The Tim Dillon Show - 249 - Jordan Peterson

Episode Date: April 25, 2021

Jordan Peterson joins us to discuss his recovery from addiction, his rise to fame, psychoanalyzes Tim and the false claims against him by the media. Bonus Episodes every week: ▶▶ https://www.patreon.com/thetimdillonshow ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS: 🩳 UNDERWEAR: Order with PROMO CODE Tim ▶▶ https://www.sheathunderwear.com/ 🔒 VPN: Get three months free ▶▶ https://www.expressvpn.com/timdillon 🥣 CEREAL: Use code TimDillon for free shipping! ▶▶ https://magicspoon.com/timdillon 🔵 BLUE CHEW : Use promo TD ▶▶ https://bluechew.com/ 🤖 MANSCAPED: Use code TIMD ▶▶ https://www.manscaped.com/ 👨‍🦱 HAIR LOSS: ▶▶ https://www.keeps.com/TimDillon 📦 SHIPPING: Enter code TIMDILLON ▶▶ https://www.shipstation.com/ 🎧 HEADPHONES: For 15% off! ▶▶ https://www.buyraycon.com/tim 🤳 COLOGNE AND SKINCARE: Use code TIM ▶▶ https://hawthorne.co/ 🛏️ BEDS: ▶▶ https://helixsleep.com/timdillon 🚗 INSURANCE: ▶▶ https://gabi.com/timdillon 🚬 QUIT SMOKING: Use code TIM: ▶▶ https://lucy.co ⚓ NICK DAVIS'S PODCAST (BELOW DECK) ▶▶ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/another-below-deck-podcast/id1216741721 💆THERAPY ▶▶ https://www.betterhelp.com/TIMD 📦 BOX OF AWESOME ▶▶ http://boxofawesome.com use code TIMDILLON at checkout for 20% off 💊 MASF SUPPLEMENTS ▶▶ https://masfsupplements.com/ use code TIMD for 10% OFF 🧴 DUKE CANNON DEODERANT ▶▶ https://dukecannon.com/ use code DILLON for 10% off 💍 NORTHBANDS RINGS ▶▶ https://www.northbands.com/ use promo code TIM for 20% off BITCOIN CONFERENCE ▶▶ https://b.tc/conference use code TIMDILLON for 10% off CERTIFIED PIEDMONTESE BEEF ▶▶ 25% OFF with discount code TIMDILLON at https://www.cpbeef.com   ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬   𝐆𝐄𝐓 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐍𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐃: 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timjdillon/ 🐦 Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/TimJDillon 🌍 Tim Dillon Live Dates!: http://timdilloncomedy.com/#shows 📹 Subscribe to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC161r7ShBvMxfyzCtiSMRbg Listen on Spotify! https://open.spotify.com/show/2gRd1woKiAazAKPWPkHjds   ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬   ▶▶ Ed McMahon [e-mail] https://www.instagram.com/benaveryisgood/ https://twitter.com/benaveryisgood   ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ #TheTimDillonShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right. So what do you want to do today? What do you want to accomplish today? That's a great question. It's a great question. I think, well, you are, you're a clinical psychologist. So I do want to, I think for my own life, it's important that I selfishly use this a little bit to get advice from you personally, which I think is, which could can help other people as well. I have the new book here, which is called Beyond Order, which I love the title of that, 12 more rules for life, which was written, I know a good chunk of this was written before your ordeal, which we can talk about too. And, you know, just the, it's so funny on the, on the book, it says in New York Times, it's called you the most influential public intellectual in the

Western world, which is undoubtedly true. It's a tremendous amount of pressure. And do you ever say to yourself, like, do you ever look at the Western world and go, you know what, I don't want to be the most influential public intellectual. I don't want to be responsible in any way for what's going on. I would say I vary in that opinion moment to moment every day. You know, I'm in an extremely fortunate position, but it's also a strange position. And it isn't exactly clear to me how to conceptualize it or how to move forward in the position that I'm in. So I'm actively working that through. Do you like fame? Like, do you like the adulation of people? Because you've helped a tremendous amount of people. And you're very

well known. That also comes with obviously a lot of negatives. But there's a ton of positives to it. And do you have you grown to, to like them, to like the idea of being famous? Well, I find it very difficult to accustom myself to it happened to me quite late in life. And so it's still very strange for me to walk down the street and be recognized continually. Some of it's extremely positive. It's, it's as if I'm always among friends and well-wishers. I mean, you wouldn't get that impression if you looked at my reputation online, let's say, because there's a disproportionate number of journalists who have taken a dislike to me. But when I'm out in public, it's like being, it's like living in a small town, but everywhere,

in some sense, because, but in a small town like that was this subject of a 1950s, you know, romantic romanticized version of a small town where everyone loves each other. And people are always telling me that they're happy to see me walking around and looking healthy. And or, or they just say hello, or they, you know, do a thumbs up or yell something out. And so it's like being among friends and well-wishers, except it's more intimate than that. And it's extraordinarily positive, but also very difficult to conceptualize. I was walking with a friend of mine this morning, who's a clinical psychologist, and I was talking about this issue and about the impact that my communication has had culturally and, and at the level of individual

lives. And, you know, I mentioned to her, and we discussed the fact that so much of this isn't a consequence of my ideas. You know, I read widely, and I read people who were very profound thinkers, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Jung people who know me know that they were great influences on me, but much more widely than that, many neuroscientists and many literary figures. And, and of course, people like Jung and Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were overwhelmingly influenced by their own reading and their own knowledge, their knowledge of Christianity, the knowledge of our religious traditions. In Jung's case, his psychoanalytic practice and his work with schizophrenics. And I've read much of the major works by all the major clinical psychologists. And I've been able to

communicate those ideas to synthesize them to some degree, and then to communicate them to very large numbers of people. And it's not that surprising the ideas have a profound effect, because they were written by geniuses who were interested in helping people sort out their lives and live more meaningful lives. And so on the one hand, it's not surprising that the ideas have that influence, but on the other, it's difficult, it's complex to be the person who's identified with that to such a great degree. You're the conduit. Yes, which is a cliched thing in some sense. You know, artists say that that they're just a conduit, but there's truth in that. And people say that I articulate what they already know,

and that that's helpful. And I believe that to be the case, because otherwise it wouldn't echo and reverberate. Right. And as powerfully as it does, one of your rules, which I looked at here in the new book, it said, and I want to ask you about this, it says, do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful or arrogant. The first part of that you I've witnessed. And I know that you've lived. I've never seen an attack on someone like I've seen on you. And I've paid attention. I'm a comedian. I talk about cultural issues. I am relatively well versed in what's going on in the public sphere. I've never seen attempt after attempt after attempt to smear and like besmirch a human being as I saw with you. I've now, I mean, there was

much less and I'm serious about this. There was maybe less negative press about Osama Bin Laden than you. I mean, I mean, I like, I think there was more of like people trying to understand Osama Bin Laden. You know, he grew up, you know, and he was disenfranchised or whatever it was. But how do you not, especially because you went through this very powerful ordeal? And I don't know how, and I know that a lot of that was internal family dynamics and your own health and your family's health. But how do you not become resentful against the people that have tried to assassinate your character? Also, do you blame any of them for what you went through recently, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But you know, the ordeal that you went through,

do you blame any of these people? Do you, do you say to yourself, had they not been as aggressive? And had they not been as vicious, you might not have been in the situation you were in? Well, you know, I worked through a lot of the answers to the questions that you're asking. While I was writing this second book, the last chapter, the chapter you referred to, do not, do not become resentful, deceitful or arrogant. Those are the three things that I noticed that were particularly catastrophic to people in my clinical practice, those three things and their interactions. And then in the final chapter, chapter 12 is be grateful in spite of your suffering. Look, the first thing I'd say is that I've watched people since I've become public,

a public figure. I've watched people, my peers, let's say academics in other places in the world, or people who are roughly my professional peers, who've been the target of attacks on Twitter or in the newspapers in some manner similar to what's happened to me. And my observation has been that it's very, very hard on people. They generally fold up and apologize and are shocked and hurt quite to a quite deep degree. And so it's no joke to have that happen to you. It's given me more insight into why people are so likely to not say the things they need to say when it's the time to say them, because the trouble that that can cause is very difficult to cope with. And so I certainly wouldn't say that it's been without effect. It's also a great mystery to me that it continually

happens. I continually expect it to stop, but it doesn't stop. And I don't, it's hard to understand why that is exactly. I'm trying to understand that all the time. I think to some degree, there's a public attempt to understand that even. And I say that because I'm also the subject of an inordinate number of memes. And they represent who people think I am in a very large number of ways, strange ways. I've become very associated with lobster imagery and with frog imagery and with king imagery and with, well, the Red Skull imagery. And it's a very complex set of images. And so that all adds to the difficulty of sorting it out, as far as I'm concerned. I certainly was tempted towards bitterness and resentment as a consequence of my illness, which created a

tremendous amount of pain. And well, at the same time, or approximately the same time, my daughter and my wife were also very ill. And so it's difficult not to succumb to the temptation to shake your fist at God and curse the clouds and the thunder and the structure of being itself for all the suffering that people go through. But it's not helpful. And I've really strived with the help primarily of my wife, but also of other people close to me, to identify resentful and bitter thoughts and to eradicate them, because they're not helpful. They're not justifiable, like under any condition, as far as I can tell. That's why I tried to illustrate in chapter 12 that gratitude is most properly conceptualized.

If it's not naive as a form of courage, it's sort of like the decision you take when you decide to get married. The trope is that you find the right person and then you just know. But the truth of the matter is that you decide and then you continually keep deciding day after day while you're living with the person. And gratitude in the face of life suffering is the same thing. It's a decision about an attitude that you are going to strive to bring forward. It isn't so much a considered opinion about the benevolence or lack thereof of the world. So, and I just couldn't see when I delved into my thoughts. I thought this seems unfair. My family is struggling under a tremendous burden of ill health. Not that that's not

true of many, many families. I'm very aware of that. And at the same time, this, in some sense, rather unique exposure to continual public pilloring, if that's a word, probably isn't. When I delved into it, I identified all the thoughts and thought them through. I couldn't see any positive utility. They weren't helping me in any way. I've done a reasonable job of dispensing with them in the last two months. I would say at the same time, however, I've also been recovering to a fair degree since I've been properly diagnosed finally. Now, what was that proper diagnosis for the people that aren't aware of what you went through? Because I know that there was a lot of speculation because there was really no information out there

when you kind of disappeared from public life. Yeah. It's still not exactly clear what happened to me. I've had a long history of depression, and that definitely has played a role in predisposing me to whatever happened over the last few years. But my new physician, I was particularly suffering in the mornings. And by the end of the day, I was back to something approximating normal, but it would take me like eight hours or so of real effort to even get to the point where I could stand up and move forward without excruciating pain, without believing that I was going to collapse. And then that would recur every morning. Well, he investigated the structure of my sleep and found that I had severe central

sleep apnea. I was waking up 25 times an hour or so, and those are stressful occurrences where you stop breathing. And so I've been using a breathing machine for the last month, and it's improved me from about 5% of function to about 50 or 60%. And I'm still seem to be improving, at least to some degree. And so apparently I wasn't getting, I was wearing this ring that monitors sleep and I was getting zero deep sleep, maybe one minute or two minutes a night, which is nowhere near enough. And since I've been using the machine, it's up to more like 30 to 50 minutes. That's where your body restores itself completely is during deep sleep. And so at least one of the problems that I was facing, it's not the only one, but at least one of them was chronic

lack of sleep. And I know you had anxiety and then you were having bouts of anxiety and your wife's illness and Michaela's surgery, and you're having bouts of anxiety. And then you're taking, you know, a doctor prescribed benzodiazepines to try to deal with that. And you keep upping the dosage of that. And then you, you're having an atypical reaction to the medication where you're having. Yeah, well, both to the medication. Yeah, well, I started taking it in 2017. I had a pronounced episode of insomnia and it lasted for a long time, about three weeks. I had very little sleep. You know, people have, I said, I think on Joe Rogan that I didn't sleep for 21 days. And the cynics have pointed out that the world record for sleeplessness is 11 days.

But there's a big difference between trying to stay awake, which is what you're doing when you're trying to break a record and being unable to sleep. Those aren't the same thing at all. And perhaps I was micro-sleeping when I was laying down, but my subjective experience was three weeks without any sleep at all. I went to talk to, and I had all sorts of other symptoms that were quite mysterious. I would faint when I stood up and chronically, and I was ice cold. I couldn't get warm no matter how many blankets I piled on. Was this any of this had to do with your stress? Well, stress, certainly. But like you start these medications in 2017, had these things happened prior to you taking the medications? Well, it's complicated because I had

a history of depression as well. And I stopped taking antidepressants in early 2016. And that seemed to be going quite well. And I have an autoimmune disorder. And what is that? It's complicated. Like an autoimmune disorder is just, I know that examples of that are like lupus or something like that. Is it a, what type of disorder is it? I know that you're dying. I haven't had arthritic symptoms, but I had psoriasis, quite marked and chronic history of mouth ulcers and peripheral uveitis in my right eye, which is an inflammatory condition in the retina. And I had, I can't remember the name of it. It's your hair follicles are attacked by our immune system. And sometimes people go completely bald. They lose all their hair. I don't remember the alopecia.

Yes. Yes. Alopecia as well. And is this why you have the diet that you have? Because I remember you said that the diet you have has alleviated some of those symptoms. Yeah. Well, both my wife and I have autoimmune problems. And so does my daughter, although my son doesn't. And my daughter's very severe arthritis was ameliorated to a tremendous degree by a meat only diet, which she's maintained for five years. And so both my wife and I, while we're still on that diet, both of us are still on that diet, which I wouldn't casually recommend to anyone, by the way. It's very restrictive. It's very hard on my social life. It makes it very difficult to travel or to go out. But it does seem to keep these symptoms essentially under control. Were you diagnosed

when you and your wife, you both have this disorder? Do you have similar disorders or is her disorder? Hers is more severe than mine. And you were diagnosed with that when you were younger? Or was that, did that come on later in life? Well, it was diagnosed mostly this year. I mean, these other sort of symptomatic conditions, UVitis and so on, they were diagnosed as they arose. But this year, I was subject to a lot of medical tests and I had markers, various blood markers of autoimmune trouble. At any time, did you become addicted to the benzodiazepines? Well, not in that I was craving them and not in that I was seeking them out or searching for them. Yes, in that I was dependent on them. Okay. So if I stopped taking them, I would undergo withdrawal

and that really, when I stopped taking them, which I did in 2019, once I realized they're danger to me, some people don't seem to respond negatively to them, but I certainly did. I stopped taking them and that was catastrophic. Do you have any other great insights about addiction, having gone through this experience? Well, I wouldn't recommend it. I mean, look, lots of psychiatric drugs are helpful to people and but everything that's helpful comes with a risk. And I mean, antidepressants helped me a lot. And the benzodiazepine, when I first took it, stopped my insomnia instantly, which is partly why I kept taking it. There were a lot of stressful things going on in my life at that time. And I felt,

especially because I had stopped taking the antidepressants that once I took the benzodiazepine and I had settled back down a bit that I would just leave well enough alone. And I just so I kept taking it was prescribed to me. I didn't know at that point that a small proportion of people, we don't know how small have a catastrophic dependency response. So they can't stop. They can't get off the medications without suffering catastrophic side effects. And I was in that category. So yeah. And then you went to, I believe, Moscow and you were put in a medically induced coma to help you detox from the medication. Well, there was a variety of reasons, but that was definitely that was the primary reason.

Yes. To get through the worst of the withdrawal. And so, and after that happened, I haven't taken any benzodiazepine since then. And you, when you woke up, but I was still suffering terribly from withdrawal effects. Still. Potentially. Even after the detox. Yes. Yes. So I mean, these are, now benzodiazepines, these are drugs that are like, would Xanax be considered? Yes. Okay. So in that family of drugs. Yes. Alcohol, barbiturates and benzodiazepines are all anti-anxiety agents. Alcohol is more complex, but they're all in the same family. And I know that people have to medically detox from alcohol as well at a certain point. Yes. Alcohol withdrawal often kills people. Yeah. Often. Yeah. And they use Xanax. They use benzodiazepines to treat the,

to reduce the risk of seizure when people withdraw from alcohol. Right. And now waking up in Moscow, which is like the chilling, you know, why, and I've heard a little bit about this, but you said you felt that you were just, your family made the decision to move you to Moscow because they felt the treatment there would be better than Canada or the US? Well, the treatments that I had in Canada and the US weren't working. Right. Okay. So it was a last-ditch attempt. It was a high-risk, last-ditch attempt. Yeah. Nobody did it lightly or carelessly. Right. It was just, we felt we were out of options. And I believe that to be the case. Right. And what was the treatment in Moscow, other than the medically induced coma? What else

would you say? Like, how was the experience? I mean, obviously it wasn't a positive one, but in terms of the doctors and the hospital and the place that you were in, you felt that you were well taken care of. They did their best. Yeah. And all the people, medical professionals that I dealt with generally speaking, did their best. And it's hard to tell what the effect of that was, net positive or net negative. I'm still alive. Right. Which is the positive. You rolled the dice and take your chances. And there's nothing certain. When my wife was treated for her cancer, which was fatal, a fatal form of cancer in virtually 100% of the conditions of the cases noted, it's very rare, thankfully.

She had quite a radical second surgery and then suffered terrible complications from that surgery for six months. They're life threatening complications, but it saved her life. Yeah. So, you know, the cure can be, the cure has danger, just like the disease. And your diet is very important because I remember that you were saying on Joe Rogan that you would had like an apple juice and had such an adverse reaction to it, just because it contained sugar, which you had not had in years. No, it was sulfites, actually. It's very unclear. All of this is very unclear still. Yeah. It's very interesting. How ready are you to get back to your schedule? I mean, you had a... Well, I am. In some sense, back to my schedule,

as much as my health will allow. I'm working from three o'clock while I do some work before that. I spend most of the morning walking and exercising and some in correspondence, but I'm recording two to three podcasts on my end a week and I'm generally on two others during the week and I'm writing again. So, you know, I'm champing at the bit. I have... It's possible that I'll tour again depending on whether or not I can tolerate it, that time changes and all of that. Right. And then, of course, with COVID, that's a whole other thing. Well, yes, there's that too. And just to ask you about that, because you are a doctor. I mean, I know you're a psychologist, but when you look at... Sort of like a doctor. Yeah. It's like a psychologist. I've said negative

things about psychologists, but not per se the discipline, but the person that... My thing is whenever I talk to someone and I say, what are you majoring in in college? And they say psychology, it's generally a person I'd never want any advice from. And that's just... That's anecdotal evidence. That's not backed up by any data. It's just like when I say, what are you majoring in? Someone says business. I go, I would never want to do business with you. It's just... It's a very general thing that a lot of people major in and a lot of people, I feel like, don't come out of that in a smart way. But as a doctor, what do you think about, you know, COVID? I mean, in psychologically what it's done to people, the lockdowns, the fear,

you know, obviously the fear of getting sick and then losing income. What is going to be the sum total effect in your estimation of this entire period on the psychology of the world and, you know, more particularly this country? Like, you know, we have a rash of shootings now that, you know, we've always had, but now it seems like we're even... I mean, these numbers are high, even for America. How do we come out of this, do you think? Well, I mean, I've been struck positively in the main by how resilient our social structures and our economic structures have been in the face of this. I mean, it's... We've been locked down in an unprecedented way for more than a year, and yet most businesses are still functioning,

and the social order has been almost completely maintained. And with any luck, we're almost out of it. I mean, in the US, I think you guys are up to something like it's close to 35% of the population that's been inoculated now, and that should start to make a real difference really quick. We're a bit behind in Canada, partly because we don't make our own vaccines, and so we've been dependent on supplies from other countries. And so, I guess to some degree, I'm surprised by our resilience in the face of this social and economic. It's a remarkable thing that the vaccines were developed and distributed within the span of a year, that there's so many vaccines that they seem to be working, that they're not producing catastrophic side effects. So, I think that's all

extraordinarily positive, all things considered. I think the signs of instability that are particularly evident in the US are attributable to factors other than COVID and the COVID lockdown that have been brewing for a long time, which I've been talking about and many other people as well for a long time. Right. There are a rash of shootings that have been happening, school shootings, and one of my biggest disappointments is that all of these shootings are done primarily by men, and it feels like it's another thing that women have been kept out of, like STEM. Is there a way? That's a terrible joke. It is a terrible joke, but it's true. Why are so many men being driven to violence? Well, it's not so many. I mean, the school

shooters are a tiny, tiny, infinitesimal percentage of the population, and so it's very difficult to formulate a policy to deal with such things because they are, in fact, so rare and so unpredictable. There's, I mean, aggression per se has its uses. Males are disproportionately violent compared to females or at least with regards to physical violence. Females have their own particular brand of aggression, which has more to do with reputation destruction than physical violence, and that starts very early. Yes. You can detect that in children. And you have a very, very large country. Right. 330 million people. It doesn't, you know, one person in a million is pretty seriously disturbed, and so that's a shooting

a day if it's one person in a million, and you don't have a shooting a day, so it's less than one in a million, so it's very, very rare. And thank God for that. It is when you look at the numbers like that, but it does feel it's too much, right? I mean, I'm sure that, like, you know, when we look at across the world and other countries that don't have these things, is any of this attributable to the fact that men now, and women as well too, but since we're on the topic of men, are retreating more into the digital world, that they are less socialized, that they are more into, you know, potentially, not to blame video games, but like, people seem to be retreating from the types of social structures that men had participated in for years,

which was marriage, family, you know, owning property, things like that. And it seems like a lot of men are not doing those things or doing those things much later in life. And there seems to be, and you've addressed this, I think, as effectively as anyone, there seems to be a tendency of those men that are not participating in those social structures to feel alienated and disenfranchised. And that often leads to, you know, negative pathologies. How do you encourage the type of social commitments that point men in the right direction? And I think you're a big proponent of the, you know, more traditional way of life, where it's, you know, forming a bond with someone, getting married, trying to, you know,

you know, create and manifest the life you want. That's a lot of the things you've read and you've talked about, involved that. Do you see the digital spheres being a real problem here because people can escape into that? I don't see the digital sphere as a problem, not as such. I think pornography might be a problem. That's the digital sphere. Well, fair enough, but you'd have to decompose the digital sphere into its various aspects and then look at each of them. As I said, I think that the ease of access of pornography and its proliferation, I think that's not a good thing. I think there are many good things about the digital sphere. I mean, there are large communities of encouragement that have

popped up on YouTube. I suppose I am at the head of one, but there are many people doing similar things like Jaco Willink is a good example. And your question was, I guess two part, you commented that there's perhaps a disproportionate number of people who are feeling alienated from the general community, from life itself, from the social world, from the natural world for that matter, and that that alienated, isolated and lonely existence can lead to bitterness. And God only knows where that goes, right? That can move in an aggressive direction quite quickly. Well, the antidote to that as far as I'm concerned is something like encouragement. It's partly why I'm so appalled by the characterization of our society essentially

as both symbolically and literally as a tyrannical patriarchy. The criticism that emerges on the left is essentially that hierarchies are predicated on power and power is equated to tyranny. And then so social structure itself is equated to tyranny. And that's nonsensical, that's a nonsensical oversimplification. The fundamental ruling principle of a functioning hierarchy is not power. It's something more like fatherhood. It's something more like encouragement and reciprocity, and what reciprocity be, and courage, and productivity, and generosity, all of those things. And I was talking to Jocker Willink a couple of weeks ago, and he's a very assertive and man, very much capable of physical aggression, built for it,

and both physically and temperamentally. And he went through naval seal training, and that's a prime example of a patriarchal hierarchy, let's say. But what they were taught most fundamentally was that each of them had their buddies back. Like they were taught reciprocity and functional hierarchy. Part of my generation's issue with that characterization, and I've listened to a lot of your work on hierarchies, and I agree with a great deal of it. But part of it is when we see so many of the institutions that we grew up with, the Catholic Church, the government, we look at a lot of the wars that we've been in that we now find out were foolhardy, and the reasons we got into them were not initially the reasons we were told. When we look at mega corporations and the

things that they get away with, whether it's these massive fraud, examples of fraud, when we look at the dishonesty that is inherently seemingly baked into not only the system, but human beings, as you say. It's not necessarily capitalism, it's deeper than that. But when you say that hierarchies are more fatherhood or based on generosity or cooperation, my generation is looking at so many of the institutions that we have seen literally have been rotted out from dishonest, malevolent bad actors and bad forces that seemingly are not really checked and seem to run amok and are not counterbalanced by that generosity or that encouragement that you talk about. So that seems to be, when I hear a lot of

what you talk about, so much of it resonates with me, but some of it is hard to grasp because it seems very positive and a very hopeful view of hierarchies. But in light of all of the nefarious people and their ability to poison organizations, do you not ever look at some of those statements about hierarchies and say that yes, hierarchies can get poisoned? Yes, definitely. A couple of observations there. When hierarchies degenerate, it's because of power and deceit. And they do degenerate. And a degenerative hierarchy is full of lies and power games. But I'm not characterizing hierarchies as based on, let's say, productivity and reciprocity. I'm characterizing functional hierarchies as characterized by

productivity and reciprocity. See, the essential claim on the radical left is that the hierarchical structure per se is tyrannical and predicated on power. And that's simply not true. Now, when the structures degenerate, that's how they degenerate. And it's definitely the case that we have to keep our eyes open for that occurrence, that we should be appalled by it, and that we should strive to do everything we possibly can to stop it. But my sense of that is that starts with you. You want to stop deceit in the world, then stop lying. If you want to stop the arbitrary exercise of power, then stop using it. Now, let me give you an example of this. Because I'm sensitive to the criticisms that you just laid out and the reasons that young

people might be cynical about the institutions that make up our culture. And there's no doubt they have the proclivity to degenerate. As I talk about in chapter 11, that's the evil, that's the tyrannical. And I just before because you're going to have a great answer for this. But like the other things when you say it starts with you and to a degree, that's true. But it's hard for a guy like me to believe, for example, when I was in community college, the CIA was running a labyrinth of secret prisons that we all later found out about. So it's hard for me to kind of make the connection. Well, if I do my homework, the CIA is going to stop running the torture prison. Like that's the disconnect I feel like

with some of the personal responsibility that it does have a limit where it's like, I can be very honest. How is that going to stop incredibly powerful people? How many people are we talking to you and me right now? A hundred and a half a million easily. Okay. So and you were in community college how long ago? Um, good question. I was there in, I went back like a real loser, but I, in 2000, I graduated high school in 2003. So let's say this around 2004 or five. Okay. So it's 15 years, roughly speak. Yes.

Okay. So you've gone from that guy 15 years ago to someone who's speaking on a regular basis with half a million people. That is correct. So everything you say matters. Well, you shaped your character back when you were in college. Look, you have power, plenty of it. And you know, people are watching you on YouTube and they're watching how you say things and what you say and what questions you ask and all of that. And so you have more influence than you think. Well, flattery will get you everywhere. You are, you're right about everything. I fold. When you can, when you can talk to half a million people on a regular basis,

then you have influence and God only knows how much and you're a comedian as well. And so you can say things that are funny and funny things are often true. One of the characteristics of comedians is to say true things and that people don't expect and everyone cracks up about it. Some of them are true and, you know, we'll see. Some of them are, we don't know that they're true at the time. And then months later, someone goes to jail and they are true. But I mean, I've observed when, when institutions become corrupted, that there's someone petting the show, generally speaking, there's individuals who are acting in a corrupt way.

They're lying often and they're dominating inappropriately. And the reason I picked the individual as the focus of my attention was because I thought that was the place where the proclivity for the corruption of, of social organizations could be best addressed. That's where the best, best addressed. Well, how else could it possibly be addressed with other institutions? They're going to run into the same problem, aren't they? That's a fair point. So, so, and, you know, you say there's limits to personal responsibility. And I suppose that's

true, but it isn't obvious to me what those limits are. I mean, you climbed out from community college to the position of authority and influence that you have now. And God only knows what you'll be doing in 10 years. And God only knows what you could be doing in 10 years if you do everything right. Right. And so, so it isn't obvious to me at all what the limits of personal responsibility is. And I certainly believe that the spoken truth is absolutely unstoppable. And so, the better you are at expressing, I do agree with you, but we do have, it is a little stoppable because we are on a website right now that can choose to take me off anytime they want. Right. I mean, we're using YouTube right now and they can take me off. And,

you know, we are on platforms that we monetize our show, but they can kick us off too. And then, so there are, you know, there are things that you do run up into, you know, you hit walls, I think. And I think personal responsibility is great. I think it's important. I think it's essential for people to live good lives. But there's a lot of seemingly institutional injustice out there when it comes to the prison system in America, for example, and, you know, private prisons, people making money, you know, by giving kids harsher sentences in the penal system, you know, and this has been a massive scandal. There was a documentary about it called Kids for Cash where you have, you know, corrupt people doing horrible things. And I'm

not naive and I don't think that you can ever eradicate anything like that. But I do feel like there is a tendency of people to say, well, I'm honest and I'm doing the right thing, but they don't hold any of those other people to account that may be doing horrible things to other people. So I think maybe- Well, I'm definitely not suggesting ever that you stop with yourself. Right. You just start with yourself. It's, if you look at any complex problem, you could say that it might manifest itself at multiple levels of social organization. The individual would be implicated, but then perhaps your family, perhaps your community, perhaps your whole country, you know, you can stack up the hierarchies, the social organizations around

any given problem. And then you could say, well, the problem could optimally be addressed at all of those levels of analysis simultaneously if you had the capacity. And that's the case. I would say that as you put your own life together and become more responsible and more capable and hopefully more generous and more honest, then you're going to be in much better position to properly assess what steps need to be taken in the broader social realm. I've never suggested that people limit themselves to their room, let's say. But for me, and this makes some sense because I am a clinical psychologist, the fundamental unit of analysis is the individual. And I would also say that's the principle upon which our culture is erected. That's the place, that's the fundamental

place is the individual. And maybe that's because individuals feel pain. That's where the reality is, you know, and the rest of its abstraction. Not that it isn't important or relevant, it is. When you look at, you know, the emerging forces in society that are tearing it apart, what are the biggest ones to you in your mind? Well, certainly ideological possession plays a huge role. And I suppose to some degree that's probably misplaced spirituality. It's something like that. And so I've always been struck by Nietzsche and Dostoevsky's analysis of the pathology of the West, you know, that we're still suffering the cataclysmic consequences of losing our religious grounding.

You need some conceptual scheme at the highest level of philosophical generalization. You need some way of answering what is good and what is evil and some way of answering what's the purpose of my life and maybe what's the purpose of existence. And at that level of analysis, the only answers are religious. Now, you can debate the rational acceptability of those answers, but that doesn't matter. I'm talking about the level of analysis problem, essentially. If you're talking about such things, you're in the religious domain. Well, intact cultures, let's say, or traditional cultures have a structure of ritual and myth and dance and music and art and story that frames that uppermost domain of conceptualization. And people live within that. When it's fragmented

and shattered, as ours has been, people turn to substitutes. And those substitutes have all too frequently been, well, either a cataclysmic loss of faith in existence itself, which is a nihilism that has a terrible psychological and social consequences, or the elevation of an ideological position to the status of a religious belief. And that's not good. And so everything in its proper place, you render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. And the rationalist objector will say, well, there's nothing that's God's. And I would respond to that by saying, be careful what you presume, because something has to act there. Something has to exist there. And you fall into a religious story. So if with the critique you laid out, for example,

of social institutions, you say, well, they tend towards corruption. And maybe they're so corrupt that only a fool would have faith in them. And that's a powerful argument. But it's essentially a religious argument. What it does is it takes the problem of evil. So it assumes that there's evil, which is the corruption and the power. Maybe you don't use the term evil, but it doesn't matter. It's still what you're referring to. And then it places it in social institutions, says the problem of evil is located in the social institution. Well, that's a religious claim. It's also a faulty religious claim. And it'll twist you up and bend you around because it's incomplete. And I tried to detail that to a large degree in chapter 11, when I talked about,

because you can think you can find malevolence in your own soul, you can find malevolence in other individuals, you can find it in the social order, and you can find something that looks like malevolence or certainly feels like it in the natural world. And if you only focus on one of those, then well, it's very convenient for you. I mean, so one of the things I always wonder, for example, if you locate evil in the social world, let's say in the institutional world, in the patriarchal tyranny, well, then you found an enemy, right? And then you found a target for all of your unexamined spite and resentment and cruelty and, and homicidal tendencies, all of that. It's very dangerous. And there's more sophisticated observers. And I think you can

make this case merely as a consequence of observing literature. More sophisticated observers place the battle between good and evil inside the human soul. And, and then it manifests itself in social institutions as well. But that's not the primary locale of the divine battle. Right. Christopher Hitchens, the late great, you know, writer, had, had argued, you know, in a polemic, God is not great, that religion should be replaced by the canon of literature, that, that theology should be thrown away and replaced with literature that all of our great lessons that we need to know are in literature. Do you find fault with that? Well, the deepest literature is religious. I mean, that's what Hitchens didn't realize is that

if you, if you took a hundred great books and sifted them so that you derived one great, greatest book from it, then you'd have a religious text. Right. And, and, and it would deal with these high order concerns that we just described. And some of that can't be done rationally, which is partly why Hitchens would locate it in literature, but it's not just literature. It's also, it's also located and expressed in architecture. You know, a cathedral says something about the structure of being. Now what it says, you can't exactly say. That's why there's a cathedral instead of a description of a cathedral. Right. It's the same with music and, and, and perhaps particularly religious music, but secular music is religious music. It's just being secularized.

It still has the same, it still has the same impact and the same message. A lot of religions seem to be less relevant to people because a lot of not all of their, not all of their lessons and morals, which many of them are great, but a lot of them, the big three, let's take, which you have Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Christianity went through a pretty serious reformation. Judaism is a small religion in terms of the numbers of people. Islam is going, maybe potentially going through a reformation now in certain countries and other, you know, politically. So when people look at these religions and we say the answers are to be found there, there's sort of a deep skepticism amongst a lot of people who

look at, you know, when people were following these religions to the letter of the law and when they had an omnipresent, you know, force in the political structure of society, it was often quite an oppressive place, whether it was, you know, if you look at like the, the Catholic Inquisition or whether you look at, you know, modern day Saudi Arabia, for example. So there, there's a skepticism about those belief systems being incredibly relevant now. And then you arrive at this place where people start believing in, you know, that there are, you know, an other can on Tumblr or whatever nonsense that you've had to go up against for the last four years. So it's like, what can you create? Or what can we put in that? Because if people,

for example, if you were raised a fundamentalist Christian and you don't feel for whatever reason that that belief system suits you anymore and you, you are out there and you were looking for belief and you were looking for meaning and you're not, you're not going to find it. And then who knows why that belief system doesn't suit you? I don't know. It could be your identity, it doesn't work. It could be that your family and you had some time, it could have been that the particular church you were in was abusive. I know many Catholics who've left the church because of the litany of abuses, right? That has happened. So what can we create or how do we create some type of, and I'm not saying that we have to do it or it has to be a group project. I love groups and I

love your focus on the individual in that sense is what makes you unique and interesting and the individuals. George Carlin had a great quote. He goes, I love, I hate people. I love individuals. It was something to that degree. But you know, I agree wholeheartedly that what you see on the left right now is a lot of people that are indoctrinating themselves into a new religion that is as oppressive, as unforgiving and as detrimental as a lot of the tenants of old religion. But what can you do if you say, you know, I don't want to be a part of that, but I also don't want to be a part of, you know, sort of that, you know, archaic superstitious kind of, you know, belief system that you may have thrown up. Well, that's what we're all trying to work out,

isn't it? Is what we should do. I mean, your comments about Hitchens are very interesting to me because I would say in the main I've taken his word seriously is that I do believe that the truth of the biblical truth, for example, is a literary truth. It's not a scientific truth. Science isn't about morality. It's about something else. Whatever the Bible is about, it's about morality. Now, you can debate the moral lessons in the Bible, but the Bible is an extraordinarily complicated book. So it's not that clear exactly what the lessons are, let's say. But having said all that, I've adopted a psychological slash literary approach to ethical truth. And I've learned a lot about Christianity, for example, as a consequence. So

and a lot of that was from reading Carl Jung, who wrote a lot of what he wrote in response to Nietzsche's observation that religion was dead, that God was dead. Yes, yes. And so Jung was influenced by Freud, but at least as much by Nietzsche. And he was trying to solve the problems that Nietzsche left. Well, you could, by definition, Christ is the perfect man. Okay, by definition. Right. Now, you can you can debate his representation in Christianity. That isn't what I mean. I mean, in some sense, I mean this, each of us has a relationship, whether we like it or not, with the ideal. No matter how obscure and unarticulate that relationship is, you know that because your own conscience will torture you. And the reason it tortures you is because you fall short of your

ideal. It's there in you. Now, you have a responsibility. It's pretty much the nature of responsibility to manifest yourself in accordance with that ideal. There's no escape from that. Now, what we try to do collectively is to represent that ideal and to come to some agreement about what it is so that we can organize ourselves cooperatively and in productive peace. But there's no escaping from that internal dialogue with the ideal. I mean, every goal you have is a reflection of that ideal. Every aim you have, every belief in something worthwhile, all your conceptions that there is such a thing as true, truth, or your conceptions that there are good ways of acting and evil ways of acting, all of that presupposes an implicit ideal.

Part of what religious, what our religious structures have done was focus on Christianity, is to try to make that implicit ideal explicit, to represent it so that we can understand it more and more deeply and so that we can also live out its dictates, let's say, more consciously. And we're always doing this, whether we know it or not. So, for example, you and I, to the degree that we're able to have this conversation in a manner that is genuinely reflective of a seeking of the truth, then we're manifesting a religious ideal in the context of the conversation. And that's why we're interested in it. And that's why other people are watching it. Right.

And they don't have to know that. And they'll say, that was meaningful. That struck me. I learned something. I thought I'd watch for five minutes, but I watched for an hour. We can't help it. This grips us. So, for example, you'll find yourself respecting or disrespecting people. Spontaneously, you'll find yourself in awe of someone or not or contemptuous of them. All of that means that you're in the grip of a moral evaluation that's related to this implicit ideal. And, you know, the more I've looked at the representation of that implicit ideal in religious texts, let's say, but in the broader religious cultures, the more I'm struck by its profundity. So, for example, I use this story quite frequently, but the story of Cain and Abel in

Genesis is very, very short. It's only half a paragraph long. It's very, very short. But it lays out very clearly the dichotomy of personality that exists inside the human soul. There's part of us, that part that's represented by Abel, that is striving towards the light that's attempting to serve our own interests and the interests of the broader community, and perhaps the divine interest to the best of our ability, believing intrinsically in the basic goodness of existence. And there's another part of us that's rendered cynical and bitter and murderous by the tragedy of life and our sequential catastrophic failures and inability to put ourselves together and cruelty of the world. And that's humanity, where all of us are caught

in the battle between those two opposing viewpoints. It's religious to the core. And when we lose Christianity, let's say, we lose thousands of years of the attempt to make that implicit reality explicit. And that's a catastrophe. Now, we replace it quite quickly. We replace it with the Avengers universe, where we watch the battle between good and evil being played out in movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and that push our computational resources to the limit. Think about that. The most sophisticated computational devices on earth are used to generate artificial realities where we can explore the battle between good and evil. And then we line up and pay inordinate amounts of money to expose

ourselves to this. And we find it gripping. Now, we write it off as entertainment. I don't write it off as entertainment. I take it seriously. It's a serious business. I think the real conflict comes into what the ideal is. And of course, that's where the real meat of the problem lies, right? And to agree on that and to agree on the steps to perfecting yourself into that is where you're going to find a lot of the discord, which I know you know. Of course. I know that you know, you've waited into those waters and there, but I love everything you say about groups. I loathe groups. I don't know why I do. It is something that I was born with a natural aversion to group think and I'm not not that I can't be

caught up in it like every other human being can and I'm sure people can see the YouTube comments are ready. What is he thinking? You know, but I just don't, I don't, you know, I'm a gay person, for example, but I find the gay movement completely insane. I don't think they represent me. I think a lot of the things that they want are absurd. And I've been vocal about, you know, giving hormones to children that are, that are, you know, questioning their gender identity. I think is ludicrous. I think is abusive. I've said that. I've said that the moralizing and the making people like you and the making them love you and the idea that they need to conform to your belief system to me is, I've had no interest in that. I have no interest in spending my time

on this planet getting people to think I'm a worthwhile human being. And maybe that's because I'm an addict. So as an addict, I can't entertain other people's ideas of me too much because then they become resentments and those resentments lead me back to addiction. So I have to just do what I do and I've attracted an audience based on the fact that they know that I don't care that much because I can't care. It's not that I'm morally superior. If I'm to stay sober and to stay effective, I can't entertain people's ideas about me too much. I can, I can make sure that I'm why is that linked to your ability to stay away from addictive substances? Because, you know, the resentments that I will build up, you know, there's a great line and yeah, the resentments,

so if you, okay, so think about that. So if you deviate from your inbuilt sense of ethics, then the consequences of that will be so catastrophic that you have to drug yourself into insensate existence, right? Well, that's exactly what I mean about the depth of the moral impulse. Right. You violated at your peril. Yes. And you know, you talk about agreement, like there are things we pretty broadly agree on, I would say. I'm sure. Well, no one virtually no one thinks it's a good idea to teach your child to lie. Right. So we have a pretty deep respect for the truth. Now, we may quibble about when it's okay to bend it. Right. But generally speaking, we all respect and admire honesty and presume it and, and attempt to, to live in a relatively

honest manner. Now, I know there are exceptions. There are some very successful ones. There's exceptions to everything. Well, you know, my experience has been that. You don't think like in the way our society is set up, we're kind of it's we tolerate a certain level of dishonesty, everything from the television shows we watch to our political system, we kind of expect on some level that the people that are in front of us are not necessarily, this is why I think you, by the way, have taken off so dramatically, because the things you were saying you believe, I can tell that and the people that are watching this can tell that whether they agree with you or not. I think when you watch how staged and manufactured American culture is media culture,

entertainment culture, political culture, we have all become a little cynical and we all expect a healthy dose of deceit with most culture that we get. And that's why I think people like yourself have broken through that academic culture. I believe as you said, many people are afraid to say publicly what they need to say or what they have said privately and I experienced this in my business too. So while I think the ideal is honesty would be great, I do believe we've been conditioned to expect far less honesty than we should have. Well, look, there's a couple of, I have a couple of thoughts about that. The first is, well, we should tolerate on average about as much deception from other people as we tolerate on average from ourselves because

there's no reason to assume that, there's no reason to assume anything other than that. And we have to allow our institutions to move forward despite the fact that they're composed of people who on average are as corrupt and deceitful as we are. So some of that's not so much cynicism as wisdom. And I would say that's built in, that's a particularly notable feature of the American political system because it's been made explicit by the founders of your state. They aimed to produce a system that people who were about as deceitful and unadmirable as they were wouldn't screw up too badly. That was their goal and that was very wise. Now, having said that, I do believe nonetheless that we should strive for better and that we

actually want it. And one of the things I have seen that's very heartening is that now that the bandwidth limitation has been blown off video and audio communication and the cost has been brought down to zero essentially, people are starving for genuine conversation. That's true. As you know, you're making your living doing that. 100%. Tell me if I'm wrong about this, but my experience with YouTube audiences and with my public lecture audiences is, but more specifically YouTube, is that this long form discussion medium brutally punishes dishonesty and insincerity. Yes. If people spend that amount of time with you, they have to know who you are or they have to want to spend time with you or you have

to have a demonstrable skill set that they find valuable. Yes. And the conversation has to take place in a certain way. I'm increasingly struck by the disjunction between a standard media interview and this kind of discussion. Right. I mean, we didn't structure this. None. Nothing. You're not attempting to do something with me other than have an interesting conversation. Right. Hopefully you're asking me questions that are actually your questions. If I go to a standard interview, especially if it's a television interview, then I'll be confronted with someone who's the face of the bureaucracy and virtually none of the questions they ask have anything to do with what they're interested in. So there's an artificiality about

it that can easily translate into manipulation and deceit. Not only am I not asking you other people's questions, I barely prepared. I've seen enough of you that I said it makes more sense for me to have a genuine conversation than to prepare questions. I said, I'm just going to go with the flow. People often offer to send me questions before a discussion like this and I always refuse. And it's for that reason. And I think part of the reason that people enjoy this form of communication is because it has the same quality as free form jazz. Right. Or I mean, the same thing happens in other genres of music when the band members are jamming. It's spontaneous creation. And to the degree that we're capable of engaging in that, then we keep our audience

that we take our audience along for the ride. And so this also relates back to your first question about the online world. I mean, I think it's an unbelievably powerful and useful method of communication. It's obviously decimating the legacy media. And for good reason, it's technologically superior and ethically superior in every way. So that's very heartening. You can have real discussions. I mean, my life right now consists of pretty much nothing but a series of genuine discussions. And are there as genuine as I can make them? And I'm always trying to learn something from whatever discussion I have. I don't go in there with a goal in mind, except to sink as deeply, sink as deeply as I can into the conversation.

Yeah. And we appreciate doing this. You have two more questions for you. This book, by the way, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life is available everywhere right now. You should grab it and read it. And then hopefully you'll be back on a speaking tour relatively soon. And hopefully you've sat down with stupider interviewers than me. I think you have. Now, I've watched some of your interviews. I think you have. Things that you would recommend that people read. If people only out there want to be smarter, or they want to understand you better outside of your own books, which are obviously 12 Rules for Life and 12 More Rules for Life, and then other things you've written as well.

I always, with somebody like you, I always like you to recommend reading because, you know, when you're talking about Nietzsche and Jung and everything, a lot of people are not connected with that stuff in a meaningful way. So is there a way, are there things you recommend for them to read? On my website, jordanbpeterson.com, under books, I have a list of about 100 recommended books. And people are buying those, a lot of those books. I keep track of their sales. And if you find the ideas that I'm presenting interesting, you'll find the books in that list interesting. They'll be temperamentally suitable for you. But you'd get a decent, you'd get the equivalent of a good humanities education if you read all those books. Better,

I would say. And so that's, and they're great books. Dostoevsky, for example, if you are a fiction reader and you like exciting fiction, Dostoevsky was a master at plotting a thriller. His books are unbelievably engrossing, and they're incredibly deep. He's very good. Have you read Chelsea Handler? Handler? No, I haven't. Well, she's, we'll, we'll, I'll send you something of her as you check her out. She's pretty good. Jordanbpeterson.com, when you are doing a speaking tour, all of your dates will be up there. You can, you can purchase the book there as well. Thank you for coming on. I know you're, your schedule is busy and you, but you are making

time for a lot of people and you've done a lot of my friends podcasts and obviously we, we really appreciate it, Jordan. And I mean, I don't know that we've solved the world's problems, but we've, we've solved the problem of people that wanted to kill an hour in a smart and enlightening way. Well, that's something to solve an hour, isn't it? That is something to solve. All right. Thank you very much. We really appreciate it. Yeah. Well, thanks very much for the invitation. All right. Thank you. Tom McHale. I said hello and I'm going to cut out sugar soon. All right. All right. Thank you, buddy. Thanks so much. All right. Bye-bye.