost, spiraling student loans.

We have a groupthink emerging and that warps the entire academic enterprise. I experimented with putting my lectures online and found that I could teach far more people at very low cost than I could at the university. And I thought, well, why not scale that? that. What I'm hoping to do is to find the best lectures in the world and to bring them to as wide as possible an audience. He came to me he basically said I want you to do the best course that you've always wanted to do. We want to bring you the highest quality education possible at the lowest possible price. It's extremely high-level content that anybody can use to educate themselves and it's available to

everybody. Well that would be good. I think it's funny because I got canceled at the university so I could try to return the favor. I think they're doing that to themselves right? Yeah well we couldn't have a better marketing campaign than the universities themselves. It's similar to what's going on with mainstream media. Yeah. It really is kind of the same thing. Yeah, well it all derives from the same source, right? Is the capture of higher education by this God-forsaken ideology that's...

Bizarre. Yeah? Bizarre how successful it is and and how how many people just are compliant yeah it's very for sure that's for sure yeah well do you see it turning around though it seems like it is a little seems like more people are pushing back against it now than ever when when you have institutions that are thoroughly captured, it's very difficult to retrieve them. You know, we've been arguing about this, I've been arguing about this with

my team, Fort Peterson Academy. I mean, is it possible to rejuvenate the bricks and mortars institutions of a higher education? Well, one answer to that is things that are dead rot and the universities seem to be rotting everywhere and maybe that's because they're dead maybe it's because their time has come and it could be that that's the case I mean I I hope not I loved working at Harvard in particular it was a amazing institution I had a very good time at McGill I had a good time at the University of Toronto. It's a real pain to see these institutions degenerate, but they're ideologically captured.

That's not good and thoroughly and it's a very rotten ideology. It's the spirit of Kane, the resentful spirit of Kane. It's not good. They're unbelievably expensive. They take terrible advantage of their students. Plus, They're unbelievably expensive. They take terrible advantage of their students. Plus, the average quality of the educational experience is actually very low at most places, not everywhere. Hillsdale College, I think, is a marked exception. But most places, the lectures aren't good. And we're in a situation now, it's kind of like what happened with YouTube in a way. You know, YouTube enabled you, for example, in Spotify as well, to emerge as an independent commentator and, you know, you've cornered the market in some ways on that. There's no reason. The universities could have seen this

coming 20 years ago. They could have found their best lecturers and they could have filmed their courses in the highest possible quality manner and taken advantage of this new communication technology. And they didn't. And that's not a good sign. You know, it's so funny, we bring our professors down to Miami, you know, professors from Oxford and Cambridge, and they're so relieved to come there. And the reason they're relieved to come there is because they're treated badly by their own institutions, these great professors. They're treated with contempt. They're

paid miserably. That's especially the true case in the UK. All we have to do is appreciate them. I tell the professors who come to Peterson Academy, like, here's the deal. You can say exactly what you want in exactly the way you want. You can teach what you love, we'll put a studio audience together that actually wants to listen to you. That's the only reason they're there. We'll offer you a financial deal that's better than you can get with any book. We'll give you more reach than you could ever also hope to get with any published manuscript. You can bring what you know to the world for next to nothing. We figure we can offer a university quality, high-level university quality equivalent

for about $2,000 over four years. Wow. Yeah, yeah, we have a great social media platform. So I don't know, you tell me what you think about this. So we've been wrestling with price, right? Because pricing something is very difficult. And part of the problem with social media platforms is that they're free. And you might say, well, well that's not a problem it's like it is a problem because things that are free get overrun by parasites instantly and so you get the trolls you get the bots you get the bad corporate actors you get the scam artists because there's no barrier to their participation right And so we put a $450 cost on our offering per year for the early adopters that's available now and we're hoping that the fact that there has to be a bit of a financial sacrifice in the front end will make our social media network high quality and clean because there's a little bit of skin in the game to participate. So we've taken the best elements of the popular social media networks and amalgamated that

and we're hoping that we can produce a community of people who are responsible and achievement oriented and upwards driving and intellectually curious and bring them together so they can form their own communities as well as participating in the lectures and so I'm extremely excited about this. The courses we got lucky too because we set up a production studio in Miami and We have state-of-the-art Film crew and editors, but just when we started to film, the AI illustration capacity came online and we filmed everyone against a white background.

And so we can fill the whole background with imagery and graphs and comments. Can you run a trailer for, just pick one of the courses at random, because this is actually how the courses look. So the trailers are very tightly edited but so are the courses and so so let me let me show you one of them so you get a sense of what we've managed to accomplish a lot of fascinating questions where do we come from where are we going what is the universe made of how can we possibly understand the grand landscape of the cosmos? When you look back in space you look back in time

It's amazing we've been able to do this to study the properties of the cosmos time scales of billions of years size scales Billions of times bigger than our own and now the question is can we go back to time equals zero? Can we go back to before time equals zero? And what does that even mean? I hope in this course to keep striving and asking these great questions, because without great questions, there can be no great answers. And without great answers, there can be no understanding. Wow. Brian Keating. Fun, Joe. Pretty badass.

Yeah, well, and I was so happy when I saw the trailers, you know Because Michaela and her husband Jordan Fuller They they've been working very diligently on this for about three years and they basically built it from scratch You know and I didn't have any idea how the courses would look, you know Because that's actually a pretty difficult thing to pull off, but I'm very happy with the trailers. They're extremely difficult thing to pull off but I'm very happy with the trailers they're extremely engaging every course has its own style sheet like so each course has its there's a there's an overarching style to the platform but every single course has its own illustration ethos and quality yeah well you can see them now would you be is this just for personal education

or you will you be giving degrees? We're going to approach that in two ways. So we'll offer certification at different time spans. So you know, generally it takes you four years to get a degree, but you could imagine that it would be useful to have a one year certificate, a two year certificate, a three year certificate, four year certificate. Like there's no compelling reason why it has to be four years. We'll keep very detailed records of our students' academic progress and they'll be able to offer

them directly to employers. So we want to be able to assure employers that anybody who's gone through the certification process that's part and parcel of Peterson Academy has done the work and met the standards and the standards will be high. Now simultaneously we're working on technical accreditation, right, so that we can pull this, so that we can have this operate as a standard university. Now there's trade-offs on that because the accreditation processes themselves are captured by the same forces that have captured the universities and we're not going to compromise the quality of the offerings by kowtowing to accreditation processes that are producing the same problem that

we're trying to address. Now I'm in discussion with a number of different jurisdictions to move accreditation forward and if that happens it can also be applied retroactively. So if we can figure out how to do it with an administration or a jurisdiction that's willing to do it, and we don't have to compromise the quality, then we'll go the classic accreditation route. Otherwise, I'm just going to go directly to employers and say, look, we're going to be very, very careful about who we grant certification to. And you'll be able to rely on the certification from Peterson Academy as an indication of intellectual ability and also work ethic and will document that by the

Record keeping process that we use as part and parcel of the platform. So I think we can do it We're gonna do it one way or another How are you going to be able to assure that these students because it's all remote? Yeah, how are you going to be able to assure that they're actually doing the's all remote, right? Yeah. How are you going to be able to assure that they're actually doing the work, that they're not utilizing AI, like are you going to have them write things? I can't tell you how, but we are going to. Oh, okay. Yeah, well look, I've tested tens of thousands of people online. So I set up an online testing service that was used primarily by a company called the Founder Institute. and we tested 50,000 people, 60,000 people over five years in about seven

different languages and we built and developed technology to capture people who are cheating. So they don't know how we're capturing them and I'm not going to tell you but we know how to do it and you know and that's that's obviously a problem but it isn't an insoluble problem. And I think we've already solved it. So and then once we move towards more formal and stable accreditation, there are lots of companies have emerged as a consequence of the COVID lockdowns to make sure that remote compliance with testing requirements can be achieved. So there's lots of ways to solve that problem.

It's very exciting. It's really exciting. And it's, you know, there's all sorts of weird possibilities that emerge from this too, because the technology now exists. And we've had some of the videos converted already to have the lectures translated into the world's major languages. And the technology that's cuttingedge uses the professor's voice and intonation in the second language and matches the mouth movements to the language. Yeah, they're gonna do that at Spotify. Yeah, it's seamless, man, it's seamless. They're doing it with podcasts. I think they're initially gonna do Spanish,

German, and French, I believe. Those are the first three languages, but they eventually will scale out. Yeah, so that's just like, that's just lay there. Which is incredible. It is unbelievable. That you could have someone teach a lecture in Russian and actually make the mouth movements and everything. Well, it's extremely exciting, especially in regard to the developing world, because

there's, you know, there'll be more people in Nigeria by 2100 than in China. And the median age of African is 19. So there's an immense opportunity in the developing world to capture the market for higher education. And it would be a wonderful thing to be able to bring this to the world. And I just can't see why not. You know, the courses are very efficiently taught. We have AI mediated testing services, and we can use the tests themselves as educational tools. You know, so you can imagine you have a test, you get a question wrong, and you get feedback

that it's wrong, and it'll tell you where in the lecture and the reading material that you made the mistake, so you can go back and review. And so even the testing itself will be educational. And you know, we're hoping to develop a community that is composed of people who want to engage in lifelong learning. And it also means that you don't have to be like 18 to 22 to attend this university. You can stay a part of it for the rest of your life. And we're hoping that spontaneous communities will develop and that we can bring people

together for conventions. So you know, if we can get enough people on the platform, we'll have conventions in different cities where we bring our lecturers, you know, to a stadium or to a theatre for a weekend and everybody who's part of the university can come and listen to their favourite lecturers and we've got educational institutions who are already interested in partnering in that regard so that they can be brought to their institution for like summertime three-day courses. be brought to their institution for like summertime three-day courses and so and it's so fun too because we can use video and audio and that's a wonderful thing

as well because as you know well far more people can listen and watch than can read now you have to read to partake in our courses as well but it's a great opportunity and it's so fun to have the professors come down there and be thrilled about it most of like we want the professors we already have to teach multiple courses because they're very good lecturers and they've, they've I think all without exception enthusiastically agreed to continue participating because we took the idiot restrictions off them. It's like teach what you want to the people who want to listen. No holds barred. It's so fun. It's so fun. With the state of higher education the way it is today, how does it recover or does it just get replaced? Well I guess what I'm

hoping at least that the Peterson Academy will do with the production quality of our courses is up the ante. It's like even if we fail financially because you know we don't know how to price this how the hell do you figure out something like that? We've argued about it a lot and we don't know what the potential financial market might be but at minimum you know we'll be able to launch the courses independently if the platform itself doesn't take off. We're going to show Harvard and Stanford and Oxford and Cambridge what's possible with regards to lecturing with the new technology. I mean they're stuck in like 1860. And you know with these online large courses that places like MIT for example have launched,

basically all they do is put up a camera and videotape a lecture. It's like you can't do that. That's that YouTube and and the the technologies that allow for the dissemination of video, they have their own, they're their own medium, right? The medium is the message. You have to use the bloody technology. You can't stay stuck a century back which is why we've done tight edits and filled in the backgrounds with images and There's just no reason that that can't be everywhere. Right? So and why why would you pay? Look people probably pay

$300,000 for an Ivy League education because that's where they meet their wife or their husband when it gets right down to it Is that really what it is? Well, Joe look you never know what an institution is doing. Okay, so what does the university do? Lectures, accreditation. Okay, but that's not all it gives you an identity for four years while you sort your life out It gives you an opportunity to mature away from your parents It gives you the opportunity to build a new network of peers. Not only living peers, but peers in the historical tradition. And it gives you an opportunity to meet the person that you might be with for the rest of your life. That's a big deal, and it's a selective opportunity because you bring bright kids together who are hardworking and they get a chance to meet each other. That might be the whole value of an Ivy League education. It's hard to specify these

things. Now we're trying to replicate that on Peterson Academy with the social media side and you know that's a new technology we don't know how it'll work but the fact that it's selective and it won't be full of trolls and bots and bad corporate actors should mean that people will be able to build social networks that are of high value because that that's one of the things, obviously, that's what you do in a bloody MBA program. You know, it's not what you learn at an MBA program that confers the value of the degree. It's the fact that it was bloody difficult to get in, because the GMAT is an IQ test, essentially, and the social network you build in the MBA program. You carry that with you.

Well, we're doing what we can to replicate that online. And we're going to make sure that we offer potential employees a record of our students' progress and success so that they have some sense that the person who they hire has done the apprenticeship work on their own necessary to accredit them as a, say, a valid student and a hard worker. And I think we can do that and I think we can do it more effectively than universities do it I know how to measure these things. It's going to be very interesting if that Becomes a criteria in which people are hired you know if someone if it really does become a thing and it becomes something where people are accepting that as

an education and and seeking people out in that regard, it's going to be very interesting to see if more of those emerge, if you start a trend and then... Well, at minimum we can assure a potential employer of two things. We didn't attract a woke crowd, and we didn't indoctrinate our bloody students. So that's not a bad minimum. You know, you can assure intelligence, you can assure a work ethic because they've completed the course material and properly we can ensure that's properly measured but we can also say here's a bunch of things they didn't

learn. Right. And the courses are subversive in the most traditional possible way. So we have Larry Arn, for example, who's the president of Hillsdale. He did a lecture series on Churchill. Where are you going to go to university to get a lecture series on Churchill? And Arne was Churchill's primary biographer, one of his primary biographers, so that's a big deal. You know, we've got Nigel Baker from Oxbridge lecturing on the legacy of UK colonialism. Well, you're not going to get that anywhere else. And he's a great lecturer, and he's a brilliant man, and very, very courageous, and Larry

Arne is in exactly the same category. So the technology we're using is revolutionary in a variety of different ways. The lectures are high quality, but the whole ethos of the educational offering is completely different than what is on offer, say at the typical Ivy League, Harvard for example, which is such a catastrophe. Like I was there at Harvard in the 1990s. I loved that place. It was really forward-looking and aimed at excellence with very minor exceptions, like truly minor exceptions. It was a powerhouse, man. And I went back and saw a bunch of my old professor friends month ago, you know, and they've all joined free speech movement at Harvard and they're fighting against

their own administration. And these were like the best professors I ever met in my life, and that's what they've been reduced to. When did it start? Specifically in the universities? Yes. It started with the incursion of, what would you say, a modified Marxism in the 1960s and then really accelerated in the 70s. It sort of went like this. You know how things fail, gradually, gradually, gradually, then suddenly. And it hit critical mass in terms of failure probably around 2014,

15, pretty much when things blew up around me. That's why they blew up around me. You know, I mean, it was so ridiculous. And what do you think ultimately caused it to not course correct? What do you think ultimately caused these universities to not course correct? What do you think ultimately caused these universities to give into that? Okay, let's talk about ultimate. So let me tell you a story, an old story. So there's a myth from Mesopotamia called the Enuma Elish, which is one of the oldest stories that we have. And let me just lay out the story because these ancient myths Capture the fundamental dynamics of culture. They're winnowed to do that. Okay, so the Mesopotamians

Believe that the world emerged as the interaction of two forces. We already alluded to them chaos and order They had a god of order Apsu he was a male god. He's the patriarchal, patriarchy. That's, you can think of Apsu as the patriarchy. And a female god, Tiamat. Tiamat is a dragon and a dragon of chaos. And the word Tiamat is the same word etymologically as the word Tohu Vabohu, and that's the chaos that God makes the world out of at the beginning of time in the Hebrew accounts. And that's the chaos that God makes the world out of at the beginning of time in the Hebrew accounts. Okay, so you have Apsu and Tyomat and they come together.

Chaos and order come together and they produce the first world and in the Mesopotamian account of things, that's a world of higher-order gods. Now those higher-order gods forget their ancestors and go about their business and they get increasingly fractious and undisciplined and noisy and hedonistic and immature and at one point they kill their father Absu and they try to live on his corpse. Right. So you see an echo of this is very complicated. You see an echo of this in the story of Pinocchio You know there's a scene in Pinocchio where Geppetto ends up in the body of a whale Okay, so here's the underlying biological dynamic. It's so remarkable so imagine a society sets itself up according to a set of principles and it stores It creates a giant storehouse of wealth

Okay, that's what a carcass is. So if you're a primordial herder, your wealth is in the bodies of your herd animals. Okay. A body is a symbol of stored wealth. In the Mesopotamian pantheon, the careless kill their father and live on its corpse. Okay, that's what's happened to the universities. So since World War II, the West has gathered huge storehouses of value everywhere. Harvard's a great example. Immense endowment. Remarkably valuable brand.

Disney's another example. And what's happened is, and this happens all the time, if you have an unguarded storehouse of value, the parasites come marching in. Right? And they try to live on the corpse. Now they can for a while because it's a storehouse of value, but they kill the spirit. Now what happens in the Mesopotamian story is that chaos itself comes flooding back in the form of Tyomette, who's extremely the goddess of chaos, who's extremely angry that her husband has been sacrificed by the careless denizens of the world. That's the death of God. So yeah, and the Savior emerges in the Mesopotamian story. It's so interesting. So the Savior that emerges to set

things right has eyes all the way around his head, so he pays attention and he speaks magic words. That's Marduk. And so the Mesopotamian emperor was an avatar of Marduk and he's the spirit of responsibility that sets the world right. Okay, so what are we seeing? We're seeing the invasion of storehouses of wealth by the parasites, fundamentally. Has that killed them? I can't think through how you would rescue an institution, a typical upper level university institution. What are you going to do?

How are you going to do that? You going to fire 80% of the people? Who's going to do that? No one's going to do that? You're going to fire 80% of the people? Who's going to do that? Right. No one's going to do that. Now, you could say, well, we'll make DEI initiatives forbidden. They're kind of doing that in Florida. But all you do is change the words. I mean, that's what the postmodernists did with Marxism in the 1970s when it no longer was fashionable to worship Stalin after everybody Realized that he was Psychopathic murderer All that happened was the French intellectuals changed the terminology and they invented a form of Marxism

That was even worse than Marxism, which was really quite the bloody achievement Do I think they can be? Rejuvenated I can't see how. Well when you have people like the president of Harvard that gets fired for plagiarism but maintains the exact same salary and a different job. Yeah, as if demotion to a full Harvard professor was, well, you know, she's not suitable to be president but she can still be a fully tenured professor at Harvard. Really, she can, eh?

With that publication record, I just interviewed Carole Swain. Do you know who Carole Swain is? No. Black law professor who, from whom gay plagiarized much of her work. Yeah. Fun. So what do you do with an institution that's that far gone? You saw what those university professors did at Congress. Yeah. And they thought they were right They didn't even look put upon they looked no, sorry. They looked put upon and shocked when they were challenged by the right Congressman they're not accustomed to being questioned and Also to communicating outside of their bubble in their bubble, which where their opinion is held in high high esteem Yes And everyone else is an idiot as far as they're concerned.

Well, the woman from Penn, when she was smiling, every time she was answering these questions. It was... I'd never seen anything like that. Like, I knew that the universities had become warped. And the warp is very deep. So I talked about the Mesopotamian story, and there's another angle of deep warping. So the spirit of Marx is a very old spirit. story and there's a there's another angle of deep warping so the

The spirit of Marx is a very old spirit. It was alive in the French Revolution. It was alive in the Soviet Revolution It's you can trace it all the way back to the story of Cain and Abel as far as I'm concerned And the story of Cain and Abel is the story of the fundamental human dynamic is the story of the fundamental human dynamic after the fall of man. So insofar as we're historical creatures, the story of Cain and Abel lays out the essential psychological conflict that characterizes human beings.

And so you have Cain on the one side. So Cain doesn't bring his best to the table. He makes second-rate offerings and lies about it. And then they're not accepted by him or his fellow man or women or by society or by God and then makes him bitter. And instead of learning he takes his complaints to God and he says something like, well what the hell's going on here? I'm breaking myself in half, making my sacrificial offerings, and everything's being rejected. What kind of stupid cosmos did you produce? And God says to him something very interesting and complicated.

He says something like, you're blaming your bitterness on your failure, and you have failed, and you know it, and you didn't have to, but it isn't your failure that's making you bitter. You've invited something in to inhabit you that's turned you against yourself and what's good. He says to him, sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal, and you invited it in to have its way with you. And there's a sexual metaphor there. Oh yeah, oh yeah. That's heavy. It's rough, man. It's rough. You don't get to be a high school shooter until you've had a thousand hours of brooding over your misery. And so that's what God tells Cain and that's that makes him violently angry and murderous.

And so he kills Abel. He kills his own ideal. And Abel, you have Cain who makes poor sacrifices and whines about it. He's the perennial victim, shaking his fist at God in the world, refusing to learn from his experiences. And he becomes, and you have Abel who makes the right sacrifices and aims upward. That's the pattern. Two spirits. That's the Joker and Batman. That's Lex Luthor and Superman. That's Voldemort and Harry Potter. It's Satan and Christ. Like it's this eternal recurrent pattern. And one of its manifestations is Marxism, and another one of its manifestations is postmodernism. And so, this is a very old story. It's a very old story.

And you can understand Cain's point, you know, because people do break themselves in half in life trying to struggle forward and they're not successes in their own eyes and they're rejected by other people and it undermines their faith in being itself. You can understand that, but you're called upon to bring your best to the table no matter what happens to you, and to maintain your faith and your courage, and to aim up. There's no excuses. Your past trauma, there's no excuses. Doesn't matter what it is. And so there's this battle. And what's happened in the universities is the universities have been captured by the resentful spirit of Cain.

And so that's all flowered up with postmodern language. There's no ultimate unity. That's the claim of the postmodernists. There's no overarching narrative. It's like that's what the postmodernists claim skepticism with regards to meta narratives. It's like well What do you mean by that? You mean that everything culminates in disunity? That's your theory of being? So how the hell do we come together as a society then and around what? Well everyone goes their own way. Yeah, that's called war So there's some is there a higher unity in which everything participates or not while the postmodernists is like no Have it your way nihilism

disunity anxiety hopelessness social Disintegration Conflict that's that pathway and that's that's just where it starts. That's just that's the optimistic view so starts. That's just, that's the optimistic view. So we're trying to present at Peterson Academy and the other enterprises that I'm engaged in, we're trying to present a unified underlying vision and a traditional unifying underlying vision. And I think that it's understandable, what we talked about in the first part of this interview. Once you understand that sacrifice is the basis of community, and once you understand

that there's an ultimate form of sacrifice, and that's what's demanded of you if you're going to strive upward, then the contours of the religious story that undergirds the West fall into place. And that's a very remarkable thing to observe, and I think that's going to happen. I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment, and something new is striving mightily to emerge. Well it's also interesting that these higher education institutes even though they do have you know the way you're describing they're extremely wealthy, they're extremely valuable, the name brand to them is still extremely potent. They have so many things going against them in terms of

like an objective analysis of what's good for your education and what's good for preparing for your future. And then on top of that, they're burdened with this insane financial problem. The insane problem of first of all, student loans being something you never get out of. Indentured servitude. Yeah. And the fact that we all know that the human frontal lobe, especially on males, doesn't even fully develop into your 25. So you're kind of taking advantage of a developing mind and locking them into an insane burden of debt,

and ideology and ideology. And so you're strapped with debt. so you must work, and then you must work within these structures that have been infected by this ideology, because everyone's coming out of the universities into those places, into those businesses and corporations, and they're deeper and deeper interwoven into the structure of these businesses, to the point where they're inescapable. And then you can't leave because you have financial burdens. You have all the student loan debt to pay off. Right. Something is an alternative to that if it can become effective to the

term, like if people can get employment. You know it's interesting like... Well as soon as we determine the accreditation route, like I said I'm in active communication with a number of people who are interested in accreditation, but I have to figure out if that's the right route. If it isn't, I'm going to work directly with interested employers to make sure that what our students obtain as a consequence of going through the Peterson Academy process is recognized by them as a marker of a high quality applicant.

Yes. And I know that that problem is solvable because I know how to do that. Well there's a lot of employers now that are kind of discounting the ideas of degrees. Elon is a big one of them. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there's quite a few people that you shouldn't dismiss someone as being qualified for a certain position Just because they've gone through some very formal process not if the formal process isn't predicated on General cognitive ability and conscientiousness, right? Yes, if it's predicated on bullshit and a grift, which a lot of it is Yeah, what do you think is going to happen with? society in general with the implementation of AI and the inevitable erosion of jobs?

I don't know if the erosion of jobs is inevitable. No. Well, we've thought that before. Well, first of all, the first thing I would say is like all bets are off. Right. Right. All bets are off. Right. We're going to have hyper-intelligent AI within five years. In fact, we already have it. Well, I'm being pessimistic. Right. I've used ChatGPT and Grok and

some systems that my colleagues have developed. We built our own large language models in-house. So I built a, my colleague Victor Swift built a large language model for me, trained on my books, and I used it to help me write this next book, because I could come across biblical passages that I couldn't understand, and I could ask this AI system for a first pass interpretation, and it could do a good job. Wow. And we're going to release that along with the book.

Yeah, so that was really something. And I'll tell you, Chad GPT and grok were unbelievably useful as research assistants so they're about as smart as high-end undergraduates They lie a lot you have to corner them like mad to get them to provide you with information that's valid What have you found them lying about? Oh, they make up references that don't exist So for example about it for chat GPT about a quarter of the academic references it produces for you don't exist. What?

Yeah, yeah, well it doesn't know. Like it will produce a reference for you that's completely plausible, except that it doesn't exist. So if I ask chat GPT a question, it'll answer and it'll give me the references because I asked for the references. Then I have to go and look up all the references and read them first of all because you're supposed to read the things you refer to but also I have to make sure that it's not you know wandered off into some hallucinatory pathway but that'll be taken care of in no time flat as far as I'm concerned and Musk has already got plans to do that. So what will the what will the addition of these AI systems mean to us?

what will the addition of these AI systems mean to us? God, well I talked to Elon about this when we had our interview and it's going to depend to some degree, Joe, on how we train the damn things. So there's this problem called the alignment problem, that's how the engineers describe it, which is how do we know that these AI systems will have human interest in mind? And you think, okay, how do we make machines that have human interests in mind? And then you think, oh well, we have the same problem with adolescents. How do we ensure that we train our children so that they have their own interests and broad social interests in mind? And the answer is, the answer always has been that you provide them with a classic

religious and humanities education. because that provides an axis of stability around which all other knowledge can be organized. Now the problem with the large language models at the moment is they're hyper-trained on modern text, and so they're ideologically addled and woke. And so we've been experimenting with training LLMs on a more classic basis, so we trained one on the King James Bible and we haven't released it because I don't know what to think about it It's like you can ask the King James Bible a question What the hell does that mean right? Seriously, what does that mean and before we release it? We also want to make sure that we have it Before we release it, we also want to make sure that we have it. We've developed the underlying technology properly.

Okay, so what's the answer to your question? What AI will do will depend on the intent of the people who design it. Here's a terrifying thing. You tell me what you think about this. Okay. All right, so your thoughts are orienting phenomena. So you think so that you can lay out a pathway to a desired destination. And then you can evaluate the thought to see if that's a good strategy to get there.

Okay, so there's an implication that comes along with that. A thought enters the theater of your imagination in relationship to your goal. So you can formulate that in religious language. The spirit that answers your prayers, the nature of the spirit that answers your prayers will be dependent on the nature of your prayer. Yeah, that's for sure. Right. So imagine that you're harbouring feelings of resentment and bitterness as you're plotting your economic pathway forward. And so you're trying to think about what you should do, but you have the spirit of resentment and bitterness sitting on your shoulder. The thoughts that enter your mind are going to be a consequence of your possession by that bitterness

to the degree that you've allowed it to Shape your goal So so here's a corollary of that. This is stunning. It's a stunning thing to understand If you orient your aim upward in the highest manner The spirit that informs your thought will be the spirit of the highest possible aim. And God, that's something to know, man. So that's what a religious practice, a fundamental religious practice is for.

It's like, get rid of the corrupt motivation. Get rid of it. Get rid of it. Pray for the salvation of your soul soul that you're aiming right because your aim is going to determine the content of your thoughts And that is how it works technically. That's how it works Neuropsychologically your thoughts are the handmaiden of your aim Right, which is why we're always worried about sociopaths because they never abandoned that corrupt motivation yeah, well, they're they're basically the best way to think about the narcissists and the hedonists and the

Histrionic types and the borderlines and the antisocial personalities is that they never matured cortically So like children come into the world in a way as a bundle of competing subcortical motivations, right? And they're very powerful motivations. Anger, for example, you watch a two-year-old have a temper tantrum, it's quite the show, and they want short-term immediate gratification. Now what happens is as your cortex matures, you transcend those lower order instinctual motivations, that would be the Freudian id, and you start to regulate your behaviour in relationship to your own future, so you stop doing stupid, pleasurable things in the moment that will compromise you, and you start to be able to

incorporate the views of other people. That's how kids at three start to develop the ability to have friends. And the more sophisticated you get, the more other people and their perspectives are part of your perceptions and the more the future is taken into account in your actions. And the cortex is actually there so that that can happen. And it has to happen in a social context because you have to pick up the society of your peers, obviously. And so conditions like psychopathy, or even power seeking for that matter, are conditions of radical immaturity. And so that's how you explain their emergence. And one of the things that's interesting about that is it provides a very powerful argument against moral relativism.

It's like there's a real difference between maturation and immaturity. Maturation is productive and sustainable, and immaturity is divisive and destructive. And there's no if, ands, or buts about that. And so, see, it's a different view of mental health, the classic therapist produced view of mental health is that mental health is sort of inside you. You know, it's in your psyche, it's in your mind, but it's not like your mental health is the harmony of your existence in relationship to the future and other people. Right? And that sense of well-being that can infuse you if you get the balance right isn't a reflection of the proper structuring

of your function of your mind or your brain. It's a phenomena that emerges when everything is in its proper place and operating harmoniously. That's what you experience in music. Like music represents that. Everything in its proper place and operating harmoniously. That's what you experience in music. Music represents that. Everything in its proper place. That's what Adam is called upon by God to do in the story of Adam and Eve.

To subdue the world. Subdue. Everything in its proper place so that the whole structure operates in a harmonious manner. It's a much more expanded view of what constitutes mental health. Anyways, education should serve that, right? And so if you take the the staff of Moses that's planted in a single place, the community grows around that. That's the same as the magic wand of Gandalf,

that idea of a magic wand. It's the traditional ethos associated with transformation and sacrifice around which communities aggregate themselves. And the proper humanities and religious education inculcates that center structure so that knowledge can be organized around it. The last time we talked I suggested to you that we see the world through a biblical lens literally see it. I mean literally it structures our perceptions and I've investigated that far more deeply and What what seems to be the case with a corpus of stories like the biblical library is that if you know the stories It structures your psyche so that you have a place to put information and so that if you know the stories, it structures your psyche so that you have a

place to put information. And so that enables you to understand the current world and everything that's happening, but to place everything in the right context. And so the transmission of an unbroken cultural edifice, story-based edifice, is the manner in which you solve the alignment problem, unite your society, integrate your psyche, pursue what's meaningful, and protect yourself from chaos and anxiety. So and solid education has been the traditional way of ensuring that that occurs.

And so, well, that's what we hope we can offer with Peterson Academy. That's the purpose of my books as well, to elucidate that. And so, can the universities do that? I don't think so. I don't know if they have that philosophy. The philosophy and the way you're laying it out resonates with me. I think it's accurate. I think when I'm in harmony in my life, it all seems to make sense. It all works together. What you're saying, it just rings true. I don't know if they're so infected with this ideology that that flies in the face of it. They've rejected it wholeheartedly. Yes. with this ideology that that Rejecting the faith

Yes, the premise of the postmodernist is that there's no uniting metanarrative If you had to define postmodernism in one phrase, that would be it. And so and so what have they done? Here's the association with Marxism Okay, so the Marxists have a counter narrative It's the narrative of power and it is a very powerfulative, because if you don't put the proper uniting principle at the pinnacle, it's power emerges immediately, because people play power games, and you can attain a certain degree of success and a fair amount of domination by playing a power game. And so Marx observed that one of the

cardinal power games is economic. And it is probably the cardinal power game, right? There's economic disparity. Those at the top do take advantage of their position at the top to stabilize their position. Like in a functional society, productive people are at the top, but even among those at the top, they's still power-seeking crooks. And so, now Marx of course would say that, well, everyone who's economically successful is a power-seeking crook, and you know, that's a great thing to believe if you're a resentful Satanist like Marx. Well, it's how the losers look at the world. Well, that's for sure, but there is some justification in it because among the successful there are...

Yes, and a large percentage because that's the culture in which they're existing. Yeah, well a dangerous percentage and a critique of power is always a valid critique. Okay, so what the postmodernists did when Marxism became ethically unacceptable, and that happened in the 1970s is they just they metastasized it they said okay we've got a victim victimizer narrative that's played out in the economic sphere and that's basically Marxism we'll just multiply that until the same interpretive framework can be applied to all possible group distinctions that's basically intersectionality so sex is a oppressor versus oppressed narrative gender is an oppressor versus oppressed narrative.

Gender is an oppressed versus oppressor narrative. Ethnicity, race, ability, attractiveness, height, any qualitative distinction is now recast as a battle between oppressor and oppressed. It's an unbelievably brutal story. It's basically equivalent to the claim that the spirit of power is the ruler of the cosmos. How can they do all this and ignore the possibility of an oppressor, like a male, adopting the identity of the oppressed, of a female, and entering into female spaces and oppressing females. Well, you can see that it can't be dealt with because...

Wild. Right? That is wild. Look, one of the things you see that's very characteristic of the utopian left is the absolute insistence that anyone oppressed is a victim. It's like, okay, we'll give the devil his due. Some oppressed people are victims, but some people who claim to be oppressed aren't victims. They're the worst kind of monsters that the most deranged imagination could barely conceptualize. Utopian, naive, radical progressives refuse their imagination for evil, and that delivers them into the hands of the absolute bloody psychopaths. Right? And they just don't see it. It's like, oh, those trans people, they're just striving to be free. It's like, you wait, you wait until you have one of them in your house, buddy, and you're going to find out just exactly how naive you are.

So how do they protect themselves? They just deny the existence of malevolence or attribute it to socioeconomic inequality. All criminals are victims. It's like, no, first of all, lots of people who are victims aren't criminals. In fact, poverty does not cause criminality. That's a lie, and it's a very damaging lie to the poor, because if poverty was equivalent to criminality, the logical thing to do is just to lock up all the poor. Right. Well, there are many pathways from poverty forward, and one of them is criminality, but you can say the same thing about wealth So the idea then that's basically a Marxist theory of causality

It's like well those people's oppression is what's causing their lack of law abiding what what conducts like no no wrong Seriously wrong and and dangerously wrong and ridiculously naive that's not how the world works at all. Right you're also in a sense you're encouraging this kind of behavior because you're not punishing people for it because you're saying it's not their fault. Or you're even valorizing it. Oh you poor thing. Right and you're allowing more of it to take place. Well we know that... so the dark tetrad types, so those are the subclinical psychopaths.

Okay, so they're psychopathic. That makes them predatory and parasitic. That's the definition of a psychopath. Okay, they're narcissistic. So what does that mean? They want unearned social status, right? They're Machiavellian. So what does that mean? It means that their use of language is subordinated to their demand for hedonistic gratification and power. So like you and I in principle, we hope, we're trying to pursue a thread of conversation that leads to further development, let's say, for us and for the audience. But I could easily be in here thinking, okay, what the hell do I have to tell Joe to increase my social media status? Right. Right. And to play this situation as a game to enhance my own status or to further my selfish desires. That's Machiavellian.

That was the dark triad. And what further investigation revealed that you had to add an additional dimension to that, to fully flesh out the picture. Sadism. What's that? Positive delight in the unnecessary misery of others. That's the dark tetrad types. Well, dark tetrad types portray themselves as victims. That's one of their Machiavellian strategies.

So now your question is, well how do we segregate the real victims, so to speak, from the false victims? And one of the answers to that is like beware of those who claim victimization as a justification for their moral, what would you say, for their moral transgressions. I did this because I'm a victim. It's like, really? Right. Really, that was your reason? Poor you. That's your story. You monster. There are no monsters.

It's like, if you think there are no monsters, you're naive and willfully blind to the point of delusion and what would you call it? What do they say? There are none so blind as those who will not see. That certainly applies on the malevolent side. And then from the point of view of if you're looking at the people that are committing

crimes there's the unfortunate reality that people mimic their environment. And if you grow up in an environment where there are no positive role models and you see nothing but rampant crime around you, even good people go down bad paths. You get, okay, so antisocial personality is somewhat heritable. There is some familial transmission. There is a role played by fatherlessness in particular, and that's perhaps because fatherless boys tend to turn towards a gang orientation, and the gangs of adolescents have a short-term time horizon, so they future discount badly, and that produces a proclivity for short-term gratification and that includes like idiot criminal behavior.

Right. Yeah, so what you need in a father, you need someone who encourages intelligent upward aiming sacrifice and an orientation towards others and future development. That's what the spirit of the father really does, that encouragement. And that reward for delay of gratification. So that's another indication of the relationship between say, upwards driving moral orientation and maturity. If you're mature, you can delay gratification. What does that mean? It means you've integrated the future into your perceptions, right? And that has to be socially scaffolded, especially for men.

Women, they get initiated by nature. In every society that we know of, men have to be initiated. Right? Right? Because that catalyzation of maturity is a difficult thing. Difficult and unlikely, but possible and necessary. So how do you reach the people that are young adolescents that are trapped in that vicious cycle? Yeah, well I think I can tell you the answer to that, you know, a lot of young men have been watching and listening to the sorts of things that I've been writing about and producing and I, every time

someone comes up to me and tells me that reading say 12 rules for life had helped them I ask why. It's like okay good what what changed and the overwhelming pattern of response is something like I started to understand the necessity of responsibility. Now, you might then ask, well, you hear from your parents, in principle you hear from the school system, although that's probably gone, that you should grow up and be responsible. Why did it make a difference?

Why did it make a difference to you to read that in what I wrote? And the answer is, I think the answer is I didn't take the standard conservative approach. I didn't say you should, you must, you ought, even though those things are true. I said there's no difference between responsibility and adventure. That's a killer thing to know. The heavier the responsibility, the more profound the adventure. And so everyone knows that, but it's not catalyzed. So I just watched The Hobbit a while back, classic adventure story. And of course, what? It's Bilbo. To begin with, it's Bilbo. He's this little hobbit, right, sort of like Abraham. He's living his comfortable life and the wizard comes along and says

it's time for you to develop your shadow side because of course he becomes a thief and to go on your adventure and he agrees to do that and it's a weighty adventure. He has to contend with the ring of power. Right, that's the ultimate in temptations. That's the temptation that Christ is offered by Satan in the desert, the temptation of power. And that's the ultimate in temptations. That's the temptation that Christ is offered by Satan in the desert. The temptation of power. And that's the temptation that Frodo has to, Bilbo has to contend with. Well, he has this adventure. Well, what's the adventure? It's responsibility. He has to carry that ring.

And it is one of the rings that unites everything, power. It's just the malevolent ring that unites everything. And so I've been suggesting to young men in particular, it's like you want to get your life together, take the path of maximal responsibility. Not because you should, even though you should. That's not why. It's because that's the pathway of maximal adventure. So you say, well, what's the meaning of life? It's like, it's the meaning that reveals itself when you take the pathway of maximal responsibility. That's exactly the message of the crucifixion. That's precisely the message. Pathway of maximal responsibility. And

that's a terrifying thing. There's no difference between that and the dragon and treasure stories that are, you know, unbelievably archaic. The greatest possible treasure is to be found where the danger is most intense. Right. Always. Right. The dragon guards the gold. Always.

Right. Well, and so one thing to know is that if there's a dragon, there's a treasure somewhere. Really? Right. Really? Right. You know, my family and I have really learned this in the last six years because we were subject to continued and assaults in the public sphere that were designed to be deadly.

What do you mean by that? Designed to be deadly? Oh, interviews with journalists in particular, snake journalists whose every single utterance is designed to entrap the person being interviewed into saying something that will devastate their reputation personally to enhance the status of the interviewer. Like the Cathy Newman conversation. Well, Cathy at least had a bit of a sense of humor. But um. But the intent.

Oh yeah, the intent. That's the serpent, man. That's the intent. It's like, well, Nellie Bowles who interviewed me for the New York Times, now part of the free press, she admitted that. She said that her job at the New York Times, like the job of many of the reporters, was to find someone, demolish their reputation by any means necessary, and elevate their status in consequence. Wow. Yeah. What a terrible job. Brutal. So isn't it terrifying that that that's the old gray lady? That's the

most trusted and respected source of news and that their intent was just to destroy? Yeah, it wasn't the news. It wasn't real journalism, the nuanced various elements of what a human being is, the the pros and cons, the goods, the bads, the ugly, the battle that they have. Not that. No, no, no, not an accurate assessment, not an objective analysis of the person. Pursuitive status. Yeah. And the danger is that people know that now, and people know who's doing that now, and then they go after them, it's attack on journalism. You're not doing journalism. You're doing hit pieces. And you're doing it under the guise of journalism. But it's not journalism. It's kind of evil.

It's kind of fucked up. Yeah, kind of. I've seen quite a bit of it where I'm like, where, especially with people that I know the actual story and what was really going on behind the scenes. I was like, this is mad. This is wild. Well, we started to learn after this had happened two or three times. Like there's a kind of a process, say, because you're exposed to that. And then there's an intermediary period where it looks like it might succeed.

And that's very stressful. That's usually when people come out with their apologies, right? Because they're just terrified. They're going to lose. Well, I did lose my job and I lost my clinical practice. Right. So like the costs are real. So your situation in Canada was that they wanted you to sign up for re-education. Oh no, no. That's already, that's the plan. I couldn't sign up. They said already that I have to do that. But we have an appeal in at the moment that's blocking it.

And this is all just... what it affects is what in Canada? I wouldn't... if I don't undergo the re-education process successfully, they'll suspend my license and well also say why, you know, they'll say, well, Dr. Peterson is uneducable. He's unprofessional. He's violated the ethical tenets of his profession. Right. Just because you have a different perspective on things than they do. No, it's because I'm actually telling the truth that clinicians bloody well

know and are too cowardly to admit. So, you know, they went after me for four reasons probably. One of them was the entire transcript of the last conversation I had with you. Whoops. Right, that was submitted as a complaint because I was talking about the climate lies. They went after me because of the comments I've made about the trans butchers and liars, the surgeons and the therapists who are enabling them. That's a major part of it. that's a major part of it.

That's a major part of it. They went after me because I went after Trudeau and his former chief of staff and what else? Those are the major three. There's probably four complaints aligned with each of those dimensions and so that's cost me about a million dollars in legal fees so far. So it's a very hard battle to fight It's very annoying because the accusations continue to flow in even though that's a choice of the college and I've already been sentenced to reeducation of indefinite duration

Right till they're satisfied that I've learned whatever the hell lesson I'm supposed to learn Right till they're satisfied that I've learned whatever the hell lesson. I'm supposed to learn So that the only reason that isn't happening is because we now have an appeal in front of the Supreme Court in Canada And so I don't think it'll succeed, but we'll see is it important to you to maintain your license? Or is it important to you to win this it's in it's important There's two things that are important to me likely One is I'm not going to let a pack of ideologically addled moralists, lying moralists who are

facilitating the butchery and sterilization of children take away my license not without a war. So that's one thing. The second thing is I'm likely I'm in a prime position in Canada to undertake this battle against the woke licensing boards because I have the money and what the hell are they going to do to me? I'm not practicing. They can't take away my income and likely they can't blacken my reputation, except among those who are willing to assume that the licensing colleges are playing a

straight game. So really there's nothing they can do to me. Plus, if it was only a personal thing, apart from the fact that I'm not letting my license be taken by a pack of intellectually-addled hypocrites, I don't really... there's a part of me that's deeply ashamed to be a psychologist at the moment. I'm so appalled by my compatriots. They know that this gender dysphoria pathology is a lie. They all know it. And they won't say anything. Now, Now partly they won't say anything because the consequences for saying something are not trivial. But the consequences for not saying anything is that people like Chloe Cole end up with their breast cut off when they're 15. Right? Well that actually matters. So, so practically speaking in a sense the battle doesn't mean anything to me because I'm fighting to remain a member of a club that I don't really want to be part of. But there is a, is there a principle at stake?

Well, there's a variety of principles at stake. stop or lose all of the woke licensing enterprises they'll just have their sway all the physicians in Canada are terrified to say what they think anybody who's governed by a professional college they censor themselves like mad and it's really appalling for psychologists because all of the psychologists who are

properly trained they know that all of this is a lie and not just a lie, a malevolent, vicious and destructive lie. Everything about it's a lie. You know, Musk revealed the other day that the the professionals that were interacting with him in regard to his transitioning son told him that if he didn't abide by their dictates that his son was much more likely to commit suicide. That's a lie. No one who's educated as a psychologist believes that to be true. No one. At minimum, if you're educated, what you understand is that underneath gender dysphoria is something more substantial, which is a proclivity towards depression and

anxiety. If you're depressed and anxious, you have a proclivity towards depression and anxiety. If you're depressed and anxious, you have a higher risk of suicide. You have to account for that before you attribute any of the remainder to gender dysphoria as such. And everyone who's a psychologist also understands that body-focused discomfort for women at puberty is normative. Because when women who have a higher probability of being depressed and anxious do become depressed and anxious, it preferentially takes the form of bodily discomfort. So Chloe Cole for example, no one explained that to her. No one sat her down and said well, you're not very She told me that the reason she decided to transition was because she kind of had a crush on Kardashian and that body type, you know hyper curvy hyper feminine and Chloe realized when she entered puberty that she was probably gonna

Have a boyish figure and Chloe's a very attractive person. She would have had no trouble attracting the attention of men. But you know, she was 11, 12, what the hell does she know? And she wasn't going to be the woman she had envisioned. She didn't really understand that, you know, there's a variety of female forms that men find attractive, that's for sure. And she certainly would have fallen into that category. She didn't know that it was typical for girls to undergo a fair bit of confusion when they hit puberty and that that would take the form of negative emotion. No one told her that. They just rushed her down the puberty blocking and surgical pathway. That's inexcusable. It's evil. Yeah, it is. It's the worst thing. It's the worst

thing I've seen professionals do, not only in my lifetime the worst thing. It's the worst thing. I've seen professionals do not only in my lifetime I've studied atrocity for 40 years I've never seen anything worse than what's happening right now and that includes the sorts of things that were done in the camps in in Germany At least the goddamn Nazis admitted what they did was wrong. They tried to hide it. We trumpeted as a moral virtue We're freeing the children. It's like, no, I don't think so. Mothers, I think what you're doing is sacrificing your child to the parading of your moral virtue. Oh, my son, he's so confused. He thinks I'm a girl, but I still love him. That's how wonderful I am. Jesus Christ, Joel. You have no idea how dark that

is. It's dark. It's unbelievably dark. And it's attached to an industry now. Yeah, that's for sure. Which is very scary. There was an industry and an ideology. There was an article that was recently released where this person admitted that they said it was, what was the exact phrase, that the way they described gender transition as a life-saving medical care in order to get insurance for it. Yeah,

yeah. Because otherwise insurance won't pay for it. So they were willing to describe it in that way to ensure that people would profit off of it, which is wild. It's terrifying and it's so strange because I never would have believed that this could happen. If you had asked me 20 years ago if this was going to be a main concern that people worried about their children being roped into this ideology and convinced that their authentic self... And then sterilized and mutilated. Yes, exactly. Yeah, I know, I know. Well, it's no wonder people... see,

even Michael Schellenberger, who broke the WPATH files, when we talked about Schellenberger who broke the WPATH files when we talked about the role the WPATH played in establishing their own ideology, addled butchery as the standard of care for the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association. Schellenberger said that after he had listened to Abigail Schreier and I talk about this transmutation he was so appalled that he literally couldn't believe it. He just shelved it, said there's no way this can be true. And I can understand that because the more you look into it, the worse it gets. It's unbelievably bad. These surgical procedures are so brutal and so experimental that they're, they're,

I'm gonna say it again, they're worse than what the Mengali types did in the concentration camps in the 30s and 40s. And that's a pretty goddamn low bar. And it's no wonder people don't want to believe it. And people say, the lefties I've talked to, the centrists, well, it doesn't happen very often. It's like, oh yeah, how often is too often? Like once is too often. And it's not once. That's for sure. No, it's happening a lot.

Policy. In fact, you're punished by your governing boards if you don't go along with it. And what about the recent law that they passed in California where the schools don't have to tell the parents that the child has transitioned at school? They hide that information from the parents. Well, they're just letting those children be free, you know, those ignored children who are looking desperately for a pathway to, what would you call it, inclusion and celebration. Oh, you're so brave and

then they're encouraged that's they're given positive feedback yes definitely especially if they're alienated kids to begin with yeah who are unsettled in their identity yeah right and aren't being guarded by anyone and are vulnerable right right right oh yeah and the parents are indoctrinated into this old woke ideology as well. Or terrified. Right. Indoctrinated or the munchausen by proxy types who get off on the fact that they have a child that's such a burden but are still really, you know, what would you say, bearing up nobly under the weight. And that is a very dark inclination that is well documented. Yeah, well that's the devouring mother for you. That was what Freud warned about back in like 1880. Yeah she's a little too close. You remember

the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story. Yeah. Gingerbread house, that's a little bit too good to be true when you're lost. What's inside it it the witch that wants to fatten you up for her own Delectation that's the devouring mother That's the maternal instinct gone mad, right? Everything good is Has the potential for pathology and proportion to its goodness So Lucifer is the intellect gone mad, right? The devouring mother is the mother who's a little too close to her kids, right? A little too close. Jesus, brutal, Joe.

It's just so stunning how widespread it is. At least UK is pulling back on this stuff, but they have socialized medicine, so they actually have to go on data. Canada hasn't pulled back. Which is wild. Yeah and I think that's true though. Yeah most of the European countries have woken up but I don't think it's gonna slow it much because there's a huge underground market in puberty blockers. You know I've talked to experts who figure that the ratio of people on black market puberty blockers to medically prescribed puberty blockers is at least 10 to 1. Oh god, so they're just self-administering this

stuff? Yeah, right. Oh god, and it's essentially chemical castration drugs that they used to use on pedophiles. Oh god. Yeah, that's for sure. That's what it is and when you tell people that and they deny it because they don't know and then they find out it is so stunning. They also don't want to know. Right. And no wonder. Yep. Anyways that's why we're trying to educate people. Well Jordan I'm very happy you're doing this. I really am. It looks amazing. I think it's fantastic.

I'm going to try some of them. I'll try some of your courses. It looks exciting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's do it. Go down a bit and I'll show you some of them. So we've got Brett and Heather Weinstein.

So that's fun. Jonathan Pagio on Symbolism and Christianity. That's excellent. James Orr, he's from Cambridge lecturing on Plato, Marian Tupi on the economics of human flourishing. That's a very optimistic course. There's Bret and Heather, Evolutionary Inference. And is this available currently? It's up now, man. It's up now. Wow. Yeah, yeah. The greatest leaders of history. That's a great course. That's very inspiring. John

Vervecky. I really like John. He's so damn smart the boy crisis with Warren Farrell I did a course on Nietzsche on Beyond Good and Evil. Do you want to run that? That's a fun preview. Sure Let's turn it out. We'll wrap it up with this. Okay, okay On books I write In a single sentence what it takes other men a book to write that it wasn't egotistical because it happened to be true. Beyond Good and Evil is a cardinal work, a prodroma to the entire intellectual and political history of the 20th century. Brilliant, romantic, insightful, deep, insightful, deep, psyche-shattering, dancing bit of literary genius.

He's had a remarkable impact on thought over the last 140 years. It's reasonable to say that he philosophized with a hammer because his thought is extraordinarily condensed. To read Nietzsche is daunting psychologically. He's like a motivational speaker. He's practical in a way that philosophers seldom are. Nietzschean philosophy is a call to arms. To familiarize yourself with him is to arm yourself against a sea of trouble. And since you will encounter a sea of troubles, you better pray that you're armed.

And this is one way to do it. of troubles you better pray that you're armed and this is one way to do it. Alright, how to philosophize with a hammer. Jordan, thank you very much my friend. Hey man, it's always a pleasure to see you Joe. It was very fun watching you on Kill Tony too. Oh thank you, yeah yeah yeah that was fun and that was a good opportunity. You were great too, I can't wait for that to come out because it's good. It's it's fun. No, thank you, sir It's always a pleasure to be on your show