#2308 - Jordan Peterson

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan experience.
Showing by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. No, no, I'm too vain.
That's exactly right. I look back and I think, oh, those headphones are pushing up my hair.
Isn't that sad? That's so sad. You shave your head.
That's sad. You never look back if you do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's the greatest thing in the world.
It's freedom. I have a big dent here from when a meteorite landed on me when I was a kid.
A meteorite. Oh, funny story.
I know. I've got plenty of cuts on my head.
I got them all over the place. Well, you're looking pretty unscarred.
Oh, the back of my head, I have one when I was a little kid. It's pretty big big that uh these one of these cranes that lifts up sewer pipes those big concrete pipes bang me off the back of the head yeah oh yeah that's not good great out went to the hospital were you a different person before that experience i don't know i don't need to have talked to my mom i was always a little wild autobiographical significance oh there's definitely a lot of head trauma.
Were you knocked out? No, no. I stayed conscious, but I got close.
That's the big predictor. I got gray.
Everything, I grayed out that I came back to. I didn't completely go unconscious.
So Jamie went golfing this weekend with O.J. Simpson's golf clubs.
Uh-oh. Not with O.J.
He's not here. You should be exercised.
That would be the next step. Jamie bought OJ Simpson's golf clubs uh-oh not with oj he's not here exercise that would be the next jamie bought oj simpsons golf clubs after this is like a childhood dream no or just for sale i saw them for sale i said why not they came in i wanted some big grips yeah a couple of my friends what did uh shane get shane got a bunch of stuff right i talked him into buying some stuff yeah he got like scarves and ties and- Ties.
He bought a bunch of ties. I think scarves too.
Okay. He bought a trophy.
A trophy? And a Bill Clinton signed photo. And he spent thousands of dollars.
What was this? Was this some sort of O.J. Simpson auction? Yeah, it was like an estate sale, yeah.
Yeah. I see.
You know, he's dead now, so you can get his stuff. Right, for nothing.
Pennies on the dollar. I mean, only people like Jamie and Shane are dumb enough to buy i was like it's like for a goof it's one of those things like you're either getting it for a goof or you're a very dark person yeah right yeah right i wouldn't want to own it even for a goof like if i found a oj played pool i wouldn't want his clue his cue there was there cues no there wasn't there was a weird notebook that robert kardashian had to him blood splattered I was like well that might be interesting it's taking a vicious turn Joe already yeah that's a dark story it is yeah and you only know the surface of it well it's dark in both ways it's also dark implanted evidence you know there was blood at the scene of the crime that had preservative in it allegedly supposedly according to Robert Kardashian and according to I believe the forensic scientists when they analyzed it it matched OJ's blood but they had to draw blood from OJ in order to determine whether or not it was his blood that was at the scene of the crime and some of the blood found at the scene of the crime had that preservative in it that they use.
They were sloppy in the 90s, you know. Compared to now.
Well, there was no DNA evidence back then. You know, people were, cops were, there's always going to be a certain percentage of cops that just want to convict somebody regardless of the evidence.
And if they're, you know, in their mind, they believe someone's guilty, they'll do whatever they can, including planting evidence, I guess.

At least that's allegedly.

Not that I don't think he did it.

I definitely think he did it.

But I also think the cops planted evidence, which is probably at least partially why he got off.

You know, I think the big reason why he got off was Rodney King, right? Right. Yeah.
Right. Yeah.
Have you gone into the whole George Floyd story at all? Have you ever like looked at like what they actually did to him for, it's a combination of things. Like what the cop did was horrible, but also he was dying, you know, like most people probably like if they did that to you you probably would have lived you know that guy had an understanding of his fucked up but that cop did lean on his neck which is always interesting to see people try to minimize that you know I'm always like you gotta be able to just say what it is a that situation can be ugly in a multitude of ways.
Yes. Right.
That's when things get well. That's when it's very difficult to pick your moral pathway forward.
All your choices are not good. Yes.
Right. Which is oftentimes the case when it comes to conflicts, right? Yes.
Conflicts are very complicated and people want it to be binary. They want there to be a good guy and a bad guy.
And that's oftentimes not really the case. Well, it's hard to organize yourself for combat unless you are quite convinced that you're the good guy.
So there's a default to that dichotomy that's a necessary part of, well, even standing your own ground, right? Because otherwise you get demoralized.

And so I suppose people, well, when they're threatened, they default to a simple narrative. And because that's, you can't defend yourself in some ways.
It's very hard to defend yourself, especially physically or militarily, without a pretty cut and dried narrative. Well, especially like military operatives.
You know, you have to have a very, your life and the people that you're with, their life depends on you not having any confusion about whether or not it's morally correct to be doing what you're doing. That's why they like to break it down to kill bad dudes, you know, kill bad dudes.
Right. Real simple.
Let's go. They tell us what to do.
We do it. Which is why you want to stay alive.
You want your teammates stay alive. That stay alive that's what you have to do yeah well you never know when doubt will cause a fraction of a second difference in reaction time oh yeah yeah yeah that's always the thing with physical altercations with people too you know oftentimes people get sucked into these things where they're not sure whether to act or not act and that's when they Right.
You know. Right.
That's probably true in life. You don't want to oversimplify things too.
But once you've made a decision, well, that's when it's necessary to put doubts behind you because otherwise you just act in half measures. Yeah.
And oftentimes you have to have done the wrong thing before, like failed to act or hesitated to act and it cost you. And then you have to learn that lesson.
It's very difficult to know that without experiencing mistakes. You have to have failed to act and then realize, oh, I should have done something there.
Yeah. Well, I think that's partly too.
One of the things that I often faced in my clinical practice and with the students that I mentored was this confusion about acting I don't know what to do so what should I do well nothing I'll wait around until I figure out what to do it's like no you should put together a bad plan and you should implement it because even if you fail in the implementation you you'll gather information. Yes.
And then you can rectify the plan. And so staying in that malaise until you know what to do makes you get older and more miserable and you gather no information along the way.
A bad plan is a good idea. The best, you know, any plan is better than none.
That's a good rule of thumb. And a bad plan, a bad plan can be incrementally improved with experience.
Right. He who hesitates is lost.
Yeah. Yeah, that's really difficult for young people.
I think more so today than ever at any time in history because the distractions are so many and they're so engrossing. You know, if you get out of high school, you don't know what to do, and then you start playing video games and you're on social media, a day can slip by like that.
A day becomes a week, becomes a month, becomes a year. And before you know it, you're 30.
And you haven't done shit. And that's really common.
That's really common today. And I don't think we can ignore those factors, the factors of just engrossing distractions.
Yeah, well, and the algorithms optimize for short-term attention. Mm-hmm.
So, you know, it's a weird thing, eh? Because you could imagine that you would want a machine that offers you what you want, right? Because you want ads that are targeted to you because you want to see a bunch of ads that aren't relevant to you now and then because maybe you'll learn something. And content, well, why not have a machine shovel the same sort of things that you are interested in at you? That's a kind of curation.
The problem comes, and we haven't figured this out at all technically, and probably not psychologically, the problem comes in time frame, right? Because there's a big difference between what you might be interested in if you were diligently striving towards a long-term goal that required conscientiousness, and what's going to attract your attention right now, this moment. And the thing about the algorithms is that they maximize for short-term attention.
And that's a... So basically, they're actually optimizing for hedonism.
Yeah. And then you might say, well, so what? Because you're getting what you want.
Well, the problem with short-term impulsive hedonism is it doesn't play out well over any reasonable time span. Yeah.
That's why you have to mature, which is painful and annoying,

but absolutely necessary and much better than the alternative.

The alternative is exactly what – that's Peter Pan, right?

Yeah. That 30-year-old, I still haven't grown up,

and I'm a little past my shelf life now too.

I think people are afraid of losing fun. They think that when you grow up, you lose fun, but it's silly.
It's not true. You can grow up and still have fun.
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You know, you just have to, you have to have discipline and prioritize your time. Well, that's why Christ says to people that they have to become as little children, not stay.
Right? You have to rediscover that. Rediscover the joy of it.
Kids are good for that too, aren't they? Because they teach you that again. You look at the world through eyes of memory by the time you're an adult.
So the world loses its freshness. That's part of the world loses its freshness because you see your memories instead of the world.
And then kids come along and you think, oh, oh, yeah, that's really actually quite interesting. And they're so compelled by everything because their perceptions are so fresh that they share that with you.

And that can help reawaken that spirit of childhood play, let's say.

I've been thinking a lot about play in the last year or so.

Well, I spent a lot of time trying to take apart the causes of truly pathological degeneration, right? On the sadistic side, on the criminal side, on the totalitarian side, very curious about tyranny. And it was very difficult for me to conceptualize the opposite of that as cleanly as I could characterize its presence.
Like what's the opposite of tyranny?

It's not freedom, by the way. It's certainly not anarchic freedom.
It's not hedonistic freedom.

Benevolence?

I think it's play.

Play.

I think it's play.

Right.

Yeah. Well, the developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, one of the things he pointed out

was that, so let's say play is the foundation of micro-community, right? When you're a little kid, you play a game with another kid. And then if that works well, you inhabit a little dyadic community.
You're both in it together. And then if it really works, you replicate that across time, and that gives you a friend.
But play is a a very interesting it's very interesting psychologically and psychobiologically because it has to be entered in voluntarily you can't force someone to play and it's also motivationally fragile so mammals have a play circuit and it can be disrupted by pretty much any other motivational or emotional circuit. So the circumstances have to be set up properly.
Like the walled garden, you know that idea? The walled garden is a place that play can take place, like eternally, so to speak. And because it has to be undertaken voluntarily, it's the opposite of tyranny.
And like my wife and I have really started to apply this in our marriage more consciously. You know, once I'd figured out this relationship, because I've been lecturing to people for a long time about how to conduct themselves in life so they don't become a tyrant or a handmaiden to the tyrants, right? A silent handmaiden to the tyrants, let's say.
And aiming at play. You know you know when we walked in here today one of the things we said was let's have some fun you know and i've been thinking this this morning too about what attitude i should take coming in to talk to you and there isn't a better attitude there isn't a better attitude than play and so and i think it is because it's the antithesis.
It's the antithesis of tyranny in particular. And then you were talking more about mature play.
And that's that good, you know, that also makes sense. This is the issue with the idea that adulthood isn't any fun.
It's like, well, do you want to play a simple game or do you want to play a really sophisticated game really well? Now, that's going to require some discipline and some training and some maturation, but the payoff is much higher. That's a good way to conceptualize marriage.
The highs are higher when you're successful. Well, and also the people who have the most sex now are religious married couples.
Really? Yeah, I know. Isn't that funny? Which religion? It's like, yeah, good question, Joe.
Good question. Well, I guess in the West, that would obviously be Christianity.
But it's an interesting case example of the sorts of things we're talking about, because you can imagine at the dawn of the sexual revolution, when birth control pill became prevalent that the last hypothesis anyone would have possibly generated was that the cascading consequences of that over 50 years would be well radical increase in pornography use because sex has been made less dangerous by the pill and that the people who are having the most sex would be really just married couples right but is that true? Because pornography essentially was very difficult to acquire before the birth control pill was invented. True, true.
You used to have to go somewhere to get the pornography. Isn't part of the excess use of pornography just because the access is so instantaneous now? Oh, definitely.
But you could imagine, too, that you might have hypothesized that if the birth control pill took the threat out of sex, that pornography would be less necessary. But that didn't seem to work out.
Right. So certainly the availability is...
We would never know, though, because the birth control was, when was it, 1960-something? That's really when it started to to to ramp up let's say it's so crazy because it completely changed the dynamic women could have sex for recreation with people that they didn't even know and not have any consequences in terms of like having to carry that person's child whereas that was always a giant fear if you're a woman in the back head, every time you have sex, you possibly could be taking care of a child for the next 18 plus years. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, every time.
Right. Right.
This thing, this is a consequential thing where with a guy, it's like you have this biological imperative to spread your seed, but you're not thinking about making babies, right? You're thinking about sexual activity. When a guy's having sex, he's not thinking, I can't wait to make a baby.
You're just thinking, boy, sex is going to be great. I'm excited.
Oh boy, that's fun. You're not thinking I'm making a kid because that would make you hesitant and nature is not interested in hesitation.
Nature's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's just make you dumb as fuck for about 20 minutes and focus on one goal.
So why did you get married? Well, I love my wife. She wanted to get married.
We had a child. It seemed like a good thing to do.
It's like at a certain point in time, making a baby is more of a commitment than getting married. You made a life, you know, like the commitment of getting married seemed.
Right, right. Of course.
But it's also. But why did you stay committed then before the marriage once you had a child? I just said you loved your wife.
I love her. It's a thing to do.
It's a Life in raising a child became everything It becomes it becomes a very different thing, right? I think I have a lot of friends who don't have kids And I don't I'm not the type of person that thinks everyone should have a kid You know, I know a lot of people with kids. They do say that I don't think everyone should have a kid I think you should do whatever you want.
I don't know how your brain works. I assume your brain works along similar lines with me, but there's a thing that happens when you do- It's a scary thought, Joel.
Well, similar lines. I think we all share similar lines.
There's an empathy that comes from having a child that's so different and an understanding that we are all babies that grew up. We all start off as these bundles of potential and genetics.
And then we're influenced by so many different things. There's so many different factors.
But I used to think of people as being grown up all the time. And then when I had kids, I was like, oh, we're all all just babies we're all just babies that have just been alive for a long time you know everyone started out as a baby and it just profoundly changed the way I interact with people the amount of compassion I have for people the amount of charity that I have for people the charitable way in which I think about them when they do something or they say something.
I give people the benefit of the doubt way more. Dave Chappelle said this to me once at the comedy store, and it was very profound.
He said, having children didn't just change the amount of love I have, it changed my capacity for love. And I was like, ooh, that's it.

You just nailed it.

You just nailed it.

You know, because there's private moments

when you talk to people about their children,

about having children and what that's like.

It's a very psychedelic experience.

That would be another reason why the family with children

is the foundation of the community, has to be the foundation of the community. I mean, it's kind of obvious from a biological perspective, let's say.
No children, no community. But there's no reason to assume that you wouldn't get radically better at something with necessity and practice.
And if you're practicing loving your infant and your child, well, why wouldn't that generalize? Why would that capacity develop? It's not like a practice. It's like an overwhelming desire that comes about.
Like the love you have for your child is like it's not like anything else. It's very different.
It's very – my friend Jim Brewer said this once. He said, when I had a child, that's when I really understood murder, really understood, like my capacity to defend my child is like I never understood.
Like, how could somebody kill somebody before? He was like, oh, now I get it. Now I get it.
And, you know, that's real, too. And that's also tribal.
Right. So it's not just your child.
It's the child of everyone around you in your tribe. And then you know, that's real too.
And that's also tribal, right? So it's not just your child.

It's the child of everyone around you in your tribe.

And then you think that you are being invaded by an oncoming tribe.

And genetics and history dictates you have to be insanely ruthless to fight off that tribe.

There's no other way for survival, which is really wild, right?

Because those people have that same feeling

towards their children.

It's like that sting line,

if the Russians love their children too.

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So that love that you talk about with regard to your wife,

you know, I asked you a little bit about that.

It's like I've talked to people who have,

they can't understand how someone could be with the same woman

Thank you. I asked you a little bit about that.
It's like I've talked to people who have, they can't understand how someone could be with the same woman indefinitely, let's say. These are people who usually haven't been able to establish that within their own life.
And, of course, the price you pay, assuming it's a price, for going all others is that, well, that's exactly it it's a major sacrifice and so what do you think what role do you think that love plays like how do you conceptualize the relationship between that love that you described and that willingness to stay in a permanent relationship and that and the willingness also to not pursue any other women. How do you understand? How does that make itself manifest in your life? I mean, I presume that you had opportunities of all sorts.
I presume you do as well. In principle, I suppose.
They don't seem to come to me in a sense. You're a hot professor type character.
Back in the day, guys like you would be banging their grad students. Not guys like you, but guys in your position.
Yeah, yeah. Well, there were guys.
Wasn't that always a thing? Yes. This is a fascinating aspect of academia.
I seem to shut that off pretty much at the beginning. Well, they seem to have completely stopped that.
Like if you go back to Feynman and Oppenheimer and famous, famous scientists were notoriously playboys, which is really interesting because it's like these wild, innovative people were essentially intellectual rock stars. Right.
And then somehow or another that just got stopped. Like if you were a professor in the 1960s, like the girls would be wooing the professor.
They would be excited. These 22 year old graduate students would be so excited to be talking to this like incredibly famous intellectual.
and they all you know were ladies men like Feynman was like famous for chasing skirts. That was like part of the thing.
He does a lot of math and chases skirts. You know? That is a giant distraction to people that are trying to get things done in life.
And it's also a distraction from your own personal development, I think. I think you could be with the wrong person and want to be with other people, and that makes sense.
But really what that is is you should not be with that person anymore, which is unfortunately the case. Like there's a lot of guys who wind up with really hot women who are out of their fucking mind and a lot of women who wind up with really hot men who are not what they thought they were going to be you know and if you find yourself in this situation where you're this with this pathological person and you're trying to make it work and you realize at a certain point in time like i'm not going to make it work like this is you have to be able to just like jump ship that's why people are hesitant to get married that's what really dangerous about marriage.
It's not like being with one person you really love being with. Like, I really love being with my wife.
She's fun. Like we go, we have date nights all the time.
We have a lot of fun. You know, we really do.
It's enjoyable. But that's not always the case.
Why did you decide to set up date nights? How did you go about that? I mean I know that's personal but and I don't want all the gory details let's say. No it's really simple.
We just enjoy hanging out together. We have a lot of laughs and so we just said like it's kind of important because I'm so fucking busy that we schedule time that's just unavoidable.
Like this is what we're doing. We're gonna do this and then we do it.
I do that with Tammy too Tammy too. We've done that for like 30 years.
I think most, most married couples will tell you that that's important. Most married couples will tell you that that's, that's kind of the secret.
And it's the secret is also the best thing as well as being the secret. Yeah.
It's fun. It's fun.
Like if the person that you're with is fun, that's the real problem is that sometimes people just, they pick people that are hot. That's it.
You know, hot and willing and nice enough, nice enough to be around. Then you deal with all the other crazy nonsense and you're, you're setting yourself up.
I've had many friends ruin their fucking lives. And then they go through divorces.
And you've said this best that one of the things that women are very good at is reputation destruction. I've seen that happen.
So imagine you are legally entangled with someone who at one point in time you loved intimately. And now that person is trying to destroy every aspect of your life.
And you have to pay for their lawyers. So you have to pay for the general of the army that's trying to destroy your kingdom.
And I've seen this happen to many of my friends. And that is why people are afraid of marriage.
That's why people are afraid of commitment. Because the disastrous implications of like what can happen

if it goes sideways like what can happen if you wind up hating each other and what can happen if you just lie to yourself and you trick you like what some of the hesitant hesitation that i had um for getting married is most of my friends that got married when i was young all went through horrible divorces. When I was on news radio, Dave Foley, Stephen Root, and Phil Hartman were all going through it, all going through it in different levels of psychosis.
Obviously, Phil Hartman's being the worst because his wife shot him when he was leaving her, by the way. He decided to leave her, and he tried to leave her a few times and she shot him in his sleep and then she shot herself is a horrible horrible story but steven root went through it and they you know they'd confide me i'd be like oh jesus christ the amount of money these women were trying to get from them when they knew that they couldn't afford this so one of the dirty tricks that will will happen with divorce lawyers, with people that are on sitcoms, is when you get on a sitcom, if you're an actor, and you get on a sitcom, it is the most stable job, the greatest job in show business for a lot of them.
Because you're going to get a steady check. You're going to do 24, maybe 26 episodes a year.
You're making more money than you've ever made in your whole life. But then you get divorced.
So what happens is it gets set up where your ex-wife wants a percentage of what you're making at this very unrealistic level where you're never going to achieve this again. And for Dave Foley, it was so bad that at one point in time, I don't believe he was allowed to go back to Canada.
I don't know if that's changed, but the judge literally told him, when he told the judge, like, I don't have that kind of money anymore. I don't have the potential for earning.
I was on a hit sitcom, not even a hit sitcom, but I was on a sitcom on NBC, paid a lot of money. And that was the only time I made that kind of money.
The judge said to him, your obligation to pay has no relation to your ability to pay. That's Canadian judges for you.
Those are words you never, those are words you never want to hear even once in your life. I love him.
So I was going through this pain, not like he was, but just like, oh, my God.

Oh, my God. So there's three people that I was very close to.

And then most of the other people that I knew, you know, I knew so many people.

Fortunately, my mother and my stepfather have a great relationship and they have for a long time.

So I had that modeled.

Like, they were always very close.

And they didn't fight, which is really nice.

It was really nice to have that as a model, you know?

Like, where I realized, okay, everybody's not at each other's throats all the time.

And some people actually do enjoy spending time together.

You know, Tammy and I, on the tour, she started to introduce me two years ago and to talk about some of the things we're doing in the family, some of our family business, talk about Peterson Academy, talk about essay. And so she'd go out on the stage.
Was that the first time she had ever gone on stage in front of you do enormous crowds? Yeah, well, so first of all, she did that. And then we replaced the business discussion because we were just doing an update about the family, you know, and so she'd do that.
We replaced that with ads and then she started to talk. She talked about the rules, say, in 12 Rules for Life or some of the religious things I've been dealing with lately.
And'd relate that to something in her own life and then she does the Q&A at the end of the lecture and and part of that was just she was along with me and part of that was Michaela was introducing me for a while and then had to go back to her work and so we slotted Tammy in because it seemed like a good business decision but one of the things we figured out very quickly that was really a shock to us was that people really liked, especially the Q&As, because what people will offer their questions electronically on this platform called Slido, which is a very good platform for such things. And then Tammy would, they could upvote the questions, and then Tammy would sort them and ask me questions kind of from the top down

that were thematically relevant to the lecture that I had given.

But we found very quickly that people really liked that

because they hadn't seen a couple engage in civilized discussion ever.

Seriously.

Yeah, there's a lot of that out there.

It was really shocking, Joe.

Like, you know, I was shocked when I first started touring

Thank you. in civilized discussion ever.
Seriously. Yeah, there's a lot of that out there.
It was really shocking, Joe. Like, you know, I was shocked when I first started touring by how demoralized people were.
Like that really, that was really striking and painful to see that on such a mass scale. And then also to see how little encouragement it took to have a really major effect.
I mean, there's a positive aspect to that too, but there's also a tragic aspect. It's like, you mean you just need to have some encouragement and that was enough and you never got that, like even once? That's rough when you see that in thousands of people.
And it was the same thing. We found it was the same thing with regards to seeing a functional couple, at even that model because you know tammy asked me questions and she thinks about the questions and then sometimes she comments but not that much but she actually listens to the answers and she wants to hear the answer and so and that dynamic is being played out on stage and people found that very heartening and all that shows you well you said you know yourself and this is why i brought it up because you had the example from your from your stepfather and your mom yeah of this long-term relationship that worked i mean how the hell do you orient yourself if you right you haven't seen that anywhere right you and then you're you consider relationships just like all the bad ones and like you're going to be burdened and locked into that.
Did you ever see that video where Alec Baldwin and his wife are on the camp on the red carpet and they're being interviewed and they're asking them questions and the wife starts talking and Alex chimes in about something. And she said, you're not talking.
I'm'm talking when I'm talking, you're not talking on camera. And you watch this.
You're like, yo, that's what everyone's scared of. Right.
That's what I definitely want to talk about like tyranny, the tyranny of being trapped in a relationship like that is like, and sometimes one person is so overbearing that the other person just sort of submits to it right and then you're just like I don't even want to I don't want to fight I don't want to deal with this I don't want to deal with this and so then you're just trapped and this person's insulting you and humiliating you publicly that was the case with Phil Hartman I got to see that we would uh all go like we went to a party once and I remember she was talking about ex-boyfriends and she loves pickup trucks because her ex-boyfriends had pickup trucks and they would climb into the back of these pickup trucks. And I was like, what the fuck? But she was doing it on purpose to like make him squirm and make him uncomfortable.
And she would say things like talk about how he's old. Oh, he he doesn't you know he doesn't like to do anything it was just public humiliation in front of friends where you're in this like arena where you he can't say anything he can't just go what the fuck are you talking about like why are you talking to me like that like why are we doing this he can't do that because he's public and he's out with us maybe Maybe he should do it anyways.
Probably should do it anyways. Yeah, probably.
But we're all out. And, you know, Phil was all about, like, appearances, health and stuff.
Right, right, right. One of the things that he was afraid of with getting married was that he was just starting to break into films.
And a lot of the films that he was doing were very, like, family-friendly films. And it helped that he was a family man.
You know, if he was— so he had he had an act he had to sustain too he had an image right and this was critical in hollywood like they had ideas of who you were okay you're a family man okay good good good and you're the so if you have this radical change in your life where you no longer you're a family man and if you want to be honest about it and you want to say, I was in a toxic relationship and some of it was me and some of it was her and this is what happened, like, whoa. Now you're opening up the world to this big can of worms.
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That's goldbelly.com, code ROGAN for free shipping and 20% off your first order. first order yeah well it's generally better not to have your your fights in public and it's certainly better you know i've been i've been thinking about this commandment to honor your mother and father and i've been thinking about what that means i read this book called angelus ashes by frank McCourt.
And Frank had a really alcoholic father, like an Irish alcoholic father back in the 40s. Oh yeah.
He drank every cent the family had and they lived in terrible poverty. And his sister died and like it was rough.
But he said his father was often sober in the morning, and he established a relationship with, like, good morning sober father and kind of put alcoholic, drunken nighttime father in a different bin. And he could get the benefit of having a father in consequence of that.
And that honoring, that's also something that you want to do within a marriage, right? Because your wife is your friend and your lover, but she's also your wife and you're her husband. And that means that a part of keeping that marriage working is honor.
And part of the honor is that you don't do that sort of thing in public. Right.
You don't humiliate each other. You don't fight in public.
Well, that's also in some ways independent. In a way, it's independent of who your wife or husband is.
It's like, you know, you could imagine two people fighting in public and one of them or both of them really deserving to have that fight as people. But then to keep the marriage intact, you have to remember, well, this is my wife.
She's not just my friend. She's not just someone I know.
She's my wife. And we shouldn't be doing primate dominance hierarchy

maneuvering in public. We shouldn't be competing for power because that's going to destroy the

marriage. So that's part of that honoring, I think, is to remember the role and to keep it

well, sacred is really right, sacrosanct. Here's another one.
Don't ever insult each other even though you want to. You want to be mean sometimes.
People get mean to you you want to be mean back. I don't do that with my friends so I don't do that with anyone else.
I don't want to do that. That's why I don't do it online.
I don't get involved in these like hissy pissy fits online, particularly on Twitter. I just don't think it's- The prime place for such things.
That's all it is. First of all, again, as someone who looks at everyone like a child or like a baby, I don't- I'm not angry that people do that.
I understand the appeal of it. If I was 15 and Twitter was around, I would be tweeting at every fucking celebrity saying, you're a loser, jump in front of a bus.
I would say things just to try to get a reaction out of them. I think a lot of kids do.
I think a lot of people don't feel like they have a voice. And one way to be heard is is to be insulting and one way to hurt is to be negative.
If you look at the majority of discourse on social media in regards to hot button issues, it's disrespectful. It's contentious.
It's shitty and insulting. And I've decided like over time in my life to not do that.
I don't want to do that. I'm not interested.
I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in that kind of conflict.

Like, I see real conflict all the time as an MMA commentator.

You know, I see the most violent legal conflict other than war all the time.

That's conflict. That's like real conflict and resolution and, you know, purposeful, agreed upon conflict.
Like regular, like back and forth and salt. Wouldn't it be better to figure out what you agree and disagree on and why and and talk like why can't we all figure out how to do that that should be a discipline you learn at an early age most of the issues that people have if the person comes at you insulting and aggressive either that person is ignorant or they're playing a game okay and the game is to get your emotions up, to get you reactive and to be reacting to them instead of acting.
The game is like if someone's hyper aggressive in a fight, the game is to put you on the defensive so that they don't like the best defense is a good offense. You learn that early on in fighting.
So you learn that you can be very offensive and then the person never has a chance to get their game going. That's the case with conversations too.
So there's a gamesmanship to this kind of communication where it's not just communicating. It's communicating, but it's essentially intellectual one-upsmanship and sparring.
You're sparring. You're scoring points.
You're trying to dunk on each other. I get that.
I've done that before. I've engaged in it.
It's never satisfying. It always feels gross.
Even if you win, it's gross. Like I said this before, even publicly things that I felt like I had to do, like the Carlos a conflict that I had way back in 2007 where accused him of stealing material and it became this viral video and then a bunch of other comedians jumped in and we all agree there was a real problem it was a real problem because he was very famous and he was being protected by these agencies who were profiting off of him being famous they didn't want that train train to stop.
I still, to this day, wonder if I would ever do that again because the negativity that came my way from people that were fans of his, it's so overwhelming if you're paying attention to it. It's like, what did I open up? Even though I knew it was necessary.
And that is also why people are negative because they want to stop you from engaging in conflict that's going to hurt them. So they try to hurt you as much as possible.
So you're like hesitant to do it. I don't want to wade into those waters.
It's dangerous. Filled with sharks.
Well, you could imagine maybe – and I think this is worth delving into in some depth. You could imagine that there are various ways of attaining status, renown, reputation.
Status isn't exactly the right word because reputation is better because you can have a reputation that you deserve. And so people do work for reputation and all things considered, that's a good thing.
Earned reputation is the best. Earned reputation.
Earned reputation. Or someone's truly unique.
Jordan, that guy, that's a unique human being. And that's a real reputation.
Right, right. That's what people want.
Right, right. And it's also, there isn't anything more valuable that you can have than that.
Not even close. This is why, by the way, this is very cool.

It's a bit of an aside, but it's worth bringing up. In the Gospels, Christ tells people to store up treasure in heaven where it doesn't rust, where the thieves can't steal it.
That's reputational treasure. Right? So the idea is that if you conduct yourself impeccably, you'll develop a storehouse of reputation that will withstand all catastrophe.
There's no place you can put your wealth that's more effective than that. It's the least violatable place.
And that's right. It's right.
Right. And so, but the problem is, and this is a really tricky

problem and you're touching on it, is that the reputation game can be gamed. Okay.
So when your reputation rises, your serotonin levels rise and that makes you less sensitive to negative emotion and more sensitive to positive emotion. So that's a really good deal.
And what that also means is that there's a high psychological benefit to status increase, reputational increase, and a real cost to reputational decrease. So that's partly why people don't like losing face, for example, because their emotions dysregulate.
Okay. So now the best way to play that game is to establish a genuine reputation.

And the best way to do that, you've done this, by the way.

I figured out this year in my lectures that I'm always trying to answer a question on stage.

So that's a quest.

And I'm bringing the audience along on a quest.

And it's a real quest because I'm actually trying to figure something out.

And I do that in real time.

And that's a very different game.

That's a very different conversational game than the status battle game yeah right because I could come on here I don't know if it would work but I could come on here and I could try to show that I was smarter than Joe Rogan now I've watched you and that's a very difficult thing to pull off but hypothetically that could be my aim and I could play gotcha questions and I could lead you into places.

The problem is that wouldn't work because I'm willing to accept that you're smarter than me.

First of all, I talk to a lot of people that are smarter than me and I like it.

It's enjoyable.

I don't ever feel uncomfortable talking to people that are smarter than me.

I want to know some things that they can tell me on certain things.

I want to educate myself. I want to see how their mind works.
I want to be blown away. I don't want to compete with them intellectually.
There's times in my life where I would have fallen into that trap. I think it's a stupid trap, though.
Well, I think that's also what's made you popular and a force for good, is that you are on quest and that quest the consequence of that quest if undertaken properly is reputational enhancement and people who can't or won't do that they default to power games and the part of it and that's a very that's that's the default to power but it's worsened with social media because if. Absolutely.
Because if you meet someone and they're playing a power game with you, you can just decide not to have anything to do with them anymore. Or you can put a stop to it if you need to.
But on social media, you can't because they're distant from you. And they're often also anonymous.
And so they can play power games to enhance their reputational status falsely with no consequences. And the social media is rife with that.
And it's really a problem. I think that virtualization has enabled the psychopaths.
Without a doubt. Yeah, well.
Without a doubt. That's a terrible thing because the psychopathic types, they're always the death of everything.
I'm seeing this come up on the right now. So imagine this.
I've been working on a new theory of political psychopathology, and I like it quite a lot. Is this where the term the woke right comes in? Yeah.
Well, Lindsay is pointing at that, but he hasn't got the diagnosis exactly right. So it isn't woke.
That's not the issue. It's not exactly.
He's one level. I think what they're talking about is like similar types of behavior.
He is talking about that. Yeah, I know.
What is the point? Woke just lets you clarify in your head, oh, it's like that. Yeah, but the problem is.
It's like Antifa. Absolutely.
But the problem is, is that that argument is predicated on the claim that the ideas are the problem,

like the woke ideas, for example, on the right or the left.

But that's not the problem.

The problem is that 4% to 5% of the population, something like that,

is cluster B, that's the DSM-5 terms,

histrionic, narcissistic, antisocial, psychopathic,

and they have dark tetrad traits, they're Machiavellian,

There's a lot of people who are put themselves even on the forefront of that. But the ideas are completely irrelevant.
All they're doing is, they're the Pharisees. They're the modern version of the Pharisees.
They're the people who use God's name in vain, right? As they proclaim moral virtue, doesn't matter whether it's right or left or Christian or Jewish or Islam, they invade the idea space and then they use that, those ideas as false weapons to advance their narcissistic advantage yeah and so then you have the problem and the right's gonna face this more and more particularly because the left had to face it when they were in powers yes how do you identify the psychopathic parasites four percent of the population who are clothed in your clothing and waving your flags, but who are only in it for narcissistic benefit. You know, the people who studied the dark triad, these were people who originally studied psychopaths, and they moved into ordinary personality, so to speak, on the fringes.
They showed that the non-criminal psychopaths, so the fringe cases, are Machiavellian. They use their language to manipulate.
They're narcissistic. They want unearned reputation.
That's what a narcissist wants. And they're psychopathic, which makes them predators or parasites.
Okay, that's pretty bad, those three things. But they had to expand the nomenclature after a while because they found that they were also sadistic which implied that if you're machiavellian and narcissistic and psychopathic you develop a sufficiently bad view of your fellow man that their undeserved pain is a source of pleasure to you and that's that's what's being enabled online yes see because we've evolved real specific mechanisms to keep such things under control in face-to-face interaction lack of anonymity for example within a community psychopaths in the real world they wander they have to move from place to place because people will figure out who they are and they're held responsible they're particularly held responsible by men.
But online, they escape from that.

They escape from that protective.

They escape from that system of constraints, and they have free reign,

and they can find other people like them very rapidly,

and they can gang together.

And so this is like,

I can really see this starting to happen on the right.

Like I've been tracking psychopathic behavior on the right

for probably four years, something like that.

Thank you. I can really see this starting to happen on the right.
Like I've been tracking psychopathic behavior on the right for probably four years, something like that, especially on the anti-Semitic side, because that's really where it reared its head first. Why is that? There's nothing more annoying than a successful minority.
Right. Now, that's part of it.
I'm going to hear I must get myself in trouble right away too yeah for sure well this is a real subject yeah it's a yeah it's a real terrible subject it's interesting because if you don't criticize it enough you're compromised if you if you criticize you know it's like when it comes to anti-semitism like it's one of those things where you can't separate. It's a religion and it's also a race and it's also a government.
That's where things get weird. Right, right.
And then there's also the concept of intelligence agencies and compromise. It also gets attached to it, the manipulation of world markets and money.
And there's a lot to unpack. And then there's regular Jewish people have nothing to do with that.
Well, the Jews, too, are they're very successful. And so what you would expect from a purely statistical point of view is you'd expect them to be overrepresented at the extreme.
They're also a walled garden, right? Meaning?

Meaning it's very difficult to join.

They don't proselytize.

They don't try to get you to join.

And they're all very tightly knit.

They call themselves the Klan.

They're all like locked in, the Jewish Klan, not KKK.

The problem with that term has been compromised by the Ku Klux Klan, but I mean it in terms of tribe.

Or community.

Yeah, community.

They're very tight knit in that regard.

You know, but I mean it as terms of tribe. Well, community.

Yeah, community.

They're very tight knit in that regard. You know, they stick together.
And if you understand the history, obviously, of Nazi Germany and of persecution in Eastern Europe, like, yeah, you have to. Yeah, of course.
Yeah, well, all these complex things are multidimensional. I mean, I watched your whole conversation with Douglas, and I thought you guys did a very credible job, all three of you, of navigating unbelievably choppy waters.
So that's the first thing I'd like to say, because one of the things I was trying to figure out when I was watching that is, do I think I could have done a better job than any of you? And I certainly didn't walk away from it with that idea in mind. But then underneath all that, I thought there's a really unbelievably tricky problem here.
And I think that's why it's made it poked up into, well, you also set that conversation up, but it poked up and made itself manifest in that conversation. And the issue is, how do you identify the psychopathic pretenders and it's even worse now and then make a barrier right now the right was calling for the left to do that for decades right and they didn't and they couldn't and the left is not good at drawing barriers partly temperamentally the right is somewhat better but there's no shortage of monstrosity there.
And so then the question is, how do you draw the line? And that's kind of what I was, because I've been watching these right wing, they're not right wing, these psychopathic types manipulate the edge of the conservative movement for their own gain. And a lot of that's cloaked in anti-Semitic guise.
There's plenty of anti-Semitism on the left, too, by the way.

So it's not unique to the right. Well, particularly now.
Yes, particularly now. And so, you know, you've let your curiosity guide you, your curiosity and your desire for knowledge, this quest, you've let that guide you as a podcaster.
And by the way, I'm trying to work through exactly the same sort of thing. How do you know, given your radical increase in stature over the last 10 years, how do you know when your curiosity and even your skepticism about the fact that things aren't the way that people say they are, because that's certainly been demonstrated in the last 10 years.
How do you, how should anyone decide what guardrails to put up? Like, what do you look for? Do you have a conceptual system worked out for that? And what do you mean, in what way? Well, how do I look for in terms of people to talk to? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you have this insanely immense platform and you're inviting people onto it.
And, you know, you said to Douglas, and I know this to be true, that you're not really thinking about the outcome exactly. You're thinking about this is an interesting person to talk to and I'd like to go on that quest.
But then you have the additional conundrum. We're trying to work this out in the daily wire side of things too not to say that that's exactly the same situation it's like once you gain in reach and authority then how do you know that how do you take great care that the people you're talking to aren't, what would you say, eliciting or feeding a subculture, yeah, that's right, that hasn't got the proper aims? I guess the legacy media probably worked that out by having people, mediators, right? And guests.
And that was also back when we could rely on the structures of authority in some sense to filter. And now we're in this helter-skelter world where everything is up for grabs.
The legacy media is the worst at that now. Yeah, I know.
They're the worst at that, which is fascinating. You know, it really is.
It's really fascinating when you lose faith in a New York Times piece. You know, it's like you go, like, well, this is bullshit.
I know what they're doing. I know they're just, this is editorial bullshit.
And that didn't used to be the case, I don't think. No, it didn didn't but then i go back to like what i learned about the woodward bernstein nixon thing at watergate that was all essentially an intelligence operation have you ever looked into that you know i've been bill murray on the podcast and bill murray said one of the wildest things he read the first five pages of bob Bob Woodward's biography on John Belushi, Wired.
He read the first five pages. He goes, oh, my God, they framed Nixon.
Oh, really? Wow. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, no kidding.
He's like, what they wrote about my friend was so not true. It was so wildly off.
He said John Belushi was a lightweight. John Belushi would have a couple of drinks and he'd be fucked up.
He wasn't like a big partier. That time he did that speedball is probably the only time he ever did it in his life.
But Woodward had him painted as this maniacal, off the rails, just drug addled monster. And he knew that to not be true.
He was very close to Belushi for a long time. And so he was like, oh, my God, they framed Nixon.
And then when I told him the whole story, you know, what Tucker Carlson had told me about Woodward being an intelligence asset, and then that was his first job ever as a journalist was Watergate, and that there's FBI guys that were involved in it and the break-in. And the whole thing was they tried to get Nixon out of there, the most popular president in the history of the country in terms of the vote.
And they were successful. They got him out of there.
And it's probably or likely because Nixon was very concerned with who killed Kennedy. And he wanted to find out.
And he wanted to get that information out. And apparently he had been talking about it.
I know who did it. And he was, you know, he didn't want it happening to him, obviously he knew it could if you're a president you know a couple of guys ago you know just most one of the most popular presidents at least posthumously popular presidents I know it was very polarizing while I was in office but was shot in the head in the middle of Dallas and you think that the government might have had something to do with it like that could that could fuck with your head obviously you know yeah well

there and there's many things like that I mean you saw the government website that came up two

days ago about COVID yes okay wild wild yeah that's that's for sure what are you supposed to do with

that all the things that have would have gotten you fired if you were a professor and you said

I'm going to be... wild to see that.
Yeah, that's for sure. What are you supposed to do with that? All the things that would have gotten you fired if you were a professor and you said them four years ago, you would have 100% got fired for espousing any of these ideas that

turned out to be true.

You would have gotten kicked off of YouTube.

You would have gotten, you know, there was a lot.

There was a lot going on there, you know, which is I feel so fortunate that right at the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height of the height I feel so fortunate that right at the height of COVID was also when I had gone over to Spotify. Spotify is a Swedish company.
It's different. They're different.
They're much more rational, and they're not overwhelmed by this identity politics shit and they aren't overwhelmed by our weird political binary system of good guy bad guy depending on which side you're on and they were like what are you talking about like this is correct we don't we don't censor the swedes also didn't lock down yes they didn't lock down they were also like we don't censor our rappers like we don't tell didn't lock down. Yes, they didn't lock down.
They were also like, we don't censor our rappers. Like, we don't tell, like, the rap lyrics, some of my favorite rap lyrics are horrendous.
But it's just like, my favorite movies are Tarantino movies. The dialogue is horrendous.
It doesn't mean that these are horrendous people that are putting together this. Tarantino's a wonderful guy.
He's fun to be around. He's great.
I've had dinner with him, brought him to the comedy club. He's great.
He's not a bad person, but he is an artist and he's creating this thing. And this thing is going to show you aspects of humanity that you know to be true, but they're horrific.
That's the same with rap lyrics. It's the same with a lot of things and spotify's position was we're not censoring that's not we're in the business of like promoting art like we sell art and we're not interested in censoring art essentially and turns out luckily we were all right we were all correct you know and now the government shows it on their fucking website, which is crazy.
Have you seen it, Jamie? Pull it up because it's bananas. And look at this lab.
Yeah, right. I know, I know.
By the way, you know, I know that he would bring up the vaccines when he was on his rallies and people would boo when he was on the campaign trail and people would boo. And I think he was like confused by that.
I think he's a little, I don't want to say he's out of touch, but there's too many things for him to be thinking about, for him to be paying attention to what people really think about the vaccines and vaccine injuries and mandates and just the psychological warfare that was played on the American people. You remember that very famous White House post that they made for the vaccinated.
You've done your job before the unvaccinated. You're looking forward to a winter of severe illness and death and the hospitals that you will overwhelm.

Like that was the White House telling you something when it was in Omicron by that point,

which was like a cold.

Like it was crazy.

The deaths had dropped off radically.

But they were so in bed with the pharmaceutical companies that they were like, you got to do it.

You got to get vaccinated.

And if you don't, you're looking forward to death and severe illness. Like, imagine this is, you're not basing this on real statistics.
You're not basing this on science. You're just basing this on this control, this fear element that you're trying to impose upon people.
So, okay. So that's, that's an interesting point there too, that issue of control and fear.
You know, I started this, I was part of a group that started this organization in the UK called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. We had our second convention in November, which went very nicely, by the way.
So you're doing like a positive counter to the world economic forum? Yeah, well, we have some rules. And one rule is you don't use force or fear, right? Use invitation.
So can I tell you a story about that? Please do. Please do.
Okay, so I've been touring about this new book of mine, right? We Who Wrestle With God. And I've been lecturing about lots of the things I know, but I've been using biblical stories mostly to provide an analytical frame, because that's what stories do.

They provide a frame.

And there's a great story in the continuing Exodus story, the story of Moses and the Israelites, where Moses has led his people away from the tyrant and away from their own slavery because there's a dynamic in that story between those two things. No tyrants without slaves.
Or you might say no tyrants without willing slaves. And so the Israelites have to get away from the tyrant, but then it's across the Red Sea of chaos and blood and into the desert for 40 years.
You don't escape from the tyrant if you're a slave without paying a price and maybe for three generations. It's rough.
So Moses is trying to get these people to stop being slaves and to take responsibility so they don't need a tyrant. And so he's kind of got there and they're on the edge of the promised land, right? And so they're almost at the end of their voyage and they they run out of water they're still in the desert they run out of water and they get all whiny and bitchy about the fact that they had to go across the desert and that it was way better under the tyrant and that Moses is nothing but a corrupt patriarch and he's only power mad and they foment some rebellion and anyways it's it's a pretty ugly situation and

the Israelites go to Moses and they say look we're really starving we're thirsting for water we're going to die do you think you can have a chat with God see if he'll do something about this and God tells Moses to go to some rocks in the desert and to ask them to bring water forth and so he goes with his people to these rocks

and instead of asking he takes this staff of his. The staff is a really important thing.
It's like your staff if you have an organization, same derivation. But it's also the magic wand of Gandalf.
It's the flag you plant in new territory. It's the tree of life.
It's the living tradition that has a spirit inside it, and that's a serpent, and that's the serpent that eats all the serpents of the Egyptian tyrants, magic, magicians. That's the staff.
It's his rod of his authority. And he, instead of asking the rocks, he hits them twice with the with the staff so he forces them and god tells him that in consequence of that number one he's going to die and number two he's not going to get to the promised land right right right so there's this insistence it's really interesting well it's a crucial insistence and it's important in this time, I think, to understand what this means.

So Moses is a leader. He's the archetypal leader.

And he realizes his responsibility in the encounter with the burning bush,

which is something that attracts his attention, that he takes with great seriousness, and that transforms him.

And so then he becomes the leader who stands up against the tyrant and frees the slaves

and takes them through chaos into the desert. And his temptation as leader is to use force.
So when he's a young man, for example, he kills an Egyptian aristocrat who was tormenting a Hebrew slave. And that's why he has to leave Egypt.
He's tempted by power because he's a leader. And then at the end, even though he's done all these things, he's been an upstanding man and gone beyond his call of duty.
And he's right at the point where he attains victory, right, to enter the promised land. And he uses force once when God tells him to use invitation, to use his words, the logos, to use words, to use invitation.
And that's enough so that he's dead. So is his brother Aaron, that's his political arm, and he doesn't enter the promised land.
And then in the gospels, of course, Christ foregoes power altogether. The temptation in the desert, one of the three temptations is the temptation for use of power.
So one of the things that maybe we could conclude from all this, given the context of what you said, is that you can tell the tyrants, they use fear and compulsion. And they don't use invitation.
So one of the rules we put together for ARC was invitation only. Play, we're going to do this playfully.
Yeah. And we're not going to use force or fear ever.
You have to use invitation. And so I don't know what you think about that.
a distinguished imagine it's a distinguishing it's the distinguishing characteristic between the wannabe tyrants and the true leaders the true leaders say here's an offer would you accept this of your own free will and the tyrants say the apocalypse is coming and everything and we are allowed to do everything to forestall it right right including control you and everything that you do that's the problem yeah right and that's how they get people to fall in line they fall in line through fear yeah yeah well fear and force it's like also you know you have to do this because the apocalypse is looming which is always in a way true always there's always Well, there's always an apocalypse of one form or another looming. The question is, what do you do about it? And terrify people and compel them.
Well, depending on where you live anywhere in the world right now, right? You might be experiencing the apocalypse right now if you live in Gaza. You might be experiencing the apocalypse right now if you're in Yemen, if you're a Houthi, right? The end of the world is always coming right and for you for me for everybody yeah right so so you can always look into the future and conjure up an apocalyptic scenario and maybe even that in itself isn't a sin although I think it is there's another but if you yet then turn to fear and compulsion as your means of governance, then you're a tyrant.
I don't care what your excuse is. It has to be invitational.
That's when it gets scary when you see governments telling people that they have to fall in line or these are horrible consequences for you not agreeing to what we're saying. Yeah.
Yeah. And then if you don't do this, you're a part of the problem.
Right, exactly. Well, and if the apocalypse that's generated in that way is of sufficient magnitude, there's no limit to the amount of power that can be exerted.
Because obviously the rationale is there. They have to do it, right? This is the rationale to stop Trump, right? You're trying to stop Hitler.
Right, right. No matter what.
Circumvent the First Amendment, use the law, use lawfare.

Use whatever. Yeah.
Use whatever. This is one of the things that worries me about Canada at the moment.
Now, I know when we talked a couple of weeks ago, I expressed my concern about what was happening in Canada. Yeah, it doesn't look good.
Well, I read Carney's book, Values. I read it twice, and I understood it.
And Carney says in that book, well, he says he's an advocate of centralized planning, ESG.

He was a huge ESG advocate.

He organized many large corporations to go down this central planning governance route

because the market wasn't pricing everything properly.

And so central planners had to step in. And BlackRock and vanguard places like that were big parts of that don't know if they were directly affected by carney but it's the same thing and they've stepped away from that and he's a big dei advocate and he's also a net zero advocate and carney says in his book this is a good example of this and i think also a good example of this kind of narcissism that we talked about earlier.
Every single financial decision that every individual or organization makes has to prioritize decarbonization above all else. Or else, and there will be many, he doesn't say casualties, but he implies that, there'll be many who pay a price along the way, but it's necessary's necessary you know because you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs and then he says 75 percent of the world's fossil fuels have to stay in the ground and this is who canadians are seriously thinking about electing right why does he say the fossil fuels have to stay in the ground too much carbon you know you know the real problem with that is the same problem with the covet narrative is that they don't allow any dissent they don't allow any data that conflicts with the narrative and they don't want to look at any possible like both of them are complicated they're not similar in a, but there are because they're top-down, tyrannical tools.
Using fear and compulsion. So they did, and during the COVID times, nobody wanted to look at any alternative treatments.
They didn't want to look at health, metabolic health. They didn't want to look at any factors other than vaccination and compliance.
With carbon, no one wants to look at, I'm sure you saw that Washington Post study of the last, was it 50 million years, the graph that shows the temperature of earth? Have you seen it? We're in a cooling period. And that was always what, I mean, during the 1970s, Leonard Nimoy, when he had that In Search Of show, one of the things that they covered was that we are at the verge of an ice age and how terrifying an ice age is.
Yeah, well, the conclusion you draw about climate and carbon dioxide is entirely dependent on where you put the origin point of your graph. So if you go back 150 years ago, carbon dioxide has increased.
If you go back 500 million years ago, which is quite a lot longer, we're in a drought, like a serious carbon dioxide drought. Right.
And also carbon dioxide is the fuel of plants. Yes.
It turns out that they like it. Well, you know the global greening data.
Yeah, say it. So people know it.
Well, you know, one of the things I learned as a scientist was that there's usually an explanation or two that accounts for a phenomenon so completely that almost everything else is noise. Like the Maha movement, make America healthy again.
The fundamental issue is insulin resistance. Like that's the fundamental plague of, say, North America.
And everything else is noise. It's not unimportant noise, but insulin resistance is the major contributor.
On the climate side, when I look at the data, the thing that leaps out for me is greening. It's like the planet is 20% greener than it was 30 years ago.
Okay, this is NASA data I'm not inventing this right okay and then the next you think oh 20% if 20% of the plants had vanished you'd be sure we'd heard about that yes okay so and agricultural outputs got up 13% now whether all that additional carbon dioxide is a function of human activity, that's still debatable. It doesn't matter.
There is an association between the carbon dioxide rise and the plant propagation. Okay, it's even more particular than that, because a lot of the greening has occurred in semi-arid areas, so areas around deserts.
And the reason for that is that if there's more carbon dioxide, the plants can close their breathing pores more and they don't lose water. And so not only is there 20% more vegetation, which is a lot, I think it's twice the area of the United States that's greened.
That's a lot of green. And where our agricultural production is more effective.
And the places that have greened were the very places that the deserts were supposed to expand into. And so, right, because they've greened.
They've shrunk, not grown. Now, you know, you could say, well, that rate of change has its problems.
And, you know, rates of change have their problems. But I don't see another data point that's anywhere near as stunning as that.
I think it's a really important point where you said that if we lost 20% of the plans, people would be freaking out. Oh, my God.
Well, and rightly so. Rightly so.
But yet it's not even discussed because, again, it's one of those things that invades the narrative, right? It's one of those pesky facts, those pesky truths that gets in the way of the thing that you're saying, well, the apocalypse is coming. Yeah, well, that's the thing about the narrative is like, okay, so now we talked about the psychopaths who manipulate belief systems for their own advantage, right? The people who use God's name in vain, the Pharisees who want to dress in religious clothing and obtain status and consequence, they're Christ's number one enemies in the Gospels, by the way, those people.
They're the ones who conspire to crucify him, right? The religious pretenders. So this has been going on for a very long period of time.
So the climate apocalypse narrative is perfectly situated to, what would you say, to serve the purposes of the narcissists, the Machiavellians, the psychopaths, and the sadists. Because it's an infinitely expanding existential threat that can be used as an excuse for anything.
Yes. Right? And it also provides a perfect cloak for any amount of power maneuvering.
It's like, I want to make your shower heads put out a needle spray so that you're cold all the time while you have a shower, while you're doing something you do every day that could otherwise be highly enjoyable. Why do I get to invade your life to that degree? Well, because the planet's at stake, Joe.
And who are you to privilege your shower comfort, something that trivial, over the fate of the entire planet? Well, you can use that argument at every single level. You know, Trump came out with this executive statement just a few days ago about showerheads.
And everybody kind of laughed about that.

And I thought, no, he has an eye for petty tyranny, right?

For petty tyranny.

And there's very little that's more petty than,

well, I think the showerhead example is a perfect one.

And then you also think, look,

if they're willing to control your life at that level of detail,

what are they not willing to control?

It's like, you're concerned about my showerheads, like we're out of water, which we're not at all. So what won't you control? So you think, well, the psychopaths are edge cases, they'll move wherever the power is.
They find a narrative that can be used to strike fear in the hearts of people and to justify compulsion. They ally themselves with that belief claim, and then they ratchet themselves up status hierarchies without any true reputational validity riding on that edge of fear and power.
Right, right. I wrote an article, it hasn't been published yet, in The Telegraph, because I got hell a lot after one of our podcasts.
You may know this, but...

The climate change stuff.

That's right. The whole bloody transcript was sent to the college as an indication that I was out of my wheelhouse.

You know, and maybe I stepped a bit out of my wheelhouse when we had that discussion because I'm not a climate scientist, whatever the hell that is, by the way.

Because you have to know a lot to be a climate scientist and an economist on top of that so today I'm talking about something that's a lot more psychological the climate apocalypse narrative is a social contagion that's driven by power mad psychopaths who are hell-bent on using fear and compulsion to make sure everyone steps in line so that they can continue with their acquisition of undeserved power. It's also effective enough that the people that are underneath the power comply and do the job of the man for the man.
Yeah, well, that's the advantage of using fear and compulsion, right? It's like, well, I have to go along with this because my leaders who had built up a certain degree of credibility are telling me that, you know, the apocalypse is nigh. And who am I to, well, first of all, question because, God, there's a hard thing to figure out.
You know, what's the global effect of human activity on the climate for the next hundred years? Well, good luck figuring that out. But this is why I'm making it more psychological this time.
It's like the climate fluctuates and for complex reasons, but that doesn't mean that you get to look a hundred years into the future and you get to conjure up an apocalyptic narrative and you get to say, we're the only people that can save you. And you get to say, you have to change every single thing you do in your life and prioritize our concern above all else including even the well-being of your own children or the economic future of the africans for example who don't get to use fossil fuels right you don't get to do that you don't get to do that using fear and compulsion not only that it's being done by people who have been wrong about everything every step of the way every step of step of the way.
Yeah, well, then they just play a sleight of hand game there. Okay, we got the time frame wrong, Joe.
It's not 20 years. But it's not even just that.
It's 40 years. It's not even just climate change.
It's basically everything. Public health, agriculture, you name it.
Yeah. Everything.
Yeah, well, that sets us- Every single thing. The water supply.
Everything. That sets us back into this conundrum that you and Douglas and Dave were addressing.
It's like, okay, two conundrums. Like, three, how do you pursue your interest in a landscape that's been shorn of reliable expert input? Who do you rely on? If you don't know who to rely on, like, how do you keep the bloody psychopaths at bay? You know, and the conspiracy theorist mongers and the people who aren't trying to discover the truth, but who are using the conspiratorial edge, let's say.
The grifters. Yeah, the gripers, for that matter.
Right? These are people who are clearly playing power games for their own benefit, and they're spinning up these conspiratorial narratives and riding on them and occupying them in this parasitical manner there's going to be a huge this is a huge problem already on the right-wing side i don't you know i don't even know what the hell that is anymore because i don't know what the left is and i don't know what the right is but we need to claim the center yeah well that's also what we're trying to do with arc yeah what is the center right the center where we can all meet up well and i think that's that's doable well let's specify it even more okay the center is a place you'd go if you were invited right right exactly that well and that also ties back into this idea of play you know like piaget figured this out when was watching little kids. So, if a little boy wants to play house with a little girl, which is generally a good idea, if you want to play house with a woman at some point in your life, you better get that right.
It's a very serious game. What's the first rule? She has to want to play.
Right, what's the second rule? You have to play with her in a manner that makes her want to play with you again. Right.
I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of what constitutes objective standards of morality. You know how Sam Harris, Sam Harris was obsessed with malevolence and he wanted to ground morality in objective science because he thought that would give us like a firm standing place.
but he went down the wrong scientific rabbit hole hole i think i think if you understand this relationship with play and iteration then you have the core of morality so so and piaget by the way this is part of what would you say this is the larger this is the philosophical edge of his theory this is actually what he's trying to accomplish how do you decide if an arrangement is good versus bad or good versus evil well piaget went to children to find that out it's like okay you want to set up a game why a game is the first social it's the foundation of social interaction right play a game with one other people one other person and then maybe you can play a game with a bunch of people and then then you can play a game with one person or a bunch of people across a long period of time, and then you could do it in a way that improves. Okay, so now, so what are the rules? If you're a little boy, she has to want to play, and then you have to play with her in a way so that she wants to play with you again.
If you do that, then you have a friend, and that iterates. Now, so you can imagine that there's a structure of voluntary play that's really quite stringent, but this is what you do on your podcast.
Seriously. And that's why it's so attractive to people.
You know, when that's the core of what you might call objective morality. It's like there's a very limited number of ways to play, to offer a game that someone else wants to play.
And then there's a very limited number of ways to play that game so that they want to keep playing with you and then you could if you add that additional constraint of improvement across the games you've got the straight narrow path right then it's marked by we're really trying to do this at We want to offer a vision that people want to accept or or even thrilled to accept because that's even better right a game that you'd be thrilled to play so one of the things we're doing on the energy side i'm going to an event with alex epstein here in two days talk to energy executives about this you know well what kind of world do you want to see well how about a world where there's so much energy that poor people can afford it how'd that be for a vision like have you got a problem with that well poor people can't have energy because that'll destroy the planet it's like no poor people can't have that energy because you'd have to let go of the game that you're playing as a narcissistic psychopath that's elevating your status inappropriately and you're perfectly willing to sacrifice the world's poor to continue your grip on power. How about that for a psychological interpretation? Right.
And how about this as an alternative? Why don't we do everything we can to drive energy costs down to the lowest degree that's sustainable, like in a market economy and make energy available to everyone so that we eradicate absolute poverty why wouldn't the left line up again around that because the left hypothetically serves the poor it's like nothing serves the poor better than an ethos first we're going to get that right because we're also interested in getting the story right but But after that, on the material side, there's nothing more important than cheap energy.

Right, but can I stop you for a second there? I don't think people on the left are getting that message. I don't think they're hearing that this is exactly what third world countries need is a reliable source of energy and industry to elevate themselves out of poverty.
They're not. They're not getting that – but it's not the problem of the people that are on the left, like the general followers.
Well, it might be a problem that's facilitated by the psychopathic fringe types. Like, look, I think— It's not offered to them, is my point.
Yeah, the question is, why not? And the reason is, like, this is part of the— You talked to Lomburg, right, to Bjorn. And Bjorn's pretty good on this, or very good on this, I should say, you know, to give him credit.
And he would like to see a world where, and he's part of ARC, he'd like to see a world where we make energy abundance a top priority. It's probably the only way you're going to pull third world countries out of dire poverty.
Well, it's also, as far as I can tell, the only way that you pull them out of environmental catastrophe. Right.
Because if you want to produce an environmental catastrophe, a true environmental catastrophe, how about a three or four year famine so that everyone there kills all the animals, for example, or dies, right? So we also know that if you get people above $5,000 a year GDP, then they start paying attention to long term environmental sustainability because they don't have to scrabble around in the dirt for the next meal. So then we could say, well, how about we have a future of sufficient abundance so that no one is deprived of energy or opportunity for their children.

Right.

Well, that sounds like an invitation. Now, if you hate people and you think the industrial enterprise is a stain on the planet and that we're viruses or cancer on the planet, then you're going to have a problem with that.
But my sense, too, is that if we had enough energy, we could make all the deserts bloom. I was watching a video on pollution in India about the amount of garbage that gets thrown in rivers in India.
And it was staggering, just staggering to watch that somehow or another through, because the population is so large and there's so many poor people and there's a lack of hope whatever it is they just they're just throwing their garbage in the rivers and the rivers are just overwhelmed with if there's ever like a symbol of thing people that have been led the wrong way like bad leadership bad planning bad underlying story everything that's it when you look at your river and it's all you see is water bottles all you see is floating plastic that's the whole river and you know that if you get in that water you're going to get sick and yet no one looks at it as this number one priority like what do you always say clean your room make, make your bed. Like, right? Yeah.
What, what's going on? Like, well, and you want to incentivize people to pay attention to the local environment. And you do that in part by ensuring that they're not living so close to the edge of catastrophe that they can only think about today.
Right. And if you start from the mindset that, can I tell you another story? Sure.
Okay. You tell me all the stories.
You have to ask questions. All right.
This is a really cool story. Okay.
This is how to set the world

right, this story. So I've been traveling around lecturing about my book, and I wrote a chapter on

Abraham in that book. And Abraham is the father of, in principle, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism,

right? He's the father of nations. That's how the story goes.
So when God comes to Abraham in

I'll be back. principle, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, right? He's the father of nations.
That's how the story goes. So when God comes to Abraham in a very particular way, it's one of the ways God is characterized in the Old Testament.
So this is like a definition of God, right? It's not a testament to God. It's a definition of what God is.
Okay, so Abraham, he doesn't hear anything about God until he's like 70. And he's already living in privileged paradise because his father and his mother are rich.
And so he doesn't have to lift a finger. If life is about having your needs met, Abraham's got it covered.
And so he lives like a satiated infant until he's 70. And then a voice comes to him and it says,

you are required

by the God of your ancestors

to leave your zone of comfort,

to leave the wealth of your father,

to leave your nation,

to leave your language,

to go out into the world

and have your terrible adventure.

And if you do that, so now imagine that's the call to adventure. If you do that, these things will happen.
This is the covenant that God makes to the Abrahamic people. It's so cool.
I just talked to Brett Weinstein about this from an evolutionary biological perspective on the road because I wanted him to evaluate the story I'm going to tell you from an evolutionary perspective. So God is the voice that says to Abraham, if you follow the call of adventure, you'll be a blessing to yourself.
So that's the meaning of life, right? To have the adventure. You'll do this in a way...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because adventure is compelling. Responsible romantic adventure is the most compelling pathway, right? And if it's intense enough, it justifies the suffering, right? It's a reason to get up in the morning, even if you're in pain.
Okay, then he says, there's another thing that'll happen too, which is that your name will become known among your people for valid reasons. So that's that genuine reputation that we talked about so if you follow the pattern of adventure properly you'll be a blessing to yourself and your name will become known among your people for valid reasons so that's a good deal you'll do this in a way that will maximize the probability that you'll establish something of permanence or even eternal permanence so So Abraham is offered, if he accepts the call and makes the proper sacrifices along the way, God says your descendants will outnumber the stars.
So he establishes the pattern of fatherhood that best propagates down the generations, which is the same as following the pathway of adventure. Then he says, you'll do this in a way that will make sure no one can stand before you, right? So that if you adhere to that adventurous spirit and you propagate it, all the enemies will, all enemies will either be converted into friends or flee before you.
And then you'll do it in a way that brings abundance to everyone. And so now, Matt, this is the question I'd ask Brett.
So imagine this. So imagine that we have an instinct in us or a divine voice.
I don't care which of those you use. An instinct within us that calls us to develop, right? That puts us on the edge.
And that's not the same as looking for infantile satiation or the gratification of our needs. It's genuinely this call to expand yourself and to be on the edge and to develop.
That if you did that, to follow that instinct, then you'd be a blessing to yourself. Your name would become known among your people.
You'd establish something of permanent significance. No one could stand before you and it would bring abundance to everyone.
Right. And then in the Abrahamic story, what happens is that as Abraham accepts that, goes out in the world, and then he has a series of adventures, each of which requires a more complete sacrifice.
Because as you develop under the influence of this call, what you're required to do is to live more carefully in accordance with your expanding domain of opportunity. And that's the pathway forward.
So I asked Brett about that, because this is different than the selfish gene idea, right? It's like, there's an instinct within us that calls us to develop, that pulls us out into the world. And if we follow it religiously, and we make the proper sacrifices along the way,

then those five things will happen around us.

And that speaks of a concordance, which has to be there, has to be there,

between the spirit that develops us and the pathway that brings maximal benefit

to the natural and the social world.

And I can't see how that can be the case.

If we're adapted to the world, that has to be the case, right?

It has to be that if we follow the instinct that would best put us together psychologically,

this quest, this adventure, that would also be the spirit that set the world in order, right?

And that spirit, that whole thing, that's what's defined as God in that particular story. Right? That resonates.
Hmm. Well, I can't...
See, the alternative is preposterous, right? The alternative is that we don't have an instinct to develop. Like, and you know that's wrong.
You just have to watch children and you know that's wrong. You just have to watch yourself and the curiosity that you have and the desire for novelty and for learning you know that's there that's what you followed to make this show definitely and so the alternative is that instinct doesn't exist that's a stupid theory or what brings you into the world is done at the expense of other people in a way that won't enhance your reputation, in a way that has nothing to do with anything permanent.

Right?

Then it would be sort of you against the world.

That would be like a power orientation.

You can get your way in the world, but you have to manipulate.

You have to lie.

You have to use compulsion.

You have to use fear.

You can't just rely on the quest, say, or your adventure.

And I think you can. I think you can.
I fear you can't just rely on the quest say or your adventure and i think you can i think you can't i think you better or else there's that too it's interesting because you're talking about tyrants right and you're talking about people of extreme power and how that corrupts and in that case there's a large percentage of those people that are violating all those things that you said. Because they do manipulate and they do rely on fear.
Well, you know, Nietzsche was an advocate of the will to power, right? So you can imagine that there's a variety of potential motivating forces and one would be hedonic pleasure. That's the golden calf worshipers, by so that's just short-term hedonism and that doesn't work and by work i mean it doesn't iterate socially it's like if it's all about you and what some women you wants now first of all that's not going to serve you well tomorrow and i don't want to be anywhere near you right like you're an over you're literally an overgrown two-year-old right and that gets pretty ugly by the time you're 40.
So the whole golden calf thing, no, that's just off the table. But isn't it kind of celebrated amongst certain high achievers, particularly in the business world, like that hedonistic, sociopathic drive to constantly get more numbers on the ledger? Yeah, well, I don't know if that's exactly hedonism.
Greed is good. That's Wall Street.
Yeah, yeah. That's Michael Douglas, right? Greed is good.

Yeah, well, okay, let's delve into that for a minute. Okay, so...

I'm not advocating for that. I know you're not.
I know you're not.

You can turn to hedonism. You can fall into nihilism.
You can turn to hedonism, or you can turn to power. Okay, this Abrahamic covenant, it's different than power.
It's adventure. It's romantic adventure, actually.
That's not the only definition of God in the Old Testament, by the way. There's something deeper than that that it refers to.
So those are the options. Now, you said, don't the achievers, you know, who are stacking up numbers, it's like they found a way forward to attain status, but they fixated on an element that shouldn't be fundamental.
They're not trying to store up the treasure in heaven. They're trying to store up the treasure on earth, and that's better than not doing it.
See, this is another thing we need to understand, because I've spent a lot of time, for example, trying to figure out why people are attracted to Andrew Tate. And I know why they're attracted to Andrew Tate.
They'd rather be Andrew Tate than an incel. And they're right, right? It's best to give the devil his due.
Like if you had to choose between being kind of flabby and unhealthy and resentful and in your basement looking at pornography, hating women because all of them reject you all the time and you deserve it, and you're ineffectual and the future looks pretty damn gloomy. and then you see Andrew Tate, who's tough and hyper-masculine in a manner that's almost a parody and wealthy and famous and apparently has women at his disposal with a fair bit of stress on the idea of disposal.
You'd think, well, I'd much rather be him than me. That's the incorporation of the shadow from the Jungian perspective.
It's like, it's right. And you think about the number of men that are incels.
The thing about men also, if they get rejected a lot, they associate women with pain. Yeah.
And then they get angry at those women because those women cause them pain. Like it's just very simple equation.
Of course. That's how you get a man hater or excuse me, that's how you get a woman hater.
And the same could be said for, that's how you get a man hater, right? You associate men with rejection and cruelty. Well, and men, young men in particular are more likely to be rejected.
Young women may have difficulty finding the ideal man, but they don't face the same degree of universal rejection. So it's hard on young men.
Well, they're not the pursuers, right, as much. Young women aren't.
Right, right. Well, and women are the gatekeepers fundamentally of sex.
So that's their essential power. That's also the power of of chastity and that's the scary thing about acquiring wealth is that wealth allows you to bypass the genetic social hierarchy yeah well i talked to i talked to russell brand about this a lot you know women threw themselves at him how'd that work out for him not great you know it threw him into great spiritual confusion it it was empty and hollow and that's worth knowing to see because you might say to the people who are interested in the shadow figures and tate plays that role the master of women let's say why not do that because you need an answer to that if it's certainly when it's better than being

lonely isolated bitter and ineffectual that's for sure right well it's because you don't confuse a stepping stone with the pinnacle that's why there's way more beyond that I mean, you're a tough guy.

You went through your disciplinary processes on the physical side in particular the intellectual side too i might add you know you've got what tate has to offer but you're what you're respectable why why a different completely different background than him, first of all. And also, my feeling in life is whenever you can, be nice.
That's like a general guideline. You mean nice or good? I mean both.
Okay okay nice as well um i get the posturing i get how it would be attractive to young men i get it if i was a young man i would certainly be drawn to him and i was to many fighters and i accepted a lot of personality flaws and people that admired as fighters because they were very successful at doing this one insanely difficult thing right right and oftentimes that requires a certain amount of narcissism requires a certain amount of internal focus ironically enough not at the championship level ironically enough it gets you close but it doesn't get you to be the king the kings are almost precisely universally disciplined focused and generally kind they're some of the nicest people the best at the most difficult thing athletically to do and the most difficult you're you're conquering why do you think that is i think you have have to be. Why? Why? I think Miyamoto Musashi wrote about this in the Book of Five Rings.
You must have balance in everything in life. If you have imbalance, you can get pretty far because you're so— Specialized.
Right. You're so driven.
Yeah. But you will fall prey to the balanced man.
Yeah, well, that's exactly my point. You will also recognize characteristics in him that you envy and that you wish you had yourself.
Like if you're a narcissist and a sociopath, you know you are and you can't really be proud of yourself. You can't.
Right. You don't have the benefit of the positive feedback that you get from true kindness to others.
You don't have that. Well, you also know that your reputation is founded on sand.
And one of the ways to rationalize that is, well, everyone does that. Right.
Everyone's like that. Yeah.
But then you don't trust or like anyone. Right.
And then you're really alone. That's for sure.
You're really alone. And then if you do achieve success, it's hollow because you realize like.
So, you know, you just outlined there the progression that Carl Jung identified as characteristic of individuation, right? With the second thing that you said. So imagine that you start an incel, right? You're ineffectual and you're rejected as a young man.
Now, there are exceptions, but let's just play that out as the unhappy majority. Okay, now you look for a shadow figure to sharpen you up, to toughen you up, and to make you strive at least along one dimension, right? And so then you do that.
Well, then the next thing that happens in the union stage progression is for a man it's integration of the anima which is the feminine part and it's integration it's not replacement it's like oh well then you discover the utility of empathy and compassion and kindness and mercy and care while still being able to deal out justice let's say and so And so then you bridge that gap and then that integration, you just said, even among fighters, that's what puts them in the highest place, right? That's right. That's right.
So, but it's hard for the people. It's hard for those who are completely disaffected and also quite angry about it.
You know, the people who are interested in the pathway that Tate offers, they're not so unhappy that he's hard on women. Because they're pretty mad at women.
And so, you know, if it's the bitch or me, then I'll pick me. Right, exactly, exactly, exactly.
And so, and it is very crucial to get this progression correct, because monster is better than wimp.

Right.

Right. Right.
But the question is, what's better than monster? And so it's very interesting that you made those comments on the fighting side because you wouldn't necessarily think that it would be true in that world as well. Well, one of the best examples is your countryman, George St.
Pierre, one of the greatest of all time, one of the nicest guys I've ever met. and if you didn't know that he was one of the best examples is your countryman George St.
Pierre one of the greatest of all time One of the nicest guys I've ever met and if you didn't know that that that he was one of the greatest fighters of all time You would never guess it. You'd never guess it talking to him.
He's curious. He's interesting.
He's intelligent He's very well read his all He's always interested in different things. He's constantly searching for new information.
And as a martial artist, he is still on a quest of improvement, even though he's retired from competing. Always trains.
He's constantly training. A quest for new information.
Okay, so let me tell you a story about that. Please.
All right, so this is the story that comes up at the beginning of Moses when he turns into a leader.

So it's about how you turn into a leader.

Okay, so he's already killed a man and he's left Egypt because of it.

So now he's in this land called Midian and he goes there and he chases some ruffians away from a well for these two girls who are drawing water.

And they go and tell their father and he says to them, bring this young home to have dinner so he does and then he gets married to them and then he becomes a shepherd and this is crucial because the shepherd's an image that runs through the biblical corpus right well shepherds at that time lived by themselves in the wilderness on their wits and they kept the wolves and the lions at bay with primitive weapons so these were tough guys and they cared for the most vulnerable so a shepherd is an image of optimized ordinary masculinity you take care of yourself you can keep the monsters at bay and you attend to the most vulnerable so moses has got that he's a shepherd. He's a successful shepherd.
So now he's out there one day wandering around Mount Sinai. And Mount Sinai, or Mount Horeb, that's the place where heaven and earth touch.
So that's where the messengers of the divine descend to earth. And so he's out there, and something attracts his attention, makes him curious.
That's the burning bush. It's not a forest fire.
It's not something you can't ignore. It's something alive, because that's a bush.
A tree is a symbol of life. And it's burning because things that are alive burn, right? That's metabolism.
And intensification of that, like a psychedelic intensification of that, that's what the burning bush is. And that's what glimmers to Moses.
And he steps off the beaten track, right, to investigate what drives his curiosity. And so then he goes off the beaten track and he starts to delve deeply into the mysteries of the burning bush.
And at some point he realizes he's on sacred ground. He takes off his shoes.
That's a symbol of willingness to transform identity because shoes signify identity, right? They're part of your costume, your working man's costume. And so then he continues to commune with the burning bush.
He gets deeper and deeper into something. He makes himself a specialist by following what compels him and delving deeply into it.
And when he gets deep enough into it, to the bottom, the voice of eternity speaks to him and says, you're now no longer who you were. You're now a leader.
You have to go back to your people. You have to stand up against the tyrant.
You have to tell the slaves that they need to leave their tyranny and their slavery and serve me in the wilderness. And you have to do that now.
And Moses i can't because i can't speak i'm slow of tongue and god says basically that's your problem and with me on your side we can sort that out and don't you have a brother aaron and can't he speak it's like bring him along for the ride and so that's when moses becomes a leader And so that's the pattern. It's like ordinary masculinity.
Those are the dwarves that Snow White serves before she meets the prince, by the way. The ordinary masculine, right? So, but, and those dwarves protect her from the evil queen that wants to suppress her by feeding her a poisoned apple.
So Snow White has to learn to serve the ordinary man

before she can find a prince.

Yeah, something Disney missed completely in the last story.

So what's the pattern?

Well, you discipline yourself so you become a shepherd,

and then you follow what compels you off the path.

Then you take it seriously and get to the bottom of it. And then that transforms you.
And thus transformed, you can face the tyrant. You can specify the promised land properly.
And you can lead the slaves across chaos and blood. That's the Red Sea.
And then through the desert. Right? And so you said, you know, you said two things.
You said that the good fighters have learned to integrate their civilized side, otherwise they don't get to be great, and that they continue the pathway of self-improvement, right? They continue to pursue what's calling to them. That's another definition of God in the Old Testament, by the way.
What calls to you. That's the burning bush.
The spirit of the burning bush is what entices you. What grabs your interest.
What attracts your curiosity. And that's identical.
The biblical claim is that's the same thing as the spirit of adventure. It's the same thing that speaks to Noah.
Noah's a good man. And a voice comes to him and says, all hell's about to break loose.
And he believes his intuition because he's a good man and can rely on himself. So he makes the ark, right? And he brings his family aboard and culture and nature and reestablishes humanity.
That's the pathway of the leader too. What is your take on, there's a university in Jerusalem that had this theory that the burning bush was the acacia bush.
Acacia bush is rich in DMT. Well, I think, look, I think that hallucinogens strip memory from perception.
So you see the world in all its blazing glory. Huxley figured that out with the doors of perception.
That's really what, that is apparently what psychedelics do psychopharmacologically. They mimic a high stress condition and they strip memory from perception so that you can return to the source and revitalize your perceptions.
Right, So the probability that there's some overlap

between that and the burning bush is high.

It's high, so to speak.

High.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So I'll tell you one more thing,

one more story, okay,

if that's all right with you.

So something else I figured out

that I tried on Brett.

So imagine you could take the hedonistic path, you could take the power path, you could take the nihilistic path, okay? And then you might say, well, that's the only three options. That's kind of what the postmodernists believe.
That's kind of what the nihilists and the postmodernists, the Nietzscheans believe. Power, hedonilism those are your options there's no uniting narrative above that okay so in the story of Cain and Abel two patterns are laid out that are different than that one is Cain's pattern one's Abel's pattern so these are the first two people that are that live in in the world right because Adam and Eve are made by God you can they're in paradise or were Cain and Abel are the first two people so Abel brings his best to the table so he takes the best animal in his flock and he takes the best cut and the best part of the cut and he offers that to God.
So he literally brings his best to the table. That's what he sacrifices.
And Cain doesn't. So Cain's sacrifices are rejected by God.
And God tells him, if you brought your best to the table, you'd be accepted. And Cain gets bitter and resentful and invites temptation in to possess him.
So that spirit of resentment possesses him and then he becomes murderous. He kills his brother and his descendants become genocidal and then you have the flood.
And so that pattern of sacrifice is established right at the beginning of the biblical texts. Abel versus Cain.

Abel brings the best to the table, and that satisfies God.

So one question.

God actually asks Cain this when Cain complains.

He says, wouldn't you be accepted if you were doing your best?

So that's a question of conscience, right?

If you're in extreme misery and your life is hollow and empty and you're bitter and resentful, it's like, you're bringing your best to the table?

Because the covenant proclaims that if you did, you'd be accepted.

Yeah, clearly.

Okay, so now the question is what constitutes?

Now you know you have to sacrifice.

So sacrifice becomes the foundation of the state, not power, not hedonism sacrifice and then that motif is played out through the whole Bible and that's what culminates in the New Testament right, total sacrifice as the foundation of the community that's right like I don't know how to what sense to make out of the metaphysics of the religious realm, you know, because that's beyond me and everyone. The world's a strange place and we could leave it at that.
But the idea that, see, Christ is the exemplar of voluntary self-sacrifice, right? Won't turn to power, won't deviate from his course, faces the worst of all possible deaths, descends to hell itself. That's the pattern of life lived with no reserve.
And that's the foundation of the free state. That's right.
I tried that on Brett. He told me when we first met on the tour that he felt that the biblical narratives were anachronistic, that they were written in a time that was no longer relevant to us.
But he decided by the end of our three days together that if you got to the core of the message, it's alive, right? That's the living spirit inside the bush, you might say. And that it's...
So here's even the weirder thing. So imagine, it's pretty obvious that Christ is a symbol of voluntary self-sacrifice.

I don't think it doesn't really come as a shock to anyone. But the weird thing is, you know, we put that symbol at the center of our churches and at the centers of our towns for 2,000 years, not really knowing why.
and the reason is is that voluntary self-sacrifice is the foundation of the integrated psyche and the stable, productive, and abundant community. And that's right.
It's right. And so, well, it's been exciting to have the opportunity over the last nine months to go talk to people about that because I've talked to about 150,000 people, I guess, public lectures.
That, to me, is one of the most fascinating aspects of Christianity, regardless of whether or not you think logically these things took place. Logically, these stories are a completely accurate depiction of exactly that one.
If you follow the principles, it's incredibly beneficial to your spiritual life as a person. Well, that's a kind of interesting proof, isn't it? Because it means that...
There's truth in it. Well, there's certainly the spirit that makes...
What would you say? The spirit of truth that makes life more abundant. That's exactly right.
And these are weird stories because the way they're true is very sophisticated. They're true always.
That's different than a story about the past. Like the truest story is always happening.
The story of Moses is exactly like that. Like the pattern of leadership development that's embedded in the Exodus story, that is how leaders develop, if they're real leaders.
And their temptation is power, but that's not their motivation. That's their temptation, right? That's a very important distinction.
And that's always the case with leaders. And if they fall prey to the temptation of power, no matter what their accomplishments,

they're not going to complete the task.

Right.

And so there's a cool element at the end of that story too. You know, when Moses, just before Moses dies,

he picks a scout from each tribe, 12 tribes,

and he sends them to Canaan, which is the future.

That's a good way of thinking about it.

It's the potential place we could reside where everything was worked out the land of milk and honey he sends 12 scouts there and 10 of them come back and say they tell a fear story say it's it's insurmountable the challenges that lie ahead of us there's no way we can master this we should have never crossed the. We should have stayed under the thumbs of the tyrants.
We should have never tried to be anything more than slaves because now we're doomed. And two of them say, no, if we maintain our upward orientation and our covenant, nothing can stand in our way.
We can make the deserts bloom. Moses dies, those two scouts.
And so do all the Israelites who are convinced by the unfaithful scouts. And the scouts die.
And the two people who go on to the promised land are Caleb and Joshua. And they lead the Israelites, the faithful Israelites into the promised land.
Those are the people who have the courage to confront the future in a faithful and, what would you say? Faithful, hopeful, and courageous manner. They're the inheritors of the future.
Caleb, Joshua. Joshua's name is the same as Christ's name.
It's the same name. And that's not fluke, right? That's one of those echoes or precursors to the story.
There's an ethos that leads you into the promised land. And what's the ethos? The spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice.
You know, you give up something for a social relationship. Of course, you give up being primary, right? You do the same thing at the social level.
And when you do that, it integrates you and it sets the world straight and that's built into the biblical story it's right at its core so pause that thought yeah i'm gonna use the restroom we'll come back yep we're back so it's great fun to explain these things to people on the tour because it it sorts them out well it's very fascinating yeah that's for sure and the fact that these stories have existed for so long so interesting you know that's that's where it gets really weird yeah well they've they've they've adapted to the contours of our memory and our imagination yeah so you find them compelling and they stick to your memory so i'm going to tell you what else i'm up to. What are you up to? Well, the first thing I want to do is thank you.
So we launched Peterson Academy in September. And we talked about it.
And it's been a stunning success. We have 40,000 students.
That's amazing. We think we're the most rapidly capitalized.
We're one of the most rapidly capitalized companies ever, especially with our degree of investment, because we run a lean show. We have great professors.
We have a great social media site. We had to kick 10 people off it.
We have 15,000 active users. 10 people were dragging it sideways.
What were they doing?

They were causing trouble, Joe.

So serious. They were causing trouble.
Well, or immature or out for, or didn't know how to conduct themselves. That's all it took.
And now everyone is sharing ideas. And Mick, my daughter and her husband, they keep a close eye on this.
That's great. We have secured funding to the point where we are dropping the price from $5.99 to $3.99 a year as of today.
Right. So that should make it accessible to a lot more people.
And we're even more convinced than we were that this has to be the future of higher education. So when we were doing our due diligence for the fundraising, we discovered that 40% of courses at university are now online.
And we've investigated some of those courses. Many of them are PowerPoint presentations, and that's all.
And so that's the university experience for full tuition. And we literally have the best professors in the world and unmatched production quality.
So, and we're filling in the social element too, because we want people to be able to meet. The social media platform does that.
It's a very positive platform. We've already had our first couple announce themselves, which was quite fun.
And we're going to do in-person events. Our first plan, we're going to do a cruise.
Can I ask you this? Yeah. What has your journey been like to go from relative obscurity as a professor in Toronto to becoming this person who you are now, sort of a worldwide educator outside of the standard system of academia, but also subject to intense international scrutiny, character distortions, complete, complete, like what they've done

to change your position.

You are probably the most intentionally misrepresented person I know.

Intentionally misrepresented.

You see it with a lot of other people too, but with you, it's malicious.

You know, I've seen it. But yet you have this desire inside of you to spread information

and to educate.

And learn.

And learn.

I'm learning on the stage.

What has it been like? How old were you when I first met you? It was like 2015, right? Somewhere around that? 10 years ago, 53. You were just encountering notoriety, just encountering attention and all the trappings that come with that.
What has that been like, like navigating that? It's very unusual that a person becomes world famous, you know, at 50. For ideas.
Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.
Well, first, I mean, it was exhilarating and painful to begin with. It was exhilarating because I knew the ideas that I was teaching at Harvard and at the U of T were revolutionary.
I could never believe, I never could get over the fact that they allowed me to teach. Like it was just a, but the students loved my courses and I was very diligent, you know, so I stayed in my traces, so to speak.
And I wasn't a revolutionary for the sake of revolutionary argumentation. And I was teaching about totalitarianism and great evil.
And so it was hard to make a moral case against me. And no one was really inclined to, you know.
They were happy with my teaching, and as were the students. And I had a clinical practice, which was quite extensive.
But then when I first started to lecture much more broadly, we rented a theater and I did a series on Genesis. That was the first foray out into the public space and it sold out.
Well, that was when I started to encounter pain, I would say, at a crowd level. And that was rough, Joe.
Because I'm pretty good at getting people to open up to me right away. I mean, I learned that as a clinician, you know, and have thousands of people do that.
That's pretty rough. Now, it was good.
It was a good thing, like all things considered, because people would tell me how miserable they were, how discouraged and how sidelined, and often how bitter. How addicted.
How imprisoned.

Rough stories.

And then tell me how much they had improved.

But that was also.

There was a tragic element to that.

Because it didn't take that much.

You know.

To tap them into the right orientation.

And so there was sadness in that.

To see all these people. Who were demoralized, thousands of them, and then to see how that could be rectified and yet hadn't been.
That was rough. I'd really, I'm sure that was what, there's many things that made me sick.
I had a pre-existing condition that was autoimmune. But seeing all that, that was pretty rough.
But knowing that it was possible to rectify it, well, there's nothing better than that. Like, you know, wherever I go now, it's so interesting.
Wherever I go now, I'm among friends.

It's very strange.

And I have security people and they keep an eye on me.

And all the interactions I have with people are positive.

And I always take time for people, you know, because, well, if they're, they've been positively impacted by something that I've read or said and they're trying to get their lives together.

It's like, how about we encourage that? Right? Because more of that would be real good. And if we had enough of that, then more of that would be real good and real necessary.
Yeah. And so.
And good for everyone too. Hey, absolutely.
That's that abundance. It's like, you got your act together.
Great. That'll be real good for you.
Great for your girlfriend, Be great for your kids. Be great for your community.
Absolutely. And it's, well, you know, the Christian ethos, the emphasis is redemption one soul at a time.
Well, I'm a psychologist, you know. That's what I think.
One person at a time. Because everyone's connected way more intensely than we think.
And so there's no such thing as a trivial person. And there's no such thing as a trivial sin or a trivial accomplishment for that matter.
And so, and I know that. I know that.
I studied totalitarianism for a long time. I know how it comes about.
It comes about when everyone lies. It's about everything, all the time.
And the way you stop that is by not lying. And that's how it stops.
So what's it like? Painful and insanely exhilarating at the same time. And the balance has shifted over the years to the exhilaration.
Once I got on top of it, once I got my health under control, which required pretty stringent discipline. Like I eat steak.
And when I deviate from that, things start to fall apart around me pretty quick. Isn't it crazy that that alone is polarizing? You're eating all the steak.
You're contributing to the downfall of civilization. You're destroying the environment.
Don't you know that cows are the number one producer of... I know, I know.
We've got to stop eating meat, Jordan. We eat too much meat.
That's why the world's... Meanwhile, China's opening up coal plants every week.
It's hilarious. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, well, that's just another... Okay, so it's also surreal.
And that's one element. The diet thing, just alone, not just alone, is surreal is surreal i mean my daughter was so sick and now she's great isn't it crazy it's it's crazy well my wife is on this carnivore diet too and like it's been unbelievably good for her it's been it's unbelievably good for almost everybody yeah that's what's really not well it's it's it's it's crazy for the mind that's Oh, well your brain likes to run on ketones as it turns out yeah it really does i felt when i you know i've done it back and forth but when i'm on it strictly you know like when i go back to it one of the things i notice immediately is i have like an extra gear intellectually my brain works stamina yeah more stamina yeah we're gonna run a study and i can people.
Really? Yeah, because we don't know. But yeah, there's two studies planned.
One group will be people with immunological disorders, try carnivore, keto, and ordinary diet, random assigned machine. But we're also going to give them personality and IQ tests.
You should do it with junk food. I'd be fascinated to see people go the right way first and then try junk food.
It'd be good to do an ABAB design. Remember that? What was that? Super Size Me? Yeah.
Yeah, that documentary? Yeah. Where the guy just ate nothing with garbage? It's absolutely crystal clear that we eat too many carbohydrates.
The food pyramid is upside down. Yes, clearly.
And then on top of that, environmental pollutants and all the other issues we have with additives. And this, to me, is one of the more exciting things about this current administration is the Make America Healthy Again movement.
And, you know, eliminate fluoride from the water, eliminate all these. I think there's a new list

of ingredients that most of them are banned in Europe and a lot of other places and are legal in America. It's insanity and it doesn't make any sense.
And oftentimes the arguments don't even make sense as to why they continue to produce it because they produce the same products for Canada, for instance, where Canada has better laws when it comes to the additives. So they produce the ones in Canada where they don't have the negative, dangerous additives.
And yet they still make this argument that to force them to stop doing that in America will cause great economic harm. Well, it's clearly the case that we have an obesity, diabetes, and mental health epidemic, and the probability that all of those are associated with insulin resistance and immunological reactions seems to me to be certain.
And probably herbicides and pesticides as well. Yeah, well, there's a cascade of differential effects.
Undoubtedly, some people are more sensitive to those things as well. I was watching a documentary that I sent to Jamie about China.
And one of the – you know, China innovates at such a level, like at such a fascinating level that, you know, because they're integrated with the government, which I'm not saying is a good thing, but because of that, sort of unlimited growth, because the growth is designed for the state, like everyone's all involved in it. One of the things they're doing is integrating rice farms with crayfish farms.
So they figured out a way to stop using herbicides and pesticides and instead farm these two things together. So they have the rice and then they have the crayfish.
The crayfish feed off the excess material from the rice, but also keep the water nitrogen and carbon rich. And so the rice is more nutrient rich.
And so soil is more nutrient rich. And then they're bringing in fish and crabs as well.
So they're harvesting all of these different things that people eat along with the rice all in together. And they've created, you know, sort of like what they've done with regenerative agriculture, like white oaks pastures and, you farms and different regenerative agriculture establishments in America.
But they're doing it with rice to avoid using herbicides and pesticides. And hopefully the new administration under Kennedy will be able to figure out how to prioritize these things so some of them happen.
My concern, I suppose,

it's not my concern, a concern is that they'll try to do too many things at once, you know, and that's why I focused when we talked earlier today about insulin resistance.

Right, but there's so much to try to change.

Well, that's it, and you can't change at all. Like, that's, there's going to be resistance on

all fronts.

But one person at a time, as you're saying, like when you when you have this message and you talk to people about things that you've done that have made you healthier, that message resonates. And then one person at a time tries that their friends join in.
And the next thing you know, you've got a large percentage of healthy people that are listening to you, which is amazing. I seen that again and at the shows like one of the things that's also changed across the years is that the proportion of people who are in trouble at my shows is decreasing and partly that's because many of the guys who come um generally with their wife and often with a child have put themselves together.
Yes. And then they're happy about that and they tell me the story.
And so that's great. There's nothing better than traveling all around the world and having people come up to you and say that they weren't doing so well.
Right. And that their lives are way better now.
And thank you. Yes, that's beautiful.
That's a good deal. That's a great deal.
That's a good deal. Those are my favorite stories that I hear from people that listen to the podcast.
They're like, I've listened to the podcast, I lost 60 pounds, I started working out every day, I'm much healthier, I'm drinking a lot of water, I'm taking electrolytes and vitamins, and just my mental health has improved because of the daily exercise, I'm a different person, I'm on the right path. Yeah, well, so that's very interesting too, the fact that that's actually, you said those are the best stories that you can hear.
I love those stories. Well, it shows you something about non-hedonistic motivation.
It's like, imagine what you could have if you could have anything you wanted. Well, maybe, you know, your imagination would drift first to the hedonistic side or maybe the power side for that matter it's like no how about you can wander around anywhere in the world some isolated field with a castle on it in serbia and people that you've never seen will come up to you and say i was having a pretty damn dismal time of it all things things considered.
And I listened to what you wrote and said. And in consequence, I put my life together and their wife is standing beside them going, yeah, he's really in a lot better shape.
Thank you a lot. It's like, yeah, no, those, those are great.
That's a good deal. That's a great deal.
Yeah. So when you ask what it's like, well, it's like a lot of that yeah you know and and do you feel a burden

do you feel like a sense of responsibility that is at times overwhelming because of this responsibility that you have i think i felt more for a good while the pain of it it wasn't the responsibility well well the intense connection you have to these people that are well the responsibility,

responsibility makes you careful.

You know, how

careful are you? Pretty careful. Yeah.
Yeah. Why? Because you have a responsibility.
Yeah. But that's okay.
Yeah. Well, that's part of that additional sacrifice.
It seems natural to me. Okay.
What do you mean? That with, you know, the concept with great power comes great responsibility. It just seems normal.
Well, it has to be the case, right? I mean, as your field of opportunity expands, if your field of responsibility doesn't expand, you'll collapse. And you pay a higher price for stupidity at larger scales of opportunity.
Yes. Obviously.
Obviously. And so get your act together.
Yeah. And, you know, and is that a burden? Voluntarily undertaking responsibility isn't a burden.
It's an opportunity. Mm.
Right? That doesn't mean it's not easy, but easy. Like, I don't know what easy is.
What's easy? Pointless misery? That's not easy. Right.
A life with no meaning is one of the hardest things. Absolutely.
Right. So I guess the reason you pick up your cross and walk uphill is because that's the best thing you can do, all things considered.
I mean, that's why Christ says that his burden is light, that his yoke is light. It's like, huh, you're supposed to take up your cross and walk uphill towards death and hell, let's say, but that's light.
okay why because because there's no better pathway than voluntarily undertaken responsibility.

Well, definitely.

That's a psychologically impeccable statement.

There's no difference, statistically speaking, between thinking about yourself and being miserable.

It's self-consciousness.

They're the same thing.

Right.

Which is a giant problem with social media, right problem Accelerant to misery Yeah, sure, as soon as you're focused on You, the narrow you Now, you're self-conscious You stumble on stage, you can't play your musical instrument You can't ride a bike, you can't box You're not in the flow Why? Because you're not serving the right thing. Like when I go on stage, I remember, first of all, I have music at the beginning of my shows.
I've got a great musician. What are you playing? Well, I don't play it.
I have a musician from Cambridge. Yeah.
Yeah. And my son sometimes plays for us, which is really fun.
So it's not songs. It's just music with no lyrics? When Julian plays, he plays country music on a guitar and a couple of his own compositions.
So it's been fun to have him along because he's quite good at it. And so that's really great.
But the music, Dave, the guy who plays for me, he starts out, plays classical gas. He's kind of like a one-man band.
He plays classical guitar, but he's got electronic instruments around him, and he can fill up the theater or the stadium. He likes playing in stadiums.
And he ends with Inception on electric guitar, which is pretty hardcore rock, all things considered, and it gets everybody focused, you know. And then when I'm lecturing, I have a question, and I know that's a quest, and it's real, because I pick something important that I would like the answer to, and then I explore that with the audience.
And I'm not self-conscious. And the reason for that is it's not about me.
It's about trying to answer the question. And even more importantly, trying to get the damn question right to begin with.
Right? Because you've got to get the question right, man. That's the crucial issue.
Then the words come to you. What did I figure out? The spirit of your aim is what answers your prayers.
There's a brutal idea for you. Right, right, right.
Right. So if you want to defeat your wife, the spirit of power will tell you what to say.
Right. Yeah.
Right is right, man. Right.
There's a terrifying thing to know. So if you aim upward high enough, then the spirit of upward aim reveals itself to you in words.
That's right. In words and intent.
And that's exactly right. So it's great.
Like it's a lot. You know, you know that it's a lot.
yeah i had a different journey though my journey was like a slow drip

of fame which i think was very healthy. It's a good way to do it so you could adjust to it.
Yeah, well, you also mostly escaped from reputation savaging, right? I mean, you've had, I'm not saying completely because people have gone after you, but I got a real flurry of early hate around Bill C-16, which I was 100% right about, by the way. You were a lightning rod.
You were the patriarchy. You were the one to point to that was going to reinforce these established norms that are not supportive of the minimalized and marginalized communities, right? You were cruelty, right? You were the cruel white man.
What did that guy call you? Mean. Mean white man.
Mean white man, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is, by the way, you've already lost.
You're throwing pejoratives out there like that in a debate like that's the thing that i was talking about like when someone tries to establish insults and get you on your back it's offense it's offense to put you in a defensive position so that you cannot do your best yeah well it's also to pull the rug out from underneath you so you collapse your reputation permanently and that redounds to the person's credit also it's established a narrative to the audience that's listening to you now you have to look at this person under this light because i've i've done so eloquently described him as this thing yeah and then he will be defensive about that yeah because he doesn't why i'm not and then you look even more like that thing yeah. It's a very underhanded way of progressing.

Which is, I don't like that.

Not only do I not like that, I don't think that's necessary.

I don't think it's necessary as the person doing it.

I certainly don't think it's necessary to respond to that.

I don't think it does anyone any good.

I don't think it's good for society as a whole. And it's definitely not good for exploring ideas.

I wonder what you do with the psychopaths.

It's also you're trying to win versus trying to express your perspective with as much clarity and as much thought as possible. You're trying to do your very best to examine these things from a selfless perspective, from a truly objective perspective.
Well, it's a truly quest perspective, I think, right? Yes. So it's not exactly objective.
It's more like, because you don't have access to that, but what you can say is, well, I'm genuinely puzzled about this. Yes.
And I would genuinely like to search for the answer. Right.
Wouldn't it be ideal if you were having a debate where someone said something that you agreed with and you're like, wow, he's got a really good point. And you, instead of refuting that person, exploring that with them, which is one of the reasons I don't like debates per se.
I don't like debates. I like conversations.
Yeah. Because in conversations, if you don't have a predetermined narrative that you want to enforce, instead, you have your thoughts, you have your ideas, and you're not married to them.
Yeah. And these are just thoughts.
And you put them out there and then you can encounter a very unique human being who has a way of describing and thinking about things that will open your mind to new possibilities, which is what we all should strive for. We should all strive to be illuminated, to learn from new things.
But yet we close those off because that is a point that your enemy is trying to score well and you will not give them well it's also because people people aren't really very well versed in how to do this you know it's like so so one of the huge advantages of your podcast and of the podcast world in general i would say is that you model how to do that you know it's like and there's a there's an there's an intense religious ethos under that so okay so what does it mean you start without pride in humility it's like what the hell do i know right or or maybe more precisely there's probably some things i could still learn that would be beneficial. Okay.
You note your interest in a topic and your desire to know more. So that's the quest element.
It's like you're after something, right? You don't know what it is. Right.
But it's more development. It's more wisdom.
It's more information, right? Right. And you're not sure where it's going to be.
Right. Okay.
So now you're the sort of person who could learn and that has something to learn, and now you have a quest in mind. Okay, so now that's the frame for your actions.
Well, if you're talking to someone who's also doing that, well, then those are the words that come. Yeah.
Right? And they come in a compelling way to you and to the participant,

and in a way that's compelling enough so that they compel other people. That's the Holy Spirit, by the way.
That's that phenomenon from a religious perspective. That's exactly what it is.
Because that's like you sit before the talk and rehearse what words you're going to say. They just appear.
No, I never do. Right.
I don't think I should. No.
I don't. Well, sometimes it's a problem because you breach subjects that you weren't really prepared to talk about and you might not have a fully formed idea about it.
Yeah. You know, you're not.
Oh, if I thought about that, what would I have said differently? You know? Yeah, but you kind of have to find that out along the way. Yes.
Right. You know, and that way you're, you know, you have a right to stumble over your own ignorance.
For sure. How the hell do you know it's there before you reveal it? Well, not only that, I don't think the audience truly trusts you unless they feel authenticity in that quest, as it were, that desire to try to understand, like, what is it that you believe and why do you believe what you believe? And where did you come to these conclusions? How what what journey did you go on? What what ideas did you dismiss? What ideas were holding you back? What ideas did you realize were just a personal weakness that you were protecting yourself from reality? Protecting yourself from the reality of bad choices and past mistakes.
What are you doing to stop that from entering into your current state of mind? And that kind of thinking, people can mirror. And they can listen to you talk about these things and say, I do that.
Okay, I got to stop doing that. Okay, this is how I can clarify the way I view things.
And this is why I'm tripping myself up because I keep trying to win conversations. I keep trying to be right all the time, which is impossible, especially as a human.
It's elevating your status in the conversation as a consequence of abstract victory instead of increasing your wisdom and enhancing your reputation as a sojourner towards the truth. Yes.
And it's especially difficult for young people because you don't have enough life experience to have made these mistakes and correct them and learned and grown and have the humility to recognize that process. Right.
Instead, you see other people that are successful or whatever it is, and you want that right now. Yes.
And that's wrong, too, because you don't want that right now. You want to learn how to have that so that when you do get it, you can— You want to win the lottery, but you don't.
No, definitely not. You don't, right? Because everybody wants to win the lottery.
Yeah, right. That's one of the worst things that can happen to you.
Crazy. Well, and what young people have, they can listen and they can ask questions.
Right. And, you know, they say when the student is ready, the teacher will come.
Well, how does that play out in the world? Well, if you admit to your ignorance and you ask genuine stupid questions, you will rapidly encounter people who are more than happy to share their wisdom with you. Like people love having mentees, right? They like to be able to share their wisdom and you.
Like, people love having mentees, right?

They like to be able to share their wisdom and their experience.

Unfortunately, even if they don't have it.

Yeah.

That's where it becomes a problem.

Yeah.

The false prophet.

Yeah, well, that's right.

Well, that's a problem.

The false guru.

Yeah, right.

The people that don't have the answers to their own lives,

so they try to give other people answers to their lives.

Yeah, well, that's also the psychopath problem, isn't it? Yes. You know, what about the people who are feigning competence? Right.
Yeah, right. Well...
Ooh, that's a real problem. Yeah, it's a real problem.
It's a deadly problem and it's massively elevated on social media. Yes.
Well, it used to be a gigantic problem in martial arts, the fake martial artists.

There was a lot of them.

Sure.

Yeah.

That's the eternal parasite problem.

Yes.

Yeah. So organisms build up a storehouse of value, a carcass, let's say, like a whale carcass, for example.

And inevitably, the parasites move in to invade it, inevitably. And that's so consistent a pattern that sex evolved to stop it.
How so? Well, parasites can reproduce faster than their hosts because they're simpler. and so they can swarm the host quite rapidly, especially if the host clones itself because the host then stays identical physiologically across the generations.
So the parasites can optimize to colonize the host and that's the end of it. If you reproduce sexually, you mix your genes up.
You pay a price. You lose 50% of your specific genetic heritage.
But the advantage is you stay ahead of the parasites. So sex evolved to outwit the parasites.
And a huge part of what we're seeing around us, and this is probably a consequence at the lowest level, base level, we've had a phenomenal boom in wealth since World War IIi phenomenal we stored wealth everywhere like in harvard at a 53 billion dollar um endowment well the parasites found the wealth everywhere yeah and they've invaded like mad that's a great example of it parasites and academia are a great example what you're talking about unearn Unearned. Legacy media? Yes.
Science has been invaded that way. Yes.
The political, this is a major problem. Right.
And so how do you protect yourself against the parasitical exploiters? Well, you could recognize parasitical behavior, right? When everything gets chalked off to racism and white supremacy, when they start using these pejoratives, they start throwing those around for everything. You know, that's one of the ways you recognize, oh, you're a parasite.
You're not

really doing science. You're not really doing academics.
Well, one of the hallmarks of

identification from the clinical literature for the cluster B types, and so they have a

parasitical element, histrionic, narcissistic, psychopathic, criminal, right? That's cluster B. They use false claims of victimization to manipulate.
And so this is a particularly pernicious pathway because they parasitize empathy. Right.
And the left is unbelievably susceptible to that because the left is full of empathic people. And so those who parasitize empathy have a field day on the left.
Right. Right.
Because the left is generally thought to be more educated, more compassionate, kinder, looking out for marginalized people. That's part of the ethics of it all.
The ethic is pretty straightforward. Anything that cries is a baby.
It's like, no, some things that cry are monsters. Ooh.
Right, right. Well, let's take the case of Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish prime minister, the previous Scottish prime minister.
Any man who wants to can be a woman. It's like, okay, any man.
You mean any man, do you? Yeah. Have you encountered the nightmare men? Oh, they don't exist.
They're all victims. You just bloody well wait till you encounter one.
You'll change your story very rapidly. And for the naive and sheltered empaths of the radical left, they're either psychopaths, so they're wolves in cheap clothing, or they're people that are so naive that the, what would you say, Red Riding Hood's grandmother can definitely have his way with them.
Yes. That's literally something that I use as an example in my Netflix special.
I said, I think there are people that feel like they're trapped in a woman's body

and then there's also people that are out of their fucking mind they're crazy and that oh they're not throughout history but but what i pointed to all throughout history when you wanted to make like a killer in a movie scarier you put them in a dress like norman bates and psycho silence of the lambs and i used the big bad wolf i'm like it's literally a wolf dressed up like a woman. Like, that's literally what it is.
And they've somehow or another completely abandoned this one aspect of masculinity that's one of the more terrifying is the predatory pervert. And they've given the predatory pervert a privileged position right right and that's that's eve's that's eve's sin by the way one of the craziest things about it is they've completely abandoned the idea of the pedophile monster and then the monster and the sexual pervert.
Then the attacker, the assaulter.

The person who – when you give a guy, you say all you have to do is say you're a woman. Now you have access to whatever women's spaces.
All the women's spaces. You could victimize them.
You could fight them. You could beat them in sports.
You could dominate them in all games. It's bizarre.
Bizarre that no one's caught on to that. And that's the – That's for sure.
That's the weirder, that's the more cult-like and even, you could say, religious aspect of leftist thinking. It's an original sin.
Eve clutches the serpent to her breast. It's like, that's a serpent.
Right. It's poison.
You don't get to love it. Right.
Right. It's a monster.
Right. It's a guy wearing a dress with an erection in the women's room yeah yeah right or or worse yeah or worse or worse or a lot worse well right and and you know there there are no shortage of naive people who've never really encountered a monster and have no imagination for it and but there's also people that are willing to justify the monster's behavior because the monster is a part of a protected class now.
Yeah, well, that's part of that. Which is crazy.
The cluster B types use proclamation of victimization to parasitize. That's part of their clinical pathology.
Poor me. I get to do anything.
And they're so common. Yeah.
That's what's really crazy. And why is it that academia is overwhelmed by people like this? Is it because it's vulnerable to parasites? Sure.
Why not? It was a storehouse of unguarded value. Without any religious principles.
Yeah, there's that too. And with no real gatekeepers.
Right, right, right. Like the parasite problem is a very deep problem.

So I can even, maybe I can even give you an example of that.

This is a hard one, but I'll try.

In the Pinocchio movie, this also happens in Jonah, the story of Jonah.

Remember, Geppetto ends up in a whale.

It's like, what the hell? There's no explanation for that in the story.

It's like he's out looking for Pinocchio and now he's a whale well a whale is a giant carcass right and so when something dies its spirit what would you say its spirit is then in embedded in a carcass that's a good way of thinking about it that's why pinocchio has to go into the belly of the whale to free geppetto and finish his transformation is that when things deteriorate, right, you have these carcasses lying around with their dead spirits. The spirit of what gave rise to them is still inside there.
And the job is to go into the carcass and to revitalize the spirit that produced it and not to parasitize it. Right.
Boy, I don't know how you got that out of Pinocchio and the Whale. I'm trying to follow you on this one.
I'm like, wow. Geppetto ends up languishing in the whale.
Right. Right.
So imagine that there's a spirit in the universities that gave rise to these great, great storehouses of value. And that spirit has disintegrated.
And now it's inside the storehouse. That's a good way of thinking about it.
It's inside the storehouse. Your job as someone who wants to become real is to go into the storehouses of value that have been bequeathed to us by the past and to discover and revitalize the spirit that gave rise to them, not to parasitize them.
And when they parasitize them... They strip them to their bones and there's nothing left and they do it obviously right there's plagiarism there's all these different and all that stuff scientific papers yes and all that stuff gets gamed all that gets swept under the rug because the people that are doing it are part of the protected class yeah so they protect the parasites like this is my lamprey yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is my baby.

Like the woman from Harvard. They fired her, but they gave her

an equal-paying job. It could also be,

Joe, and might as well get

in trouble for this, too. Let's go.

Well, because

women are more agreeable,

they're

more prone to manipulation by

psychopaths because their

primary ethos is is nurturing yeah for a naive woman every victim is a baby it's like fine 90 of them are victims you could even say that about criminals you go to a run-of-the-mill prison and there's going to be people in there and you heard their lives you think oh my god no wonder right and then there's another core group that's like oh i see i see who you are you're you're uh if i saw one if i saw inside your skull for five seconds i'd have post-traumatic stress disorder i never. Those people don't exist.
It's like, oh, oh, yes, they exist. Yeah, they exist.
Yeah. Yeah.
And they're very good at crying like infants. Yeah.
Right. And then the mothers, the naive mothers come flooding out.
The women dominated the universities from the 1960s onward. It's like, in come the parasites.
And they're enabled. And what are they enabled by? One of the more fascinating things to me is when parasites are confronted and they laugh.
Like one of the things about academic parasites, when you challenge their beliefs, that's contempt. You don't.
You don't know what you're talking about i saw this with the anti-semitism on campus thing when women were these women were confronted by these statements like death to the jews on campus and whether or not this this is hate speech and i saw it with uh i believe it was josh howley was yeah yeah what the woman was he was saying some women can give birth and and some some men can give birth as well like some men have period like this this kind of like and i guess you're you're this line of questioning is very transphobic and opens people up to violence right right with a with a laugh with a laugh and a smile, a diminishing of your position by mockery. It's contempt, yeah.
What they're saying doesn't make any fucking sense to anybody rational, but they're so embedded in this system that they really believe that they have the kind of control over Congress that they have over their classmates. This is like standard behavior for them, mocking and dismissing other ideas that are counter to theirs.
Right. Well, and there's plenty of reward for that disseminated in the universities.
Yes. And so that's part of their- How do you fix that? With Peterson Academy? Yeah.
No, I'm serious, man. I believe you.
I believe you. It's not like I'm thrilled about the fact that Harvard is having a war with Donald Trump.

And I'm less thrilled with the fact that I hope Donald Trump wins.

I worked at Harvard.

It was a great place.

I'm not happy at all that these institutions have become what they've become.

And if I could see a way forward to revitalizing them, then, but what are you going to do? Like the administration took over the universities and parasitized the tuition fees and the tax dollars. Then the woke mob parasitized the administration.
And here we are. Now, what are you going to do about that? All these tenured professors who are progressive, and they're way less progressive than the administrators, are you going to fix that? How? How? Even in principle.
I don't see it how. So what we decided to do, we've been working on this for 10 years, is like, well, what do universities do? Well, they educate.
They offer lectures. They have a place where people can congregate.
They help people mature. They explain the world.
They encourage people to aim up. They teach people to write.
My son runs this essay app. We're trying to teach kids to write.
We're integrating that with Peterson Academy so they can learn to think. That's our solution.
Yeah. Will it work? The world's a pretty dynamic place.
It's working real well at the moment. Well, people need some sort of an alternative to that system.
If you recognize what that system is, especially if you're participating in it and you're opposed to all of it and you're trapped in it and it's vital to your success that you accept some of it, how else can you get through? How can you get this degree and maintain some level of sovereignty over your mind and your ideas? It's a horrible trap. and I've met a lot of people that I think are very rational, reasonable people that get at least some of that stuck in their head.
Oh, yeah. Well, when we did some research trying to see what predicted politically correct authoritarianism, it was the last piece of research I did before my research lab ceased to be a viable entity, let's say.
What predicted, so politically correct authoritarianism was that like hyper-compassionate leftism, but conjoined with willingness to use force to put the doctrines forward, force and fear. So it's tyrannical compassion.
That's exactly that. What are the predictors? Low verbal intelligence.
That's the first one. Second one was being female.
The third one was having a feminine temperament. The fourth one was ever having taken even one politically correct course.
Wow. Yeah, right.
And so I've thought that through for a long time. It's like, well, what's the relationship because that's that's a crucial one the the female dominated disciplines are the most woke by far why so i think it's because of that basic ethos of compassion all who cry are babies well look that's the right default for women yeah you know like wise women my is one of these women.
She was a very good mother. She never thought adult men were babies.
Like one of the things that's quite striking about my wife is that if you're a useless man, she doesn't feel sorry for you. You're not a baby.
Now, she's really good at taking care of babies. And so she got to be, she's discriminating in her empathy.
And we're in a situation now where people think that indiscriminate empathy is a virtue. That's Eve's sin.
See, Eve, literally, Eve wants to put the feminine ethos at the top of the hierarchy of value. That replaces God.
Right? And that causes the fall. And then Adam, he's such a cuck.
That's exactly it, is that he goes along with her. He doesn't stand up and tell her that maybe she shouldn't be listening to poisonous serpents.
He doesn't. He consumes with her what she delivers so that she'll be his friend, because you know how useful men like that are.
And then when the fall happens, he complains to God that God made Eve and cursed him with her. That's the story.
So it's not just women, and we've got to get this straight, women with their drive towards indiscriminate compassion so that even the serpents are their children. It's men too who won't say, they always say, yes, dear, whatever you want.
Yes, dear. Weak men.
Weak men who enable the, who don't help the women set boundaries. Now, you got to do that as a man, you know, like when you have a, when you and your wife have a baby, for the first nine months, every time the baby cries, it's right, right right you respond to a baby's cries as if it's right 100% of the time because human infants are so dependent and on utterly unable to fend for themselves so that sets up a very powerful feminine dynamic it's like if it cries take care of it okay so what are the men for it's if it cries, take care of it.
Okay, so what are the men for? It's like, if it cries, take care of it. Accept that.
That's a false cry. And you see that with kids.
They'll start playing with that by the time they're 9 or 10 months old. Right, right.
Yes, of course. And so you differentiate.
It's like, oh, no, that's not a baby. That's a snake.
Well, are you sure it's not a baby? It's like, nope, nope, snake, for sure. Snake, poisonous snake, in fact.
Right. Well, I'm feeling pretty sorry for it.
It's like, save your compassion for the truly needy. And leave the snakes to me.
And Adam doesn't do that. Is it a function of a society that's almost, I want to say say too successful and empathetic and there's too much abundance that you have more of this crying? Look, no, but you have more parasitical behavior.
Right. Why? Well, everyone's got pretty comfortable because we've been in a high trust society for a long time.
It's like, oh, everybody's trustworthy. It's like, no, a few people in a few countries are trustworthy most of the time.
And that's really hard. Right.
Right. And there's stringent preconditions.
Right. So everyone's trustworthy.
And now there's all these piles of wealth lying around everywhere. It's like parasite dream, especially when it's unguarded.
Yeah. And so it's enabled by the women and unguarded by the men.
And both are at fault, right? And you see that in the Genesis account too. It's like Eve clutches the serpent to her breast, but Adam fails to help her distinguish.
Plenty of these parasitic men as well. Oh, yeah.
Well, they're the worst. The worst men cry victim and look for sympathy from women.
There was a famous mass murderer, no, a serial killer who did that. The lawyer, Bundy, Ted Bundy.
You know what his trick was? He had a VW, if I remember correctly. He had a cast that he could take on and off.
So he put his hood up. Maybe it wasn't a VW.
He put his hood up because his car didn't work.

And he did it around places where he knew there were young women. And then he enticed them to stop because, well, poor Ted, because he's crippled and his car doesn't work.
And then, and then, well, and then the woman learned very painfully the difference between a monster and a baby. Right.
Brutal. He was a bad guy.
There are some bad people. And a fair number of them like to dress in women's clothing, let's say.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's really uncomfortable for people if they have this idea that's embedded in their consciousness about what's going on to accept that reality.

Of course.

In fact, accepting that when that reality is thrust upon you unawares, you develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

Right?

Because it's naive people who encounter malevolence develop PTSD.

That's the pathway.

So if you want to make your children susceptible to PTSD, like all these kids that are triggered by everything, make them extremely naive and then let them encounter malevolence.

Right.

Because you're supposed to teach them to handle serpents.

Right.

To identify them and handle them.

And that means they have to learn about the nature of the world and the girls to differentiate between snakes and babies. Yeah.
Right, right. And babies and men.
And the man who worms his way into your dreams because he's a dependent infant, he's a snake. And your sympathy is wasted on him.
Yes, there certainly are. Man, I tell you, those riots that used to gather around me you know when base that was mostly 2017 before i stopped speaking at universities mostly um the women were pretty bad harpy city man and this self-righteous feminine toxic compassion just screeching at the top of its lungs but the men that were with them oh my god i didn't even i I didn't want to be within three feet of them.
It's like, I'll be your friend. You see those people on the net talking to children.
I'll be your friend. When your family abandons you, I'm here for you.
They don't understand. Not like me.
We could be closer than anybody has been with you. That just barely scrapes the surface of awful.
Like awful is a long, long ways down. So part of what's happened in the universities, and it's a terrible thing to say, well, there's a lot of things.
storehouse of wealth, radical increase in the number of students served, radical feminization of the institutions, and weakness on the part of the men who should have been guardian of the gates. All of that.
And is it repairable? I don't think so. Jesus.
I think once the parasites have the corpse, what are you going to do? Are you going to bring Lazarus back from the dead? You know, I don't think so. I think it's time for something new.
You need academic dewormer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, that's what critical thinking was supposed to be, Joe. So you think it needs to...
So something needs to emerge, like your academy, as an alternative. Well, the thing is, it already is emerging, right? Because the universities...
Of course they're going to do this. As they spiral downward, they're going to turn to cost-cutting.
Well, they're not going to cut the administration, obviously, because they make the decisions about who's going to be cut. So they're going to turn to low cost alternatives to having courses.
And so they're already doing that. Let's put our courses online.
Well, fair enough, except they're terrible. They're terrible.
We got the best professors and the best production quality and so you've designed it for online versus just just having a power percent right we have a plan mapped out no we'll have a full the full equivalent of a four-year distribution of courses we'll have that within we think two years something that. Four new courses a month at the moment.
We're putting out 32 hours of original content a month. It's very, well, people can go look.
It looks great. And that's because it's great.
Michaela and her husband, they're unbelievably picky about the professors and about everything.

They watch the social media.

They watch the look.

They watch the images.

They watch the ads.

You know, we're trying to do everything 100%.

And then we're trying to make it as inexpensive as possible.

Soon we're raising money because we want to translate it into multiple languages.

Because wouldn't it be lovely to offer that to the developing world? Sure. With free market economics instead of Marxist economics, so that people could learn to be entrepreneurs.
That'd be great for Africa, especially if we could get energy prices down. Then maybe everybody could be rich.
And not just materially rich, right? Because that's not enough. If you're materially rich and you're spiritually poor, your money just serves to destroy you and fast.

So that's not wealth.

Right.

And yeah, right.

You know that.

You've met people that that's happened to.

Oh, yeah.

A lot.

Money is not the cure for poverty.

No, you're naive if you think that.

No.

It's not the cure for being discontent either.

But it does offer you freedom if you use it. No.
It's not that you're happy for being discontent either. But it does offer you freedom

if you use it correctly.

And opportunity.

And opportunity.

So it gives you some relief from stress,

which can give you some kind of happiness.

But it's not the goal.

No.

No, well, it has to be put in

an ethical framework

or it'll just...

Look, money's opportunity. That's a way of thinking about it.
And if you're going to the devil and you have money, you just go to the devil faster. I saw that lots of times in my clinical practice.
And, you know, maybe if you're aiming upward, then money can be a force multiplier. And it can be.
You know, you can make a good... You can establish a solid institution that provides mentorship and opportunity for people.
And actually, that's the most fun to do that. It's by far the most fun to do that, to make something of genuine value.
Why wouldn't you do that? Only if you were cynical and unable, why not make something that works? That's much more entertaining, all considered. And so, and we're trying to do this with ARC, and it's going real well, you know, and you were very helpful there too, you know, that podcast that we did, there were lots of reasons that the climate apocalypse narrative has been falling radically apart, but that podcast that you and I did was definitely one of them, you know, and I've interviewed a lot of good scientists who, they're not climate skeptics.
You know, that's a stupid term. And Lomberg's a good example of that.
It is. Climate denier is right up there with vaccine.
That's such a manipulative phrase. Yeah.
It's like, oh, you're like the Nazis who object to Jews being baked. That's your argument, is it? Really? That's your argument, you scum rat.
You're going to use that as a moral lever. That's your level of ethos.
That's your argumentation. You're going to take the worst slur you can possibly imagine, and you're going to use it to devastate someone's reputation publicly, because you don't have a leg to stand on, because you're the kind of tyrant who uses fear to monger power that's you there's a psychological interpretation of the climate apocalypse scandal and it's if it and it's killing it's it's it's it's destroying germany it's destroying the uk didn't germany like didn't they shut down a bunch of their nuclear.
Yeah, and they replaced them with leg night coal. Right, the dirtiest burning coal.
So they're in a situation where they pollute more for more unstable energy that's delivered by tyrants. While outsourcing their industry to China, it's a very bad idea, right? who's building coal plants at a rate that is so fast that everything the West does to ameliorate carbon is utterly irrelevant, utterly irrelevant.
Yeah, and that's an uncomfortable truth, that these climate cultists just don't, they don't address. They won't even entertain any information contrary to the narrative.
They won't even let it

in. Of course not, because it upsets the game.
Most of the people that are involved in the game

don't even understand the game. They don't even understand what's really not just at stake, but the actual facts that they're arguing for.
Well, Carney's a good example of this in Canada, to return to that. Yeah.

You know?

Is he going to win?

It seems like he's... The polls certainly indicate that.

Yeah.

And maybe with a majority government.

And I can see why.

Canadians were accustomed to having everything go pretty well.

And we could be morally superior to you Americans,

because that was also fun.

And we'll never forego that opportunity. And Trump has provided it in spades in the last month so we look at carney and we don't pay any attention to politics and we certainly don't read his goddamn book and so we see someone who looks like a banker from the 1990s when everything was just fine in canada and canadians were just as rich as americans and the whole country was stable and peaceful and we think well you know we kind of made a mistake on Justin turned out he was a little incompetent a little narcissistic and maybe we shouldn't have voted for him just because he legalized marijuana because that's actually what brought him into power the first time and so we kind of made a mistake but now look we've learned and we're not going to be fooled by narcissistic pretenders and Mark Carney used to be governor of England, you know, and that's pretty good.
That's a pretty good resume. And it certainly looks like that.
And yet he believes that 75% of the fossil fuels in the world should be left in the ground and that there's nothing that should guide your purchasing decision by force other than decarbonization. But it seemed to me, at least from an observer from afar, that Pierre was gaining steam.
Oh, yeah. It looked like he was going to win.
Oh. And they seemed to have taken the win right out of his sails.
Well, two things happened. Trudeau resigned.
Oh, yeah, the Liberals were headed for extinction. It was going to be the worst defeat of a governing party in Canada ever.
They might have lost their official party status. So it was, they were done.
Well, they pivoted, brought in Carney, who'd been advising Trudeau. He's put himself up as an outsider, a competent outsider, a lot of private experience in the private domain, you know, a steady hand at

the helm. It's like you were Trudeau's economic advisor for 10 years, 10 years, and there's going

to be more of the same under you. And now you're pretending to be an industrialist, even though

you were one of the leaders, the world's leading authorities on DEI, ESG, and net zero. That's Mark Carney.
All you have to do is read his book, which people don't, of course, because it's a book. You know, first three chapters will do the trick.
Well, now, either he's decided that every single thing he ever believed was wrong right to the core and hasn't apologized or let anyone know that, and now he's actually Mr. Industry, which is how he's presenting himself to Canadians.
Or he believes what he's always believed. Or he's a wolf wearing grandma's dress.
Yeah, he's a benevolent wolf. Well, that's why the wolf wears grandma's dress, isn't it? It's like, there's no one nicer than me.
So how does Canada correct course? Well, people either correct course by waking up or by experiencing severe pain. And it looks to me like we've chosen the severe pain route.
You know, we already make 60 cents. We already produce 60 cents to every dollar you Americans produce, even though we were at parity 10 years ago.
And so after four more years of Kearney, we could easily have that down to 50 cents. Spiraling housing prices, a lot of social instability in Canada, especially since after October 7th.
Do you think that that's social? All my Jewish friends in Toronto are terrified. That's not fun.
I don't like seeing that. No, it's awful.
It's awful. And all those psychopaths who've been parading around their moral virtues since October 7th, they're plenty emboldened.
Plenty. Plenty.
And I'll give you a little example of Canada. So we had the English leadership debate a week ago.

And the powers that be who organized the debate, the legacy media types, with CBC radically involved, couldn't figure out how to exclude rebel media. You know that right-wing news, kind of tabloidy news group from Canada, Ezra Levant, who's been buzzing about for 10 years, causing trouble like a right-wing tabloid journalist, which is what he is.
Well, they didn't want him in the press scrum for the leaders after the debate. So they cancelled it.
They cancelled the journalists' interviews of the four leading contenders for Prime Minister in Canada. Because some right-wing tabloid journalists, they've had a newspaper or a media empire for 10 years, I don't care what you think of it.
It's not the point. The point is they cancelled...
They cancelled the journalist scrum after the English language debate. That's so fascinating.
and no one complained that but that doesn't even make sense like if you're in if you're a presidential candidate and you're in count or prime minister candidate and you're encountering someone that has an opposing perspective you should have really good answers that's oh look if look, if you're guys leading, why ask questions? That's the legacy media in Canada. It's the CBC.
Right. It's state-funded, right? Right to the core.
1.4 billion. Think about this, Joe.
This is our bloody state media. It's so funny.
$1.4 billion in direct government subsidy and $600 million in federal advertising per year. $2 billion to the cbc website on youtube you look at their last 20 videos i'll guarantee that not a single one of them has more than 200 views right which means the people who made the video clips didn't watch them right for that's what you get for two billion dollars now everyone in Canada who's older than 55 watches legacy media.
Right. And Poliev said he defunded the CBC.
So you can imagine they're not exactly covering him in a positive way. I watched the debate where he kept getting talked over.
Yeah. Jagmeet Singh.
Fascinating. He's such fun with his pink turban.
Yeah. He's such a fashion icon.
Luckily, he's going to lose his own seat and his party is going to be devastated. That's the socialists.
They're going to be devastated so badly that they won't have official party status. But it's incredible to watch that in Canada where I've always thought at least your discourse is much more polite.
Yeah. Was.
Was. Yeah.
Parasites. We've got a lot of – there's a lot of mopping up to do in canada well and our the country and you know the man who started the reform party in canada so that was the populist end of the conservative movement 20 years ago maybe a little longer eventually reunited with the conservatives ernest manning or preston manning son of an an Alberta premier, he was premier of Alberta for like 40 years.
He wrote an article in the Globe and Mail, which was the, it's the Canadian liberal establishment newspaper. And I mean, liberal by the classic, you know, old school, small L liberal centrist sort of newspaper, saying that Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan should have an immediate

constitutional convention immediately on Carney's ascension to the throne. Quebec doesn't want pipelines traversing its territory.
And Quebec, one of the, I don't know if you noticed this, but one of the participants in the debate was a Canadian separatist. We literally have a Canadian federal party, federal, localized in Quebec, whose stated intent is to break up the country.
Hasn't that always been the case with Quebec, though? For a good while, it was provincial. Right.
I mean, they had a provincial party, like a state party, right? Okay, fair enough. Have your state separatist party.
It's for your state. Oh, no.
We want to have a national party. We want to be represented in the House of Commons as separatists.
Oof. Yeah, so the country's in...
It's very sad. And I was hoping...
They could be the 51st state. Yeah, well, then...
Well, that's what happened. So two things.
Yes. Back to that.
That was the big one. Carney showed up just in the nick of time to save the burning damsel from the train tracks or whatever the hell it is.
The rhetoric. And then Trump.
He just timed it so badly. And he didn't know.
He didn't know what it would do. He didn't know.
But that's also. how do you not know that people have national pride yeah he he knew that but he didn't know what the electoral consequences would be he didn't know that that would shift them to the liberals so radically and he's going to pay for that because once carney is elected if that happens trump will not have a more seasoned enemy in the West.
Boy. Right.
Carney is very well connected. Very.
Especially in Europe and the UK. Very well.
So and. And Europe and the UK is a mess.
Yeah, you might say that. Oh, that's for sure.
We've highlighted all the arrests in the UK over social media posts. And most people have no idea.
Constantine Kissin is great with explaining all that to people. It's so funny when he compares it to Russia.
He says how many people got arrested in Russia. How many people you think got arrested in the UK? And most people are, oh, none, right? No, 4,000.
What? Oh, yeah, it's's unbelievable there's videos all over the internet you just see this everywhere so they've implemented these 20 mile an hour speed limits everywhere and so 20 miles an hour yeah yeah because joe that's a bike you don't really need a car like what are you doing that's so important that you need a car like if i have to go to a to a climate meeting, well, I get a car. But the peasants, they don't really need cars.
They don't need heat either. Not that much heat.
Maybe they can stop grandma from freezing. One of the fascinating things about Bernie Sanders and his anti-oligarch tour is they're doing it on private jets.
Yeah, exactly.

So we were in the UK not long ago for this ARC conference, and we rented a truck. And whenever it went over 20 miles an hour, it beeped at you just like seatbelt things beep.
Oh, God. 20 miles an hour.
If you go more than two miles an hour over the speed limit and you get caught then that knocks one-third of your license off if you do that three times you don't have a license for a year beep beep beep beep climate climate knocking climate yeah yeah you can tell They use fear and comp use fear and and uh compulsion and they hate comedians and cars right there's tyrant checklist hates cars check no sense of humor check uses fear check uses force check psychopath right i hate to end this on a bleak note but let's end it on a positive note. Okay.
Okay. So what's positive? Young people are flocking back to churches across the West and more to the conservative churches.
And the only thing we have to buttress us into the future against the Islamists and the Marxists and the nihilists and the hedonists is our return to our core traditions. Without that, we're done.
And so that's happening. And in big numbers.
And so that's really quite something. The back has been broken of the climate apocalypse narrative.
There's plenty of mopping up to do, but half the people know that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark and that that particular apocalypse is probably not worth giving up all your freedoms for. We've seen a lot of progress on the ARC front, like a lot of the things that we've been putting forward, the better story, that's a return to the foundations of Western civilization that made our society the sort of place that dispossessed people will go to voluntarily.
There's lots of people who are starting to understand that that's seriously worth preserving. right energy executives are waking up as far as I can see to the fact that

they could help the world's poor in a serious way That's seriously worth preserving, right? Energy executives are waking up, as far as I can see,

to the fact that they could help the world's poor in a serious way.

And if they want to moralize, that would be a...

If they want to act morally, that would be a good place to start.

There's lots of people who are working to produce abundance.

Your country, the U.S., you guys are unbelievably good at that.

Way better than any other country in the world.

And you generally deliver in times of crisis and you might just do that again and so and then i would say underneath all that you know you said you you're pretty happy to encourage people you're very happy when you hear that your show is being helpful to people and there's lots of people who are consciously trying to aim up and more and more of them all the time and if enough of enough of enough people do that we won't need to learn through pain and we can bring abundance everywhere in the world and we can make the next 50 years an unparalleled success.

And we need the faith and courage of Joshua and Caleb to do that.

Of course, the future is full of giants and disasters.

But if we aim up and we speak the words of truth that make good order out of chaos, then anything's possible. So, all right.
Beautiful. Always enjoy this.
Always enjoy our conversations. I appreciate you very much.
I appreciate our friendship. It's been great knowing you all these years and watching this crazy journey that you've been on.
I'm glad you're doing great.

Yeah, Joe.

Same thing for you, man.

Thanks a lot.

And thanks for your help with Peterson Academy, too.

My pleasure.

Very helpful.

All right.

Much appreciated.

Bye, everybody.

Bye. Thank you.