Jordan Peterson Part 1 | Club Random with Bill Maher

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Not available in all states or situations. You've been standing up to the woke mob more and more.
Of course. Yeah, and so what's in the consequence? Not of course.
Not many people are doing that. No, you're right.
Oh, yeah, it's going to come back and get you. No, I weaponized karma weaponized karma no life is random okay is he wearing a free piece suit no tuxedo instead just a two-piece suit how are you doing you're doing good to see you thanks for the invitation it looks so good i can't tell you how much to me, as we get older, of course, means more.

That is the lead story, is that someone who I didn't know if we were going to have, you look so hell.

You look like it might have been good for you.

I knew someone once who, their house was burning, and she ran in to get her kids.

And whatever the fire did, it's like her skin was perfect i always get her about it yeah seems like a rough way to get good skin tone yeah well sometimes you can sometimes you can emerge um if not improved at least somewhat unscathed uh i'm on Substack now. Yeah, I heard.
Tell me about that. Thank you, Ed.
Go to BillMar.substack.com. Quentin Part 2 is our first exclusive episode.
Oh, yeah, this is extras, and you'll get much more. And the Peterson Academy.
If you want an actual education, join up.

And if you just want an education like I do, because I want to hear somebody who's brilliant,

you know, I don't have to tell you where you can get Jordan Peterson.

And you feel good?

Not bad.

You feel like you're all over that?

No.

No?

No, no.

I have a lot of pain.

You do?

Mm-hmm.

But not compared to what I did have. So, you know, there's that.
And my head's clear. I know a lot of pain.
You do? Mm-hmm. But not compared to what I did have.

So, you know, there's that.

And my head's clear.

I know a lot of people who are a pain.

Yeah.

Where's your pain?

Kind of everywhere.

Really?

Like, if you have a flu, you know what it's like?

You ache?

Yes.

Yeah, it's like that.

Why do you have that?

I have no idea.

And they don't know? Just luck.

Just good luck.

No medical experts? No. It's probably immunological reaction.
Yeah. I mean, not to get on my horse about medicine, but I'm always on the wrong side of the woke on medicine.
Or maybe, I don't know. You're on the wrong side of the woke fairly frequently recently.
But especially on that one. They really hate, they hate it when I went after obesity and, you know, not in a mean way, just in a way that's saying.
And it's so funny. Now that Ozempic is getting everybody back into shape, I notice these articles saying, you know, it's not just good for weight loss.
And they list like 20 of the things it's good for. And I'm like, hey, you idiots.
What it means is obesity was always bad for everything. And now that people aren't so fat, all these other things are getting better too.
It's not the Ozempic. I interviewed this psychiatrist, Chris Palmer, who works at the McLean Hospital in Boston.
And that's, I suppose, the premier psychiatric hospital maybe in the world. And they're using the carnivore diet to treat schizophrenia, manic depressive disorder, and endogenous depression.
So depression without a cause. It's all meat.
That's what you used. Yeah.
And he's had remarkable success with it. And this is really something, right? Because those are very intractable conditions, especially schizophrenia.
And I never did think that they were like psychological in origin. They're so serious that it's very difficult to shake the suspicion that something has just gone seriously wrong, like physically, physiologically.
And anyways, they're having, I think he has, I think he told me that they're running 50 different studies examining the effect of diet on these serious mental disorders.

So that's very exciting to watch.

And again, this is one of those things, meat, that really shouldn't even have a political dimension because it's just science.

And the science is out.

This is more evidence to me that, well, we don't know a lot of shit. This is always one of my issues that they argue with me about medicine is that, you know, it's not an uncommon story to hear somebody say, yeah, I have some pain.
They can't really figure out why. They can't figure out a lot.
It's not an indictment. It's just that's the century we're living in where they just still can't figure out a lot.
Yeah, well, people turn out to be complicated. And medicine is very complicated.
Yes, that's for sure. And some things the medical profession do very well.
They're very good at joint replacements, for example. They're good at many things.
They're very good at after they're being very bad at preventative medicine when you're right at the end of the line, swooping in at the last minute with heroic measures. It's hard to monetize preventive strategies, and it's also hard to get people credit for them.
That's so true. It's like, here's a major problem you didn't have.
That's a great point. It's really rough.
Right. So that's a real strategic and tactical problem.

There have been attempts at times to pay doctors for how many people they keep healthy, you know, to give them a crew of people. But those are hard systems to set up economically.
Well, it's a hard sell to the people who make money on ill health. That's what it is.
But you're right. I have seen those studies.
Let's incentivize keeping people. I think there was one in McLaren, Texas, they did the biggest one.
And of course it works. You know, you can set up the incentive structure.
Yeah, you can incentivize anything. You can, yes.
Well, in any event, you look, I mean, I've had doctors who always say, you know, I can tell when someone walks in the office if they're healthy, really. It's a look that you get right away.
I mean, this is part of Biden's problem. It's like he just looked bad.
You can't look bad. And then, of course, he sounded like a junkie when he talked at the end.
But, you know, you look healthy. You look healthy.
And I know you have, you're starting your own college? Yeah, well, it's well started. We have 30,000 students.
Wow. In three weeks.
Yeah. And it's, it's, it's going great.
What's it called? It's called Peterson Academy, which wasn't a name I was particularly fond of. You know, there's, it's got that potential for something.
Physical or online? Online. Online.
Yeah. We have a stable of about 40 professors at the moment and they're top rate.
And we launched with about 20 courses. We have another 30 already recorded.
They're the best courses that have ever been offered publicly in terms of their quality of content and delivery and also the production values are unparalleled. It's Hollywood level production quality.
What does that mean production value for a course? Tight editing. Editing of what? The lecture? Camera shots.
So a lot of, a lot of, a lot of So when the students are watching online, it's not happening live? No, it's not live. It's recorded in front of a live audience.
I see. And, and we filmed people against a white background and with, with no angles.
And so we filled it all with images, imagery and text AI generated. They're beautiful.
Actually, the courses are beautiful. And so you don't not only hear what the professor is saying about the shout of Turin, but then you see it.
Yeah, right. Because you've added that.
That's production value. Yeah, yeah.
We certainly didn't have that when I was a kid. But on the other hand, you could raise your hand and ask the professor a question.
Yeah. Yeah, well, that's an advantage if you're in a small course in a bricks and mortar university.
But in many universities, the courses are immense. You have 500 students in a course and there's no interpersonal interaction.
And there's no reason fundamentally not to replace that with video, especially given the quality of our professors. Like I would say at the typical state university, let's say, 10% of the courses are of high quality educationally and in terms of their capacity to grip interest.
And all of our courses are high quality. What in your mind constitutes low quality, that it's more indoctrinated? Dull.
Dull. Dull and often wrong, ideologically addled, taught by people who don't know how to teach

i mean when you when you when you train as a professor you're not trained to teach

and it's not like faculties of education know how to train people to teach you say in the k-12

system so being able to lecture is a rare gift you know most people use powerpoint read it or

they just read their notes which is you know that's a terrible thing to do to people you just

Let's go. lecture is a rare gift.
You know, most people use PowerPoint and read it, or they just read their notes, which is, you know, that's a terrible thing to do to people. You just give people the damn notes if you're going to read them.
And PowerPoint, reading off a PowerPoint is not lecturing. No, if you're a good lecturer, first of all, you know way more about the topic you're talking about than you actually have to deliver in the lecture.
Like, you know it should be very expansive. And then what you should be doing is modeling.
Because you have to realize, well, you would realize this because you've done stand-up comedy and you know how to perform. It's called a lecture theater for a reason.
It's a theater because it's a performance. And then you might say, well, what are you performing? And the answer is you're performing, you're modeling how you wrestle with ideas.
You're modeling how you think. When I do my lectures and tour, I never do the same lecture twice.
It's always spontaneous. You know, I have stories that I tell that are part of a set in a way, but I'm always trying to solve a problem or address a problem in real time.
And if I'm fortunate and the lecture works out well, it has a narrative arc and it has a punchline. Now, that doesn't always happen because I don't necessarily know where it's going.
But all the people we pick to lecture are expert lecturers. They're captivating.
And most of them, many of them are also revolutionary in their thinking. One, two of my favorites, for example, conceptually, Jonathan Paggio is an orthodox icon carver from Quebec and he's probably the deepest religious thinker I've ever encountered and his lectures are great and he has done some work with a cognitive psychologist named John Verveke.
He's also quite a revolutionary. He was a very popular professor at the University of Toronto.
And they're putting forward a view of the world that's really new and exciting, I think, and meaningful to people. And so we're very interested and excited about this.
Because I think of part of the problem, what's going on in campus these days, and as we're taping this on September 11th, the schools are newly back in session. And I remember when I was that age and heading off at this time of year, I couldn't wait to get back to my encampment.
Right. So I could protest for a terrorist organization.
But apropos of that, I really feel... An Iran-funded terrorist organization, right? And the protests are Iran-funded as well.
What do you mean by that? Oh, Iran. Iran, yeah.
I thought you meant the Rand Corporation. No, no.
Well, you never know about that either. Right.
No, it's really appalling. Oh, yeah.
But I feel like part of the problem with that kind of thinking, with what has gone wrong with the very, very far left, which is absolutely embodied in academia, is that everything has to be a revolution. Yeah, right.
I saw this quote from the kids back at Columbia the other day. They put out a manifesto, and they use language now like, we need to eradicate America at its root.
Yeah, right. Like yeah right like this is by the way something we heard in the late 60s from certain what they became sort of terrorist organizations like the weathermen yeah definitely you know yeah let's right out of this right out of the communist playbook eradicate the past and you know all the people who lived in past you know that's just a side effect but i mean to eradicate a past, and, you know, all the people who lived in the past, you know, that's just a side effect.
But I mean, to eradicate America at its root, like, what... So you're talking, obviously, about a different kind of revolution.
Definitely. Yeah, well, this revolution is more grounded in tradition.
Well, part of that is... Well, that's more of a renaissance, then, no? Yes, yes, that's right.
That's a better way of thinking about it. Definitely, definitely.
Well, I think partly what we're struggling towards and partly with Peterson Academy is a more synthetic view of the world. Like there is, I sent you my new book.
I read it. And so- I told you, I gave you a blur.
I know you did. I know you did.
And so you can see partly what I'm aiming at, and this is what many of the thinkers on Peterson Academy are aiming at, you know, insofar as they're aiming at anything other than trying to express what they believe to be the truth, is a synthesis. And so I've been interested for a very long time in the concordance between evolutionary biology and psychology and religious mythology, because there's a deep analogy, there's a deep concordance, which you'd expect.
If knowledge unifies at the highest level, then there shouldn't be contradictions in the different domains of knowledge. And I don't think there are.
I think contradictions are apparent rather than real. They're a consequence of misunderstanding.
And so I'm trying to, and have been for a very long time, with this new book I wrote, this We Who Wrestle With God. The rule was that I wouldn't formulate any proposition that I couldn't justify scientifically as well as from a narrative perspective.
And so that was a fun exercise, you know, it's a rigorous exercise and it's been very useful. And it's funny because as I told you, it really brought me back reading your book to being at Cornell.
Yeah, yeah, you mentioned that. The only good thing for me about Cornell was I did have intellectual epiphanies and they did give me an amazing, this is the 1970s, so they were still teaching like horrible stuff like what white people did.
You know, people, you know, I'm sorry that it had to be white people who came up with a few of the good things that, but they did and we still teach them. And now in colleges, I feel like that has to go out the window because George Washington had slaves or some crazy shit like that.
But I got a great, I think, liberal arts education. And so that's kind of what your book reminded me of.
But look, I mean, I'm in a different place than I was in the 70s. I've been an atheist, and I felt like you're a lapsed atheist.
I feel like it's a paradox that someone of your extraordinary intellectual abilities is trying to reanimate this dead hooker called religion and bring it back to life in some way or find what's useful in it when why try to take these because you get false substitutes emerge i don't what i know what that what does that mean well imagine that things imagine that your systems of ideas imagine that they're either unified or not unified those are basically the options right and if they are unified there's something under which they have to be unified and that they're either unified or not unified. Those are basically the options, right? And if they are unified, there's something under which they have to be unified.
And if they're not unified, then they're in conflict and that's not good. That makes you anxious.
It makes you hopeless. It breeds social discord.
Ideas are in conflict, you're saying? Yes, yes. Ideas are always in conflict.
Yeah, but if they're in conflict too much, people go to war and they fall apart. I mean, look, you want diversity and you want difference in opinion because you want to keep things churning.
What has made people go to war more than anything? Belief in who's the real God. I mean, religion, just to take any number of reasons why I think it's better to junk the whole thing, but start with religions are supremacist just by their nature.
If you're telling people what happens when you die, which nobody knows, and you're telling who the great master of the universe is, you kind of have to be in a place where you can't abide other thoughts on the subject. And certainly all religions are like that.
Islam is super

supremacist in that way. And a lot of the people today who are speaking for it will tell you right to your face, why am I supporting this? Because Islam is the best.
Of course, obviously, that's why we justify these things. And certainly the Bible, same thing.
I mean, God is very supremacist for the Jews. I find it very amusing that the thing that they are accusing the Jews of today of doing, colonizing, ethnic cleansing, which are neither true, are true in the Bible.
That's exactly what God tells the Jews to do. Ethnically cleanse the Canaanites.
Commit genocide if you have to. God tells them, you know, kill all the men.
You know this in the Bible. You've written about it in there.
Kill all the men, the Midianites, another number of people. Kill all the men and the women who aren't virgins, kids.
Yeah, standard pattern of human warfare. I know, but for people who take a book as the guide to morality, it's filled with...
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But again, not to keep beating a dead horse about why religion is so horrible in any form, but if you read the teachings of the Mormon church until recently,

the things they say about black people are just horrendous, the worst kind of racist thing. And they justify it by talking about that.
Ham. Well, no, that's interesting.
They get it. The black people in religion get it from two sources.
The Mormons talk about Cain, that black people are a descendant of Cain, and because Cain is a murderer and he did a dark deed. I mean, they're very open about it.
Like, that's why they have dark skin, to remind us of the darkness in their past. I mean, it's just fucking ugly.
Yes, the other thing that the Southerners in this country used was Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham.
Ham was the contemptuous son. Also the one who wanted to fuck his dad.
I guess, or maybe both, I don't know. But Ham, some think the black line runs from Ham.
Right, right, right. But both of them, again, use religion to be justifying what we would today call one of the worst things, racist.
Okay, well, don't, look, right. Is it worth it to, like, resurrect that whole structure when it comes with that? It's what I call the one turd in the pool theory like i mean a book that contains okay we're okay with slavery it's terrible on women it's terrible on on homosexuals it's like if somebody said yeah but you know what there's only one turd in the pool jump on in i wouldn't jump in if there was even one turd in the pool and i i wouldn't want to like resurrect a book and a

mythology um that why do you why okay okay you get me yeah yeah i mean there's there's nothing incoherent about that argument although i i think that it i think it still leaves you in an awkward position because the post-modernist would say take a look at your stance and say well you defend Western civilization and there's plenty of turds floating in that pool. Well, but, but, but, but.
Okay. Right.
All right. You win that one.
Well, it's, it's rough because look. There are plenty of turds floating in that pool.
Well, we look back at the past, right? But we can, well, here's the thing. We can fish our turds out.
Like we had slavery, but we fished that turd out of the pool. You can't do that't do that the bible is the bible yeah it's there and it was written by god it was the protestant evangelists that did that did what took that particular uh bit of pollution out of the pool right that was will that was wilberforce in the uk and he was completely motivated by motivations who were for emancipation he was the oneation? He was the one who convinced the UK to put their navy against slavery.
In 1776, when our country was declared independent, there were 24 people in this country who belonged to the abolitionist society. They were mostly Quakers.
24 people in the whole fucking country thought abolition of slaves was a good idea. Well, Wilberforce in the UK started out kind of as one.
But it gathered steam. Right, right, right.
It gathered steam. And 87 years later, four score and seven years later, we did something about it.
That's the big argument against religion versus science. it's self-correcting.
We can be self-correcting. Religion, to a lot of people, seems too rigid.
I mean, its virtue is that it's set in stone. This is what we believe.
That's what they're counting on, is that people want that sort of certainty about something, that it's not going to change. That's what the Pope is always selling.
Well, so one of the criticisms that Christ levies against the Pharisees in particular is exactly that criticism. He says to them, this is one of the things that sets himself up for crucifixion because it's a very vicious insult.
He tells the Pharisees that they worship their own doctrines as if they're religious truths and that they would have killed the prophets. Had they been around in the time of the prophets that they purport to worship, they would have killed them.
He said that they walk across the graves of their own prophets. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They haunt the graves of their own prophets. That's a good way of thinking about it.
So he accuses them of their very deep cynicism. And he's trying to make the same point you're making, which is that you're not supposed to worship the static doctrines of men as if they're religious doctrines, and that there's something in the transformation process that isn't encapsulated in the, say, in the letter of the law.
So what would you say? You don't privilege the letter of the law over the spirit of the law. And part of the, I think, part of what the genuine religious enterprise is, is the attempt to identify what that spirit is, that dynamic spirit.
And I think that can be done. I think, and it does, it has an affinity, for example, with this idea that it's incumbent on you to voluntarily confront the tragedy and malevolence of life.
And that if you do that, it will transform you. And we know that clinically.
All the different schools of psychotherapy converged on a few realizations. One of them was that it was useful to get people to get their story straight, to recount their story.
Another was that if you expose people to the things that they're afraid of and that they're avoiding, that they get stronger. That works.
That's how you help people overcome anxiety, for example, social anxiety. It's also the fundamental mechanism of learning is to put yourself on the edge of disaster and dance there, and that expands you.
G. Gordon Lenny once said that he was afraid of lightning, so he tied himself to a tree during a storm.
I mean, that's an extreme version. See, now we know there isn't a God because if there was, and it was Gordon Liddy tied to a tree.
Yeah, but look, you use exposure training and therapy all the time. And a lot of what you do when you're trying to help people heal is return to that idea of the snake on the staff.
It's like, what are you afraid of that's stopping you from moving forward? That's what you try to find out in therapy. It's like, what is it that's paralyzing you? Okay, now can we break that down into manageable bites so that you can confront it and people see it was a weird thing because the behaviors were the first people that figured this out that you could expose people to what they were afraid of voluntarily and that they would uh that they would become less afraid that was the theory they'd become less afraid the psychoanalyst said that's not going to work because maybe someone's afraid of an elevator, but they're not really afraid of the elevator.
They're afraid of death. And if you get them to relax about the elevator, their fear will just pop up somewhere else.
Right. But that isn't what happened.
What happened was that if you got people to face any one thing they were afraid of voluntarily, they started to learn that they were more capable than they thought. and that made their bravery generalize.
And that's really what kids do when they go out into the world, right? They find a challenge and they overcome it, and they learn that they're the sort of creature that can find a challenge and overcome it, and that generalizes, and that happened in psychotherapy. And then there's a radicalization of that idea in the gospels and in this this story of the brazen serpent.
It's like, there's no limit to that. You take the worst, and this is also part and parcel of hero myth because there's a, the most ancient story we have literally is a variant of the dragon treasure story, right? That the quest is...
I love that part in the book. Yeah, yeah.
It's a very useful thing to know. Look, if you're a person who has been listening for this last half hour and doesn't know what the fuck we're talking about, that book isn't for you.
But if you're a person who has even a little bit of understanding of the Bible, you don't need to be religious. It's a historical document.
I really found this book so fascinating. It's so great.
It's like what you were describing about your lecture. It's like your lecture in a book form.
Somebody who knows how to tell a story, make you think differently things. Even in the blurb I gave you, and you're a friend, I'm trying to be supportive.
I had to even say at the end, I didn't get all the way with him. He didn't convince me because I feel like you're more religious than you used to be,

or at least willing to give it a try. And maybe that has to do with you getting sick.
I don't know.

I don't think so.

But what a ride to go on.

Well, I'm glad to hear that.

I love that book.

I'm glad to hear that.

And people will too. I mean, you don't have to, you just have to be interested in

great stories. I mean, why does the Bible survive? A lot of it is good stories.
It's a lot of stories. They're stories you need to know too.
And it doesn't bother people that they're told by, both Testaments are an anthology. It's funny that in the New Testament, they write out, say, this is four different versions, and they're not even going to match, and we don't care.
The Old Testament, I think this is still the case, but certainly when I studied it in college, they identified four main writers of the Old Testament. They called them J, E, D, and P.
And they would be like, J wrote this in 850 B.C. And then obviously this is added.

I mean, this is how scholars see it.

But it's kind of the same thing.

It's an aggregation.

It's an aggregation of people over.

Now, the New Testament, it's much closer.

Mark is about 70 A.D.

And the last one, John, is about 110.

So there's about 40 years.

But all of them take place well after Jesus died. They never knew Jesus, the gospel writers.
The only one who was close to Jesus' time is St. Paul, who's writing in the 50s.
Jesus dies in 33. And he knows nothing about Jesus.
It's so weird that the people who wrote later know everything about him. Paul doesn't even conceive of Jesus as someone who lived on earth.

He said if he had lived on earth, he wouldn't have been a priest.

He wouldn't have even been a priest.

That's in St. Paul.
He doesn't know anything about Mary, Joseph, the virgin birth, the crucifixion, miracles, walking on water, you know, fishing with the guys, and then nothing. I find that.
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Kind of weird. There's no shortage of things that are incomprehensibly strange in the biblical library.
So being sick had nothing to do with... Not much.
No, I wouldn't say so. I mean, what did being sick do? Well, it made me more grateful.
That's for sure. But isn't that wrapped up with religion? Well, that's partly why I'm bringing it up.
You know, I mean, I was in excruciating pain for three years. And so now, when I'm sitting here and I'm not on fire, I'm reasonably pleased about that when I have enough sense to remember.
Right. You know, and so, and that, is that a permanent change? I suspect so.
Three years is a long time. I mean, it does sound like what God did to Job.
I'm just saying. Well, I think that that happens to everybody to some degree.
I mean, every single person in the course of their life has to deal with the fact that somewhat random, extremely unpleasant things come along, and to some degree, even independent of your moral conduct. Oh, totally.
And then, well, it's just, look, if you're a bad actor, the probability that horrible things are going to come your way is all things considered quite radically increased. Yes and no.
I mean, nothing bad happened to Saddam Hussein until we captured his ass and hung him. But he had 65 years of being able to act like the most ridiculous tyrant in the world and get away with it.
Other people, again, they don't do anything and something bad happens. I feel like when people connect their behavior with some sort of punishment or reward, that's childish.
That's what, when people go, karma. I did a whole thing on this on my show once.
What a bunch of bullshit karma. Americans interpret karma to mean like, you took the last parking spot and now shit's going to happen to you.
That's schadenfreude. That's not karma.
But that's how people think about karma. Oh, yeah, it's going to come back and get you.
No, I'm sorry. Weaponized karma.
Weaponized karma. No.
Life is random. Good people get punished for no reason, and bad people go unpunished.
You just, you know, you're right. I mean, if you're some sort of a petty criminals always committing crimes you're probably going to wind up in jail and that's not good but not everything has a uh logical connection to well and lots of times good people suffer terribly terribly right and that's partly what job is trying to deal with and you know and part part of what he does do is take it's a strange thing because he takes refuge in his own ignorance.

And I think there's some utility in that.

There has to be, you know, because we have to, if we don't operate on the assumption that there's something like an intrinsic moral order, it's very difficult for us to conjure up the courage to continue to exist when things go seriously sideways. But it's worse than that.
It's worse than that because, and this is why I brought up the Cain story earlier. If you are tortured, even unjustly, and you lose faith in yourself and the structure of existence,

it isn't only that you become demoralized.

It's that you tilt towards malevolence.

You start to work against things.

And this is why, for example, I'm not thrilled in Little East with the antinatalist types. They make this claim that existence is characterized by suffering that's so intense

that it would be better if consciousness itself just ceased to exist.

And you can make, that's Mephistopheles' case, by the way. At Salinas in Greek mythology, yes.
Well, you can make a case for it. What would be better to have never been born? Exactly, exactly.
Now, and you might say, okay, you know, fair enough. What you're doing essentially is saying that the suffering in existence invalidates its utility.
But what if it is the case that if you believe that, that you become an agent that produces suffering? Well, that is what seems to happen, is that once you turn against life, I mean, look, everyone's going to have a time in their life when they think, oh my God, like really? Is this worth it? Like you watch someone you love suffer, or maybe you're in agony for doing something good, let's say in the worst possible situation. You think, really? Like really? And so then maybe you get cynical and you get bitter, but the problem is that that has a direction too.
That is what happens to Cain. Like he starts out cynical and bitter, but he ends up murderous and his descendants are gen genocidal.
Like, that doesn't seem like a good alternative. And so, what you see in Job is this insistence, and it's a terrifying insistence, that you are required to maintain faith in your essential goodness, despite your flaws, which is already a hard thing to do, and your faith in the fundamental benevolence of, what would you say, of the created order.

Because anything else hurts you, but it's worse than that.

It produces a kind of malevolence that spreads.

And I think that's, like, you asked me what the relationship was between me being ill

and this interest in religious belief, and I said that wasn't the primary mover.

The primary mover for me has always been the study of atrocity because I spent a lot of time. I spent a lot of time as a psychopathologist studying the actions of the people who have done the worst things.
And they're unimaginably bad. I mean, there's Iris Chang's book, The Rape of Nan King.
The Nazis are the good guys in that book. Well.
Right. I'm serious.
That's how rough it was. For those who may not remember, 1937, the Japanese are on the march.
Yeah. Pearl Harbor was 1941.
So this is four years before before pearl harbor and they were on the march in asia and they went into china manchuria and what they did i remember reading somebody's column recently it was on the anniversary of the bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki and it went into great detail about what the Japanese did in not just in Manchuria.

I was Chan committing suicide after writing that book. Boy, when it's so bad, even the book writer kills it.
Yeah, exactly. But I mean, this guy said, I know there's a lot of hand-wringing in America about Nagasaki and Hiroshima, not in Asia.
they were not upset at all that the Japanese regime was taken out as brutally as it was. Because what they did, to your point about the rape of Nanking, was just like, we won't like...
See, well, and that's also the conundrum at a relatively deep level that's being contended with in the Old Testament. It's like, so the Canaanites in general, like from a narrative perspective, the Canaanites are the evil descendants of Cain.
Right. Okay, and so the people that are being fought against are the cynical, bitter, twisted, nihilistic, genocidally motivated, sadistic murderers, let's say.
Well, then the question is, if that's the enemy that you're up against, what exactly is the moral thing to do? You know, and you just made a case, you know, painful it is to point it out, is that you made a case that there are patterns of behavior that are so despicable that what?

What's justified in that situation?

Was the atom bomb justified?

Well, you know, we're arguing about that now.

And people take the same tack with regards to the firebombing of Dresden, right?

And you think, well, you know, the Nazis, they were pretty bad.

And so what do we do about that?

And the answer is, well, you know, we don't exactly know.

It's not like it's simple. You know, how do you limit your reprisals while we're dealing with that right now with the situation in Israel? Did you see the guy on Tucker Carlson recently who was giving a revisionist history? Was it Cooper? Was that his name? I don't remember his name.
I think so. I had never heard of him.
Tucker Carlson introduced, and of course we're talking about Tucker Carlson, who I think is crazy insane about a lot of things, but he introduced him as like the most important historian and blah, blah, blah, and this guy, I'm just paraphrasing like mad, but like, no, you got it all wrong. Hitler was the good guy and Churchill was the bad guy.

Now, you would agree that's insane, right? Yeah. Okay, because there are people in this world who think that that's who you are.
Me? Yes, I do. You know I'm not one of those people.
I do understand that. Like when you're not fully on the woke train, you are somehow just thrown all the way across the field into that bin.

That's what bothers me about the way people react to you.

It's like, and me.

I have some objections to it too.

Yeah, and me.

It's like you, it's just so childish.

It's so naive and childish.

You've been standing up to the woke mob more and more. Of course.
Yeah, and so what's been the consequence? Not of course. Not many people are doing that.
No, you're right. Well, the consequence is some people left the building.
I can't give an estimate, and I don't care, and I don't miss them. Other people joined.
Like there's a lot of people in this country who are tired of the hate and the hating. And I am one of them.
I don't want to hate half the country and I don't hate half the country. I would never vote for Trump and I think he's an abomination.
And Kamala, you know, do I have to love everything? No. And it's fine.
And I thought she was great last night, and I can't be more thrilled that I would put my money on that she's going to win the election. But I don't hold my tongue about what is insane about the other side, because it is.
It's not nearly as threatening as not conceding elections, which Trump does not do. So that's where I am on that.
But I also understand that Trump, I think, will go away after this. I think he's kind of finally reached his Joe McCarthy stage where it's like people are tired of it.
It just took longer. But Trumpism won't go away.
And I would define Trumpism as a fear of the insanity of the far left, which is not completely unjustified. And therefore, anyone is better than that.
And Trump proves it because he is that anyone. If he's okay, if he in all his monstrosity is still better than what you fear about the left, that's a problem the left has to deal with.
It would be so easy. This thing I just mentioned about Colombia where they were saying we want to eradicate the United States as it is.
How about pick some Democratic politician? Pick that as your sister soldier moment. Remember sister soldier? That's what Clinton, he made a thing about a rapper who had said, we should take a week out and just kill white people.
Now, no one was- It'd take longer than a week. Exactly.
But she said... She's just not committed to the task.
She was being reasonable. She said, let's take a week.
Okay. And nobody really took this seriously.
He purposely picked on that. And someone could do that.
Does anybody think most kids in America want to eradicate America? Of course not. But just pick out something to signal to the middle of this country, we're not as crazy as the super crazies on the far left.
Just pick it. That's a sister soldier woman.
We don't want to eradicate America. Okay? So Trumpism, they will find someone.
They will find another Trump. It's not really just him.
As long as there's things that scare them about the things you've gotten in trouble with, gender and the hysterics about racism, not that it isn't a real thing, but all this freedom of speech issues, parenting issues, all these things that really scare them. And again, not completely without justification.
Well, there's plenty of reason to be scared of the radical left. That's what I'm saying.
Until you take care of that problem, they will always come up with a Trump. That's it.
So I spent five years working with Democrats, trying to pull them to the center. And I had a lot of behind-the-scenes conversations with people, virtually none of them public because virtually no one would talk to me publicly.
Are we talking about politicians? Yes. Yes.
And many of them. Many of them.
And I asked them all on the Democrat side, I asked them all the same question. Purposefully.
And I asked this to RFK too. When does the left go too far? Because obviously the left could go too far.
And none of them would answer. Really? Not one.
Not one. Dead serious.
In private? In private as well. Come on.
No, I'm telling you the truth. I know some people who would answer that.
Well, look, it's also, I stopped doing a fair bit of that about a year and a half ago. And things have changed.
There are more people on the moderate Democrat side who are willing to draw a line with regard to the radical leftists.

But they're still not very good at defining it.

So they'd reverse the question and ask me, like, when do you think they go too far?

And I thought that was simple.

It's like equity, equality of outcome.

And the universal response to that was always the same.

Oh, they don't really mean that.

It's like, yeah, they do. To be fair, it is more complicated than just that.
Equality, meaning equality of outcome, I believe in that too. Equity is what they changed it to a lot of people on the far left.
And Biden went along with all of it. Means, no, some people started out not from the same place, so we should make an effort to redress that.
I believe in some of that theoretically and some of it in how you would put it into practice. You can't just say, okay, some people weren't even at the starting gate for the first 350 years and now go.
Of course, there's going to be remedial, I think, things that we can do. And we're doing many of them.
We're doing some of them anyway. But do I think it means we should make it that medical school is not something that you can only get into completely by merit? No.
Because no one wants a doctor who got there by affirmative action. Yes.
Right. But you would count what I said to be valid, right? That you can't say if you started 300 years late, we expect you to be.
I guess I guess this is one of the things that probably tilts me in the more conservative direction, and partly as a social scientist, is that well-meaning interventions seldom have the outcome that's designed. Correct.
And it's really a radical problem. Okay, so the historical solution to the problem of unequal distribution of, say, even of opportunity is that everyone is treated the same under the law regardless of their, regardless of anything, regardless of wealth, regardless of race, age, status.
It's the same. Now, obviously, there's elements of that that appear unjust.
So if you make a million dollars a year and you get a thousand dollar fine for speeding, that's a lot different than a thousand dollar fine for someone who makes twelve thousand dollars a year. And so then you might say, well, maybe your fine should be income adjusted.
OK, but the problem with that is like, OK, you're differentially privileged with regards to your wealth. Well, how many dimensions of differential privilege are there? And the answer to that is, well, there's as many dimensions as there are differences between people.
And that's an infinite number of differential advantages and disadvantages. And so I'll give you an example that I think is quite germane.
So there's obviously disparity in wealth. Well, one of the best predictors of wealth is age.
Older people are richer. Well, why? Well, obviously, because they've had their whole life to work.
Race. So, yeah, yeah.
Even more. Okay, but let me make the case with this for a minute.
Okay, so then you might say, well, it's very unfair that the old people have

the money. It's like, yeah, fair enough, buddy.
But the young people have the youth. And if I'm

serious, and if you took the old person and said, look, you give me all your money, I'm 18, you give

me all your money and I'll be 65 and you get to be 18 and broke. But would you actually take that

bargain? Because I wouldn't, even though I'm punching 70 in the mouth, I still wouldn't do it because my head would still be my 18 year old head. And I just couldn't take any more of that.
Your stupidity, at least my stupidity at that age caused so much pain, unnecessary pain in my life that I would rather be this age. Well, that's another sign of differential advantages.
You've got the disadvantages of being old, but now you're not quite as stupid. Not quite.
No, it's awesome not being stupid. Yeah, right.
It's just awesome. There's like that old commercial, Priceless.
It's priceless not being fucking stupid. What do you think is better about you now than when you were young? I'm not fucking stupid.
I don't make stupid mistakes. I don't make that.
I mean, I'm sure people would say, oh, Bill, you said this the other week. And I meant it.
And it wasn't horrible. Well, frequency and intensity also matter.
Also, I'm mixing dangerous chemicals every week. OK? I'm playing third base in, okay? I'm going to get more hard hit grounders.
But personally, much more in my personal life. I mean, men take a very long time to mature.
I mean, when a woman says like, boy, you need a 40-year head start. Yeah, you do.
You need a 40-year head start to be on the same level. It's crazy how immature, as society would define immature, you can be, or I was, late into life.
Because the immature things are the fun ones. I still don't want to give them up.
You know, people are different. We've talked about this the last time you were here.
You know, we could not be more different in that way. I mean, you're so much more a woman's dream and I'm like a woman's nightmare in many ways, like never committed, never got married, never wanted to.
I never understood how people could, and I see so many people who talk about it like married couples. And they talk very finely about like, oh, remember when we were in love? And they're reminiscing about this time in their life that lasted like maybe two years.
And they're living off that for the rest of their life. For the rest of their life, they're kind of remembering, oh, yeah, that time when you were crazy in love and you'd have sex all the time and it was hot and it's like yeah and i i had that and went can we just keep this going forever would that really be the worst thing right but you probably have both well it's something that it's something that you practice.
Really? Well, the way I look at it is, and I guess this is biological and theological at the same time, is that we can start with the way that you perceive children. So you don't see your own child the same way you see someone else's child.
And so then the question is, well, are you deluded about your own child or are you deluded about other people's children? And I would say, and I'm trying to think about this scientifically, is that you're kind of blind to other people's children. And there's a lot of reasons for that.
You see them, in a sense, you see them generically. Like,

most people show their best side to children, so I'm not trying to make a blanket condemnation

of people. But I think that when you have your own child, then that's a child that you actually see,

and so there's a depth of love there, and it's because your perceptions aren't inhibited. You actually see what's there.
And so you fall in love. And then you make this commitment to the child.
Now, I think the same thing happens to you when you fall in love with someone. Is that you actually see, you see into them much more deeply than you ever see into anyone else.
And that's something that you're given. It's like a grace.
Or you can think about it as the action of an instinct. I don't really care which of those particular pathways of interpretation you take, but it's something that's offered to you.
And I think that you can practice maintaining that. It's hard.
It takes work. It's an art.
That's always the one that gets me off the trail well people aren't trained to do this like it's hard yeah yeah you know so like one of the things one of the things that i do with my wife is i try to remember that i love her like i try to remember that and i don't mean i bring the idea i love her to mind that isn't what I mean. I try to remember what it was like to see her when I was deeply in love with her and then to have that happen again.

And you can practice that.

It works.

It's hard.

But it's like ridiculously worthwhile.

And I think my wife and I learned that more deeply in the last three or four years because I just about died and she just about died.

And it was like it was damn close in both situations.

And so, wife and I learned that more deeply in the last three or four years because I just about died and she just about died and it was like it was damn close in both situations and so then well then we didn't die it was like hmm it's very strange because she thought she was dead and I was sure that I was gone I thought there's no way I'm coming back from this so when you're going through like some where people are attacking you for something is she like right by you always like saying like look at what these assholes are saying you're so right and like making you feel because i know the feeling as you do yeah of like being in the glare because you said something or did something that they hate and they're screaming and And, you know, I always think of tennis matches. You ever watch a tennis match? Yeah.
And the player's girlfriend is always in the audience and they cut to her and she's just like bleeding along with him on every point. You know, like it's almost like she's in the match too is that what i would say when you go through i would say my wife is definitely in the match too but she's not exactly the bleeding along with you type well seriously my wife isn't my wife as far as women go she's not particularly agreeable she's fairly combative and so well i like that about her i like that really yeah i like that about her because she's she's a rough player but she's fundamentally on my side and so how does she stand beside me it's not so much exactly with empathy it's more it's more like it's more like it's more like strategic strategic play you know so if an attack comes and I do this with kids too, because we're quite tightly unified in that way.
It's like, we take it on as a war. It's like, okay, you're after us.
Right. I feel like it's stronger with the kids then.
And that's why maybe a great reason to have kids is because, you know, even Eric Trump is like, hey, dad. Yeah.
Well, that is definitely an advantage of having kids. There's no doubt about it.
But my wife is like, we're pretty allied. We're pretty, now, she's also quite, she's discriminating.
The reason that I wouldn't characterize her affiliation with me exactly as empathic is because she's quite judgmental. She's expecting me to do things the right way.
And if I don't do them, she's not happy about that. But that's actually helpful because in these situations where- When was the last time you needed to be righted? Oh God, all the time.
Really? Oh God, absolutely. Really? You need the woman to sit there and go, hey, you're really mark there well it's the sit you know what it's like the situations that you're in let's say politically tell me the last time she corrected something in you and you and you were like oh thank you for telling me that because i was about to be such a fucking asshole and then you I guess it's probably more subtle than that in some ways i mean so for example she's watching me in public all the time and the way that i'm interacting with people and we discuss that to make sure that i'm treating people properly when when i'm out in public in general when people come up to me or when we're in restaurants or anything like that.
Like what? If she wasn't there, you'd fucking give them the... No, but you know, like if people, I don't know, when you're met by people in public, what's your philosophy of conduct when people meet you in public? Be awesome.
Be awesome because performers will never stop. Maybe maybe at a certain level you would but i have never gotten that level and that's fine i love the level i'm on but i am insecure about like i do not want to alienate one single fan yeah like i mean i still have the insecurity from when i was 22 years old is that insecurity or is that? No, I think it is.
It's both. Okay.
I want to do it because more than anything to my audience, I always want to be a hero. When I do the show on Friday night, I want to be their hero.
When I do a stand-up show, I want to be their hero. And when I meet them in person, like I've had the experience of meeting someone who I liked from afar.
Yeah. And then they disappointed me.
Yeah. You never forget that.
I want to be the – you don't. That's right.
You never forget. And then you'll tell everyone too.
I want to be the opposite. I want to be the – wow, he really engaged.
You know, not for long. We're not – we mean – you don't know me like that.
Yeah, right. But like I don't ignore you either or I don't take for granted that yes that i think a certain way in this world and i speak a certain way and i have a certain type of audience apropos to your point before about how what have i lost yeah i have lost some audience i have the super woke left the building and again i don't miss them people who are indoctrinated into one way of thinking and never really hear anything that gets into that bubble.
I don't find that interesting or getting to reality. So I do have a somewhat of a different audience.
Anyway, so when I meet people who are across the board, you know, I mean, I still meet the old super liberal folks who love it. And I.
And now I meet like, yeah, more. But I always met certain conservatives always were respectful of my show.
They felt like this is a guy who is a liberal, but he is not afraid to criticize his own side. It just got more exponential because the left got crazier since about 2015 is when Jonathan Haidt says it began with the Gen Z.
Yeah, that seems about right. That's when trigger warnings and, you know, what happened was we'd switched generations and the people— Well, we had the social media technology and the cell phone come along.
Yes, yes. That was a big part of it.
Yeah, it enabled the psychopaths fundamentally. Yes.
I mean, look, Elon Musk has definitely changed. You can't tell me he hasn't changed.
Do I think he's evil? I don't. But I do think he's changed.
And it's because of what he calls the woke mind virus. He thinks he lost his son.
He talked to you about it, as I recall. Definitely.
Yes. Okay.
Yeah, and that's also something you don't forget. Well, you know, I can't endorse where he's gone.
I can't endorse voting for Trump in any possible way, and he's for Trump. And i think he did a great thing in taking over twitter

because and so you think you think that the the the moderate left is recoverable

you think the universities are recoverable no why not okay so how did how do you have to go in there

with the fight with the flamethrower there's a big difference i mentioned this on my show at the end

of it last week there is a big difference between Democratic politicians who generally are a sane crop. They're too timid, yes, about calling out their far left, but they are generally a sane crop.
They're not for and would not get on the page with legislatively, for example, defunding the police. They've been pretty useless on the trans butchery side of things.
Like I say, not standing up against that stuff. Exactly.
You're right. 8,000.
That's 8,000 double mastectomies of minors so far. Compared to the worst Republican politicians, it's not even close.
The Republican politicians are way worse. you could say and i I would agree with you if you did, that there are crazies on each side.
I would add to that, and in the Republican side, they have found a place for them. Unfortunately, it's in elective politics.
But the people, not just the politicians on the far left, they're the ones who are so obnoxious, the ones who control culture, the ones in the media, the ones on what used to be on Twitter. That's what I was saying about Elon.
He did a good thing. He drove the woke out of Twitter the way St.
Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. But then instead of creating what would have been like the internet version of what I think I'm doing, a place where you have a kind of a centrist view, where you have maybe, you know, generally central left, but not afraid to call out the left, but also realistic about how dangerous the right is.
But he didn't. He went full bore and just switched it all over to the super right.

So now we just have Twitter's mirror image.

Let me ask you about that.

And it should have been Twitter the middle place.

Well, some of this is a technical problem.

And what I mean by that is that these new social communication technologies

are landscapes that lack governance. And no one knows exactly how to do it right it's not like mark zuckerberg knows how to regulate facebook no i'm serious it's really okay now but there's some reasons for that too so the the anonymity that the social media platforms allow allows the psychopathic narcissist types that are a real danger to civilization it allows them free reign and they're amplified because they they what would you say they parasitize negative emotion and they're amplified and now it's it's the case that throughout history when the psychopathic minority which is about four percent of the population gets the upper hand that all hell breaks loose.
This happens all the time. And what I see happening in the social media world is the rise of exactly those sorts of people.
They'll say anything they can possibly imagine, regardless of political orientation, because they're just using that as a weapon to draw power and resources to themselves. And there's plenty of them.
And they have come out in staggering numbers on the far right in the aftermath of October 7th. And it's a seriously ugly thing to see.
But it's also, we're trying to solve that. So tell me what you think about this.
We tried to solve that with Peterson Academy. So we built a social media network into it.
Now there's a couple of differences between it and Twitter. And the first difference, and I really want to know what you think about this, is there's a price of entry.
You have to pay $40 a month. So here's a hypothesis to be part of Peterson Academy and to participate in the social media network.
$40 a month. Well, that's nothing.
I know, I know, I know. We have the most progressive university in the world.
High quality education for everyone. That's so Canadian.
Hmm, hmm, yeah, yeah. So, so, so...
$40. Well, so...
You can't get a Mai Tai for $40 in this town. Yeah, we think we can get people a bachelor's level at equivalent education for $2,000.
That's the plan. And I think we can do it.
We have the capital to do it now. capital you're teaching like the old school curriculum please say yes yes like what i learned yes i mean european history it's not evil just because it happened in europe right yeah okay we're teaching i mean it's going to be a classic liberal curriculum fundamentally that's not to say i, to some degree towards the conservative side.
Do I think that in my fabulous Cornell education, they gave short shrift to Asia and Africa? I do. I think I probably should know more about Asian and African history.
Yeah, but at least you know something. Well, I don't know- You've got to start somewhere.
I. I don't know much, but I'm sorry, but there is less that's relevant to the modern world.
Because again, the ideas that... You're a Eurocentric bigot.
I'm not a bigot. I know you're joking, but no.
I'm just saying, if the ideas that came through, as I mentioned before, Athens and Rome and Jerusalem and London and Paris and Philadelphia, if they had come through Dakar and, I don't know, Timbuktu, I would be, I'm sorry, but they didn't. So should I study these civilizations more? Yes.
But you then have to prove to me that you know now you've just lost

like another hundred thousand woke fans you know so they're already gone yeah they're already gone

brother yeah they're already gone and it's okay maybe they'll come back but uh you know i mean

it's very hard to reach the indoctrinated on either side i mean i saw you got in trouble

because you said kamala harris's uh fans she talks to them like like retarded children okay

Did you see the debate last night? I did. I mean, what could be more retarded than...
It was rough. Than saying the immigrants are eating the cats and the dogs.
I mean, come on, man. I mean, come on.
It's kind of asking for trouble when you position the one person, and again, people are binary in their thinking. But when you use that word about, which I agree.
So let me ask you a question about that. So I think Trump made a mistake last night in not making more of the the nature of his team so let me walk you through that and tell me what you think about it so you already admitted for example or agreed that the universities are in dire shape horrible okay okay okay so now the question is i call it the source of the problem yes the mouth of the river from which all the woke in nonsense flows yeah the mouth of the river is what i would say yes yes and i and i i agree with that sentiment i think it's true and we know perfectly well that the university faculties are tilted radically to the left that there's far fewer classic liberals than there were say 30 years ago and there's virtually no conservatives right no conservatives.
Right. So it's very tilted.
And the phrase ivory tower, you know, sometimes something becomes such a cliche, you don't hear it anymore. But that's perfect.
It's really what it is. The Ivy League ivory towers.
They're living in towers. They don't understand.
The towers of Babel, as it turns out. Really? Mm-hmm? Definitely.
Which is kind of the Eve story retold. You know, you cannot know what God is like.
Don't eat the apple. Don't try to climb up to me.
Yeah, that's right. It's a story of pride again.
All those themes recapitulate. I mean, I'm getting this from your book.
I mean, I knew knew it before but the way you get at that again I have the next one written too such a pleasure well thank you, I appreciate that there's so few things left for adults everything is geared it's that impulsive gratification that we were talking about earlier a society society that's tilted towards that. Well, you talked about immaturity, you know.
And that immediate, that requirement for immediate gratification is like the definition of immaturity. The problem is parents used to go see movies and now they give kids their money to go see the movies they want to see.
That's what happened in the movie industry. Right, right, you know i mean i'm not a parent i i probably shouldn't comment on it so the twitter issue so i think part of the problem you tell me what you think about this is that part of the problem with the social media networks is that they're free because no it's just that el is constantly, you know, just writing true about some insanity.
It's the thing that happened last night at the debate with the immigrants are eating the cats. And like the human mind, you know this better than me because this is your life's work, but it's just such an amazing place that you can be so brilliant as to be able to figure out electric cars and how to relaunch a rocket from Mars back to Earth.
But like the stupidest thing someone puts up on Twitter, he will retweet and say true. I know that the far right mob that emerged after October 7th,

I know for a fact that they're attempting to manipulate Musk and draw him into a web that amplifies their views.

Well, it's working.

I know that. I understand that.

But he should, like I said, he had the chance to take Twitter

and twist it away from the far lefties who had made it a ridiculous place.

My line about Twitter was always, anything I want to say on Twitter, I can't say on Twitter. That was the problem with Twitter.
Because the school moms were pointing their finger at you. Yes, I've noticed that.
And he completely switched it around. But he should have just gone halfway.
Okay, so let me ask you a question. So I have some friends who have been looking into the rise of the far-right anti-Semitic psychopathic types on Twitter and elsewhere.
And they've done very deep analysis, tracing the sources of funding as well. From the left.
The people who are doing this? From the left. No, the right-wingers.
The right-wing Jew haters.

Yeah, yeah.

Because there's ones on both sides.

Yeah, definitely.

Definitely.

Yeah, that's for sure.

There's plenty of them.

And which is worse?

It's like, I don't know.

It's like... I'm much more afraid of the left Jew haters.

Yeah, I think that's right at the moment.

I mean, the right ones were always there.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're more there now than they were, though, too. That's the tiki torch, Jews will not replace us crowd.
Yeah. They were always there.
That's a problem. We should keep an eye on it.
It's bad. It's real bad.
Yeah. But what's new is...
Globalize the Intifada? That sort of anti-Semitism? Hamas will save us. Hamas is coming.
I mean, just read their signs.

Hamas is coming.

Like, that's a good thing?

You know that women between the ages of 18 and 35 get almost all of their news from TikTok, eh?

Oh, I'm sure.

Yeah, yeah.

So that TikTok and TikTok, I think the stats we have is it's 60 to 1 Hamas versus Israel in terms of messaging.

Well, women between 18 and 35 get most of their news from TikTok, but also from what I tell them. Okay.
What is, what's the demography of your, of your fan group? Yeah, right. It's not that.
No, definitely not. No, it's, it's, can you imagine anyone 18 listening to this conversation?

I mean, they would have to be just, and there's always those 18-year-olds out there.

There's always that 1% of kids, no matter how bad the system gets, you can't stop them from being smart. You can't stop them from knowing shit.
Even if you send them to university, you mean. Exactly.
They're intellectually curious, and especially with the internet and everything else, that what gets on their radar, what sticks in their head is just enormous. And it's always impressive to me to meet somebody young like that who knows so many things.
But the vast majority of them, I could go on and on about the educational system, and I'm sure you could too.

But I mean, we've passed.

That's why we're trying to replace it.

Yes.

And I'm glad you are. And Barry Weiss, I'm sure you know this, started a university.
And I say the more the merrier. Yeah.
Because, I mean, obviously we can't just have one. Yeah.
And I think it'll be successful because, you know, success in any market is finding a niche that is not being exploited. Something where the market goes, we need that.
Or else you have to invent a need. You know, people did that.
Nobody thought they needed $5 coffee. Yeah.
And nobody thought they needed an iPhone. But people have always, I think, thought they, I want my kids to actually get a real education.
I mean, isn't that the success of Catholic schools in this country? People go to Catholic schools in greater numbers than ever who are not Catholic. Yeah.
Because it's one of the last places you can get a serious education. Careful, careful.
You're starting to sound like someone who's pro-religious again. I am not pro-religious.
I'm an atheist and I have tremendous bitterness against the Catholic who personally made me an unhappy child. What happened? What happened? I was raised Catholic is what happened.
Were there specific things? What happened was church and catechism and nuns who fucking pit you with a ruler and anxiety about I have to memorize a hundred questions. Like, where do I come from? God made me.
I still have, I saved it, the mimeograph sheet. I can still smell it.
Where I had to know a hundred questions. Like, where is God? God is everywhere.

I mean, some of them you could just guess.

But when you're seven, it's traumatizing.

Make a seven-year-old memorize a hundred questions about the fucking world.

And again, if- A lot of people who tilt towards atheism aren't doing it only for rush for reasons of rationality they're also

doing it because they were hurt by bad religious actors oh i'm completely open to admitting that yeah fuck them yeah and i would love to put them out of business but i also rationally believe it's the right thing to do i believe that future historians will say that humans actually exited their medieval period when theism died. We think we exited our medieval period with the advent of the scientific revolution and when science became a thing around 1500 or whenever, you know, Da Vinci and Copernicus.
Okay, I think they will say it's when we stopped, as a general thing, there would always be pockets of resistance, but generally stopped being theists. I think they will say that's when humanity entered their post-medieval period.
I throw the glove down, sir. Well, problem i have with that and and have had for a long time is that there's always going to be something that tries to rise up to occupy the highest possible place always because there's a drive towards unity socially and and psychologically and so but you're saying better religion than what replaces it? Well, no, not necessarily.
That's not a ridiculous theory. Because I've seen religion replaced by this kind of QAnon thing.
Yeah, right. QAnon is kind of a religion.
So is wokeism. So is wokeism, Absolutely.
And they're both very deleterious.

Yeah, right.

So, I mean, do I think QAnon, which is quasi-Christian nationalism, is worse than old school Christianity? Yeah, I do. Okay, so why? Why is it worse? QAnon is wrapped up with dumb ideas like, you you know if the guy you want to win the presidency doesn't win uh ignore it and install your guy anyway because they believe getting back to the other conversation about trumpism they believe that the other side is such an existential threat and again the other side gives them so much ammunition to believe this, that they think anything is justifiable.
In Vietnam, they used to say, we had to destroy the village to save it. This is like, if you destroy democracy to save America, you are destroying the village to save it.
See, you asked me earlier why I'm trying to, say, revitalize a corpse. And my answer to that is that, well, that's a very old idea, that idea.
And the reason for that is that... Which is something religion does.
It does that repeatedly. It does that repeatedly.
Lazarus. Right, right, right.
Well, it's a motif, right? The raising of of the dead and there's reasons for that and and that's one of them um i'm trying to separate the wheat from the chaff like i became convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt when i was 20 something early 20s 21 that evil existed and that raises the specter that good exists, at least as the opposite of whatever evil is. And so my religious pursuit, such as it is, and this is why I was interested in psychology as well, and biology for that matter, is because I wanted to contend with that particular problem.
And what I'm trying to do is to separate the wheat from the chaff, because I see that there is a drive towards unity in knowledge, and something will strive to take the highest possible place. And what you see with the postmodernists, for example, the postmodern Marxists, because they tend to be the same bunch, is that they dispense with God, but they substitute power.
And like of all the gods you could worship, power might be the worst. Yeah, power is another way of saying what I was saying before.
They substitute God for Mao, Stalin, Kim Jong-un. Exactly.
It is the same thing. Yeah.
And then there's an issue there. Hero Hito.
Well, so imagine you had to pick two dictators even. And one believed that he was God himself.
And the other believed that despite the fact that he had almost unlimited temporal power, there was something sovereign above him that he was beholden to. Which of the two would you pick? And there's a technical reason I'm actually asking that because thousands of years ago, this happened in Mesopotamia, the Mesopotamians realized that the sovereign had to be subordinate to some abstract set of principles.
He had to be the embodiment of something that was beyond him, or he wasn't valid as a sovereign. And it was a real shift in viewpoint because you could imagine a situation where it's North Korea.
What I say goes. And that means, and I'm saying that deeply, I'm saying whatever I say is right by definition, right? That's a rough situation.
Eleven holes in one. Yeah, exactly.
Do not question it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so as civilization progressed, there was this abstraction of the idea of sovereignty as a principle itself, and that the leader should be subordinate to that. And that seems to be one of the applications of religious thought that's extreme.
It's like rule of law, right? It's a similar idea. If you think there's a body of law, but there's a spirit that characterizes that body of law, right? Because it's coherent.
It rotates around the central axis. Well, the idea in the West is that if you're the king, if you're the president, you're subordinate to that body of law.
You're not sovereignty itself. You're subject to something that's beyond you.
Well, then the question becomes, well, you want that, obviously, because otherwise you're the guy. And then if you want that, it's like, well, what is that principle of ultimate sovereignty? And that's what I was trying to discover when I went through the biblical stories.
It's like, what's the principle of ultimate sovereignty that unites these stories? You said before you had a follow-up book? Yeah. What is it about? It's about Job and about the Gospels.
Oh, some more. Because I was going to say, if you want to keep on this thread, I mean, as a history major, I would love to see a book about all the same things that you're talking about.
But get more into the the influences from the surrounding civilizations. Plainly, in the beginning, it's a lot about Egypt.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, Abraham.
I did this in the first book I wrote in Maps of Meaning. Oh, okay.
I talked a lot about Egypt and Mesopotamia in particular. Yeah.
I mean, like Abraham, he winds up in Egypt, right? Right. Again, not to be shitting on religion how bad it is, but they're not really great about women.

And among the terrible things they think about women is that if you're barren, it's really the worst thing it can be.

I mean, a lot of the patriarchs, chicks were barren.

Abraham is with Sarah. She's barren.
So he fucks. He stays with her, though.
He stays with her, but he fucks the Egyptian maid. Hagar.
Hagar. Jacob, I mean, he does have Joseph with the wife, but then he gets with Leah because she's the maid.
Where was I going with this? Oh, you were talking about, what would you say, the lack of respect accorded to women in the patriarchal stories. Sarah is a pretty good character.
Sarah is a pretty good character. She has her own adventure.
You know, and one of the things you have to say about Genesis, the story of Genesis, that I really think is quite miraculous, is that there's an insistence right from the beginning that both men and women are made in the image of God. And that's a hell of a thing for a document that's 5,000 years old.
That's a radical thing to say. She's made out of his rib.
What are you talking about? Yeah, but that makes her an equal. She's taken from his side.
She's not taken from his head. She's not taken from his an equal she's taken from his side she's not taken from his head she's not taken from his feet she's taken from his side why does that mean anything what did what the side why well it's neither up nor down it's in the middle and we're and they're and they're they're both of the same there's a variety of meanings they're both of the same essence and there's more to it

than that too because but she's from him yeah but i mean she doesn't exist before him women are also

cultural creatures right so one of the common characterizations of culture is patriarchal culture

let's say and women are creatures of patriarchal culture they're derived from they're derived from

adam in that manner and that's part of the deep structural meaning of that story because what does that mean to be a patriarchal creature cultural creature you're socialized you're socialized you're not merely a biological entity but should you be should be should be socialized i mean again not to uh pile on with the religion like the Baptists, a number of denominations in this country follow quite seriously the writings in the New Testament. Women should be subservient to the husband.
Things that are very out of step with, I mean, even Harrison Butker, I don't think, is on the page with all of this. But really out of step with where we are today.
I mean, a woman should gracefully submit, I think, are words in the New Testament. I mean, gracefully submit.
Okay, let me throw two sticks in the spokes just for the sake of argument. All right, so this will probably get me in trouble, so we might as well do it.
So women are hypergamous. So for maximum sexual arousal, they want men.
Excuse me, Professor Egghead, but could you explain that term for us regular New Jersey denizens who only went seven semesters? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the average age gap between men and women worldwide for maximal attraction is four years.
The men are older. Completely blown past the limit here.
Okay. Okay.
Women like men of higher status than they are. Okay.
So the thing that predicts male sexual success best is his comparative status. Yeah.
It's an immense predictor, and it's not the same with regard to women. So what that means, what it appears to mean, is that I'm not making a case for women's female subservience, by the way, but what it does appear to mean that for women to find a man sexually attractive, he has to be of higher status than she is.
So does that imply about their relationship does that mean that that's a relationship of equality like i don't think it does yes you are going to get in trouble for the biggest people who are who you know are guys work for women the women yeah yeah yeah or they're married to someone who makes more money than them are you saying that that's's going to fuck up their sex life? It does. The evidence for that's clear.
And it increases the divorce rate by law. There's actual evidence for that? What is the evidence? Well, one of the predictors of domestic violence is disproportionate earnings of the wife in comparison to the husband.
You're saying that when the woman makes more money, the guy loses it and clocks her? Yeah. That is exactly what I'm saying.
Oh, my God. Yeah.
And we have evidence? Or maybe she provokes him because she's contemptuous. Oh, Lord.
Well, either of those are going to get us in trouble. It's worse than I thought.
I'm so glad I never got married and have a good salary. But, you know, I mean, this kind of stuff.
And then, well, we could add another twist to this, too, with regard to our treatment of women in the West. So, you know that half of women now at the age of 30 have no children.
Half. And half of them will never have a child.
And 90% of them will regret it. So that's involuntary childlessness.
How do we know they'll regret it? Because there's enough data now to show what happens. At what age do they regret it? Well, they start to regret it generally around 30.
30? Well, because so by the time you're 30, one couple in three has trouble conceiving. And that's defined as trying for a year with no success.
So already at 30. Well, let's get that couple help.
No, I'm kidding. There's lots of technologies to help, but they're not that helpful and they're very expensive.
No. I mean, I find it always very amusing that the people who desperately want to have a kid very often can't.
And the people who are desperately trying not to. 15-year-olds in the back of a car.
Yeah, yeah, no kidding. It's like, yeah.
Arbitrary fate. I mean, I think we're on different sides of the population debate.
I mean, I've always been on the page, let's have less people on Earth. And I think you're on the side of, let's have more babies.
I never understand that because, I mean, the resources of Earth are finite. I don't think so.
How could they not be? Because we get better and better at making more from less. So we're depending on actually figuring that out before there's more? Yes, that's right.
Well, it's always been that way with people. That is what we do.
That's our niche in a way. We're very good at that.
We're very good at it. And we've been spectacularly successful at that since the 1960s.
Eight billion people on Earth. We're going to peak at nine, by the way.
What do you think we could support? Unlimited? I mean, space-wise, we could have a lot more, of course. Most of the land is empty.
There's no obvious limits. The limit is energy.
And there's no obvious limit to energy. And then you would have waste? You can bury waste pretty effectively.
We're not going to run out going to run out of holes bury waste well what kind of waste are you talking about all kinds pollution what's ruining people people are pretty good at making landfills what's ruining the ocean um overfishing mostly overfishing yeah yeah well that's to feed people who you say there will be more of how could there be be enough fish? Well, we could stop managing the resource stupidly. If there's not now enough fish, how could there be...
There's no real limit to agricultural production. It's energy is the limit.
But fish? Well, we mismanaged... Look, we mismanaged the oceanic resources terribly.
We just give up on fish. Well, we probably destroyed 95% of the oceanic resources already.
Now, they could probably already. But you say that in such a cavalier way.
No, it's terrible. It's terrible.
It's a terrible thing. And like I did a deep dive into- The world can't survive without the ocean.
Yeah, it's a terrible thing. It really is.
I think the worst thing we've done ecologically is to decimate the fisheries. It's stupid too, because it was unnecessary.
It was unnecessary. Like there's some evidence that already by the dawn of the 20th century, that 95% of the oceanic resources were gone and that we've depleted another 95% since then.
I mean, the accounts of how much fish there was in the ocean before, you know, when the Europeans first came to North America, they're just, it's just stunning. Like schools of cod that were hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles long with the average fish being something approximating three feet length and so thick that you could lower, well, buckets into the water and lift them up.
And sea turtles that were so plentiful around the Caribbean islands that you could hear them dozens of miles away. Like there was so much plentitude that it was, it was, it's, you just can't believe it when you read it.
Yeah, like the buffalo. Well, at Cape Ann in Boston, 300 years ago, when there was a nor'easter, the beach, Crane Beach, seven miles long, would be covered across its entire length with shit with shellfish three feet deep and now if you go after a nor'easter there's like i because i've walked that beach like you know three starfish and a and a and a you know where there's no cod cape con yeah there's no cod in canada either yeah yeah.
No, I mean. But I don't think there is a limit on, there's no obvious limit on human population sustainability except energy.
You know who we need is Jesus. Because didn't he create like fish out of nothing? Yeah.
Isn't that one of his miracles? It is. And that's reported by St.
Paul and his wife, Mrs. Paul, who was into fish.
But, yeah, we need a modern day. Well, you know, what I find interesting about that is— Well, the meaning of that story in part is that if we treated each other properly, there'd be more than enough to go around.
Yeah. Yeah.
Right. No, the Jesus story is a beautiful philosophy.
I mean, if you take the religion out of it, which Thomas Jefferson tried to do, he wrote a Bible and took out all the miracles and the bells and the whistles. But, I mean, that was a revolutionary idea.
I'm not sure if it's a great idea because of what I was bringing up before about losing the desire to fix things on earth. But the idea that it gets good in the, in the afterlife, that was pretty new.
I mean, that's not really. It's also something like, it's a strange thing, Bill, because part of that is an extension of the idea of delay of gratification, which is a necessary, it's a necessary, what would you say? It's a necessary

advancement for civilization. It's like defer your reward.
That's the definition of maturity. Well, the limit to reward deferral is an afterlife.
And so I think at least in part psychologically that the notion of an afterlife, the notion of something like a deferred eternal reward is the logical consequence of deferred gratification.

So, now, your criticism... afterlife, the notion of something like a deferred eternal reward is the logical consequence of

deferred gratification. So now your criticism is still right.
I mean, if you defer everything to the afterlife and you see this with say more pathological forms of Islamic fundamentalism, it's like, well, nothing on earth matters at all because everything accrues to you in the afterlife. Like, obviously, that idea can be pathologized.

And I would say there might also even be a rule, like it might be, I don't know if this is true, but it might be that the best ideas are the ones that can be used by the most evil people for the worst possible purposes. Yeah.
You know, and that's part of that religious hypocrisy problem. Well, you one of those evil people i hope that whole thing you said about the ocean Ontario College of Psychologists would beg to differ that whatever you said about the oceans you know i hope they show that in left-wing media because like i did a whole series on oceanic mismanagement yeah but they but they don't want to watch it they don't want to talk about that because it just doesn't get clicks.

Anyway, I could talk to you all night, but I'm going to let you back.

Hey, thanks, Bill.

It's always a pleasure talking to you.

Such a pleasure.

Yeah, yeah.

And I appreciate the comments on my book, too.

And the blur.

Thank you for that.

That was the first book I've ever read completely on a tablet. I'm an old school book.
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