#1769 - Jordan Peterson

Joe Rogan Widecast, check it out! The Joe Rogan experience. concentration. Uh before you could really manage it. I think there's mental endurance that comes with uh anything that you do on a day to day basis, whether it's writing whether it's uh doing podcasts, whether it's uh doing stand up comedy. I think anything we have to think and and manage like complex ideas and manipulate your language and your the way you're speaking and and be able to engage in the dance between two people.

I think you gotta do it all the time. I I I think if you just do it every now and again. Like especially like if you took time off of speaking to people. Like if you hadn't talked to anybody in a long time and then you talked have you ever done that? Well, you haven't talked to anybody in a long time and then you talk to them?

It feels odd. It feels awkward. Mm-hmm.'Cause I think there's like a thing where you have to get used to it. You gotta get used to Yeah, what I found that was particularly the case with the podcasts is that it's hard to do that. Sporadic. Yeah. Um you also g lose that rhythm of preparation. Because you get well, I I did. I I'm not sure. How do you prepare for your podcast? Like if you have an author come on.

I usually read their book. It depends on um within like I'm on I have two books that I'm reading right now that are future uh people that are coming in February. So there's a lot ahead. Yeah, they'll be well, you know, it's like one of'em is a climate change book and it's it's intense. And so it's requiring a lot of thinking and then I have to like look at the criticisms of this guy and criticisms of the work and, you know

you know, who believes that in ten years Miami's gonna be underwater? Who believes that this is probably hyperbole and that it's a a gross exaggeration and the reality is you know, the world sort of always goes through these cycles of change but human beings are definitely having an effect on it, but a small effect compared to cows

And other other things. It's like it's hard to sort out. The climate change one is a weird one. So that one's'cause there's no such thing as climate, right? Climate and everything are the same word. And I r that's what bothers me about the climate change types. It's like this is something that bothers me about it technically. It's like climate is about everything. So okay.

But your models aren't based on everything. Your models are based on a set number of variables. So that means you've reduced the variables, which are everything, to that set. Well how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation if it's about everything?

And that's not just a criticism. That's like if it's about everything, your models aren't right. Because your models do not and cannot model everything. Aaron Powell What do you mean by everything when you say Well when but that's what that's what people who talk about the climate apocalypse Claim in some sense. We have to change everything. It's like everything, eh? Okay, what and the same with the word environment.

That word doesn't mean it it means so much that it actually doesn't mean anything. Like when you say everything, in a sense that's meaningless, right? Well, what are you pointing to? Well I'm pointing to everything. Well what's the difference between the environment and everything? There's no difference. What's the difference between climate and everything?

Well there's there's no difference. So this is a crisis of everything? It's like no it's not. Or if it is, well if it really is, then we're done because we can't fix everything. Well specifically. C the what what human beings are doing that's causing the earth to warm.

Right, right. But you have to include all these factors in the models to determine that. All these factors. Well what can you not include? Well then by deciding what you don't include, you decide which set of variables are cardinal.

And you have to make that decision in some sense before you even generate the models. This is a big problem. It's it's partly it's not the only reason, but this There's another reason that another problem that bedevils climate modeling too, which is that as you stretch out the models across time, the errors increase. Radically.

And so maybe you can predict out a week or three weeks or a month or a year, but the farther out you predict, the more your model's in error. And that's a huge problem when you're trying to model over a hundred years, because the error is compound just like interest. And so at some point it's all error. In fact, it's already the case that even if the climate models are right.

The error bars are so wide by a hundred years out that we'll never be able to measure the effects of the changes we're making now. We'll never know if the changes we're making, you know, to save the climate actually worked. We can't measure it. The errors are too large a hundred years out. What do you mean by the errors? Like what errors? Well pr prediction error. So look um

Imagine that you're going to predict how your life goes. Okay. Well, you can kind of do that. No, you kinda know that tomorrow is going to be somewhat like today. Okay, but how much is next year's day gonna be like today? Well Somewhat, but less certainly because you might get sick, for example. Th and over and then over a five year period, well

There's much more that has to be accounted for, and so the probability that your prediction is correct decreases as you move forward in time. That's why we discount the future. Right? So if you ask people, you want five dollars an hour or do you want five dollars in a month? They're going to say, well I want five dollars now.

Well, you think, Well, why is that? Well, if I have it now it's certain a month, well there's a lag in there and anything could happen. And you can play games with people this way and because people differ in the degree to which they discount the future? Because how seriously to take the future is actually

a near computationally impossible task to solve. How m seriously should I take the future? Well it depends on how uncertain things are. How uncertain things are are they? Well I don't know. Classic example. There's a chicken. And the farmer goes out every day and feeds the chicken. And the chicken thinks, Man, I've got a good friend in this farmer. And then one day it's dinner time, and the chicken's the main course. Right. And so

The chip poor chicken used induction to derive certainty. The farmer comes every day. He didn't realize there was a massive flaw in his theory. And one day that flaw reveals itself and everything falls apart. Well that makes a sense that makes sense when you're talking about chickens and farmers. But when you're talking about human beings, I'll give you five dollars an hour or five dollars in a week. Which one do you want?

And people say five dollars in a week. Then I say, Okay, I'll give you five dollars an hour, I'll give you ten dollars in a month. It's like hmm, okay. ten dollars in a month. Okay, I'll give you five dollars now or I'll give you seven hundred fifty in two weeks. Or I'll give you fifty dollars now, I'll give you five hundred dollars in ten years.

And so imagine you do that with all sorts of amounts over all sorts of time frames. Okay. Then you can compute a discount curve, which is how much people devalue the the amount the amount a dollar is worth as it progresses out into the future. And what you generally find is that impulsive people discount the future more heavily. That's actually the definition of impulse.

And you might think, well, the impulsive people are wrong. It's like the ant and the grasshopper, you know, the grasshopper's fiddling all summer and then he starves to death in the winter and the good old ant who packed away the the supplies is he's doing fine in the in the winter. He sacrificed the present to the future and isn't that sensible.

Yeah, it's sensible. You should save. Except, well what if it's nineteen twenty in Germany, nineteen twenty three, let's say, and you're you're in a period of hyperinflation. It's like Grasshopper won.'Cause he spent all his money before it became worthless. So should you save or not? The answer is it depends. And then there's a further answer, which is It depends on things that you actually can't predict.

And so it's it's actually a computationally impossible problem to figure out how much to discount the future. It's actually impossible, which is why we vary so much in it. Part of that reason is that the The magnitude of our prediction error increases the farther out we predict. Yeah, but the grasshopper and the ant analogy doesn't work. 'Cause they're based it on food. And the food that the ant supplied and and stored and and stocked away is still good.

Inflation doesn't mean jack shit to an ant because they don't deal with currency. Well the other way an ant can be a good thing. But you know what I'm saying? Well, fair enough, but I mean no ants also ant colonies also have wars. And so it's just as possible that the ant will store up all this food and another ant colony will move in and that'll be the end of that. And th th this is a huge problem. Well, you're very unlikely to be robbed and pillaged

Unless you have wealth. Mm-hmm. Right. And so so the ability to store wealth across time to to decrease the risk of the catastrophes of future. That's a huge that's the that's the problem that in some sense that civilization set out to solve. How can we stabilize things over a long term enough to make long term investing a reasonable proposition? Here's a here's a positive spin-off of that.

So I worked on the UN committee that wrote the Secretary General's report on sustainable development. I worked on the Canadian subcommittee to be technically accurate, and I was by no means the head of that. I worked with the team that worked on that, but we We edited and wrote and rewrote a fair bit of the document. And so I did a lot of work in the background, learning what I needed to learn to work on that committee with some degree of

what would you say? Uh qualification. I read maybe two hundred books on ecological development and economic development, the relationship between the two and two hundred books. Oh yeah, yeah. It took uh it was over about a two year period. And so And uh a lot of it was on oceanic management uh because I did realize that one thing we're doing that's extraordinarily stupid on the ecological front is

destroying all the marine life within forty miles of the shores. And all the marine life is with for within forty miles of the shores. Like you think the oceans, they're vast. Like yeah, but they're empty. Except for where the sun can shine to the bottom, and that's the forty to two hundred miles, say on the coastal shelves. And we've like trawled those bare like seven times. No is a catastrophe. So but that was the only real environmental catastrophe.

that I encountered in all that work that I thought was both credible and addressable. We know how to fix that. You make marine protected areas like national parks that you need about fifteen percent of the total coastal territory really protected. And that

solves that problem essentially. And then everybody has fish because the fish they don't just stay there, they they move around. You can have your cake and eat it too, with marine protected areas. But mostly what I learned and this was really cool was that This was so cool and I really believe it's true. Ah The fastest way to make the planet sustainably green and ecologically viable is to make poor people as rich as possible as fast as we possibly can.

Because the thing about poor people is that well, first of all they live in They're not resource efficient. They use a lot of resources to produce very, very little outcome. And so that's a problem. Slash and burn agriculture, for example. But even more importantly When you're insecure on a day-to-day basis, you don't know where your next meal is coming from.

You're not paying attention to the broader environment, that hated word, around you. And you can't even really worry about your children's future in some real sense because like no no you don't understand. Lunch is the future. We don't have lunch, we're hungry and that goes on for like a month. We're dead. That's the future. So what happens you if you can get resources to the poorest section of the population, as soon as they get to the point where they have

some hope of a genuine future, especially for their children, they immediately become concerned about broader environmental considerations. And then the attempt to make the environment habitable and sustainable that comes up of its own accord at a grassroots level and spreads everywhere. And the evidence for that is clear. And so this is one of the things that really b bothered me about COP twenty six.

So and that was based in part on this What is that? That was the the big climate uh meeting in in the UK just a few months ago. You know, the one where all the COVID rules were suspended so the important people could talk about important things. Any in anyway, any case I thought. If the politicians who were discussing environmental sustainability were serious, especially the left wing one,

And I say especially because the left wing ones always say, Well we care about the poor and dispossessed. It's like, do you really? When push comes to shove, it's like is it the environment or poor people if your idea is that we have to limit growth to save the planet?

If we limit growth, poor people starve. Because whenever we put limits on economic development, who suffers? The rich? Are you are you really? That's what you think? And you're on the left, you think if you put limits on economic development, the rich will suffer. That's runs contrary to every theory that your whole political philosophy is based on.

You put limits to growth on, the poor stay poor or get worse. Doesn't matter because the planet has too many people on it anyways, which it most certainly does not. If you are serious about the environment. And even vaguely concerned about poor people, all of your policies would be donate devoted to making the poor rich as fast as possible.

But that would violate the anti capitalist presumption, let's say, that the reason for environmental degradation in the first place is, say, entrepreneurial and free market development, which it most certainly isn't, that's actually completely backward. Make poor people rich. So what should a COP twenty six bean about? That's fairly straightforward.

It should have been about trying to generate as much energy as we possibly can to be distributed as widely as possible in the cheapest possible manner. And what would that be? Nuclear? No well, I would say ultimately likely nuclear and not probably not fusion'cause it's so you know, fusion has always been a year away, ten years away for the last fifty years. We haven't managed it. Nuclear likely. France managed that very effectively. We can do it. There's been a few disasters.

Yeah. More people die every year from solar energy than die from nuclear. Who dies from solar? Well of course guess how you die from solar? Uh sunburn? No. You fall off the roofs when you're installing it. Oh that's a good example of unintended consequence. Because systems are complex and when you change them you think only good things will happen. It's like, well, you know oh so I was gonna you asked about energy. Yeah. There's also a environmental progression.

towards clean energy. Yeah. And so poor the poorest people burn wood. Well that's not so good because first of all they cut down the trees and burn the trees, and second If you're concerned about pollution, especially particulate pollution, especially indoors, which kills I think seven million children a year. Seven million children a year. are killed by indoor particulate pollution. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. How is that possible?

Seven million. Indoor particular pollution, you mean from starting fires in homes like to keep it in the middle of the year. Yes, exactly. These people are poor. Yes that's a real number. I need to know that that's a real number. Seven million children die every year from indoor particular pollution. Well charcoal is better.

Coal's better than that in terms of pollution as well. And then fossil fuels are better than coal. And then natural gas is perhaps the cleanest of the fossil fuels. And maybe I don't know if you know this, but this is also this is so funny too. The United States has cut its carbon emissions fifteen percent in the last twenty years. It's gone down, not up, down. Why? Why fracking. Fracking. Yeah. Fracking. Real. This thing that environmentalists hate. It's like don't frack it.

supplies. Not really. No. It hasn't polluted any water supplies? Look, did you ever see everything everything pollutes something and so so the idea that there's any source of energy that we can derive that's not going to produce some pollutant as a consequence?

That's the kind of nonsense you hear from people who say things like net zero. We're gonna hit net zero by twenty fifty. Okay. More than ninety percent of the world's children breathe toxic air every day. Yeah, how many of them is this? How many? Eight ninety-three percent of the world's children under the age of fifteen years, one point eight billion children. But this is about polluted air. I don't think this is necessarily about indoor particulate pollution.

But it's only a few years ago. Okay, it says World Health Organization. There is a part on here that says it lowers the life expectancy of up to seven million people per year, but it's it doesn't say they all die. Yeah, right. Oh okay, okay. So but this is for clarifying they're talking about what though? They're talking about pollution, right? Air pollution.

Uh the second line there. Together household air pollution from cooking and ambient air pollution causes more than fifty percent. But that's both things. Yeah, but it's still it's still almost all that inside. Yeah, but the air outside air pollution. Together household air pollution from cooking and ambient outsour outside air pollution

caused more than fifty percent of acute lower respiratory infections in children under five years of age in low and middle income countries. Right, and read the next one too. Air pollution is one of the leading threats to child health, accounting for almost one in ten deaths in children under five years of age. That's fucking wild.

Yeah. Well it's just poor children and the world has too many people on it anyway. But that's you you say that that's you're being facetious. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um D I I still wanna like we've kind of like you you went on these rants, so I wanna like s bring you back to like this idea of climate environment. We should be concerned not just about particular pollution

But shouldn't we be concerned about the effect that we're having on the CO two that we're releasing the atmosphere? Now, from what I've read, it has an impact. They don't exactly know what percentage of an impact it has, but it's most certainly something that we can reduce. What I also have read What I've also read is that one of the problems is when people start talking about like electric cars is that is literally impossible

for there's not enough minerals. And what a what the these conflict minerals they use for these batteries, there's not enough. to give a car is like as many cars as we have in this country, as many cars as there are in the world that are mostly internal combustion engines, if we replace those with battery powered cars, I don't think that's possible. Well where are we gonna get the electricity?

Well there's nothing that's a big problem. Yeah, fair enough. But even if we did get the electricity from nuclear, which by the way is fairly clean. It's like It's all in whether or not there's a disaster and whether or not they have these precautionary measures set in place to you know, to have systems

that will be uh able to shut down the core when there is a disaster. Fukushima didn't, right? And that's part of the thing. Yeah, and those were large scale reactors and they have small scale reactors now, thorium salt reactors that are small and modular in some sense. And

When those sorts of things happen they shut down by themselves. But we should talk about it because those Fukushima when d I mean okay, look let's look look this up. When was Fukushima first online? I wanna say it was in the nineteen seventies. Is that correct? Likely. I think it was when most of the nuclear development took place. I remember reading about it at the time and f finding out that they couldn't shut it down. I was like, what?

Okay. Sixty-seven. Construction began sixty seven. Commission date seventy one. Okay, so yeah. So seventies essentially. Um Imagine getting a car from nineteen seventy and expecting it to be compliant with whatever emission standards we have today or braking. You ever you ever drive a car? I'm a a an enthusiast. I love old cars. But I take them and I bring them to these craftsmen and they put modern brakes on them. They put modern suspensions on them.

So you don't kill yourself driving'em. They but if you drive an old car, like if you get a jet a nineteen seventy Pontiac and you just try to drive it around, the brakes are fucking terrible. The the the steering is like you kinda have a rough estimate of where you're going. You know, they're awful. Right. You take a two thousand twenty two Chevrolet

like a Corvette and drive that. My God, it's like telepathic. I know, I know the acceleration is like time travel. Yeah. New cars are so good. Oh my God, they're so good. Plus they have airbags and And then the stereos are great. The old stereos in those sixties and seventies cars was like it was like listening to the end of a two tin cans with a string between them. But not just sixties and seventies. You go into the two thousands. Everybody used to buy

Aftermarket stereos. You used to get a car and then you bring it to a place and get a stereo place. Shout out to my friend Kenny Fong, Dark Side Motors. I would bring my cars to Kenny and Kenny would like hook me up with people that would do the stereo, fix the wheels and all kinds of stuff. You always had to do that. But then car manufacturers realized like why are we leaving all this money on the table?

Let's just give them an option to have better stereos and better wheels and better suspension and all that jazz. So they they fix that. But my point is anything from nineteen seventy one sucks. Including the nuclear power reactors. But if you get a nuclear reactor from twenty twenty two, th you know, all that advancement in technology and innovation, you're gonna have a far better system. Yeah, well we're we're see, part of the problem

I've been very curious about why the left wing types particularly seem willing to sacrifice the poor to their utopian. I don't think they're thinking that way. I just think that's a good thing. And and it wouldn't take much thought to figure it out because let's say you you increase the cost of energy

And that's the price you pay to move forward to a hypothetically green e economy. But you increase the price of energy. Okay, so what happens is that in any system that's hierarchical and this is the left wingers know this'cause it drives their whole philosophy. In any hierarchical system, when you stress the system

The disproportionate amount of that stress falls on the people who are in the lower rungs because they're barely hanging on anyways. So, you know, you get a 1% emplo increase in unemployment, you get a five percent increase in psychiatric hospitalization.

Well why? It's'cause there's a bunch of people there who are right on the threshold of psychiatric hospitalization and then they lose their job. It's like that's the end of that. And so even among birds, even among birds that don't live in strict hierarchy, so non social birds, not ones that hang about in flocks like crows. The birds will move into an an environment, any environment, and the the more

able in some sense, healthier birds get the best nesting spots. They're closest to the food. They're sheltered from rain and wind and all of that. So they're not psychophysiologically stressed. And so then when an when any kind of avian flu comes through, let's say, to to to challenge the bird population, the birds die from the bottom up.

They always say that's the old saying, when the aristocracy gets a cold, the working class gets dies of pneumonia. It's like, okay, so fine, increase energy costs. Well what happens? A bunch of poor people fall off the map, like a bunch of them. And the more you increase the energy cost, the more that happens. And so if the pa price we have to pay to move towards a sustainable environment is

increased energy costs, and it isn't, that's a policy decision, it doesn't have to be that way. The absolutely one hundred percent inevitable consequence of that will be that you sacrifice the poor. Except the left The real hardcore leftists, they want to implement socialism. And implementing socialism will solve a few of those problems. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah. Well that's that's that's part of the issue, is that the pro-environment stance is contaminated by an anti-capitalist rhetoric.

Now the problem with the socialists, so let let's take this apart a little bit. I mean the socialists are always point out something that's true. And Marx pointed this out, but it wasn't Marx's discovery, and he's like seriously wrong about it in an important way. So Marx Marx observed that money tends to aggregate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

Okay, the first question is, is that true? And the answer is Not only is that true but It's so true that you can model the distribution of money in a population using equations derived from physics. Like it's really unbelievably true. But then Marx said, that's capitalism. That is not true. And it's actually an underestimation of the problem because

If the problem of inequality, which is an actual problem, was as simple as let's change capitalism, well yeah, let's change capitalism. Unfortunately the problem is so deep that changing capitalism won't change the problem at all. And in fact, in most of the places where it's been attempted, especially the more radical forms of communism, let's say, rather than socialism, because we could distinguish the two and should, it's important to do so. In in c countries that became communists,

It wasn't like a small percentage of the people still didn't own all the resources. It's just that there were hardly any resources and almost everyone had nothing. There was still a tinier fraction of people who were the privileged elite. And so you know if you play Monopoly, what happens when you play Monopoly? Everybody starts out equal and one Yeah, exactly. And so you can you can actually model this pr problem with something as simple as a monopoly game.

That's actually a fairly good model of how money distributes itself in the environment. And you can blame that on capitalism, but you can get the same you can get exactly the same result if you have people trade because they flip a dice. So if you took a hundred people, let's say you give a hundred people ten dollars each.

And then they had to trade with each other. If I you you flip a coin and I I flip a coin and if it's uh if we flip a coin, if it's heads you get a dollar. And so that's your game. Heads gives you a dollar. If you play that out Till it concludes, what happens is some people lose let's say ten they have ten dollars. They lose ten times in a row. Well then what happens? At zero. Well, they can't trade anymore.

So what happens is people lose at different rates, but if you lose enough Even if it takes you a hundred trades to lose all your money, as soon as you hit zero, you're done. If you play that out to its conclusion, even though it's random, completely random, the trading, one person ends up with all the money and everyone else ends up with zero. And so th I'm a member of a native Canadian family, West Coast Indian family, native family. And uh this particular culture had a tradition, the Portland.

And they had the same problem in their culture. And the problem was that Some of the big chiefs over some period of time would end up with like all the stuff, all of it. And that wasn't good because Well, for obvious reasons, you know, it would destabilize the society. That that's the in some sense the least of the problem.

And so they evolved this mechanism. They'd have these big celebrations that rich people would put on where status was determined by how much of that wealth you would give away. Right, right. And that was the podlatch. Yeah, yeah. They had to do it. And b in the in now I think people really look very highly upon very wealthy people that engage in a lot of philanthropy.

M this might be a biased sample, but I don't think so. And if it is, it's biased towards entrepreneur conservative types who you would think in the parody sense would be the least likely to do this. I haven't met anyone who has a vast fortune whose primary concern is isn't What the hell can I do with all this money that's beneficial as fast as possible? They're not sitting around thinking, I need another super yacht. And now look, there's gonna be people like that, you know, but

But I haven't met any of them. No, I haven't. I haven't met Bezos.

But as he I bet he's got a couple super yachts. I'm sure he does. I'm sure he does. But like I'm pretty happy about the fact that he's building rocket ships and that actually takes a lot of capital. Yeah. You know? And the other thing that there's a couple of other things about capitalism that are worth thinking about. One is All the evidence suggests that relatively f free markets are the best way to make the absolutely poor richer.

That's not an inequality issue. It's just that while they're not starving. And that's something. We've lifted more people out of poverty in the last fifteen years than in the entire course of human history. Can I pause you for a second there? Um oh one point that I forgot uh need I I I read this the other day that where Karl Marx is buried They have to charge money because they have to maintain it. 아하 And they need to find a maintainer. Make sure that's true.

Yeah, yeah. I read that and it was like a meme and I was like, Is that real? My daughter on that is kinda funny. My daughter once bought me a fifty percent off Karl Marx doll, which I thought was just ridiculous. And she bought it for that reason. That's it. She told me it's so funny. It was so funny. Capitalism. Yeah. And we talk about capitalism uplifting poor people. Mm-hmm. One of the issues that a lot of people have in this country is when you ship jobs overseas and you ship companies

start manufacturing things overseas for essentially pennies on the dollar. Yeah. I mean this is like the it's it's one of the great contradictions right to the progressives in America that they complain about capitalism on a fucking iPhone. Mm-hmm. Because if you knew where that iPhone was if you went down to the factory where that iPhone was manufactured, you'd be heartbroken. If you went further

to where the minerals are dug out of the ground in the Congo, you'd be devastated. Like that's the reality of capitalism. That's the reality of sending jobs overseas. The cure to that is a more even distribution of wealth within the company, meaning that

the company would have to and I'm not picking on Apple like any company, name'em. They would have to pay the people that work there a a decent living wage with great uh benefits and health insurance and dental and all the stuff that people want and need in order to feel secure and safe. Give'em a great working environment, don't overwork them. And now how much money do you have?

Because y the amount of money that Apple has put aside and obviously I'm an Apple fan. I have an Apple wall phone right here. I'm not picking on Apple. But they are one of the richest companies that's ever existed on the face of planet Earth. But how are they doing that? One of the ways they're doing that is by paying people very little to make their products that they sell for a a giant amount of month.

Yeah. So what what's the solution to that? Is the solution to pay people a fair amount. And if you do that, is the solution to pay people a fair amount in another country or is the solution to pay people a fair amount here where we can regulate? Because we do manufacture some things here, but we manufacture way less than we used to because it costs too much money to do so. But that word too much or that phrase too much is bullshit. It's not that it costs too much. It's just that it costs more.

And they don't want to pay it. They would rather just reap in profits and the way they do that is on the backs of poor people. Yeah. Now if you do that on the backs of poor people we can take that apart a bit. Right. And so But here's my question. If you really wanted to make these other countries, like third world countries and raise them up

And really increase the economy. What you would do is pay people in third world countries where you have these plants the same amount that you would have to pay them in America. then you'd have a complete change in those environments. Okay, so w we can take that apart a bunch of ways. I mean Part of the advantage to manufacturing things where wages are relatively low is you give those countries a competitive advantage.

So p part of the reason that there aren't millions of people starving in China is because even the Chinese communists wake woke up enough to realize that if they opened up their economies, that free market

Free market is nothing different than allowing unrestricted choice among consumers in some sense. So when we're talking about the free market, we should be careful about what we're talking about. It's like you get to have choice about what you buy. That's the central spirit of free market capitalism. So exporting those jobs stopped the Chinese a huge proportion of the Chinese from living in absolute privation and likely decreased the probability of like a broad scale war.

So and it also brought the Chinese into the economy, which is a big deal. The Chinese produce more engineers every year than the Americans have engineers. And so now we've unlocked an unbelievable amount of brain power, and that's produced an insane technological revolution. Now, I think it's unfortunate that a lot of that was done on the backs of the American working class.

And I think that the Democrats abandoning the working class when they were in that state of privation was a catastrophe of of public policy. And also part of the reason why Trump got elected. But it isn't obvious to me that exporting those jobs was was a bad long term decision. Because well you want a world where

twenty million Chinese are starving, that's not good. By any measure, right? But is that the only way that they don't starve? The only way they don't starve is if iPhones are manufactured there for pennies on the dollar? Yes. Really? Well, there no other solutions ever worked. But that doesn't mean they can't work. If if they work in America, it might really be. For me the problem with utopian theories is that They're hypothetical. So I like to look at what's actually worked.

And what's clearly worked is the introduction of free market principles into poor countries. So for example, in Afri Africa has the fastest growing economies in the world, particularly sub Saharan Africa. That's really something. And some of those countries are really getting on a a reasonably solid footing. And most of that's happened, almost all that's happened since the Berlin Wall fell.

And part of the reason for that is that that continent isn't being riven by a terrible conflict between the communists and the capitalists. And most of the reason the eradication of that conflict has been beneficial is because they're not doing unbelievably stupid and counterproductive things at the policy level.

They're letting markets flourish to at least a limited degree. And that's making that's people aren't s you know, there's I talked to some people, I was in Washington for a week last week. And I talked to some people who are working with uh UN committee that's prime goal is the eradication of paw of of of hunger. Well, there isn't any hunger in the world anymore that isn't caused by political conflict.

Everyone has enough to eat. In fact, it's so interesting that one of the emerging problems, especially among the poor all over the world, is that they have too much to eat. And so we're seeing diseases of affluence replace diseases of privation. And you think, isn't that too bad, these western diets, and you know, fair enough, but you wanna be fat or dead? And fat's better. And m fat isn't optimal, let's say. But it h beats the hell out of dead. Well how many people starve to death?

Now in the world. Almost none. Almost all almost all those who do do it because of political conflict. Like it's purposeful starvation now. So someone has put a blockade on ships and good. Yeah. Right, as a as a political weapon. Yeah. When you're saying when you're talking about the the prosperous areas that have prospered because they've brought in the market and these companies have shipped these jobs over to these places and allowed these people to flourish. The flip side is Detroit.

Right. Detroit was one of the wealthiest cities in this country and hence one of the wealthiest cities in the world just a few decades ago. It wasn't that long ago. When they were in the height of their manufacturing, all of the m American automobiles were made in Detroit. Cadillacs and Chevies and Fords and That was where everybody worked and then it was also where the union auto workers had established a strong foothold and they made good money. The people got paid a a great wage.

And everyone who worked in those places they they had a a good lifestyle. Well Henry Ford did what you said that that that capitalists should do. I mean when Ford was pressed on how much he paid his workers, because he paid them a lot, he said I want to pay them enough so that they can afford a car. And so he ramp he ramped up wages dramatically. And that was partly part of his, you could say, self interested vision, although I think that's an oversimplification. It's like well

If we want to sell our product, why don't we expand the consumer market? Well those people have to have some money. That was Ford's notion. When I was a kid, um I had friends that had done gigs in Detroit when I was just starting out doing stand up and they were like, Whatever you do, don't go to Detroit with a fucking Japanese car'cause they will fuck your car up. I go, Really? They go, Yeah, these guys are auto workers. Like they don't want to see foreign cars.

that they don't make in their city. It's a proud city that makes American cars. So like there was like a there was a thing. Yeah, well they were responding to a real threat. You were talking about old cars with me earlier. So one of my friends in in the little town I grew up in, this was back in the mid seventies, had a dodge colt. And it was one of the first Japanese cars.

And that thing was a real piece of junk in a sea of pieces of junk because cars in the mid seventies they were they were not good. They fell apart. They they rusted fast. But nothing rusted faster than a Japanese car in Canada. Those bloody things you could

You could put them outside in the winter when there was salt on the road and watch them dissolve. But what was so what was very interesting about that and I saw this with the Chinese too,'cause in Alberta I I went to Edmonton I think this would be nineteen seventy five about. It was the first Chinese trade fair in in Canada.

So they had Chinese manufactured implements at this display. It was really interesting'cause it was like walking back into nineteen forty five or nineteen fifty. We looked at all these things and we thought, Oh, that looks like exactly like what Grandpa was using on the farm, you know, forty years ago. So but with the Japanese it's like their cars were junk to begin with. Yeah, to begin with.

And then they got to be Toyota. Yeah. And just think what Toyota did. You talked about how good cars are now. Well the net consequence of opening up that competition was the Japanese got their act together un I mean in the eighties. Particularly.

Japan got so powerful that everyone thought it would be the dominant world economy for like ten years. And they just went from nothing after World War Two just like superstars in forty years. And it's really hard to see how that wasn't to everyone's benefit. Now, to your point, When you open up competition internationally, especially in manufacturing, you pose a tremendous threat to the current working class in your country, a tremendous immediate threat.

Like it might be long term benefit'cause it stabilizes international relations between co countries that might otherwise go to war, in which case it would be working class people that would be being slaughtered like mad. But it's no doubt that to me there's there's almost no doubt that the freeing of trade worldwide. And the benefits that that produced.

were paid for disproportionately by the American working class. And it it also raises another really complicated problem, which is when your economy switches to information and services, which is more complex cognitively. to deliver. What do you do with people who would have been really good at working class jobs but aren't going to be good in the knowledge economy? And the answer is we don't know.

Which is not a very good answer. And the idea that we could just somehow give them money. You can't solve people's problems by giving I had a client. um, who had a cocaine problem and he was he was rather intellectually limited, this client. And would have agreed with that assessment by the way. I'm not being rude. Well, I didn't use that for the thing. I've dealt with I I've dealt with many people in my life who who who were they weren't going to university.

Right. They probably weren't going through high school. And it isn't because they didn't work hard. Sometimes that was why. But it was because no, they couldn't do that. They couldn't do it. And so they struggled, man. And this guy in particular, it was so interesting because he was o he wasn't doing too bad when he had almost no money. But he'd get in he he got a a disability check because he'd been hurt at work.

And every time he had a disability check, he was gone for three days on a cocaine and alcohol binge and he'd just drink up all his money. Then he'd end up in a ditch somewhere, like really eighty percent dead and then eventually dead because Eventually it was that kind of behavior that killed him. But more money, he would have just died sooner.

tremendously destabilizing technology. But okay, now about that man, do you believe that that was a genetic situation or was that a situation of nurture? It was the way he was raised, is the environment that he grew up in Well it was a couple of things. I mean

He really liked alcohol and there's a huge biological contributor to that. Some people I I worked with a researcher in Montreal who had a monkey farm on St. Kitts, Green Monkeys, and uh he was interested in studying alcoholism and he would capture monkeys in the wild and bring them to his compound and then give allow them to access a pretty sweetened mixture of rum and and water. Well they use something else other than water. And um most of the monkeys could take it or leave it.

Five percent of them would drink themselves into a coma on first exposure. And he has videotapes of this. It was like watching the Frat House, you know, on Saturday night. So it's really it's comical. Drunk monkeys are actually pretty funny, as you might imagine. But five percent of them would drink themselves to coma on first exposure.

And those are the monkeys that would become alcohol dependent if you if you gave them unlimited access. Right. But you know the problem with those monkey studies, right? The those monkey studies th is the same as uh rat farm studies. Mm. When they've done studies on rats, they've done studies with rats in cages with cookies. Natural environments. Housed in colonies, uh how large are these colonies and what kind of land are they on?

It's very hard to get rats addicted to cocaine if they live in a natural environment. Right. If you put them in a cage and bore them to death. Let's explain that to people what we're talking about because there are studies that were done where i initially people thought that cocaine was so addictive

that if you gave it to rats they would just take the cocaine until they died. Right. And they would even i they wouldn't even engage in sex. But then they realize that if you take these rat that what you were doing this you're taking these rats in these highly stressed out environments, you're putting them in cages. Nothing's natural.

And if you take these rats and you put them in a far larger environment with trees and everything that a rat normally has and like other rats real normal. Like a normal rat environment. And then you give them cocaine, they're not interested. Yeah. They're only interested in it if you stress them out by putting them in cages. Okay, so is that the same with these monkeys? Okay, so now you have your rats in your n in the natural environment.

Now imagine you gave them axis to cocaine and you stressed them. So what would happen is a certain percentage of the rats would start using cocaine in proportion to the amount of stress. Like if you let a bunch of cats loose. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And maybe in that case, maybe they'd prefer alcohol or benzodiazepines because that would

specifically alleviate anxiety. And so it is it is the case, and this was brilliant research showing that see, a lab rat is not a lab rat's actually a pretty good model of a human being for reasons we can go into later. But An isolated lab rat who's been genetically bred is not that much like an actual rat. And when Skinner did all his studies on lab rats, not only were they isolated

Which rats never are in the r in the real world'cause they're communal and social. They play, they laugh, they wrestle. Yeah. They have very complex social environments. They're not that interested in artificial forms of psychomotor stimulation if they're in a natural environment. But some of them will still be more interested than others. There's still that variability that's lurking in the background. And with these monkeys, most of them wouldn't

take alcohol repeatedly. But a small percentage of them would. And you see very much the same and and all I'm saying I'm not saying anything re revolutionary here. I'm saying I'm saying, for example, If you experiment with twenty different drugs, you'll probably find the one for you. Right? And people react differently to pharmacological substances and a huge part of the variation in that reactivity is genetically determined or genetically influenced.

So that's not a surprise. It's no mo it's not that mo it's not any much more it's not much more surprising than saying Some people are born more anxious than other people. Can I bring you back to this though? What what kind of an environment were those monkeys in? Is it are they in a cage? They were in a cage, but it was a large cage. The cage wasn't stressing them.

See, the monkeys actually didn't mind being in the cage because we're not going to be able to do it. How do we know this? Do we talk to the monkeys? Oh, you can tell because it they they won't run out of it if you open the door. Like there is ways of de So f you say what does a rat want? Well, how do you know what a rat wants? It's like that's easy. What will he work to obtain?

And so rats we don't what that rats like play. It's like how do you know rats like play? Give'em toys. You you you put rats put two rats in a little arena where they can rest And then the next time that you They know they can go into the arena. So maybe do it a couple of times so they learn that. Well, then you measure how many times they'll press the bar and how fast they'll press it and then you can derive

insight, direct insight into how motivated they are, because motivation is directly proportionate to the willingness to expand energy, logically enough. And so And you can do the same thing with drugs. How hard will the animal work to obtain a given pharmacological substance is an indication of how rewarding that drug is to them. Those studies have been done unbelievably carefully, and we know there's tremendous variation.

So but so you can have your cake and eat it too. You can say, look, under under most normal and natural conditions, it's not that easy to addict animals to an addictive substance, but there's still a a percentage of them that are more susceptible to that than others.

And even in s highly stressed human environments, not everybody becomes a cocaine addict or an alcoholic. And and then you might say, well, why do some people become cocaine addicts and some people become alcoholic? And some of it is availability, but some of it is well, they like alcohol better. Or they like cocaine beds. Other people can take it or leave it.

And so when you say'cause you asked me is it nature or nurture, right? Right. And that's w that's where this argument stemmed from. But I was talking also about his limited intelligence. Um that seems to be completely independent of susceptibility to drug addiction. Right. But do you think that his you were talking about him being intellectually limited? Yeah. Do you think that that intellectual limitation made his life harder. Is it genetic? Yes. Yeah.

Yes. It's not only genetic, but mostly because you can you can really impair people by putting them in situations of deprivation. And so one of the things that's happened over the last century is the the mean IQ has gone up seven points per generation. Which is a lot. Like it's really a lot. So fifteen point IQ difference is the average difference between the typical high school graduate and the typical college graduate. So fifteen points is four years of university. Roughly speaking.

Seven points in a generation is half the difference between a high school student and a college graduate. And it's gone up seven points a generation every fifteen years. It's a lot. And so is is is intelligence mutable? Well, there's some evidence that it is. Um why did it happen? Well, partly because there are far few extremely deprived people.

Even on the information front, some of this was the introduction of television. You know, you hear television makes people stupider. It's like No, it makes smart people who could have been even smarter if they would have read Shakespeare, stupider than they would have been if they read Shakespeare if they're watching T V. But if you're a deprived kid and sitting in the crib with no one paying attention to you for like three years, TV is way better than that.

And so if you give people access to information and access to enough food, let's say, you pull up the bottom end of the cognitive distribution tremendously. And a lot of that a tremendous amount of that has happened all over the world in the last hundred years. And that's a great deal for everyone because

Well, that's that much more brain power that's available for everyone to benefit from. Like it's it's unbelievably valuable and and you can see the cascade in that part of our technological transformation. It's so incredibly fast. It's like Well the Chinese are producing ever in as many engineers every year as the Americans have engineers.

It's no wonder that things are accelerating at such a rate. Now they don't innovate at the same rate as the US innovates, but they're not doing too bad. And soon, you know Depending on how much they continue to flirt with totalitarianism. Just think of all that billion people, all that creativity unleashed. Man. All that intelligence unleashed. So that is the dance over there, right? The the totalitarianism versus innovation versus giving people the freedom and and also

It's the eternal dance. It's the part of the eternal dance between freedom and structure, even. And that's a tough one because there's no freedom without structure. Like I used to play a game with my students when we were talking about Jean Piaget, who was very interested in the development of morality through games.

So I say to them, so we're talking about freedom. It's like okay, freedom. It's uh freedom from constraint is freedom. All right, fine. Let's play a game. You wanna do you want to play this game? Sure. Okay. You move first. What do you mean? That's the game. You can do anything you want. You move first.

You think that's not much of a game. It's like no, it's it's a complete it's the perfect game. You're absolutely free to do anything you want. Okay. Well everybody does what you did. You just sit there. The the r the right amount of rules for freedom is not zero. Say now I put a chessboard in front of me and you think, Oh my God, all the limitations. I can't throw a basketball on the chessboard. Which you certainly can't, not if you're playing chess.

But now you know, you move first or I move the pawn two two s two spaces forward. I see what you say. So so so having some structure and some rules to follow gives people Yeah, yeah. And it's so so and I think this is modeled by music. This is really worth knowing. This this

like almost took the top of my head off when I realized it. And it took me about four months of thinking to figure this out.'Cause when when I was in graduate school at McGill, I was really interested, I became really interested in the reality of evil, and I was very interested in the viability of nihilistic belief.

You know, what d why bother if everything's going to disappear in a hundred years? Who cares? Life, you know, it's meaningless. In the final analysis, life is meaningless. Right. Okay, well, you know, you can make a credible case for that. Now Yeah.

'Cause once you accept that, first of all, you're anxious and hurt by it, so that's not so good. And second, it kind of makes you aimless, and that's part of nihilism. It's like, you know, you're anxious and upset, but you're also aimless. Because why bother? And fair enough, but you can make a credible case for it. But then I thought, well When that gets out of hand,

Maybe you're nihilistic because life because you're mortal and life ends in death. So you're sort of nihilistic because of suffering. And so then you become nihilistic as a logical response to that, and then what happens? And then what you see is that nihilistic people definitely make suffering worse. Definitely. They make it worse for themselves, for sure.

But then they get bitter because their lives are so unbearable and then they start to take it out on other people. So if you are nihilistic that's not neutral. It gets bad real fast. So then I thought, well what are are there any antidotes to meaninglessness? And rational antidotes are hard to come by because you can just say, well, who cares if in a thousand years we're all going to be dead, what why get out of bed in the morning?

You can't really make mount a rational case why that's not reasonable. Now, I'm not saying it is reasonable, but I thought about music. Music is a very strange art form. I had a great journalist friend of mine He said to me the other day, he said, All art aspires to

to the condition of music, which I thought was great. But music it's you think about the revitalizing effect mu music continues to have in our culture, especially among young people, and that's really, really been the case since the beginning of the sixties. It's like

We got more nihilistic and less religious and all of that as our culture became more secular and more rational, more materialistic. And at the same time the power of music as a cultural phenomenon just grew and grew and grew and grew. Say music gives you the intimation of meaning.

Right, directly. So I used to watch punk rockers. I went to a Ramones concert once, which was really fun. We were up in the second floor of this theater in Montreal and uh the Ramones were playing on stage like a hundred feet away with their with their Like they're uh they're they're huge. stud not the studio uh stadium equipment. It was so loud in there. Like I had to listen to the whole concert with my ears plugged and I was still like three quarters deaf for three days. and beneath us

on the the stage sort of. In front of the stage there was a flat place and all these punks were down there smashing into each other and and and and doing this this really rough dance and I thought this is so cool. We got all these nihilistic punks in here like half beating themselves up, dancing, and in and And being taken in by this rough music that gave them, even in their aggressive nihilism, a sense of meaning. I thought that was so cool. So why does music do that?

That's a good question, because people think of music as a non-representational art. It doesn't represent anything. It's not like a drawing or a picture or even dance where you can act something out. Really? Non representational. Like what do you mean by music being non representational? Well it's not a picture of anything. Right, but it represents the feeling of the person who puts out the the lyrics. The feeling of the person who composes the music.

There's unhappy music and there's happy music, minor keys and major. Definitely. It plays on emotions, for sure. But but it still d it doesn't represent anything like a picture represents it, let's say or a sculpture. That's all I mean. Well you can say it represents emotions and fair enough. Fair enough. I I was thinking more like a picture of an actual thing.

First of all, it's it's a pattern. So non-pattern music is noise. It's a pattern. But then it isn't one pattern, it's multiple patterns layered on top of one another. in a harmonious manner and in a manner that indicates in some sense, communication between all the patterned layers, because they have to go together. And so what's the world? Well the world's made of objects. It's like, no it's not. It's made of patterns.

So music is just like the world, because the world is made of patterns. And then music has layered patterns that are all moving together in a harmonious manner. And so what do you do when you hear that, especially if it's got a beat? Well then you move your body. And you want to, right? The music calls to you to move your body. So now you're moving your body in sync with the patterned layers of the world.

Well that's meaning. And then there's more too, so that's so cool. Is music is an analog of the structure of existence itself. And it calls to you to take part in that. And then so maybe you dance by yourself. Or maybe even better, you dance with someone else, and so then you both bring your bodies into this patterned relationship with this. multi-layer harmony together in a spontaneous way, indicating that you can both play and are therefore potentially trustworthy future mate.

That's unbelievably cool. And birds dance. It's not just human beings, you know. So this is a deep thing. And then music does something else, too. It puts you on the border between chaos and order because a boring song does exactly what you expect it to do and and gets dull very quickly, and an unlistenable song is so random you can't follow it. And so what you want is predictability. with a leaven of unpredictability. And then that puts you right on the edge.

That's the zone of proximal development. Vygotsky discovered that. Like a Hendrix song. Yeah. creativity inside the structure of the song. Right, right, right. And everyone loves well man, I went to this bar in Nashville, this band was playing, Kelly's Heroes, a great guitarist, the best guitarist I've ever seen.

and they were playing old country music with a heavy blues rock uh twist. So they do this great version of uh Ghost Riders in the Sky, that's fifteen minutes long and this brilliant guitarist just goes way out on a limb and

Everybody in the crowd, it's so it's so fun to be there. They're just thrilled to death because they're watching this man doing the same thing that surfers do. He's like dancing on the edge of chaos and order in this virtuosic manner. And everyone is so taken by that, that it just lifts them out of the normality of their existence, you know, do you see this joy just transfuse them, and that's because they got an intimation of genuine meaning.

And it's and it's it's it's not amenable to rational criticism, which is w the thing that I thought that struck me as so miraculous about music and why it has this element of salvation. It's like It puts you directly in touch with the m meaning that sustains you in life directly. And it shows you what that would be, which is something like to observe the harmonious interplay of the patterns of being stacked.

st on top of one another, and then to bring yourself into alignment with that, which is what yogis strive to do and what disciplined athletes strive to do, and what we celebrate in athletics and it's all a reflection of the same thing. And that's real. It's real, that meaning. It's real also in what it imparts on other people. It's not just it's Ye it doesn't exist in a vacuum. even though people can play beautiful music when no one's around.

it's not the same as playing beautiful music in front of people because there's a thing that happens when people interact with that music. Well, you see that and you know, if you get lucky you go to a mu I went to a Leonard Cohn concert, one of the ones he put on when he went on tour when he was old. He lost all his money when he was in a Buddhist monastery.

dangers of being in a Buddhist monastery, by the way. Did he really? Yes, his manager manager, uh Shanghai. Yeah, and so he had to go back on tour, which turned out to be a great thing because he made way more money on that tour than he did, I think, in his whole life. Did he get a new manager? Yeah. Yeah, it was an old friend of his as well. It was really a catastrophe.

He he got better and better as he got old, kinda like Johnny Cash, you know,'cause Cash got damn near transcendent just before he died. He put out some songs like The Man Comes Around that are just they're just unbelievable. He wrote a book on Saint Paul, by the way. He did? Yes, yes he did. On Saint Paul. Yeah, yeah.

So Cohen when he came onto the stage everybody gave him a standing ovation and then he he played his sets and it was like a religious experience, you know, and every well it was it was a religious experience in the most fundamental sense. And everybody in the audience was there in the same place at the same time doing the same thing with him, you know? And you know what a what that's like when you go to a great Well, that can happen too I'm sure it happens to you at your comedy shows.

Yeah when the whole audience is united and y and the stories are unrolling and everyone's focused on it, it's it's it's not exactly the same thing, but it's similar. There's a hive mind. are right they're like musicians. Because the place of maximal funny is when you're just about pushing it too far. Right? You think oh Do I have to say this?

You know, do I have to say this? Like, yeah, you have to say this. Okay, I'm gonna say it. And everyone cracks up and they crack up, you know, and it blows apart their sterile preconceptions. That's part of cracking up, you know, when you laugh. And it's so cool because It's the antidote to their totalitarianism comedy. And that's why you can tell anybody who goes after a comedian, it's like, Oh yeah, I know who you are. You're the king who can't stand the fool. That's the tyrant.

So you you reveal yourself, same as people who go after musicians or dancers. Well, I think people are going after comedy for a different thing today. Because they're going after comedy for a literal literal representation of what the words mean if you put them in print. And that's nonsense. Yeah. Well they're doing that. Because there are some things they believe that can't be made fun of.

Yeah, but th really what they're doing is just looking for targets. They're playing a game. The game the rules of the game have been established.

Comedy violates the rules of the game. Yeah, what it is. Does comedy take those things? Well there's a lot of things you can't joke about. Mm-hmm. Sacred things. Yeah. There's there's protected classes now. We all know where they are. We don't even have to bring'em up, you know, whether it's Trans people, gay people, uh people of color, Asian people, whatever those things are.

Um one thing you can mock relentlessly is white people. Sp specifically white males. It's one of the Well, they are pretty funny, you know. Oh sure. We're ridiculous. But there's a funny pejorative that people will say about

like a group of folks they're primarily white males. Like that is that's a pejorative. Like that's like It's my audience. That's what everyone says. Yeah. Oh, you're talking to those those young, angry young white males. But isn't that funny? That that is that that means something negative. That's not funny. But it's horrible. But it's a horrible generalization.'Cause you're taking an enormous group of people and you're looking at their ethnic background and their gender.

and then you're dismissing them. Well for a while, you know, because people kept coming and telling me that, you know, your audience is only angry white young white men, I thought I d I I kind of approached that wrong to begin with. I mean I knew my audience was primarily male, as I suspect yours still is, but then I looked at the YouTube stats and seventy percent of people who listened to YouTube were male.

So the fact that seventy percent of my audience was male was not an anomaly, it was just a consequence of the technology. Why d why are seventy percent of the people that watch YouTube male? Does that make sense? Women are more interested in fiction than non fiction.

And and men are opposite to that. So if you look at book buying preferences, for example, women tilt towards fiction and men t tilt towards women's fiction. And if you want to know why that is, it's because The most reliable difference that psychologists have ever found between men and women, the biggest difference, is interest. So women are reliably more interested in people and men are reliably more interested in things. Now there's still overlap.

It's one standard deviation, which is a big difference. But That that that isn't to say no women are interested in things, because some are, and no intr no men are interested in people, cause some are. Like I'm a man who's more interested in people than things. That's why I'm a psychologist. You know, I actually have a relatively feminine personality structure because I'm pretty high in negative emotion and I'm pretty high in agreeableness, and that's the typical feminine.

structure. And that that's an interesting discussion to have too because you know, we have this idea in our culture that you can be a woman born in a man's body. And that's not true. But you can definitely be a man with a feminine personality structure. Like ten percent of men are as feminine in their personality as the average woman is. And vice versa. Ten percent of women are as masculine in their personality as the average man is.

Now you can move those boundaries around and say, well, it's five percent and forty or something. It doesn't matter. But the point is there's plenty of men who are as feminine in their personality as the average woman. That doesn't mean they're in the wrong body. It just means that men and women are more alike than different, even though they are different, and that there's huge range within both genders. And we need to know this. So what do you think is happening with trans people?

Well, there's a lot of different kinds of trans people. Well then I would say it depends on what period of time you're asking that question about. Right now, if you look at teenagers, for example, who want to switch genders ninety five percent of them are unbearably confused. That's what's causing that. And I think there's other reasons too. I think this is a conjecture. When the when the trans

teenagers came after me when I opposed Bill C sixteen in Canada on compelled speech grounds. I I spent quite a bit of time watching them. And I already kinda knew about that Fluid identity crowd. So when I was at Harvard, piercing and and tattooing started to become a cultural rage. And I was interested in, well, who's doing this? Because I knew it was It was a practice that was limited to criminal subtypes and outcasts.

For a long time. So for example, if you worked in the circus, you were likely to be tattooed, you know, and you toured around the circus and that was a kind of carny life and it was an outsider life, and if you were a prisoner, same thing. But then all of a sudden it started to make its inroads into the popular culture. So we studied a group of early adopters of tattooing and piercing from the perspective of personality. Like who are these people? And they were all highly creative people.

Well what it and creativity is a trait. And all people who aren't creative, that's wrong, in fact most people aren't creative at all, and I can explain that later, but they're not. We g we developed a scale called the creative achievement questionnaire which is assess his lifetime contribution to thirteen different creative domains. And that your scores would range from zero, I have no training or talent in this area, to I think it was eight.

Um I'm an internationally recognized expert in this area, right? And so seventy percent of people, if you sum their scores across all thirteen domains, scored zero. And I ask audiences like How many portraits have you painted? Zero. How many songs have you composed? Zero. How many plays have you written? Zero. How many recipes have you invented? Let me stop you. Some the tattooed types are high they were high in creativity. Okay. And a lot of these people who are fluid in their identity

are actually high in trade openness and they do have fluid identities. And some of them are feminine men and masculine women. So yeah, but that doesn't mean that surgery is the cure for that. That it does not mean that. Not at all. Well what do you think it means when someone is so attracted to the idea that they were born in the wrong body. They it means so much. They're so compelled that they're willing to go through surgery to change

God, it means all sorts of things. I knew a kid in Toronto who was on the autistic spectrum, and a lot of the people who are manifesting serious Issues with gender identity or on the autistic spectrum. Yeah, well that's a different thing. The rapid onset. That's more like So part of the reason I objected to Bill Seesaw sixteen to begin with was because I knew full well as a clinician that as soon as we messed with fundamental sex categories and changed the terminology

We would fatally confuse thousands of young girls. I knew that because I knew the literature on psychological contagion and it stretches back like five hundred years, that literature, three hundred years. It's all outlined in a book by Henri Ellenberger called History of History of what's the name of the book? History of psychoanalytic ideas, it doesn't matter. It's Henri Allenberger and it's his main work if you want to look it up.

And so psychological contagions are very common and so one of them, for example, was the satanic uh ritual abuse accusations that emerged in daycares in the nineteen eighties. And that was a consequence of women going into the workforce en masse, leaving their children with strangers and starting to have pathological fantasies about it, especially if they were borderline schizophrenic. And those fantasies propagated into the population.

So what does this have to do with creativity? You were talking about creativity and people that are Well okay, so you see people with blue hair, the blue haired crowd. Uh huh. Well they're the same people that were doing tattooing and piercing, and they often are literally the same people'cause they have piercings. It's like well, they have mutable identities. They're not st they're not stable in their identities. That's their their creative.

Creative people by definition aren't stable in their identities. That's what makes them creative. Now the downside of that is you can creativity is a high-risk, high return strategy. Your new idea is probably stupid and wrong, and maybe it's fatal. But now and then it's unbelievably successful. And also, now and then our culture would die without. So we have o we always have this problem because we have to maintain stability. Because otherwise everything degenerates into chaos.

But mere stability won't work because the future's different from the past, like technically different, different in a nondeterministic way. It's actually different. And so then we have to figure out well how do we modify our memories or our traditions At a rate that enables us to keep up with the culture. And the answer to this is in part: we let creative people play multiple games on the fringe.

And some of them are radically successful and then we copy them. So you think that a lot of what's going on with people that want to change their gender identity is creativity? No, I don't think so. Yeah, but that's not all of it, but that's definitely part of it. But there are for sure a lot of

people that transition. Um and there has been work on this that shows that if they didn't transition, they wanted to transition at one point in time and then they eventually wound up becoming gay men. Yeah, that's definitely males to females. Look, I mean I also think, by the way, that part of what we're seeing in late adolescence with this insistence on the primacy of felt identity is the re-emergence of suppressed fantasy play that should have taken place at at at between say three and five.

That's being suppressed by the imposition of technological artifacts like television and phones and by the absence of free play among children who are hyper supervised. So the fantasy play is imperative to develop your identity by trying out a bunch of different patterns of behavior. Exactly. Yes. So so when my my son uh so m when my son was about Two. His sister was about three and had a little gaggle of of friends, and they used to dress him up like a fairy princess.

And this didn't happen for like years, it happened for a couple of weeks, you know, and he was playing along and I went down there and I'm a northern Albertan, you know, and so the gender roles there were fairly finely def defined and I was watching this, I thought

Is it really a good thing that he's like got wings on a little fairy hat and a wand and a dress? It's like is that okay? And I talked to Tammy about it. I said, the girls are dressing Julian up like a princess. Um and it kind of I have qualms about it and but I but I I'm not sure what to do.'Cause he was having a good time and he was playing with the girls and

What what qualms would you possibly have about that? Because that th f from my personal experience of having daughters, they they think it's funny to put me in a dress. It is funny. Yeah. Well there's uh there was a dress that my wife was throwing out and my daughters made me put it on. They forced me to and they took pictures of me. Yeah, I bet they're not. Yeah, yeah. My wife my my daughter

Decorated me up like a woman one day in her makeup class and that nothing, right? Well that's fun. No. But why would you w worry about anything else other than it being fun? Wa probably because I had why was I worried about it? I suppose because I Hope that's not true. His pathway towards adulthood would be normal? Yeah, sure. Sure. Normal biological male progression to

I only had qualms for like about two hours. I went and thought about it. I thought, okay, what's going on here? Well he's playing with the girls. Okay, should he play with girls? Yes. Definitely he should play with girls. Absolutely. Adult males should play with women. Like we should be able to play with people of the opposite sex. Like so so he's learning to play with the girls. Good.

Is he enjoying it? Yes. Are they bullying him? No. Are the girls enjoying it? Yes. That's all good. Okay, so what does it mean he's playing at being a girl? Oh He's trying to understand what it means to be a girl. Well, how do you understand that when you're three, or maybe when you're fifty? You play at it. Which means you allow that pattern of being to inhabit you and you experiment with it. Now, a lot of older transgender types, the late onset types, they're playing.

They just don't know it. Now, there are often people who have a kind of a rigid identity, and part of their escape from that rigid identity is to develop some of the characteristics that are typical of the opposite sex. They need it. What is the term? There is a term um for a man who derives a lot of sexual pleasure. He's heterosexual, but he derives sexual gynephilia. Yes, that's it. Well I don't I don't think it does. I think the reason they derive

Because the question is why do they derive sexual pleasure? Like explain what we're saying. Yeah. Well they they they derive sexual pleasure. They get turned on by seeing themselves in the clothes of women. Yeah. Or feeling it. Right. But I think the re the sexual instinct is directing them towards personality expansion. I look at it in union terms. So part of the process of personality expansion in the deep psychoanalytic sense is First you're a persona. Or first you're nothing.

Then you develop a persona, which is a way of presenting yourself in a socially acceptable way to the world. And maybe you confuse yourself with your persona. Now you've had conversations with people on your podcast who are stiff and you can't get a dynamic conversation going. That's because they're acting out their persona. You're not really talking to them. You're talking to an act that they've constructed. It's popular.

An act that they've constructed to make themselves socially acceptable to the world. Yeah, sure. It can be anxiety too. But then often i under anxious conditions people will revert to their persona because it's a well rehearsed set of routines. Right. And that they know is socially acceptable. Okay, so for the Jungians The first step outside the persona was the shadow followers of Carl Carl Jung or students of better better terminology, was discovery of the shadow.

Oh, I thought I was the good person here. But it turns out that I've got like some darkness. And you often see this with imagine you have hyper compassionate people who are dependent, and they won't engage in conflict, so they're always oppressed. And so then when you talk to them, you find out they're really, really resentful and they have a lot of fantasies of revenge. Like a lot. And so then you work with them and you think, okay, you have something to say and do here.

You've got some harsh words to say, maybe to your partner. You've got some things to say to your boss. You gotta spine up and say it. And that's part of incorporating that, especially aggression. So agreeable people, compassionate people don't like aggression. But like that's like not liking sex. It's dangerous.

But it's necessary. And so you want to integrate it. And if you don't, it has its own life. You know, y you see people all the time who they're so nice. You can't even be in the same room with them. They're that nice. They're they're resentful and passive aggressive. They take it out in all sorts of ways, partly because they're always unhappy. They're often moralistically judgmental.

Because they're not saying what they have to say. They've got to integrate that shadow. So that was part of it. And it the shadow is consists of in part all the things about you that you've deemed morally unacceptable and failed to develop. And so a lot sometimes that's aggression, often. Sometimes it's sexuality, often, and so it'll manifest itself in impulsive aggressive sexuality, say under conditions of alcohol intoxication, when it leaks out.

Aggressive, meaning like rough sex? Combo yeah, forced forced. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Forced. So you mean like rape? Well, or or it doesn't have to go all the way to rape. It can be like over aggressive sexual compulsion in the in a dating situation. So does that account for um certain men that like violence in their sex? Like they like abuse in their sex? Like'cause there's Of men too. that like to hit women during sex. And a lot of them

turn out to be these like kind of male feminist types, which is really strange. No, it's not. But it but it's really strange it's strange on the outside. Definitely find out it's strange to those men too,'cause it's often it's very unsettling for them to see. you know, in the cloud of their niceness and their harmlessness, this deep, dark desire making itself manifest. Do you remember that case of that Canadian broadcaster who was this guy who was like, really talks like this?

Very calm. Ver and then a bunch of women came out that dated him said he beat the shit out of them and he would wanna beat them up during sex. Mm-hmm. Like really beat them up. Punch them in the face. And that's the answer is zero. No. I'm not saying in the least that that's acceptable. Let me be absolutely clear here. No, it's not.

It's it's what's repressed. There's no clearer way of saying it. It's like look look, men many men are terrified of women. Many. And so that terror might uh manifest itself even in a relationship. in the inability to ever let their the partner know what they really want. They're terrified for what reason? Because of rejection. Yeah. Yeah. And then the feelings of inadequacy that produces, often which are necessary.

They're necessary. Right. Right I I was just trying to explain this to a friend once where we had a friend of ours who had developed what seemed to be like a real hate for women and he wasn't an attractive guy. And so we were having this conversation and I said, Imagine if all of your interactions with women hurt your feelings. and you're not a very thoughtful and introspective person, you would immediately associate women with negative feelings and you'd be angry about.

And that's what's happening to that guy. He got a bad roll of the dice in terms of his facial features and his jeans just wasn't that good. And so w he was not intr girl girls were not interested in him. So he had developed this anger.

And it was it was shocking. Welcome to the human race. Shocking to well that's incels, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well it's not even incels. It's like okay, so I'll finish one thought'cause we were talking about transsexualism. Yeah. So the second stage of development in the Jungian sense is the integration of counter sexual possibilities. So one of I just watched uh uh Joachim Phoenix in Joker and he's he's a very charismatic actor.

And I was thinking, Well God,'cause he carried that whole movie on on single handedly. It's a dark, dark movie and it has to do with resentment, this man who was forced to be nice by his mother. Yeah. You know, who turns out to be absolutely crazy and abused him like mad when he was a kid. And and then he becomes this role model for the dissemination of complete catastrophe into the entire society. It's a story of Cain in in part.

But Phoenix really carries that and part of the reason that he does that is'cause he creates a compelling character who's sympathetic. Like you can be sympathetic to him'cause he really did have a hard life. Like really hard. But Phoenix is an extraordinarily charismatic person, partly because he's so unbelievably he's masculine in his features and carved, but he's so graceful.

Every single thing he does in the entire movie is a dance. Like he's conscious of every single movement he makes. Every turn of his head is Conscious, it's dance-like, and you can't take your eyes off it. And a lot of stellar performers had that ability to integrate, male performers had that ability to integrate that feminine grace. into their masculine character. You saw that with Bowie, David Bowie, you saw it with Mick Jagger.

They say they're good examples. A lot of those 70s glam rockers were gender benders, long hair, a lot of flashy outfits, and and they did show and they were they were they weren't exactly androgynous. That's not the right way to think about it. Is they're not going to be able to do manifested a higher order integration of masculine and feminine.

And that made them that made them charismatic because that's high order integration and I would say that part of the compulsion be between adult onset trans sexuality of the autogonophilic type is a consequence of the sexual instinct manifesting itself as a guide to the integration of personality across the sex divide.

You I'm sure you're uh w familiar with Douglas Murray's work. Yes. And Murray, who's very funny, who I like very much, and who's one of the most courageous people I've ever met. Yeah, he's brilliant. And he had uh an amazing point about Civilizations collapsing. and that when they start collapsing they become obsessed with gender. And he was saying that it it it you could trace it back to the ancient Romans, the Greeks

Yeah, Camille Pellia has made much of that. Yeah. I think I think probably it's not so much an obsession with gender, it's a disintegration of categories as a precursor like so it's a marker for If categories dis dis d dissolve, especially fundamental ones, The culture is dissolving because the culture is a structure of category. That's what it is. Right. So and in fact culture is a strut is a structure of category that we all share.

So we see th things the same way. Well that's why we can talk. I mean not exactly the same way, because then we'd have nothing to talk about. But roughly speaking, we have a bedrock of agreement. That's the Bible, by the way. So I just walked through the museum of the Bible in Washington. That was very cool. It's a very cool museum. So the structure that's what the Bible is.

So it was a cool it was a cool thing to walk through because it's it's chronological. They have one floor which is the history of the Bible. But it's not exactly that. It's really what it is, is the history of the book. Now, in many ways the first book was the Bible. I mean literally, because the At one point there was only one book. Like as far as our Western culture is concerned, there was one book. And for a while literally there was only one book.

And that book was the Bible. And then before it was the Bible, it was a cl you know, it was scrolls and it was writings on papyrus and but it was we were starting to aggregate written text together and it went through all sorts of technological transformations and then it became Books that everybody could buy, the book everybody could buy, and the first one of those was the Bible. And then it became all sorts of books that everybody could buy.

But all those books in some sense emerged out of that underlying book. And that book itself, the Bible isn't a book, it's a library. It's a collection of books. And so What I figured out was partly because I was talking to my brother in law Jim Keller, who's The world's greatest chip designer and has now designed a chip.

That's as powerful as the human brain, which is optimized for artificial intelligence learning, by the way. And so I talked to him about that. He said, You heard of the internet? I said, Yeah, Jim, I've heard of the internet. He said, This is way more revolutionary than that.

So in any case, we were talking about meaning in text because we were talking about translation and the problem of understanding text, and Jim said the meaning of words is coded in the relationship of the words to one another. And the postmodernists make that case that all meaning is derived from the relationship between words.

Wrong because well, what about rage? That's not words. And what about moving your hand? That's not words. So it's wrong, but but part of it's right because The meaning we derive from the verbal domain is encoded in the relationship between words. So So now then you think, well, let's think about the relationship between words. Well some words are dependent on other words, some ideas are dependent on other ideas. The more ideas are dependent on a given idea, the more fundamental that idea is.

By de that's a definition of fundamental. So now imagine you have an aggregation of texts in a civilization, and you say which are the fundamental texts? And the answer is the texts upon which most other texts depend. And so you'd put Shakespeare way in there in English because so many texts are dependent on Shakespeare's literary revelations.

And Milton would be in that category, and Dante would be in that category, at least in translation. Fundamental authors, part of the Western canon, not because of the arbitrary dictates of power, But because those texts influenced more other texts. And then you think about that as a hierarchy, okay, with the Bible at its base, which is certainly the case.

Now imagine that's the entire corpus of ling of linguistic production, all things considered. Now how do you understand that? Like literally, how do you understand that? Well the answer is you sample it by reading and listening to stories and listening to people talk. You sample that whole domain. You build a low resolution representation of that in your inside you. And then you listen and see through that. And so it isn't that the Bible is true.

It's that the Bible is the precondition for the manifestation of truth. Which makes it way more true than just true. It's a whole different kind of true. And I think this is I think this is not only literally the case, factually, I think it can't be any other way. It's the only way we can solve the problem of perception. You say w the precondition of the manifestation of truth? Yeah. What do you mean by that? How do you know when what you and I are saying is true?

Well it depends on what we're saying. Not exactly. You know this, Joe. This is a mystery. And I've been tweeting about it while people have been attacking you. Why is Joe Rogan so popular? He's a gateway to the alt rights. Like, no, he's a psychedelic hippie. That's a stupid that's a stupid hypothesis. That's wrong. Well, he's a propagandist. It's like no. Joe's an honest man. And he actually says what he believes to be true. But let's think about that, because that isn't exactly what you do.

You follow the conversation and you listen, and you spontaneously manifest words that indicate your reaction. And it isn't the words themselves exactly that are true, because you might be wrong and you might be right, right? I mean, what do you know or what I know? We're gonna be wrong a bunch during this conversation. But the process that we're manifesting In the discovery of truth and untruth, that's not wrong.

That's exactly right. And you know when we're doing it'cause it's it's so engaging. The process that we're manifesting. The mutual Exploration of structures of truth through dialogue. Oh. In good faith. In good faith. That's the most important. Yes. And then and then we could ask, well, what does in good faith mean? Okay, so first of all, I can trust you. And that's been my experience. You've never played games with me. We disagree. That's fun.

I can trust you. You don't play games. I can talk to you. You listen and you say things. We have a conversation. It's real. It's fun. We fall into it. The time flies by, right? Yeah. That's a cool thing. That the burden of temporal mortality lifts in the face of genuine dialogue.

You think, well, there's a marker for paradisal meaning. It's like a bit of transcendence of death right there and then. You think, no, it's not. It's like, yeah, yeah, you go for five years without a meaningful conversation. And see if you're dead.'Cause if you're not, you're sure gonna wanna be. Well, it's it's akin to isolation. Hm. I mean you can be around people but not have a good conversation and you might as well be isolated.

You are isolated. In the prison of your own thoughts. What's the problem if you do like if you are stuck somewhere where your own the only conversation that's available is with dull people. Like if you have a job And the people at the job are like your friend who was on cocaine and alcohol and wound up dying from it. Like those kinds of people, if you're only around them, it can severely limit the way you express yourself.

and the way you see the world and the amount of stimulation you get out of interacting with people. So it'll it'll inhibit your intellectual development because you won't be interested in expanding ideas and you may look to escape. You're in the entire unfolding of your existence.

There there's there's I I did a series on on Genesis that became quite popular and one of the stories I analyzed was the story of Abraham's very cool story,'cause Abraham's like eighty years old living in his father's tent, talk about failure to launch. And God shows up one day and says, You have to leave everything you know and journey out into the unknown. And you think, well what is that? Well, that's the call to adventure. That's what it is.

And so and what happens to Abraham is it's a bloody catastrophe. Like the first thing he runs into is a war and then he goes into a totalitarian state, Egypt, and they try to steal his wife and it's like

Man, he's thinking, I think's pretty good in that tent. But well, he goes on this tremendous adventure and then he's the forefather of of you know Biblically speaking, half the people on the planet, he has this tr tremendous adventure to think, well, what do you set against the suffering of your life? Well, the adventure of your life. That's what you set against it. It's not safety. You forget about that. There's no safety for mortals, that's for sure. And besides, safety? That's what you want?

You don't want that. You want adventure. So then the question is where's adventure to be found? In exploitation. Well try it and see. Hell is to be found in exploitation. How about true who thinks adventure's to be found in exploitation? Well that's kind of the claim that everything's about power. Everything's motivated by power. Is that really what people say though? Who says that? Well the postmodernists all say that. That's such a silly expression. Yeah, but that is what they're doing.

Yes, because you want to climb up the socioeconomic status hierarchy. By painting? That's ridiculous. You're just not very good at it. Okay, what about music? Same thing. Motivated by power. You bet everything's motivated by power. Well that was the answer that came out of France in the nineteen seventies, and that was the answer that all the universities accepted. Everything's why do you think that the whole cultural critique is patriarchal oppression?

Don't you think that that is done a lot by people that have not taken those chances? That that diminishing of effort by s calling a painter or a musician and saying that those people are motivated by power? Like i these are from career intellectuals who d don't venture outside of the university.

They don't out venture outside the prisons of their own imagination. Or the echo chambers that exist in the right. I mean this was Nietzsche's observation and and Orwell's too is that a lot of that's motivated by resentment. Tremendous amount of it. I think that's a hundred percent True. And I think we should be very careful of people who aren't charitable. Hm. Very careful of people who aren't nice. And people that you I mean, there's uh people that make a career

Just insulting and shitting on people all the time. And they never can look at things from that person's perspective. Well, that is the expression of power then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I always think you think everything's about power. It's like that's a confession, buddy. perceptions of yourself.

Yes.'Cause you know you know who you are, you know what you're doing, you know, if you're you're just doing Yeah, well what attitude do you have to yourself if if you believe the only true expression of human existence is to be found in the will to power It's the crap. It's like Okay, you you're a psychopath. Right. What's all that? And even more when you're pretending not to be. God a dismal viewpoint. What about friendship? Like is that power too? It's all manipulation.

That's great. That's a person who's never hung out with good buddies. Yeah, that's for sure. Ridiculous. It's ridiculous. The best part of Friendships is laughing and joking around with Yeah, that's for sure. That's the play. For sure, absolutely. Yeah, well so you know y if you're in a humor humorless group.

Yes. What's going on? But that's the same thing as killing the comedians. It's the same thing. That is an issue with people without humor. It is a problem. Because if they're not capable of generating it themselves, they resent it. So that's another reason why I trust you. I've watched your comedy specials. It's like Oh yeah, he's uh he's funny. He's actually funny. Like seriously funny. And like seriously funny. Because you'd go very dark places, very successfully. And it's very funny to watch.

It's like is he really gonna do that? Yeah, yeah. Your Kardashian devil is like that's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. And it's dark. You know, that's a good in an indication of that investigation of the shadows, right? You went way in there. What spirit is possessing this? This manifestation. Satanic spirit crouching on a on a bed boat.

Yeah. Uh so funny. I couldn't believe you did it. It's really hilarious. Well, I was trying to figure out a way to attack a sacred cow. I know and you d you did it. You didn't get cancelled for it either. Which is what I'm saying. I attacked myself. Yeah.

far more than I attacked that. Yeah, well that's that's that That's what I did. That's also the sign of someone who's got their sense of humor. That's one of things I really like about English comedians in particular. The English are really good at making fun of themselves. Yeah. And the Monty Python troupe was particularly good at that. Yeah, they're brilliant at it. I mean you cannot like comedy, but that means you don't like good conversation.

That means that means you don't like camaraderie. Or you're incapable of it. Yeah. And there are some people that are brilliant people that don't like comedy. They don't like conversation. They don't like They they they're brilliant at very specific maybe non social things. And maybe they're brilliant at engineering or maybe they're brilliant at mathematics or maybe they're brilliant at something that doesn't require

the kind of back and forth play. Yeah, yeah. The play between Yeah. That's so important. My favorite people to hang out with are all funny. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah, my favorite friends uh I'm going to New York, so I'm going on a forty city tour, which is going to be, I hope, playful and and fun, you know, as well as serious because we're trying to maintain a spirit of play while we undertake it. That's that's

That's part of the goal. And I'm inviting some old friends from high school to join me in New York and they were this group of people that I knew who were competitive comedians essentially. And all we ever did when we hung out together the h all of the status Jockeying was all Funny. Who's the funniest who can say the most outrageous thing and then and take it too? Oh we take it. So that's so fun. Yeah. And I I missed that. I found it was really characteristic that culture of

Healthy working class groups, affiliative groups. And as I sort of climbed the intellectual ladder, I found that a lot of that fell away. And I missed it a lot. You know who's really good at it? Sam Harris. Sam Harris's lectures and his debates and his conversation, one of the things that really highlights them is his humor. Like he has a wonderful way of making things seem really silly with jokes.

And I talked to him about it once. Like there was one that I watched that I I laughed really hard and I called him up. I go, Hey dude, I go, You could be a comedian. Like a like a real legit comedian. Like your takes on things are very funny.

Like they're funny, they're clever. They're sneaky. Douglas yes, he's got a great sense of humor, man. Brilliant people are oftentimes They can they're capable of anything and g Sam one hundred percent could be a I was walking through New York Times Square with Douglas Murray about a month ago and we were we had gone to an opera and we were on the way to this unbelievably fun Russian bar.

And we were walking through Times Square and then in Times Square there's these people dressed up like superheroes, eh? And the kids that have been hired to do this and Spider Man ran up to me and he said, Are you Jordan Peterson? And I said, Are you Spider Man? And this that was pretty damn funny. And then Douglas Murray, we were walking by and he Douglas Murray said, I wish he would have asked me if I was Douglas Murray and so It was ridiculously funny.

Douglas Murray drinking at a Russian bar must have been awesome. It was really good. We had a blast in in New York. It was really s was ridiculously fun. He's got this goes along with his insane courage. He's very courageous. And I've and out of that I've seen emerge some unbelievably brave people like Brett Weinstein, for example, and his wife Heather. They're unbelievably brave and I and her sea lee, she's like that and but Murray is like Murray, that guy's got a spinous steel.

He he certainly does and he backs it up with consideration and thought. Like he's thought these things through. He's not being flippant. He's not talking off the cuff. He knows what he's saying. And, you know, he he shuts people down in a a pretty beautiful way. So I went to Cambridge and Oxford in December.

after I had been disinvited and that's a whole interesting story in and of itself'cause there's a real free speech movement developed at Cambridge and centered on the school of divinity that's so interesting. Yeah. So it's really starting to manifest itself in

in all sorts of fascinating ways. But I tested out some of the ideas that I talked to you about today about the idea that we look at the world through a we have to look at the world through an ethical structure, not a s not an objective structure.

And I developed a little bit more when I was talking to you today'cause I hadn't realized at that point that this literary structure was composed in part of the relationship between foundational text and that the Bible was by definition at the bottom of that. It has to be. Technically, because

I'll go back to that for a minute because imagine that as we moved forward through time, well at one point we had no books at all, we had no writing. Well, then the question might be, well what did we write down? And the answer is well stories. Well what are stories? Well they're descriptions of people moving through time and space doing things.

Now that isn't all they are'cause they can be boring. So they're interesting stories about they're interesting descriptions of people moving through time. Those are the ones that stick. You bet. Well no one will listen to them otherwise or write them. They have to be interesting.

So that means that our sense of meaning orients us to certain types of stories. Well those are the ones that get written down and remembered. And so we aggregated those stories across time. And those are our first basic documents. We're like a self description. What are we doing? Well here's what interesting people are doing. Well how do we know? Well'cause we're interested in them. And so then you think, well, what's manifesting itself? And that's that spirit of engagement.

And so th there's also a religious twist in this. And so you and I are engaging in dialogue. That's dialogos, right? So it's it's the manifestation of the logos dually. What is that? Well it's the redemptive. It's redemption in action. That's what it is. I m I mean technically that's what it is. So imagine this. You've got a bunch of worn out ideas.

And they're blinding you. And I got a bunch of worn out ideas and they're blinding me. And if we stumble forward in our blindness, we will fall into a pit. So what do we do about that? Well I talk to you about what you think and I listen because man Maybe you know something that I don't that I need to know. Yes. Well so how is that a not a redemptive process? Obviously it is. And and what's its signal? Because it redeems you from your own totalitarian idiocy and the hell that leads to.

You you just told me that. You said what happens if you're isolated for five years? I think it more of uh as expansive than redemptive. That's fine. I think of it more in term I mean, that's my personal experience in doing this podcast, which is It's not just expansive though. I agree with you, it's expansive. But it's not just that, because while you're expanding, you're also discarding.

Right. Yeah, so that's that's part of it that makes it redemptive, right? And that's there's a reason that in Revelation cu Christ comes back with a sword to judge the elect and the damn. There's a reason for that, because that's a symbol of the operation of the logos, and the logos, even in dialogue, says That's an interesting point. We'll keep that. Let's focus on that. Well, we can ignore that. We can get rid of that. We can we can junk that.

And it's this constant part of its mercy because let's keep what's good because we want everyone to flourish, but part of it's judgment, that's the sword. It's like no no not this. And most you most you get rid of most things, right? You can't keep most things. You have to put them aside. Well and that's that there's an old idea that Jung elaborated on that God rules with two hands, mercy and just And the mercy is well let's let everyone flourish and welcome people and forgive them all of that.

But justice is more, yeah, but let's do the right thing and leave what's wrong behind. And that requires judgment, judiciousness. I talked to Jimmy Carr about how he prepared for his comedy tour, and maybe you do exactly the same thing, and he said comedy stand up comedy is the most dialogical of artistic enterprises. And I thought, Well what do you mean?'Cause you're just talking like I do on lectures and I think. I'm listening to the audience all the time.

It's making contact with them, watching how they're reacting. I'm listening. Carr said. Well, I do a hundred shows before I go out on tour and I try out new material. So he generates new material, a lot of it, that's the creativity part. Then he goes and tries it out an audience. And they either laugh or they don't. And because he's brave and listens, he notices when he's not funny, and he stops being not funny.

And so the audience just tells him what's funny and then he collects that across a hundred instances, and then that's funny and verified by the audience and he goes out and tells those jokes. And so that's dialogical and redemptive as well. It's like What jokes need to be told? Well our culture has some sacred cows. Those are idols.

The idols that the Israelites worshipped in the desert, the golden calf, sacred cows. They need to be punctured. Why? Well, because they're impeding our progress. Well, how do we puncture them? Well, one way is we show that we can transcend them. And the Canadians are doing that all the time. Here's something we can't laugh about. Let's laugh about it. Everybody breaks down, everybody cracks up. You know it's so cool when people laugh they can't fight.

I used to w used to go work out with Jim Keller, this chip designer, and we did this for years and one of our jokes was, you know, we'd be striving to bench press whatever we were managing at the time, 175 pounds, like it's really straining, and then we'd t crack a joke. And that was always funny. We spotted them of course because as soon as you laugh, all your muscular tension disappears. Right. And so that's so cool, eh? When you laugh you can't fight. You can't fight when you're laughing.

So how much laughing should we be doing? It's like it depends on how much fighting we want to do. And maybe if we w didn't want to do any fighting we'd be laughing all the time. And that's how you said that cements your your group of comrades together. Well you're not fighting. What are you doing instead? Playing. Yeah. Well that's what we need to do, man, is we need to play. All of us. Yeah, well I agree with that. For sure.

There's uh there's a thing going on with stand up where you're you're working with the crowd too. It's really interesting. So tell tell me about it. Well you like I'll have a bit and I'll have the bit fully structured. You know, I'll write it out and then uh I try to go on stage and on stage I'm informed by the feeling that I have by interacting with the crowd to take it to a different place. To take it

To take the subject to a different place, to to abandon parts of it that just don't feel organic to me. Right. And I you learn through the crowd that you can't just write. Sometimes you can. Sometimes jokes come out in full f there's some jokes that I wrote that I literally wrote them down and then I did them on stage the exact way that I wrote them down. And they always stayed that way. Mm-hmm. I don't know why.

But some of'em they don't come that way. They come like as they come like as a thing that you have to piece together. Like you have part like y here you have some material. You have some raw material. And I guarantee you this could be a house. But you're gonna have to figure out what the layout is. That's what happens when I'm lecturing. Yeah. Because I never give the same lecture twice. Mm. And I don't use notes. But I do the same thing. I have a a whole

I think about it like jazz improvisation. I have a whole bunch of stories that I know and I have a whole bunch of questions that I've investigated. And all what I try to do in the lecture and that's what I do on the tour is I have a question that I haven't investigated to my satisfaction. Then I sit backstage and I think, Okay What question am I investigating? It has to be one I actually want to investigate. It can't be a lie. This is a good hint for people who want to write essays.

Don't write an essay about a question that you don't want an answer to,'cause that's a lie. Right. And it'll be dull and you'll hate it, and you'll hate writing, and you'll get a bad grade, and you'll get cynical, and you'll drop out. It's not good. So you gotta be a real question. So okay, this is a question. I think it's worthy of pursuit. I'd like to get farther with it. Okay, here's here's

A theory I know about that we could explore it with. Here's another one. Here's some examples of that that make good stories. Here's another place I could go to investigate that. So I have that in my mind, and then I go out and I'm watching I always watch single people in the audience. One at a time. The lights kinda interfere with that.'Cause I like to be able to see the people at the back, but I can't. But I so I watch the front people and I see is this landing?

Like are the lights going on?'Cause you can tell. And it's the time I think this the thing that's most similar to what I'm doing in my book tour is stand-up comedy. So you can tell if the if it's landing people are nodding and they're not fidgeting and the crowd isn't rustling, like they're all focused.

And some of them are looking like this. And now then you see someone who's kinda nodding off and if there's a lot of them that's a problem. But if it's one guy, you don't look at him, look at someone else. You know, maybe at a bad day. You don't take that personally. And then the crowd, you said informs you and inform is really an interesting term information.

Mm-hmm. So now you're looking at the crowd and you're looking at their eyes in particular and their face. And their eyes tell you what they're focused on, so what they think is important. And their face tells you how they're reacting.

And then you glance around the crowd and then you get a sense of the whole crowd and you map that onto your body and that gives rise to a set of intuitions that allows you to communicate, because otherwise you couldn't communicate. And that's listening, although you're doing it with your eyes, but you're still listening.

And and that does inform this dance, and that's partly also why people love stand up comedy. That's partly why they like my lectures. Is because they don't know what's going to happen, and neither do I, and it could fail at any moment. And so a good conveyers that failed spectacularly? No. But I've I've certainly had ones Oh it certain I certainly have felt that it might. Right. Because I'll go out on

my thought tends to be quite tangential because I try to link lots of things together. So then I'll go way out on a limb. It's like I'm addressing this question. idea idea idea idea idea uh oh I'm away from the tree and I don't know how to get back. Right. And then at sometimes and then sometimes that'll happen mid lecture and I think then I get self conscious, then I forget everything I'm talking about and and that can then that can be real awkward. Yeah. But Luckily he had

Generally so far knock would. If I pause I can recreate the argument. And then I can figure out where I was headed and then I can think, Oh yes, that's why I made that point. And then I can go back. And people like the you know, one of the things comedians often do? is they'll tell a joke early in the set. And then quite a bit later in the set they'll reintroduce the joke.

It shows them that they've followed along and that we're in the same place. Right. And they love that. They love that. And it's just as satisfying as a punchline. Yes. And it is a punchline in some sense. It's like all this Yeah. This. Yes. Click. Yeah. Fun. You can see lights go on all the time in the crowd. It's such fun. Yeah, people love that. Yeah. Well, and no wonder. It puts them in the zone. So here's a cool thing. Vygotsky, Russian psychologist.

Study the acquisition of language in children. So he thought, how do children learn to speak? Because no one teaches them. They just learn. It's a weird thing. Even very intellectually impaired human beings learn to talk. It's really deeply embedded in us. So he looked at how chill parents talk to their children while they were developing language, and he found that parents

Talk to children at a level that slightly exceeds their current level of comprehension. And they do that without knowing they're doing it. And so then you think, well, what are you doing? You think what you're doing? You've got the child and he knows some things. but he doesn't know enough But you don't want to punish him and exclude him because he doesn't know enough, but you don't want to leave him undeveloped.

So you speak to him so he almost catches on. And that way he gets something, but there's a horizon, right? And the horizon keeps moving, moving, and this so the child's right at that edge. That Vygotsky called that. The zone of proximal development. That's the zone.

That's the term. So when you're in the zone, which you love to be in, and you know when you're in it, and so does the audience, so does everybody, they're in the zone, man. Athletes are in the zone. Everyone's like, Oh my God, they're in the zone. Isn't that cool? It's like, yeah. It's the precondition for cool. It's like everything.

I think what's going on with comedy, at least I can speak to that I've never really done any lectures, but that with comedy what's happening is there's it's kind of a mass hypnosis and the audience is trusting you with their thoughts. If your thoughts are clean enough, meaning if they're they're precise enough that someone can follow you with wonder.

Like not knowing where you're going with it. It can't be too obvious. One of the worst things a comic can do is have too many words to set up a premise and to set up a punchline because then it allows the person to formulate their own punchline. And oftentimes they come with to the same punchline. A little sooner. Right. Because if a person is going to write if that person's gonna use too many words to describe something, oftentimes They're unskilled.

Right. So their punchline will also be obvious. Mm-hmm. And it's a real problem. But that same punchline, even though it's obvious, would be effective if you hit it with an economy of words. So that wonder is really an interesting thing. So Um most of the things around us we don't attend to.

And that's because there's an infinite number of things around us. Well, except maybe if we're on psychedelics, in which case we attend everything. And that's Yeah, and that's too much. And everyone says, Oh, that was too much. It's like, yeah. That is literally the definition of too much. Well that's good. Never? No. No, I feel like I can't handle it at the moment. But enough. Not even that I can't handle it. I can't categorize everything.

Right. Like it's j it's overwhelming in in in its possibilities. Yeah. But one of the things that I love the most about psychedelics is that it informs me. of that uh uh just by existing, it informs me that all of my notions of reality itself are bullshit. They're all bullshit. And I live in this sort of confined this disrestrained narrow carved pathway world because that's where I live all the time. But then sufficient. Yeah. And then but then you have a psychedelic experience and it just boom.

So that's gone. That wonder that you described, that's like a fractional psychedelic experience. So you say, Well, they entrust you with their wonder. It's like yes they do. So so when we're sitting in this room Most of the things that are going on around us we're not attending to. So basically we've we perceive them as equivalent to zero. So that's kind of interesting because everything around us is infinitely remarkable, and yet we perceive everything as if it's zero.

Now the reason we do that is so that we can use our limited attention on a few things. So it's necessary, but it's also blinding. Now, when you start to wonder about something, what you're actually doing when you wonder about it is freeing your perception from the constraints of memory.

And that's a d place of dancing. It's a place where memory itself is updated. And if you trust someone and you and you express that sense of wonder in the confines of that trust, then you are in fact Oh you are in fact participating in the process that reveals the underlying complexity of the world to you and then does literally inform you. And you feel that I've been very interested technically in the instinct of meaning,'cause what is meaning? And is it illusory?

'Cause that's the fundamental question in some sense. It isn't even is suffering real. It says the meaning that keeps suffering at bay. Is that real? That's a more fundamental question. And the answer to that is it's not only real, it is the most real thing. And it you have an instinct that signals its presence to you. Part of that manifests itself as wonder. It's the openness to transformation.

It isn't even the new ideas that are redeeming. It's the process of continually opening yourself up to the transformation of new ideas. And and that's signaled by wonder. When you're talking about ignoring all the things around you, it made me think about sensory deprivation tanks. And I don't I don't know if we've ever discussed this before. Have you ever done that? Yes. What did you think?

Well, I thought a bunch of the things that we just talked about. You know, what happens is that in a sensory deprivation tank, You become increasingly sensitive to less and less because there's almost nothing going on. So the threshold for perception is. But you get more and more and more sensitive as you're trying to pick up signal where there's no signal. And that can open these gates of imagination, for example.

You know, well you know this already because to some degree, imagine you you want to go figure something out. You usually go somewhere. where you can be by yourself. You're not flooded by sensory information. Maybe you go for a walk or maybe go sit on your bed. You kinda shield yourself from outside input.

And then by concentrating you open yourself up to this internal revelation that's otherwise blotted out by the external world. And that really happens to a huge degree in a sensory deprivation tank, or can. And I think that is akin in many ways to ask. and people have made this case many times, is that it's analogous to a psych psychedelic experience and I think that's technically true.

Yeah, it certainly is because if that i experience was achievable through a psychedelic I think it'd be a very popular psychedelic. If the experience of having no sensory input and being able to be alone with your thoughts like completely without the influence of even gravity on your body and the the a seat or the floor on your feet. You don't feel any of it. So Yeah, you start to get

Because you're you're you've eliminated all that external stimulation, you allow yourself to become aware of things happening that would otherwise be in the background. Jung believed, for example, because Carl Jung that we're always dreaming. Always. We just don't perceive it because the outer world blots it out. And there's definitely truth in that. So daydreaming, fantasy. Well even it's even deeper than that because Look, there is a thread of meaning that guides this conversation.

And neither of you know what it neither of us know what it is. We know when it manifests itself.

Because we get interested, right? Think, Oh, that's interesting and then, you know, you I say something, you think it's interesting, and you nail it with a bunch of words and then I pick up some of the words and I think that's interesting and I nail it with a bunch of words and but there's this thread It's the golden thread that leads you out of Ariadne's maze, by the way, and that's part of the redemptive process is By following that

manifestation of spontaneous interest, truthfully, we participate in this process that revitalizes our perceptions. That and that's technically true. That's that's what's happening. And and then what's even more cool than that is that There's nothing we can experience that we would rather do than that if it's happening intensely. And that's because that is the best thing we can do. That's the logos. That's the logos.

When you have done By definition. When you have done sensory deprivation experiences, how many have you ever done? Is it About six? Six of them? Yeah. Recent? Uh no, it's been f ten years probably. Do you think you would benefit from that? It would depend on how I did it. I mean even conceivably. Why haven't you uh tried to incorporate that into your life?

I have other things I do that are probably partial substitutes for it or reasonable substitutes. I do kundalini yoga in the morning. Oh, do you? With my wife. I have for twenty years. Not every day, but I'd say A third of the time and often for months on end. And so and I've learned what that means. So you know when you do those yoga poses? Mm-hmm. That's not yoga.

That's training for yoga. It's like imagine that you go to a dance studio and they teach you moves. That's not dancing. Dancing is what you do on the stage after you've written your joke. And yoga is what you do with your body after you've mastered the poses.'Cause it's all spontaneous. And so when my wife and I do kundalini yoga in the morning, it's a series of of flex flexion exercises and breathing. But mostly what it is is so maybe one is rotation of the head.

Like that. And then but you're paying attention. It's like, okay, oh my back hurts there. Okay. I'll move my head back and forth a little bit. Relax. Move my head. Relax. Okay, it doesn't hurt anymore. Oh, that hurt. Oh, gotta explore there. Let that go. Let that go. And you go through your whole body. It's like, oh I'm cramped there. Oh that hurts. And what's so cool, it's like massage. You know, if if you're hurting and someone massages that, the pain goes away.

What the hell's going on there? Facilitation of of of uh uh circulation, removal of toxins from that locale, but also the drawing of your reparative attention to that spot. Well yoga's like that. It's like, oh I'm out of alignment there. Oh, I'm out of alignment there. And so what you're doing and this is akin to stacking the chakras, which is the same as a musical experience, is imagine that to get that process of optimal self revelation right. You have to be aligned. Atoms aligned.

with the molecules above them, the molecules aligned in the cells, the cells aligned in the musculature, the muscles aligned in the body, the body aligned with the environment. Broadly speaking, all stacked up. That's the cosmic tree, by the way. That's the tree the shaman climb up and down in a psychedelic experience. That cosmic tree that unites levels of being. We can climb that with our consciousness. We do it all the time.

You know, if you're writing a book you concentrate on the word or the paragraph or the whole chapter. You know, and when we're conversing I could concentrate on each word or the phrase or the sentence or the context or I could look round the room up and down these levels of analysis. In yoga you're trying to get

your body psychophysiologically aligned so communication between all those levels isn't interfered with unnecessarily. And then that opens you up in some sense to the possibility of Speech emanating from the depths, that would be one way of thinking about One of the things that people who do kundalini talk about is that they are able to achieve psychedelic state.

and psychedelic states that ordinarily are achieved through drugs. I I have many friends who have done kundalini and for whatever reason I never have. But they have said that through it with long term commitment to practice they can achieve these bizarre states where they have hallucinations. Have you ever had that?

No, but I what I would say is that the pr this process of alignment makes everything into the equivalent of a psychedelic experience, like everything. Because Part of the manifestation of the truth is a consequence of the alignment of these levels. It's like that's what we mean when we talk about someone having integrity or being authentic. It's like they're the same all the way down. And not only that, they're where they are completely. So not only are they aligned internally.

They're aligned with everything that's happening around them. And then, and you know this perfectly well, it's your master at it, because otherwise he wouldn't be where you are. The fact that you can focus your attention almost completely on the current conversation. means that the conversation becomes deep. And that's obviously manifesting itself in a psychedelic way in your existence. It's like what the hell, Joe? Like you're you know who the hell are you?

You started this podcast just talking to people, zero production value, you don't edit it, you talk to people for three hours. Well what kind of stupid business model is that? That's insane. Yeah, and look what's happened. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty insane. It no, it's completely insane. It's completely utterly insane. It's insane for me. It's it's not me. Like people think I plan this.

That's what's hilarious. Yeah, well what's so what's so cool about that, I think, is that well the best laid plans of mice and men, we all know that. But so there's a doctrine in the Sermon on the Mount. It's often viewed as a hippie sort of doctrine, right? Uh the problems of the day will take care of themselves. Don't worry about the future. That is not what that sermon says at all. Not even a bit. Not a not a bit. It says

Align yourself firmly with what is the highest. So that's what you're committed to. So what is the highest? Well We can argue about that, but we don't have to argue that much. Beauty? That okay. Yes. Truth? Sure. Why not? Courage? Yeah, that's a good one. How about love? What's love? The desire that everything will flourish rather than the desire that everything will suffer.

So you aim at that, they aim at the highest good you can conceive of. So we'll call that God. Because we've got to call it something. And it's the integration of all things good. That's by definition. Do you believe in God? Do you believe in the good? Well, the integration of all things good. That's the superordinate thing. It's ineffable. So that's God. Aim at that.

And then concentrate on the day. And you'll get not only you won't even get what you want, because what the hell do you know? You'll get way more than you could possibly imagine. And that's right, that's the adventure of the truth. It's like you won't get what you want if you tell the truth, but how do you know that you're right in what you want? You don't. So how do you operate when you don't know if you're right in what you want? And the answer is tell the truth. Why?

Well, not least because it's the adventure of your life. Like think up think about it this way. Imagine you conduct yourself in deceit. You lie to yourself, you manipulate other people to get what you want. That's a form of lie. It's instrumental manipulation. It's psychopathic, Machiavellian. It's like well that's how you should treat people. It's like no you shouldn't. Why not? You won't get what you want. Yeah, but you don't know what you want. Okay.

Given that well doesn't that entirely depend on what your endeavor is? I mean it may there's a lot of people in business that do lie and manipulate and that's how they become successful. No I'm not saying they should. No, I I also don't think they become successful. No, I think they drive around in their like You don't think that Donald Trump has uh you don't think he's engaged in deception? Do you don't think that'sn't there's a I didn't say that people don't engage in deception. I said that

They do not become successful by engaging in deception. That doesn't mean they don't make a lot of money. There's a but there's a long history of businessmen who are total sociopaths, who've achieved im immense wealth. No. No? No. Psychopathy. No. No I wouldn't say I think that. Okay, what about oil sheep? that have uh d had slaves and have treated people like total garbage, had people assassinated for criticizing them, heads of state

of these uh you know b bizarre countries where you do have these oligarchs that are running the military and they're in charge of massive amounts of currency. Yeah well there that's the postmodern quest In some sense, in a small way. But dictatorship. Yeah, I know. Look, I'm listening, man. But don't you think that there's many examples of quote unquote successful dictators today.

You don't think so. You don't think Kim Jong un is a successful dictator? Only if you think that ruling over hell constitutes success. And you might say, and this is what Milton Satan did say, better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. Kim Jong un fine. Yes, he's a ruler. What's his domain? Hell. You're a psychopath, you're successful, you're ruling over hell. I see what you're saying. So not not

Not successful in that he doesn't engage in love and camaraderie and he doesn't have a full Yeah that full and balanced life Yeah but he's got lots of money. You want that? Go ahead, man. That's how you define success. I see what you're saying. So you're def but success in that he's able to maintain that position. Yeah, we'll see man. Hey, here's an example. This is this is a prime example. So

Our hierarchy is dominance hierarchy. So my one of my graduate students, I used the word dominance hierarchy for years. He took me to task, former student, brilliant guy, slow to speak. But never says anything he hasn't thought through for like five years. So when he talks, I listened. He said, Stop using the term dominance hierarchy. It shocked me because it's like a term used in biology everywhere. Said why? He said, It's full of implicit Marxist suppositions.

Okay, I'll think about that for a while. Said here's the dominance hierarchy. I strip you naked, put a choke chain around you, and lead you round on the floor. It's like that's dominant. That's not what's happening in most human hierarchies and you know that'cause you you have comra you have comrades you joke with, you play with. You said that organizations that are functional aren't based on power. What are they based on? Well not power.

So not dominance. It's like, okay, I thought about that for about two years. It's like, oh, that's a really fundamental criticism and I didn't realize that implicit Marxist presuppositions had been structuring biological thought. And that's exactly right. And so what's proper what's the proper hierarchy constituted by? What's not the expression of the will to power? That's basically the admission that s that satanic forces rule the world. It's the same idea. Well what rule? Well

Satanic forces rule hell, and yes you can be successful as a hellish ruler. Now whether you can maintain that, Franz Dewal, world's greatest primatologist. Studies chimpanzees. They're tough and they're male dominant, unlike Bonabos. They're male dominant. So they're patriarchal hierarchies. Okay, rough, tough chimp can pound everybody flat, maintains the highest power through intimidation.

He's got he's got preferential sexual access to the females. He does that by chasing away the subordinates. It's like heaven, he's dominant. What happens to him? One day he has a bad day, and two subordinate males that he hasn't really been attending to and has been harassing quite a lot jump him and they castrate him and they tear him to pieces. That's what happens. But it doesn't always happen. Ah yes it does. Genghis Khan.

It depends on what you mean by always. Like it's a time frame problem. I mean that guy Yeah. Yeah, I know. He's like he's like Progenitor of a third of the human race. Yeah, I know. I understand. I mean he was successful being a dominator for his entire life and was responsible for the death of somewhere between fifty and seventy million people. He changed the carbon footprint of the planet Earth during his lifetime because he killed so many people.

We can agree on that. But you know, I mean you're asking an absolutely germane question. In the book of Exodus, the Pharaoh is a tyrant, but he's up against God. And the pharaoh loses. And you might think, well, what does that mean? Well, it's complicated. It's a complicated story. That's why it's been around for like

three thousand years. And why it's the it's the fundamental narrative, for example, is the ident it was the narrative that black Christians really identified with in the United States, which is something that's really worth thinking about, the fact that that's the case. The Pharaoh is tortured by God. Well, what's God?

Well, we said already, at least to some degree, God is the amalgamation of all that is good. I'm I'm not speaking religiously when I say that. I'm speaking conceptually. Okay. God is the union of all things that are good. Okay, but that's not conceptual exactly,'cause that's also something that you exist in a relationship to and that you act out.

It's not just an idea. Okay, so God is that spirit that calls to Abraham to have the adventure of his life instead of languishing in his father's tent, so it's called to adventure. It's truth, it's the burning bush, it's the psychedelic experience. It's God against the Pharaoh. The Pharaoh is a totalitarian and he keeps imposing his edicts, r running contrary to freedom, promoting slavery, let's say.

Well the kingdom c fractures and crumbles continually, continually, continually. And you might say, Well, time frame, time frame's a problem, man. Maybe you can be a successful tyrant even over the course of your lifetime. But maybe you doom your cunt your country to death. You doom your country to hell. Is that success? It depends on what you mean success is, because these things do depend on definitions. But all countries collapse. All of them.

Every civilization that has ever existed has fallen apart. No, I don't think so. Which one's still around? Ours? Yeah, but we haven't been around that long. I don't know, you can trace the We're falling apart right now. You can you know this, Joe. You can trace the religious experience, the religious revelation, the central religious revelation, back at least twenty five thousand years.

Of continued transmission. Twenty five thousand, really. Sure. All the way back to the Stone Age Shaman. For sure. For sure. Is that a hundred percent proven that they were experiencing altered states of consciousness and that they were l imparting these lessons in a form of a religion? Okay. I can only say what I've concluded by looking in as many places I could possibly look, ranging from the theological through the literary, through history, through the scientific.

The biochemical, all of that. Trying to stack all that up. So it's multiple, it's called a multi-method, multi-trait construct analysis. You try if something's true, it will manifest itself in multiple different places with independent methodologies. So it's like your detec your senses do that. Is this real? Well I can see it, I can I can hear it, I can touch it. Now, is that finally real? No. But that's a different question. It's real enough for the purposes. Same thing here.

I think the idea that like Jack and the Beanstalk, the magic beans climbing up the the magic stalk to heaven, that's a shamanic tale. We know some fairy tales are fifteen thousand years old. That one's 100,000 years old? Is it really? We don't know. Right. It's our story. Like Mercheh Eliad wrote a book called Shamanism. He's a great historian of religion.

And he looked at the commonality of shamanic experience across multiple cultures. It's very stable. He thought that Psychedelic induced shamanic practices were uh Corruption of the original tradition? I don't think that's right. I think it's wrong. You know, we were we were talking about that sort of field of study that has emerged in Harvard now because of Brian's work.

And that they're now And Ruck, right? Yeah. Yes. And Gordon Wassalls. Mexico from the fifties, right? Let's discover psilocybin mushrooms. Yeah. Um that is now being really c it's not fringe anymore. Yeah, yeah, that's and also uh Who did the DMT work? Rick Strassman? Yes. Poor Rick. I love that kind. Yeah, he had to stop doing it really. It's like, uh oh. Look what's happening. All these people get shot out. Well, he didn't know what to do with it. He's he's a really traditional

biological psychological researcher and he said, Well, we'll measure people's heart rate and we'll check their psychophysiological responses and you know, we'll see what this DMT does. It's like and then all these people came back from the experience and said Hey, I got shot right out of my body and I went into a domain where I met alien beings. It's like you were dreaming. No, no, you don't understand. I've dreamt before.

And this was not only real, it was the most real thing I've ever experienced. He said, Well that's a Jungian archetype He said, Well no, it was you don't get it. It it was more real than reality itself. And every single person came back and said that.

And so I read The Spirit Molecule, which is a very interesting book, and by the end of it, Strassmann is Well, he kinda got shell shocked like our whole culture did when it discovered L S D. Well he had to be very careful in his depictions too, because he can't talk about personal experiences'cause he wants to be taken seriously as a

You know, as a actual researcher. And good and good for him,'cause he should be treading lightly in that domain, just like just like uh the Johns Hopkins teams does. Yes. They're very careful. It's but it's uh such a tragedy that you can't talk about. Yeah, well it it we're talking about it more than we did ten years ago. Yeah. And more and much more carefully than we did in the sixties.

Yeah. Well there's no Timothy Leary guy that's telling everybody to tune in, turn out and drop out. I had his old position at Harvard. Yeah? No kidding. Yeah, yeah. No kidding. Isn't that something, eh? That's pretty wild. Yeah, that's for sure. I knew people there that knew him. Yeah, it was really something, I thought. Oh he taught personality at Harvard. He had the same position as me.

The whole Casey thing and the Married Pranksters and I just think it it was such an upheaval. That's electrocoolade acid test. Man, that's a great book. It was such an upheaval of the current state of culture in the nineteen sixties. It's like the very definition of upheaval. Instead of bringing people along, they so many people were opposed to them. Yeah, well tune in. Yeah. Okay. Turn on. Yeah. Okay. Be better.

Yeah, that would have been better than drop out. Yeah, a lot better. Yeah. A lot better. But I think that's a good thing. That's why the hero in the hero's journey. So imagine you're you're you're taking psychedelics, like you're the hero, out there into the unknown, to gather new information, to con to to confront the dragon, the terrors of your imagination, to bring back the gold, to ac to acquire the gold.

Okay, now what? You got the gold. Right now what? Share it with the community. Right. That's so in the when the Hobbit comes back. From his great trip and that's also a retelling of the oldest story we know, the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. And K Tolkien knew this. This I'm not making this up. And he talked to C. S. Lewis a lot, who is a radical

and extraordinarily well informed Christian. All of this is lurking in the background of that. That's why that book had such su captured the imagination to such a degree. It reintroduces shamanic level religious preconceptions back into popular culture.

That's why it has that power. Because how else do you account for it? It has religious significance. That's why everyone read it. It's the definition of religious significance that that it was attractive enough that everyone read. Well when the Hobbit comes back, it's like All the heroes who come back from that journey.

share what they have with the community and integrate it. It's the opposite of dropping out. Right. Timothy Leary let his political his unformed political preconceptions contaminate The sacredness of his experience. And he'd like he'd warped the entire culture in doing so and pretty much put an end to psychedelic drug research for like fifty years. Drop out? No, no. Man up.

Get your act together. Get your act together. Because you get an intimation in states like that of the first of all the fact that things are infinitely more than you could possibly realize. Including you. Like really, like really. And that's an unbear umbe unbearable in some sense. Don't you think that it was in response to the rigidity of the times though that you know you're dealing with an excuse. I no I'm not saying it's an excuse. But yes it was.

The nineteen fifties were I mean, and then also dealing with the Korean War and then Vietnam. Yeah. There was so much to oppose uh from their perspective that society was almost impossibly for a good good story for that. So I went and met gu Guy Richie when I was in the UK. So that was real fun. Yeah, he's so hospitable. He built these huge barbecues.

He's m manufacturing these bloody things, same size as your table here. He makes barbecue. Copper top yeah yeah. Really? Yeah. He wants everybody to gather around a fire so he can be hospitable. So he built a bloody barbecue. Like it took seven years to build the prototypes properly.

They're worth like fifty thousand dollars. He's marked it's such co and he's so hospitable. Where do you buy a guy Richie barber? From Guy Richie. Come on. Yeah, there you go. The gentleman. Yeah, so there's these braziers on both sides. You sit outside in the cold. tent and there's cloth around the outside of the table so you can put your knees underneath and a stove in the middle so it keeps you warm.

Yeah, well that's where we were. So it's a whole structure. And then he was roasting these huge steaks in this charcoal brasier and cutting them up and feeding them to us. Wow. And he wanted everybody to gather around the fire. He's such a fucking interesting guy. You know he's a legitimate Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. I didn't know that. There's not a lot of them. Do you know that that's a good idea? Right. Right. Well, it's like UFC fighter like podcast geniuses.

a y uh y uh Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt. He's a black belt under Henzo Gracie. It's like one of the most esteemed schools in the world. It's like the lineage is like r from the the original source of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I mean he's from the Gracie family. Right. You know, his characters in the movies they di they ad lib those that dialogue. What? He absolutely. I I talked to Matthew McConaughey about this first.

said Ritchie and and then I asked Guy Richie about it. I s so he sets up the scenes and he has the story in mind, and then he pays real attention to the context and he lets the actors ad live. Mm that well that makes sense'cause it seems so organic. No kidding, and the dialogue's so sharp and witty and on point. So I watched uh Uh King Arthur. One part is this is very, very cool. So when Arthur first grips the sword, he's blown off

Now he can pull it out of the stone because he's the guy. He's the long lost son of the rightful king. Long lost. You said, Well, wasn't everybody opposing the tyranny of the times? It's like, Yeah, welcome to the world, man.

Welcome to the world. We're all long lost sons of the rightful king. And the king's a now a tyrant. And don't we have to deal with that? And the answer is bloody well right we do. So Arthur born in straightened circumstances and has to grow up street smart and and he's and his friends are all funny and they engage in witty reparte and like he's a he's he's he knows the world from the ground up, grabs the sword, he c pull it out of the stone

But it he's blown right off it. He can't wield it because he has visions of his evil uncle who conspired with feminine forces of chaos and killed his father. Murdered his father and his mother. So his uncle's a murderer. His uncle's a murderer. Well so is your uncle. And so is my uncle. That's our historical guilt that the lefties weaponize all the time. It's like the soil we walk on is soaked with blood.

And Arthur can't wield the sword that's his rightfully, because he has visions of historical atrocity. It's like welcome to the world, man. It's like how do you know your masculine ambition isn't part of the world destroying force? Because yes, it is. So so then why when I accuse you of racism and so forth and and your white privilege and your masculine privilege? Like why don't you just wander off in a corner and feel terrible and apologize? And the answer is

You probably will,'cause most people do. You don't, but most people do, and I know why. Partly'cause they're reasonable. If thirty people come after you and say, You're a racist tyrant, And it's there's thirty of them, you go home and you think, Well, thirty people think I'm a racist tyrant and like I got my flaws, man and

I might be a little racist'cause we all have in group preferences and I shoot my mouth off sometimes and I haven't always been the way with women that I should be and maybe I've mistreated some people and maybe I did it too much and Sorry. And then you're a shell, right? Another mob comes for you, it doesn't work at all.

Do you think that this is uh a factor of this new way of communicating where everyone's communicating all at once? It's not just these small groups of people that you're familiar with. that are in your tribe or that you interact with from other tribes. This is the whole this is like unprecedented volume of human beings. I think I think that's part of it. I mean I've stopped re almost stopped reading Twitter comments.

I still yeah well still hanging in there? Yeah yeah and I I'm not exactly sure why. Some of it's like pathological curiosity. I don't think it's good for you. No, I don't think so either. But but In any case. Twitter really can be a cesspool and people say things to me On Twitter that they would never say to me face to face. But I mean re not not only because Probably it wouldn't end well if they said something like that face to face. That's part of

But also partly because people just don't do that face to face. Well it's you know what it is? It's talk. So if you are working on a assembly line and you're next to some other guy. And, you know, he brings up um Ricky Gervais.

And you're like, fuck that guy. That guy's a piece of shit and he starts saying all these horrible things about the guy. That's just talk, right? Well this is just talk, but it's written down. First person to say that to me is Louis C. K. He was talking to me about the way people talk on Twitter. He goes it's just talk. Like people talk like that.

All the time. But now when you see it written, you think of it as different than just talk. Because it's not the way they would talk to you. So if Ricky Gervais visited that assembly line and he was talking to those guys, then they would have to

reflect on the fact that he's a human being. Right. He's right in front of him. You would never say the things that you even if he was not an opposing, threatening person, but you would never say the things that you would say to that guy when Ricky's not in the case. You say the same thing if you're in your car. You know, and somebody cuts you off. That's different. Well, it's kind of the same because there's a barrier between you. But you know why.

Do you know why that why they're so accelerated? It's because of the speed the cars move. Your reactions have to be very quick. So you're in a heightened state. Right. It's a completely different like people always want to w say that, like, no, if people were stationary And they were in cars and they looked over at each other. They would never talk to each other the way they do when they're driving campaigns.

It's a physiological condition. You're going sixty five miles an hour. You're like Ah you fucking idiot! What are you doing in front of me? Yeah. It's natural. Yeah, yeah. It's natural. Yeah, yeah. That's a good thing. And you have to learn to manage that and that's not discussed or talked to people. People say don't get road rage, but they don't ex tell you why you're getting road rage.

A lot of you're getting road rage is just your physiological response to the fact that you're going fast and your body's required to make very quick moves. Yeah, yeah. Fair enough. You're in a heightened state because of the speed. That's the thing. That's very different than talking shit about Ricky Gervais if he's not next to you. Right, but it might be akin to what's happening on Twitter because everything is happening very, very fast on Twitter. It is, but it's also because people are at it.

The the real problem with a lot of what's going on on Twitter and I there's a bunch of people that I follow on Twitter that don't have anything to w do with me. They're just negative people. And I don't even follow them, follow them. I bookmark their page and then I go visit Because they're so fucking crazy. And I see them twelve, thirteen hours a day tweeting. Right. It's straight madness.

And it's one hundred percent an addiction. And the amount of interactions that they have that are negative, the amount of expressions they have that are negative are overwhelming. That is an addiction. It's an outrage addiction. They're addicted to recreational outrage. and the response to their recreational outrage. It's constant and consistent. It doesn't vary. They're not learning anything. They're not growing and expanding.

And becoming better human beings and more more kind human beings. But when you manifest that in the real world, there's a cost. Yeah. And the cost is look the hell out because maybe you said it to the wrong person. Well you also can't get that many interactions in the real world. So so one of the problem I I like that. I think that's I think that's very interesting that there's a hit because the thing about anger Anger is a mix of two emotions.

It's negative emotion. Yes. But it's also positive it's approach because if it wasn't You couldn't fight when you were angry. Let's talk about your own comments. When you read your own comments. You could read many comments like thank you, Jordan, that book was really aligned.

And then one will come in and go, You transphobic piece of shit. Yeah. You know, you're responsible for the death of thousands of children who've killed themselves'cause they can't express their true gender identity and you'll see that one and that won't have an effect on you. That's the same as these other people. These other people that are interacting, we're we're we are designed to seek out danger.

When danger comes our way, we are we're prepared to react to danger in a much different way than a friendly smile or a a casual compliment. Casual compliments and friendly smiles are nice. But danger is something you have to pay attention to. That's the addiction of Twitter. So so the kind of comment that you described where someone will say, I don't agree with your views and you're hurting all these people, those comments don't make me angry.

The misrepresentation of your position. That doesn't really make me angry. What makes me angry is like I think it's something like it's like casual insult. That makes me angry. And it's because I think That's a tough one, man. The problem with Twitter is is that the price of being a prick has fallen to zero. Yeah. Okay, but that's not true in real life. So the question is if someone's being a thoughtless prick to you on Twitter, I mean maybe one

And maybe this is the proper answer is that you should just ignore it. Yes. But but the thing is Ignoring psychopathic behavior does not make it go away. Well, it goes away to you. That's all that's important, Jordan. You can't control the interactions of the the seven and a half billion people on Earth, but you can control how you interface with them. Yep. That's the difference.

And if you continue to interface with people who one out of ten is gonna say something fucked up to you and that's gonna hurt your day, it's gonna b hurt your feelings. I have friends

that will go on Twitter all day long, comics and they'll read comments about them and then you'll see'em at the club, they'll be a fucking wreck. Yeah, yeah. And they'll be like, Hey bro, stop reading that shit. And I'll tell'em. Yeah. You know, I'll I'll do c podcasts with comics and they'll they'll say something that's fucked up or they'll

They'll go a little too far or they'll they'll talk over people too much and I'll tell'em afterwards, like, don't read the comments. Mm-hmm. Just stay the fuck out of the car. They never listen. Mm-hmm. They never listen. It's impulsive. You wanna know, you look at it. You gotta look at it. Yeah, well it's also the case that people You know, it's not all bad that drives people to that too, because

Someone who's immune from social criticism is a psychopath. And so you wanna be open to you wanna be open to feedback, you know. But and so I'm not I'm not What discounting what you're saying and Twitter in particular is hard to deal with. I read YouTube comments, thousands and thousands of them. But that's a different game. Well it's also way more p it's also

Almost all the comments on my YouTube channel are positive. That's interesting. Because They were so negative sometimes and then so disproportionately angry about takes on certain subjects and the way they would you know, uh exaggerate interactions with people and make it seem like these were horrible, you know horrible aggressive exchanges when they weren't.

There were just casual disagreements between people that sometimes are clunky. Right, right. You know? And so Well I've been fortunate with the YouTube channel in particular because it it has become a very, very positive place. And so I'm very happy about that. I'll give you an example. I was gonna say something though, but let me finish my thought. Because the what I was gonna say th was what I realized is I don't need to read those and those don't necessarily represent truth.

But what they do represent is someone having a clunky reaction to my clunky reaction. And maybe they've drawn all sorts of conclusions and they've decided to look at it in the least charitable way. Yeah. And I can choose whether or not I let that affect me. And the best way to not let that affect me is to not read it. And the best way to make sure that I'm not immune to criticism is my own self-criticism. Which is ruthless.

I'm very introspective and I'm I'm a hard one. Well you're also talking to people all the time. So so that and if you if you don't I mean if you don't manage that

properly, you're gonna be punished in the discussion. Yes. And you're gonna be punished afterward because people won't listen to it. Like I'm not sure if you're also I'll be punished because I'll hate myself. Right. I'll be angry at myself for my poor handling of any sort of verbal situation. But In doing that, I have become much happier, I've become much nicer. 'Cause it's made me think of all of my interactions, like the way I interact with people, all of them are for person to person.

All of them. All of them are face to face. Even though this podcast is reaching fucking millions of people. All of my interactions with people are face to face. And it's a much healthier way to communicate with people. I might as well say all'cause I've had like I don't know how many interactions with strangers in the last five years, but it would be at least It's it's at least. Seventy five thousand. Like at least. It might be way more than that, but it's definitely at least that.

There's been three that weren't positive. And weirdly enough, there's there's only been three that weren't extremely positive. They're so positive that it's almost unbearable. Because one of the things that's very strange. Now, I don't know h I don't know what happens to you when you're out on the street. What happens? Come with me. Tell me what happens. We will. It's fucking wild. Yeah, so t tell me what happens to you. I get mobbed.

It's weird. Okay, and and how often have you had a negative interaction? Very, very, very, very rare. Most people are friendly. Even most people if they didn't like me before for whatever reason, they say hi, I say hi to them. Yeah. And we usually oh he's just a person. Just a person. And I'm a nice person. I'm very nice. I try to I go out of my way to be nice. It's something I practice. Like I practice martial arts. I practice being nice.'Cause I think it's valuable.

So that's just valuable to me. I think it's valuable to the people I encounter. I think I have a responsibility to the way people react to me. Yeah. And and if I if I if I misstep it bothers me a lot. Well the the other thing about being in a position l like the one you occupy is because People know you in a way that you don't know them when they approach you. Yes. And the reason they approach you is because you're an idol of sorts.

Because otherwise they wouldn't hold you in esteem. And that is even the case if they're negatively attracted to you in some sense, right? And so the problem with those interactions is that if you make a mistake, That person will never forget it for the rest of their life and they will tell everyone about it.

Well, more importantly, like the way they feel could have been avoided. Yes, absolutely. You could have done a better job in interacting with them and then you know, sometimes people come up to you and Look, one of the things that I've done when I've met famous people that I really admired is I've been awkward and clunky. And if you very likely awkward and clunky, especially when I was younger, and you catch someone who's tired

Maybe someone's jet jet lagged or hung over. You could have a bad interaction. You bad. And then you're like, dah, that guy was a dick and then it's fun it's fun to say that guy was a dick. Oh yeah. It's fun. Yeah. Well it's also an expression of your profound sense of betrayal. Yes.

They're the real thing. Yes. And then you get burned and you're really betrayed by that. Like it's a deep betrayal. I mean, I I I I spent a lot of time in my clinical practice working with people who are socially awkward and so Analyzed social awkwardness.

At the level of detail. And so and one of the things I do when people come up to me because they're often awkward and they'll say things like, Oh, you know, I'm I'm I'm fanboying or something like that and and I always I always shake their hands. and I always look at them and I always ask them their name. And no matter how awkward they are, they can almost always remember their name. And so once they

say their name and they look back at me, ninety five percent of that awkwardness goes away. Yeah. And then so I can put them at ease instantly and then we can have a little a real interaction. Not long because otherwise I would only be doing that. And and that all that always goes wonderfully and it's amazing. But I think it was hard on me. It's hard on me in a way because A lot of the people who come up to me are emotional.

Mm. And so it's weird. My life is so weird because wherever I go it's like being surrounded by old friends because I'll go down the street and everybody says hi, you know, or they'll come up to me in this friendly way and open, eh? Like there's no defences. Right. They come up to me.

Like their people I know, which is very weird. Yeah, I'm sure it is. Same exact thing. Yeah, yeah. And so you really have to handle that carefully because they have made themselves vulnerable in that moment. And you don't want to be able to do it. I'm sure. Your work has shaped a lot a lot of the people that are very careful.

Happy to see you. You've had a personal impact on their life. Yeah, and and it's been a positive one. And so wouldn't I be the uh ultimate bloody fool to do anything to put any sort of twist in that at all? Because wouldn't that be a catastrophe? But human interactions are messy and sometimes things go clunky. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well

My wife has got good at this and I have a good team around me and they help me manage this and and so'cause we try really hard to make sure that all these interactions go as well as they possibly can. And that's and that's it is really wonderful because It's really something to be received as a friend by strangers everywhere. And you think this is w back to this idea of success. You talk about these successful power mad psychopath types.

That isn't what happened when they walk down the streets. Like people are plotting murder or they always are lying to them. Like everywhere they go, it's literally hell. You bet, you bet. Or Stalin who got hyper paranoid. Everyone's a liar. Everyone's a liar. Well yeah, everyone lies to you. Everyone. Right. You have no friends. They are terrified of you. Not a single word ever anyone has ever said to you for the last forty years

was honest. He's got a bias control group. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and he created it. So how's that for Hell? What was it like for you?'Cause you have a a very weird experience in life. You were uh it's very weird. There's not a lot of people like you where you were a university professor and then all of a sudden you were famous. And you were famous in your late forties.

And uh really famous. Like not just famous, but famous as like a a worldwide the dep depending on who you ask, either you're a voice of reason and rationality and And uh you know, uh personal responsibility, or you're a voice of intolerance and bigotry and anger and hateful Sexual oppression. Yeah, yeah. You're not mean at all. That's what's dumb about that statement. It's you're not mean at all. It's I am white. Actually that's a lie too. I'm kinda tan. And he was actually not black.

'Cause I'm I'm darker than you. Yeah, yeah. That's ridiculous. Yeah, but neither of us are white. Well I'm Italian. And he was brown, not black. Well, isn't that weird?

Yeah, I just don't know the black and white thing is so strange because the shades are so spectrum of shades of people, unless you're talking to someone who is like one hundred percent African from the darkest place where they're not wearing any clothes all day and they've developed all that melanin to protect themselves from the sun. You know, it even the term black is weird. It's a w it's a w and when you l use it for people that are

Literally my colour. It becomes very strange. Yeah, yeah. You know. Mhm. This is true. It's like so you were asking me what it was like to be What is it like to be you? Like what is it like to and then I know, you know, you've gone through a lot of shit.

And this latest thing with uh getting off of the benzodiazepine That to me was a a real shocker because uh first of all I had no idea that you were taking it and then to find out that it's that difficult to get off of and then to hear from other people that have tried to get off of it how difficult it is and then to realize how many people around me have an issue with that stuff. Xanax. is a motherfucker.

It and I didn't know what a motherfucker it was until I talked to a friend who is a counselor at a drug rehab center where he was saying that that is one of the ways that people get locked back into drinking and doing drugs as a psychiatrist Will prescribe Xanax. And sober people who get on Xanax all of a sudden start drinking. He said it's super calm.

He said that it's one of the most difficult drugs to get off of. He said and this is something that uh Dr. Carl Hart, who's uh I love him to death, he's brilliant. He he speaks so openly and honestly about drugs and, you know, the guy's a professor at Columbia, he said that there's two drugs that will kill you when you get off of'em. He goes it's alcohol and benzodiazepine. Those are the two that if you just quit, you'll fucking die.

And or you wish you would. Meanwhile they're handing those things out like Tic Tac. Yeah. Well they were regarded as a safe substitute for barbiturates. And you could easily overdose on barbiturates, especially with alcohol. Well when did they know? When did they know? When was it in the literature the difficulty of of detoxing yourself from that? Very recently. Really? Yeah. Jesus Christ. And when did they start being handed out?

Twenty years ago. Fuck. More. So what happened? People just stayed on them? Often. W my f I have one good friend that takes it every day and takes it oftentimes with alcohol, which I know you're absolutely not supposed to do. There's not a damn thing I can do about it. I this is a friend that I love to death and I just go I put my hands up and I go, There's nothing I can do.

And he's been on it for more than ten years. Yeah, well I started taking them'cause I was ill. Yeah. You know, and it they helped.'Cause I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sleep at all. I don't know. I don't know. What I still really don't know what happened to you. You couldn't sleep. And so an anti anxiety medication. Do you think that any this is the one one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about. This is real why I brought up the fame thing. How much of

the pressure of being attacked by all these different people and having these um people write these uh horrible articles about you and I know you read that stuff which is different from me. I don't read stuff about And I think that's helped me tremendously. And that like my gauge of how I deal with people is like I said, Tucker Carlson doesn't read things about him either.

You could tell. You can tell by the way he communicates. He seems free. You know, there's a burden that people carry around when they read things about themselves. Like Eric Weinstein has that burden sometimes. You know, when people read So did I read things about me? Well yeah, but

That wasn't what was stressful exactly. Oh, but there's what but it's a multiple. When I first got I've had a history of depression and that runs in my family and that's probably stems back for me right to the time when I was a kid. And and I think when I really got sick in two thousand and sixteen it was partly a manifestation of that. But at the time my job was threatened, like actually and my clinical practice was threatened.

And the Canadian Revenue Agency was after me all at the same time. And they were after me because of a mistake they had made, which they admitted three months later. And the college was after me because of a vindictive client who came after me with a pack of lies, but because they were so and uh basically I emerged

from that unscathed, but that w it was by no means obvious that that was going to be the case. I was accused of sexual misconduct. And the evidence when I was dealing with this client I would turn my wedding ring around. You'd spin it? Well I play with it. Right. And that was sexual misconduct? Yeah, well to her it was a signal of some dark underlying desire that I wasn't I've been doing that with you the whole conversation.

I have this uh silicone wedding range. Yeah, well I'm gonna report I'd report you if you're gonna hang your in there. I'd uh yeah exactly. It's it's really bad. And if there was a college that governed the behavior of reprobates like you I would definitely report No don't do that. That's terrible. No that's uh Freudian to the

Extreme although I don't know what turning it means. How could stretching a silicone wedding band be Freudian? While you're putting your finger in the little hole rubber making the fuck kind of vaginas you're dealing with. Anyways, we don't have to go there. So the that was all you had done was turn Play with your wedding ring. Yeah. Yeah. And that unfortunately when you're dealing with people that are extremely troubled, the um oftentimes they look for extremely

external reasons why they're troubled and they find oppressors. Well, she was also angry with me because when all this blew up around me it interfered with my clinical practice and She had come to rely on our weekly meetings. Oh, so she was she was angry and about being abandoned. And it was really sad because I didn't want to abandon my clients.

I had to stop my clinical practice, which was also very upsetting to me,'cause I had like twenty clients and I knew these people, man. Like they were I knew these people. Yeah. You know, I'd fold them through thick and thin. And then all of a sudden so many things piled up around me that I found when I was in a clinical session that I was distracted.

So Well, you can't be distracted in a clinical session. Right. And so anyways, what emerged from that, and it was in the middle of the winter and I have seasonal affective disorder, I couldn't sleep. and at all for quite a long time and I went to my doctor and I said I can't sleep and he gave me a sleeping medication and and and an anti anxiety drug and I took the a little bit of the anti anxiety drug and I could sleep.

And my life was pretty stressful and I thought, Okay, I'm much better, I'm just gonna leave this be. This is working. I'm not gonna muck with it'cause I could barely go back to work. And what was it a low dose? Yeah, yeah. I couldn't even feel it. Really? So it alleviated the anxiety, but it didn't affect your cognitive performance or it didn't affect the way Well it didn't affect it as much as how sick I was.

Like that really affected So y sick meaning depressed. No, no, no. No, no. I uh when it hit um I if I stood up, my blood pressure was really low. If I stood up I'd faint. I was fainting five or six times a day. Okay. So this was when all the pressure from all these different sources was coming at you. Yeah. And that was making you sick.

So it was changed physically. Yeah, that was part of it. I think I think it what it did was it it stressed me enough so that I was susceptible, more susceptible to whatever was wrong with me in the first place. So I had a lot of immunological problems. But this was also when you got on this diet, which has been very beneficial, right? When did you get on the diet? Yeah, it was around the same time.

Yeah, the cure to a lot of your woes was to eliminate processed foods and eliminate sugar and bread and pasta

in a sense, you know. Partly'cause I'm not an authority. But it's your personal experience. Yeah, yeah. Well So your personal experience and just this all Well my wife has a lot of immune problems and and some of them are quite serious and I have a number of immune problems and some of them are quite serious and our daughter got both of them and was really affected by it and like she was she told her mum

There's Michaela. She told her mom when she was starting to come out of a bit, she said, Michaela was only staying awake six hours a day when in her late teenage years. And the only reason she could stay awake was'cause she was taking Ritalin,'cause otherwise she would have just slept like all literally all the time. Jesus. And and uh she said, You know, mom, I was dying. And and slowly, you know, which is not a pleasant way to die. And in pain.

Yeah, she it was terrible. I mean she had to have her ankle replaced as a teenager, right? Yeah, and then re replaced like three years ago. And this is no general aesthetic. This is all oh because she can't be on general anesthetic? She didn't want it to de s yes. Spinal. But they still had to do all the hammer and sawing while she was there. I had my knee done that way. Yeah, yeah. I watched it. Uhhuh. Why because I figured I was only gonna have one knee surgery. I should see it.

That's not true. I had three. Oh yeah. But I thought it was true at the time. I thought it was only gonna have one knee reconstruction. Yeah, so I started getting better in September. And I'm not sure why. So but but let's go back to this. So the the the meat diet. The all meat diet, you lost weight. Getting rid of excess body fat it uh oftentimes will help with a lot of things. But also you eliminated all these uh inflammatory foods. I eliminate I seem to have

recovered from all the inflammatory conditions. So um I had very bad gum disease, which is not good for your cardiovascular system. But what is gum disease? What do you mean? Um Well your gums recede and they bleed. And it's it happens when people age, that's the theory. But but and I had three surgeries to control it because

You know, your gums will recede all the way and then you lose your teeth. It's like it's not good. And plus you're way more likely to have heart trouble because of it'cause it indicates a systemic infection. Yeah. And so I had that for like twenty years and that's incurable. And it's completely gone. Completely gone, meaning the gums came back? No, because they never quite grow back, but there's no inflammation. Mm. That's all gone.

And no irritation. Interesting. So that's that's interesting. I had psoriasis and that's gone and I had peripheral uveitis which caused my right eye to be full of floaters'cause there's inflammation on the bottom producing like uh tissue uh production and that would fill the the aqueous liquid in my eye and I could see all these floaters all the time and that's pretty much gone completely and

Um I lost fifty pounds in seven months and now I weigh exactly what I weighed when I was twenty three. And like I don't have an ounce of of excess body fat and um I'm What else? My my the sides of my legs were quite numb. for like two decades. Sides of your legs. Yeah, yeah. Were you having back pain? No. No back pain. No. None at all? No, no back pain. But that went away. So now they're they were hard they got hard and rigid.

And kinda old,'cause you see that in older people, that their muscles start to rigidify and so forth, and that's all gone completely, that's completely flexible again and um So And you've been on this diet now for f five years. Five years? Yeah. And it's just meat. Yes. Although there were times when I was eating some other things but that didn't seem to work very well. So what other things were you trying? Low carb veg vegetables?

Primarily? Like greens, mushrooms, mushrooms? No, I was mostly greens. Any fruit? S some, yeah. I missed fruit a lot. I missed a lot of things, but say la vie. So when you introduced fruit that was an issue? When I I was still really sick in August and I was eating some more things because I thought, Oh Christ, I'm so goddamn sick that I'm

I don't care. I'm gonna get some something positive somewhere. Right. So I started to eat some other foods, but my daughter convinced me to st stop that entirely again and another m number of other things happened and I started to feel better. Like the day in the mornings when I woke up for like two years. Took me like four or five hours before I could stand up. So do you think a lot of the same thing? I I really don't know, Joe, you know.

When you get sick and you don't know what it is, you actually don't know. But it seems like distressed. My mother and Yeah, my mother and my sister were worried when I decided to go on tour again. We decided to to plan this tour back when I was still literally so sick I couldn't stand up. And we thought we're gonna live like this is gonna come to an end so we planned this tour. Um

My mother and sister were quite worried about it'cause they thought that the tour the last tour was part of what stressed me out. But I don't believe that. I really liked I really liked it. Like I thought it was a really affirming experience and like it was intense but I've I'm not interested in sitting around relaxing. I don't even know how to do that, really. Even if I have time off, I don't relax like Well enjoyment and stress they're often the same thing.

Not if you're doing what you love. But even if no, I know it can be too much. Yeah, but what do you do instead what do you do instead? Like I relax, what does that mean? I have a A pontoon boat, I go out on my lake, we look at the sunset, I love I'm not saying you should do anything different. I know we but I'm saying physiologically, enjoyment and stress.

Often come hand to hand. Yeah. Because that some of the things that you enjoy doing are challenging. And challenging things create physiological stress. Yeah, they don't. They don't? No. In fact, there's there's a whole literature on this. Imagine that you challenging things ph ch challenging things. Not if they're voluntary. Not if they're voluntary. Okay, what if you like to fight?

Okay, if you like one of the things that I noticed when I was young when I was competing is I was always s getting sick. Yeah. Even though I loved doing it. I loved fighting. But I lo I was always nervous. Yeah, but you're taking a fair bit of physical Mm. Physical no? No. That's not what it was. It was it was Look success of anything can push you beyond your limits. I'm just saying that there's a there's a ta

There's a thing that you're doing, right, when you're interacting with thousands and thousands of people. You're expressing controversial viewpoints that are often criticized. You're reading articles that are written about you. There's a stress. that comes with doing this thing that you love that's undeniable. Yeah. And I've had to parse that apart carefully to decide what was particularly stressful that I could let go of and how and maintain the rest of it.

And hopefully Tammy's helped me with that oh my whole family and my friends, everybody around me has helped me with that a lot, tremendous amount and hopefully I'm more and more able to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I do I do more artistic things now than I had been for a long time. Like what?

Oh, I've been writing a bunch of music. We recorded a bunch of music. Five songs. Really? Yeah. No, I do character voices. Character voices. I wouldn't call it singing. What does that mean? Yeah. Well the music Um I could give you if I could give you a taste of it. We need a taste. Okay, okay. I'll give you a t a taste. So I wrote these books you get drunk before I went. I wrote these books called An A B C of Childhood Tragedy. Oh boy. And uh they're really dark poems.

Twenty six of them. No, definitely not. Absolutely one hundred percent decidedly Thoroughly comprehensively not For children. Mm. Right. They're very dark. And I had my illustrator for Beyond Order, who I really like, Juliet Fogra. Julia Fogra. Juliet. who's a Eastern European, got a dark side, brilliant, brilliant artist. And when I was really sick in January and trying to figure out what I could do

Tammy said, You remember those poems you wrote? And they're the sort of poems you read, they're like four stanzas long. You read them and you laugh and then you hate yourself for laughing. And so and I wrote them when I was in the midst of pretty intense clinical experiences, c try to I'm not sure exactly why. To blow off some steam? But there was more to it than that and I don't know all of what it is. I'm kind of working at the juncture between black comedy and

and beauty. It's a weird space. And Yu Yulia's drawings are unbelievably beautiful and deep. She's so good at this. And so we we m so I sent her these terrible poems I wrote that are comical and horrible. And uh I said Tammy thought it would be good for me to'cause I thought about getting them illustrated. Said, Do you wanna take a look at these and see if you're interested? And then she sent me back these stunningly beautiful illustrations.

And then she produced one every three days for like three months and these they're st I'll show you I'll show you them and maybe you can post one if you want. And so And then we thought, Well that's fun, that that was fun and uh very worthwhile and then like they're all these depression era children and they're all beautiful, beautiful children and they're all pathos there's their her drawings are full of pathos and s and and sorrow for their suffering.

And so they're very deep and dark and and beautiful, all of that at once, with these terrible black comedy poems. And then we thought, Well, it'd be fun to figure out how to market this, which is just communication. Well, why don't we write some music? And so it turns out I can write verse. I wrote a whole screenplay, which we've also recorded three songs for it called The Water of Life, which is a fairy tale. And I want to make a musical out of it.

And so that's quite fun. And so we've we've written and recorded three songs for it already. So this is what you were doing when you were recovering from the sickness? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was great because I it really worked out nicely because when I was so ill I had something to look forward to because I knew Yulia was gonna send me a beautiful image and

And I didn't know what it was gonna be and then we assembled it into a book and then I started working with this musician, Marshall Tully, who I really like and who's a good arranger and uh like uh he can play all sorts of instruments and he's got a great musical sense and so

We w started working on music together, so he'd write the music and uh and I I wrote some of it and but he wrote most of it and he played almost all of it. And we had a band involved for one part and we'll do that some more. And so he'd write the music and then I'd write the lyrics. And then I'd send

them and then we'd record it. I'd send the music and lyrics to Yulia and she'd generate a bunch of images and so then we made a bunch of videos out of it set to music, which we'll release on YouTube in like fall of this year. And and uh You know, that was part of marketing for the book, but then it turned into its own complete enterprise and so we're gonna put out an album of all these songs and so that

I love that. It's so fun. So that helped you d just having some sort of a creative expression. Oh yeah. Yeah, it helped a lot. How long did it take you to recover from the benzos? Well when I finally two years. And I and I haven't fully recovered. But but I but also I was also sick. No, I've my left hand is quite numb. and was way more numb. Both my hands both hands and my feet were like completely numb. And uh I was in like excruciating pain.

for two years, like pain at levels that I didn't even know was possible. All the time or on occasion? No. This is one of the things that was terrible about it is that It was really, really bad in the morning. And what did it start right after you got off of the Xanax? No, but it got way worse. So it just started showing up eventually.

Yeah. And then it started to get worse about the same time that Tammy went into the hospital. But when because she was fighting her way through, you know, catastrophic cancer at the same time when this started to happen. So this was additional stress. Yes. And that heightened everything. Well it didn't it certainly didn't help. Right. I think it made me again it made me more susceptible to something that was already happening.

So whatever this illness has that that's plagued my family, my father, my grandfather, multiple cousins. And and a lot of immunological problems on my mother's side too. My one I had a cousin whose daughter died of immunological problems, the same ones that Michaela had. And this is all mitigated somehow or another by this only eating meat diet? I don't know. It certainly is for Michaela. And for you as well? I don't know that for sure. I know what the diet has done.

Explain this. You were telling me about this study that was recently done. Oh yeah, yeah. Well Michaela was invited to Oxford to do to debate. Yes,'cause she's done her research, but not technically, no. No, she had a background in trying not to die. So and trying not to be an agony and trying not to have all her bones deteriorate because she had thirty eight of the as to why they would ask her to go to Oxford to debate. Uh the the topic was uh we should move beyond meat. Right. But why her?

Well, because she's become a well known advocate, I suppose, of a carnivorous diet as an investigative tool for chronic untreatable disease. That's a good way. So imagine here's the rationale, Joe. Imagine there's something really wrong with you. Like really wrong and and nothing's helping. Okay. What might be causing it? Well, something complex you don't understand. Okay, what complex things are you doing? You're eating a lot of different things.

Okay, so how about elimination diets do this? How about you simplify it? So Michaela tried a bunch of elimination diets, but they were dopey. It's like why eliminate this and not this? There was no rationale. And so she wanted to find out. How much can I eliminate and still survive? What can I how can I bring it down to the simplest possible thing? And it turns out that you can pretty much live on meat.

Weirdly enough. Not just live but thrive. Well, you know, people debate about that, but certainly some people seem to thrive compared to how they were. What about supplements? No. No. No vitamins? No. Does that seem ideal?'Cause I would feel like you don't have to just eat the meat. You can eat meat and get all of your m micronutrients and all of your minerals and vitamins and Seems like you don't need them.

It isn't even obvious you need vitamin C. Now I'm gonna get killed for that. Apparently there's some indication that you only require vitamin C if you eat carbohydrates. Real Well, you know, don't take anything I'm saying as gospel'cause what the hell do I know? But does she eat organ meat?'Cause that's the healthiest of all. No, she eats lamb. That's it. Just lamb? No. Salt. But lamb and salt. Not not beef anymore? No. Okay. No. Tammy eats only lamb too. Wow. Why lamb?

It's more of a game meat. It sh they seem to s they both seem to manifest fewer immunological symptoms if they only eat lamb. Yeah. Tammy has some serious immunological problems as well. So but they're very well controlled. Now how did the Oxford debate go? Oh God, I hope they release it soon. Yeah? Oh, she did very well, but she wasn't the star.

She did very well. And oh yeah, just before she debated, uh study was released that was published by Harvard Epidemiologists, I think they were p epidemiologists. They did a retrospective analysis of twenty four hundred people who were on the carnivore diet for six months. And he It was the only p scientific paper I've ever read. It's published by Oxford University Press, by the way. It's in a high quality medical journal.

The study's no joke. And you might argue about the validity of retrospective self report, but if it's carefully done it can be valid, and it's a good initial foray into investigation. It's not a definitive study'cause you'd need a double you'd need at least a randomized trial. That's harder. But anyways, it was the only scientific paper I ever read where the surprise of the authors was evident in the manner in which they wrote. Because what they showed was that radical weight loss first.

So that was pretty much experienced by all the participants. Ninety percent reduction in all self reported disease symptoms. All. All. Enhanced well being and decrease in suffering and uh Yeah, that c that pretty much covered the territory. So she introduced this during the debate? Yes. So when it came out the week of the debate?

It came out two days b we encountered it two days before the debate, but it had been published very recently, like within the last three weeks or something. Did she have time to go through the entire study and get all the

Yes. Time enough for her section of the debate. She only spoke for about ten, twelve minutes. There were three people on her side. But I really am hoping that this debate is released soon because one of the people on the other side who was rallying against meat delivered the most preposterously unsatirizable, politically correct rant.

that I'd ever seen anyone deliver anywhere by a m um a a factor of about five. She just about made me convulse. And part of it was sympathy, you know, because it was so over the top. It was so utterly miraculous that anyone could and two of her compatriots were sitting in the audience and she said things like Every hamburger is served with a side order of misogyny which is a really good line. You know they crafted that line. It's a pretty good joke, but you know she said.

Well because she associate she associated the oppression of women with the oppression of farm animals, which is like it's a dangerous territory to wander into that analogy. And uh she said that The she compared the husb the husbandry of animals to slavery, which is also like a place that you wander into with real care when you choose your metaphors and

She said the reason we're bombarded with i images of sexy chickens and sexy cows is because we feminize our farm animals before devouring them. Hold please. Are we uh bombarded with images of sexy chickens? Oh sexy chickens and pigs. It wasn't cows. Well, pig cows, you know how sexy they are, so that's forgivable but Miss Piggy? Is Miss Piggy our she's our only one? Is that bombarded? Is this woman on a Miss Piggy rampage? Sexy chickens is like I thought fucking sexy chickens are there.

Hey man, you tell me. But I did tell me. Oh, you wait I I'm praying they'll release it. Uh this will go viral. This is like Kathy Newman on steroids. Like I mean it. It was something, man. I was sweating. I would really, really, really. It was like being hit. And and then in the in the sh there were two people who helped craft her speech and they were sitting in the audience and while she was on this unbelievable rant. It was just jaw droppingly miraculous. And they kept yelling genocide.

It's like they're sitting in the audience and she'd make a point about meat and and how appalling the human race was, especially the men, especially the white men, the press oppressive patriarchal racist uh uh uh uh uh white What it w Supremacist. Meat is a white supremacist exercise, by the way. Where was she from? Was she in English?

Yes, yes. She had written a book on this and that's why they invited her. But they had then I get the English accent with it too. Genocide is like genocide. Genocide. It's like

What are why yes, we think that's bad. We think that's bad. We've already established that. But that was so it was like s theater of the absurd. It was so It was one it'll be a if they release it, I think it will it'll be a cultural moment because it it was the point, at least it was the point in my life where the politically correct argument reached an apogee that cannot be exceeded. It was like that is as absurd as it can possibly get.

in every possible way in ten minutes. It was it was a it was theater of the surreal. Everyone well, there were the the audience was full of vegans and so they were on the side of the anti meat people and so they kinda gave her a pass, although a lot of people walked out during her whatever it was she was doing. But I did feel bad for her while I was convulsing because because I really did because I thought, Oh my God, you're so crazy. You're so utterly crazy.

And there's no way that you can bring that set of presuppositions to bear in a real human relationship and have it go anything but terribly wrong. And so that means that you're completely isolated and all your so called friends are never offering you any corrective feedback whatsoever, right? They're just feeding into this terrible ideological mess you've wandered into. And so it was painful at the same time, which is partly why it was sweating. But it was

Yeah, it was something, man. Yeah, that's it. That's it. The pornography of meat. Yeah, well there you got your dancing hamburger there. Eat me. Oh my god, late night menu, Friday and Saturday. Oh my god. But I I defy you, I defy you to find a depiction of a sexy chicken. Yeah, where are the sexy chickens at? See if you can there it's a politics of meat. So it's like all sex and meat. Yeah. So living amongst meat eaters. And look at the woman like in this like sort of sexy pro pose here.

Yeah, but she's surrounded by plants, Joe, and so that makes it okay, apparently. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, that was her, all right. And and yeah, it was something, man. I tell ya, I tell I I s I I'm I'm not exaggerating this. I n I've never heard a speech like that in my life. It was a w it w in its own way, it was like an ultimate work of art. It was just something beyond comprehension.

Yeah. Every trope, every politically correct trope you could possibly imagine was magnified beyond its normal range of reference and then applied in this utterly scatter shot it was like She brought every ideological tool in the playbook. randomly to this issue. Imagine if it's all performance art. At the end of the day she's like, I was just fucking around. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Well then it would be funny and remark well that's like Titania McGrath, right? Yes. But Titania McGrath wouldn't have couldn't have held a candle to her. She would have demolished oh it was No, no, no, no. No, they weren't even in the same league. No Titania at least has has a facade of reasonableness. Have you met Andrew?

Yeah, he's great too. I really like him. I love him. Yeah, yeah. He's very, very funny. He's bright. Very, very smart. It is. It is. But but she's she's obsolete. She's obsolete. So how did the vegans react to the pro carnivore uh although it was stacked to some degree because a couple of the people on Michaela's side damned the the freedom to eat meat with faint praise. And I have my suspicions that it was staged that way. How so? Well they were

They basically said, Every reasonable person thinks that meat eating meat is bad and immoral, but we should still let people do it. It's like On her son? Yeah. Why would they say that? Why would they say it's bad and immoral? What what about having the argument that monocrop agriculture is immoral?

Yeah, yeah, that was part of Michaela's argument. Yeah, and Nick Nick talked about sustainable agriculture and and And made that case as well, that that that that our relationship with animals that we devour can be made as humane as possible and that's acceptable and perhaps even desirable in a broader moral framework.

woman I w I wish I could remember her name, autistic professor at the University of Chicago who revolutionized the treatment of animals in the in the uh slaughterhouse industry. Um She made the case that the animals that we eat don't suffer a humane death in nature. They're all torn apart by carnivores and but No none of them died of old dish. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so and so

So I've been working on these books. I have some other projects too that I'm working on that that are I have a new book that I'm working on called We Who Wrestle With God. And I outlined some of the ideas we talked about today and I'm I'm interested in the weaponization of guilt and how to deal with that. Why why it's possible and and how to protect yourself against it and

what we should do in face of the fact that we walk on soil soaked with blood. You know, how do we atone for that? Because we have to or we get guilty about it and then we're exploitable and even by ourselves. And um I have an app coming out in a month or two, hopefully a month, called essay. And I've been working on that with my son Julian and some other people.

for four years and it stemmed out of our project to sort of universalise the university, which was too big for me to manage when I got sick and sort of we narrowed it in scope because we wanted to teach people how to write. And that's really hard to scale'cause you usually learn to write by having people Write read what you've written and critique it, and that's very labor intensive and expensive. So we built a

an a writing program like a word processor that has built in conceptu tools that aid in the conceptualization of an essay. So imagine when you're writing First of all, you have to pick a good question'cause you want to answer it. It has to be a genuine intellectual answer. And so the people kids are never taught that. And so pick something important that you want to explore. And then, okay, so what are you doing when you're writing? Choosing words.

Forming phrases, organizing them into sentences. Sequencing the sentences and paragraphs, sequencing the paragraphs into the chapter, and then chapter into books if you're going that far. But so it's a hierarchical enterprise.

And so when you write, you have to get the word right and the phrase right and the sentence right and the sentence order right. And you shouldn't do all that at once, because you can't because it's too hard. So you write a rough first draft that's twice as long as the thing you're trying to write, and then you edit. You shorten the sentences, you pick the right words, you pick the right phrases, you rewrite the sentences. So we built in tools to guide people through this process.

to help them conceptualize their essay at the level of the word and the phrase and the sentence and the paragraph. and to build those ideas of of multi level editing into the process. And then we've tested it on a lot of people and we have a nice elegant user interface and we're hoping that'cause I'cause one of the things I've learned is that Words are power. No, wrong. Words are authority. Words are a legitimate authority.

And so without having your words in order, you have no legitimate authority. And that's the last thing you want, unless all you want is irresponsibility, but that isn't gonna work out for you anyway. And so the pathway to success for virtually everyone is facilitation of their capacity to communicate. And so we're hoping we really we really want to pull young men into using this product'cause they're the hardest market to target with such things and the most in need of it. And part of that is

Engaging them in an honest dialogue about what exactly writing is. It's like there's no difference between writing and thinking. And there's no difference between thinking and not failing. So you let your thoughts die instead of you. That's thinking. You test everything you do before you implement it. That's thinking. And writing is a massive aid to that process. And so if young men

in particular were taught properly about writing and thinking, they would come to view those as like arrows in their quiver. So or shields in in their in their combat, or the means by which they aggregate their allies, or even more importantly, the

the means by which they serve themselves and the world properly and like really. Not w no no moral overlay on top of this. Well, you know, you're a communicator, like you're a comedian, you're a master of words, you're a master of wit, you're a master of listening. That's why you're successful in this weird, radical way that's completely unpredictable.

And it's also the pathway to adventure. Get your words in order. And so that's essay. And like I said, I think if you go to my website or to essay dot app, essay dot app or to my website. You can sign up for for the we're gonna do a beta release, test it m broadly to make sure it doesn't f fall apart under use pressure and before we release it completely. But we're very excited about that because

How to teach people to write is a really hard academic problem to solve. And the idea of building the writing tools into the software. If we got it right. maybe could could at least in part address that problem. It's a massive problem. It's a massive problem, right? Most people come through university now without learning how to write. And that means they don't know how to think. And that means they don't know how to talk. It's not good.

So so there's that and uh it's the book and the music and uh screenplay and this essay app and oh yeah. I'm I'm gonna be Chancellor of a university, uh Ralston College in Char in Savannah. And I also started this thing that we're gonna launch called the Peterson Academy where I'm gonna get all the great lectures I know to make courses.

That'll be a universally accessible university. It won't be free'cause I run things on a for profit model for all sorts of reasons, efficiency not being being foremost among them. I recorded two courses for this when I was in Nashville, one on Jean Piaget, nine hours. I got way deeper into his thought than I'd ever been able to at the university. And then I recorded an updated version of my maps of meaning course. I compressed it from forty hours to nine, which took me like forty years to do.

Forty. Thirty five years to do. And I got way deeper into that too. I realized some things about the Exodus story. There's a scene in there in the Exodus story where God sends poisonous this is so cool. It's so stunning. I'll tell you a little bit about it if you don't mind. It's so cool, Joe. I can't believe it can possibly be true. So Moses leads his people out of the tyranny. Right? But weirdly enough, they don't go to the promised land. This is very weird. They go into the desert.

Well why? Well, we're all say prisoners of our own tyrannical misconceptions and misperceptions, psychologically and socially. So let's say we we free ourselves from those. Well then we're nowhere. At least we were guided by that's why people have nostalgia for tyranny. It's like at least we had enough to eat then, at least we knew w who we were then. It's like out of the tyrant's grasp into the desert.

And so you think why don't people want to challenge their own preconceptions? It's like, yeah, it's out of the tyranny into the desert and the worse the tyranny The worse the desert. So if you've been tormenting yourself with tyrannical preconceptions and totalitarian obligations and you decide to drop it, or maybe you're shocked out of that by trauma, you don't go to paradise. You go to the desert. And maybe that's even worse.

So no wonder people don't do it. So now the Israelites are out in the desert, you think why are they for there for forty years? And maybe it's because it takes three generations to recover from tyranny. You're in the desert, man. And so the I Israelites start worshiping idols. It's ideology. It's the same thing. And that's why'cause they don't have anything to orient themselves,'cause they're not tyr tyrannized anymore and they get all fractious and they fight with themselves and Moses

has to s spend like all day judging their conflicts because otherwise they're at each other's throats and anyways they turn to false idols. And so God isn't very happy about this. And he sends poisonous snakes in there to bite them. So it's like out of the tyr tyranny, into the desert. Now we're fractured by ideologies. Now the poisonous snakes come. And so the poisonous snakes are biting them and biting them and biting them and they finally

break down and go to Moses and say, Look, you wanna have a chat with God and get him to call off the damn snakes? And Moses says, Yeah, okay and so he goes and talks to God and God says This is weird. This is one of those impossibly weird stories. You think this is either insane or it's true, because that's the only option. It's not boring, it's not predictable. It's either insane or it's true.

Okay. And maybe we could start by thinking it's insane, but whatever. Moses talks to God, and God could just call off the snakes, right? That's what you'd expect them to do, but that isn't what happens. Go make an image of a snake in bronze and make an image of a stick, like a staff, and put the snake on the staff, and then stick it in the ground, and then have the Israelites go and look at the snake. And then the snakes won't bite them anymore.

And you think what the hell is that's the same symbol physicians use it. Why do you think that that would be insane or true? Well, what does it mean? What the hell does that mean? Well, that's what many of the stories from the Bible mean. Well, that's what we're trying to say. Jesus coming back from the dead, pe walking on water, Moses partying the Red Sea. We're not gonna be able to get all there, but we can get to this one. Okay. Okay. Yeah, same symbol.

Do you you know the l the links to that in Mesopotamia? Yeah, the ancient Sumerians? Yeah, yeah, and it's a snake that shifts the skin. Yeah, I know. It's a symbol of transformation. They also think it might have had roots in the double helix of DNA. That's what the wacky conspiracy theories. Yeah, I know deep down the rabbit. Richard Dawkins stripped uh stripped my skin off when I went to Oxford to talk to him about that. He said.

You said that under some conditions shaman shamanic people might be able to see DNA. It's like that's complete nonsense. If you have psychedelic experiences, you see all kinds of iconography from ancient Egypt, you see hieroglyphics. You see geometry true or insane. But it doesn't matter if it's true or insane. It's repeatable. You could you could have it over and over. I mean, people who take mushrooms and people who take dimethyltryptamine have these kind of images. They happen all the time.

It's not uncommon. So the idea that it's impossible for those people from thousands of years ago to actually see the double helix pattern of DNA. Says who? Well I'm glad you said it and not me. Me, I'll say it. Richard Dawkins is a brilliant man. Yes. But he stands on this foundation of a lack of experience.

the lack of experience of psychedelics and he's he's t been tempted to do it before under clinical settings and he's talked about it but he's never done it. So the idea that that's preposterous Everything when you're on psychedelics is preposterous. But they're real. Not real in the sense of you can put it on a scale, but real in the sense of if I give you DMT, you will fucking go there.

You will go there just like everybody goes there. And if you try to hang on, good luck. You're gonna get shot through a cannon to the center of the universe. And that's just how it goes. And so you can either have experienced that or you're talking out of your ass. So if you say, Do you think those people thousands of years ago could have had a shamanic experience where they saw the double helix pattern of DNA? Yeah. Yeah, and you can too. You can too.

And it's not just because you know what the double helix pattern of DNA is, because you can also see soul. You can also see the the the the vertical. Here you're talking just like the conservative that everyone thinks you are. Yeah. So back to this let's go back to this story. Okay, okay. So so So the snake you have to go look on the snake. Yeah. Okay, here's the doctrine from all fields of psychotherapy. Okay. Look at what you're terrified of, and you will get braver.

Unless what you're terrified of is a pack of wolves and they're gonna fucking eat you. Yeah, well look, it's not like there aren't real dangers, but look if you're threatened by a pack of wolves and you go out and study them You'll realize you're fucked. Unless you have guns. Okay. So so the the classic therapeutic treatment for terror and the poisoning that terror induces is exposure, voluntary exposure. Okay, so so the the the pattern there is

Face f face what you're face what you're most afraid of, and you will be free. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. Voluntarily. Yes. Now that's a doctrine of psychotherapy now. Right. Okay. So now that's weird. That's weird. So God doesn't chase away the snakes, he makes everyone braver. Mm. Okay,'cause that's better than being safe. Bravery is better than safety. It's a more reliable cure for terror. Okay, now that's cool, but this is even more cool.

In the gospels Christ says that he has to be lifted up like the serpent in the desert. And you think, What the hell does that possibly mean? Because well that's a snake first on a stick. And Christ is comparing himself to a snake on a stick. Okay, so what is this what can this possibly mean? Well

I was thinking about that in relationship to imagery of the crucifix and the story that surrounds it. So Jung thought that the passion story was archetypal because It's a limit story, like this this debate at Oxford. You cannot write a more tragic story. It's impossible, technically. Why? Well, because it's a story of the aggregation of everything that people are afraid of.

So there was no death more painful than crucifixion. That's why the Romans invented it. It was to punish political miscreants. It was the slow agonizing death by suffocation, essentially, and and and dehydration and exposure. Extraordinarily painful. Okay, so that sucks. That's pain, man. Plus you know it's coming. That's part of the story.

Plus your best friend betrayed you into it. Plus your people turned against you. Plus they're led by a tyrant who doubts truth. Plus you're a victim of the Roman Empire. Plus you're completely innocent. Plus everybody knows it. Plus they they choose a criminal to be released from this experience instead of you, even though they know he's a criminal and they know you're innocent.

So, and you're young, and you've done no wrong, and all you've done is help people. So it's a limit story. Okay, so then you think. We've been looking at that limit story for two thousand years in the image and in the story. What are we doing? Well you're supposed to visit the stations of the cross, let's say. Okay, here's the idea. You hear the crucifixion story and you play with it. Who are you?

Maybe if you're female you're married, and why is that? It's the pied.'Cause you have to offer your children to the destruction of the world. That's female courage. That's the mother that doesn't hold her child back. It's like, go out to what? Eventually your death and destruction. Go out, leave me, be in the world. That's feminine courage, man, to let her baby go. You're Pilate, you doubt truth, but you're you'll go along with the crowd. You're Judas because you betray your best friend.

You're the mob. You're the criminal. All of that, that's you. You look on all those things that you hate and are terrified by. That's like that's not a snake. It's like the worst of all possible snakes everywhere. That's what you're looking at. What do you see? You see death, you see destruction, pain, terror, tyranny, frailty, betrayal? Look harder. Look harder. Look harder. What do you see? The death and resurrection. You look far enough into the abyss, you see the light.

Well, that's the story. That's the connection between those stories. And this unbelievably strange thing is that connection exists. There's the strange story of the serpent in the desert, and we know that story is three thousand years old, something like that. We know that.

And then we know perfectly well that Christ said that he was allied that his image was allied with that snake. That's written down. And even if you don't believe in the historical reality of Christ, someone still made that connection.

And did they know everything we were talking about today explicitly? What do you think they did know? What do you think I mean we were talking about this before that the root of these religious experiences almost certainly come from some sort of transcendent experience. He he sh he he laid out the pattern. So shaman die, they're reduced to a skeleton. They're reduced to duct.

And then they climb the axis that unites heaven and earth and enter the kingdom of the ancestors and the gods. They have a paradisal experience and they come back and share it. That's that's a death and resurrection. That's what they experience. So what does that mean? I don't know what it means, but that's what happened.

And then we know from Murrescu's book, people can read it and make up their own bloody minds. Do your investigation. It was probably the origin of democracy. It was the origin of Greek culture. The Illusinian mysteries? And was that a psychedelic experience? It's like come up with a better hypothesis. Good luck. Well there's physical evidence now. Yeah. Because of Merorescu, all the the you know, yeah. They know botanical archaeologists.

Yeah, they're messing about with ergot. Yeah. And psilocybin, God only knows how l I mean, how long have they and then there's DMT in the j in the in the Amazon. I mean There's a massive shamanic tradition and it stems back way into the Stone Age and th that's its pattern. Aaron Ross Powell Well you know the the univers was it what what university was it in in uh Israel, uh in Jerusalem that made the connection between the burning bush and Moses?

The acacia tree which is rich in DMT. And they made this connection like most likely. We know that the people who were going to approach it purified themselves before they dared do it. You know, we know that a good psychedelic experience will drag you through your sins. That's known as a bad trip. Yeah.

So what do we make of the fact that the shamanic experience, which is replicable cross-culturally and which dominated the human landscape for at least twenty thousand years, we know that It involves a a death and a resurrection and an entry into paradise and and a reunion with the ancestors and So what does it mean? Who knows, man? This is way past this is way past my knowledge but I c I know that connection that I just told you about between the story and and

in the New Testament and that story in Exodus. That took me like thirty years to figure out.'Cause there's also the idea that the hero goes into the abyss to rescue his felly f his father from the belly of the beast. That's the same idea, right? You go down, and I thought I knew this the last time I went to lecture to is like you look into the abyss long enough and you see

You see the f the spirit of the benevolent father manifesting itself. That that's the case. That is the case. If you look into the depths of evil and suffering. What you see is not the finality of evil and suffering. You see the victory of the spirit that. obtains victory over that. And then you might think biologically, well how could it be any different, Joe? That's the spirit of life. Life is mortal suffering. It's like but we live. What's the spirit of victorious life if it's not

The benevolent father who overcomes the catastrophe of suffering. Like what else could it possi even if you think about this just as an instinct? It's like you're threatened by wor what's worse than death, and there are plenty of things worse than death that you can be threatened by. And yet you you have a revelation that enables your your transcendence of that. Well what could it be other than the spirit that overcomes death in some fundamental sense?

Now how fundamental? Look, think about it this way. Maybe we're running at 10% capacity, us human beings. I don't mean we use 10% of our brain. That isn't what I mean. I mean we're not fully committed to the enterprise. So let's say here's the enterprise. Let's make everything better and better as fast as we can for everyone.

Like full flat bloody out, one hundred percent committed. No resentment. Well what is c what's stopping us from being committed to the enterprise? Like when you say we're not committed to the enter is that what it is, really? Oh Samuel Don't you think it's like individual desires for achievement? instead of like thinking in terms of the greater good of the group. I th well no no no I think that I think that can be that's a minor impediment in some sense. We're not working in cooperation.

Well that's that that yes, I mean versus the greater good of everybody. The worst problem is that the thing is. But that isn't that like the origins of the the good concepts of socialism, the good concepts of people working together. Like that's the origins of it. It's like if we all just work together, if we all just shared, if we all what it doesn't take into account is human nature, right? Yeah, sure. That that's fine. And I also think that

Look, if you have kid A and kid B on the playground and they're both selfish, they don't play very well together. Right. And so you could say, well their selfishness, which is like a narrow self centeredness makes it impossible for them to cooperate and then they can't even play very good games'cause it's actually more fun to play with other people than to play with yourself.

Even sexually, for all you pornography addicts, by the way. So yeah. So so in any case it's a form of but at least at least the people who are selfishly achieving value achievement. Right. You can go w you can get way w uh look, I I'll tell you a story. I I was r uh someone wrote to me two months ago and Warren Farrell wrote The Boy Crisis. We had a conversation about

Boys who aren't encouraged and how bitter they can become for all sorts of different reasons. And somebody wrote us who was planning to shoot up a high school. And he'd written a fifty three page manifesto. And he was in touch with the last person who shot up a high school. They were corresponding'cause it's a competition, you know, that shooting up high schools, that's a competition. It's a very, very dark complication.

And you have to do a lot of brooding over evil before you want to emerge victorious in that competition. That's like months of pathological fantasizing that you nurse and nurse. And it's all resentment driven. And so that's way worse than just a bit of a warped desire to achieve. That's that's it's like Heath Ledger's Joker. He wasn't a criminal. Criminals you can trust, man, it's like they want your car, so do you. You got lots of common ground. It's the guy who wants to burn your car that

That's a whole different level of mayhem and that's and you think how do people get there? Well their lives have no positive meaning. Abuse. Resentment. Resentment. Rejection. Yeah. But also see, when God when Cain slays Abel when Cain uh Cain gets jealous of Abel in the biblical story. And no wonder,'cause Abel is like

He's everybody's golden boy. He's good looking, he's successful, he works hard, he's a really good person. He gets everything and deserves it. That's the Harvard students were very annoying in that way when I was there. It's like They had these positions of privilege, let's say. It's a very terrible way of conceptualizing, but we'll give the devil his do.

And it's like you'd hope that they'd be whiny, spoiled, self centered, narcissistic brats because then at least you could hate them in good conscience for their success. But they weren't. They were smart, attractive, hardworking, talented, athletic, like polite, cooperative. They they were great. And so how annoying is that? If you've rejected all of that. How annoying is that? Well, so that's Cain and Abel. So Cain goes to God to crab and complain.

You know, what's going on? Abel makes these sacrifices and you reward him, and I make a sacrifice and I don't get anywhere. And that's the complaint of everyone bitter. I made all these sacrifices and God rejected them. Like, yeah, that sucks. Well, so God says to Cain, I I had to look at a bunch of different translations to kind of get this right. God says Something like Sin crouches at your door like a predatory sexually aroused animal. It wants to have its way with you.

You invited it in and let it have its way with you. And it's this great metaphor because That kind of evil is the that's creative. That's creative. It's like inviting a vampire in. It's like you invite that in. Say inhabit me.

Then you toy with it and toy with it, and you let the fantasies of revenge build in your head and till it inflates you into something that's indistinguishable from demonic. You read the read the writings of the Columbine kids if you want to find out about this. I mean it's crystal clear. They're the judges of the human race. They want to eradicate being itself. They are out for revenge against God. Like this stuff is bi biblical. They're also on psychotropic medications.

There's all sorts of problems. I'm talking specifically about this But lots of people on psychotropic medications don't shoot up high schools. Right. But under the right conditions, people that are on I mean, I don't know what kind of psychotropic medications they were on, but some of them act as uh There's an aw a way where you take them where it makes everything okay. It it alleviates consequence, it alleviates the feeling of of

whatever you're doing uh being wrong. It's yeah well that's I I that didn't happen in the Columbine case. They knew it was wrong. No no no no what do you say? No, no, they were doing it because it was wrong. Right. They didn't just know but that's different. No, no, it isn't. It's exactly right. They were out to do the maximum amount of harm in the minimal amount of time.

But they but they felt it was the thing to do and they didn't think that it was there was something that they shouldn't do. No no no no no no no it's like it's like the Joker. Right, but they did it. They thought it was something they should do. No. But they did it. Yes. So they shot thought it was something they should do. No. What are you saying? I'm saying if they want but they wanted to do it. Yes. And they did it. So it was something they should do. No.

No, they did it because it was the worst thing they could think of. Right. Which is what they should do. Because they wanted to do the worst thing they could do. Yes. They wanted to do we can agree on that just to okay. But I'm saying they wanted to be the worst thing. It wasn't a question of causality. It wasn't because their conscience was alleviated by the drugs. They knew they knew that what they were doing they'd already planned to die. Right. Well, so then here, ask yourself this.

If you plan to die, Why not just save everybody the trouble? And die first. Yeah, well you want Yeah, you want revenge. But but you want revenge against the innocent. Do these drugs that allev that that change your state allow you to do things that are impossible to do without them? No. Some horrific act. No, I don't think that was so is it a th there's a question. Yeah that this this comes up, this is why I'm asking you and you're a good person to answer.

the the question of whether or not it causes something or the fact that they're on these drugs because they've been so tortured by life that they needed these drugs. If these drugs are not causing these actions. Right. Yes. Is that what you think? Yes. In all cases? No. So and people will react idiosyncratically to all sorts of medications in somewhat unpredictable ways. But But there's no straightforward pathway from the use of such drugs to that level of atrocity.

correlation that almost all school shooters are on psychotropic drugs. Yeah, but they're all depressed. So that's not surprising. And and depre oh they're not exactly depressed. They m they're nihilistic They're nihilistic in a way that manifests itself as a kind of depression that would elicit psychotropic medication. But it's not depression precisely. I had a friend who was on uh I think it was on Zoloft and their

take on it was that they lost a whole year of their life where they just didn't give a fuck about anything. And they could just felt like nothing mattered. There are people who report emotional blunting of that sort on antidepressants. If you are Tortured and angry and furious and then you're put on something where it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. I don't give a fuck. You think it'll alleviate conscience? Yes. No. No way?

I like I said, z zero of of anything is pushing too hard. So I wouldn't rule out the the possibility of idiosyncratic responses. These drugs are extraordinarily widely used, antidepressants, and the proportion of people who commit atrocious acts on them is infinitesimally small. Right. But the proportion of people who commit atrocious atrocious acts

while they're on those medications is extraordinarily high. Right, but I don't believe that that's involved in the causal pathway. Is that because you have personal experience with these drugs? That that would be part of it, but that's not the primary I say that's a tiny fraction of it. Because I wouldn't generalize from that. Do you still have personal experience with these drugs? No. Yes. Small amount of one medication. What is it?

Um I'm not gonna discuss that. Okay. But um I no, I don't I don't believe that that Because these crimes these particular crimes we're talking about. They're a very specific kind of crime. No, I'm not saying that the drugs cause those crimes. You're saying that maybe they dampen the voice of conscience. Yes. Um

Or also alleviate the anxiety of committing them. Yeah. Alleviate the anxiety of g of following through with something. If you look at li th the effect of these drugs on motivation and emotion has been pretty well delineated. And they do dampen negative emotions. And so but for most depressed people that's really good because they are suffering from a pathological excess of negative emotion. And some of that does manifest itself in the form of harsh superego like conscience.

Analogs. So a depressed p here's how a depressed person would think. Um maybe they have an argument with their wife about uh who's supposed to take out the garbage. Trivial in some sense. It's like Oh man, I didn't take out the garbage again. I never do anything around the house properly. That's just an indication that I never do anything at all properly. People who do in nothing at all properly, they're not very good people.

I've never really been good at that sort of thing in the past, in the present. I'm probably gonna keep fucking up like this into the future. I'm a terrible person. I should die. That's too much negative emotion, right? It just blows every level out. And they go right from the trivial mistake to the suicidal thought.

And one of the things that antidepressants do is bolster their resistance to that propagation of catastrophe.'Cause that's like that's hallmarks of depression. And you're talking specifically about SSRIs? Yes. Yeah. So I no, I don't believe that they make there's no evidence, for example, that they make psychopaths worse or worse or that they tilt people into kind of psychopathic psychopathic behavior because they decrease negative emotion.

I know no literature that indicates that. And people are very interested in such things. It would be studied. Yeah, people are interested in that correlation. Yes. But but that doesn't mean that there's no single person to whom that ever happened. Right. That's not a behavioral consequence of SSRIs in or even of serotonin itself. Because then you'd also have to say that

raising someone's serotonin level, which does make them more calm by the way, like less prone to negative emotion, because as you move up a hierarchy, you produce more serotonin. And the consequence of that is that Threatening things become less threatening. Well they should because the higher you are in a hierarchy, the less dangerous it is. Right. Right. And so and so partly you can destabilize people by threatening their position in the hierarchy because you dysregulate the

structure you dysregulate their claim to valid occupation of that position and then you destabilize their nervous systems. That's partly say when let's say you see this in academia. A new a young faculty member comes in for a job talk and lays out his theory and a upstart graduate student puts up his hand and pokes a hole in the idea. You might say, Well, the professor on stage gets taken aback and is destabilized because his theory has been

challenged and he uses the theory to protect himself against anxiety. That's kind of a terror management idea. But that isn't what happens. Not exactly. It's close, man. It's real close. What happens is the young faculty member comes in Using his claim to valid knowledge as an indicator of his suitability for that position. So I'd say I know a bunch of things that are useful, that I can use in trade, and because of that I I'm it's I'm justified in occupying this position.

And so then the student stands up and says You're a fraud. You don't deserve that position. And it's the specter of the loss of the position, the hierarchical position, that's destabilizing, not the threat to the integrity of the belief system. Now there can be some of both, right? Right. But but the reason that people don't like to lose faith is because it undermines their moral claim to their position.

And people hate that. And no wonder, like'cause it's that is really a that's a severe threat. You're a fraud. Like to have that revealed means that the system could validly take away your position. Well, the terror management theorists regard your theory as a defense against death anxiety. But your position is actually a defense against death.

Not just death anxiety. It's like that's your space in the in the culture. That's why people don't stone you. That's why you're a valid member of society. That's how you make your living. That's not an illusion. That is actually the structure that defends you against catastrophe.

And then part of what the mob does is come up to people continually, especially from the left, but the right can do it too, and they certainly have done it in if you look back at any reasonable stretch of history, but the left comes up and says You're a white supremacist racist oppressor, part of this patriarchal system. You have no moral claim whatsoever to the position you occupy. Well that just strips people, you know. Especially if they're good people.

Well it's also often disingenuous because all they're trying to do is silence you. All they're trying to do is defuse you. No, no. They're also trying to hurt and destroy you. Destroy you. But they're they're also trying to stop you from being a valid member of the conversation. Oh definitely. And they're trying to undermine the idea of merit itself because maybe they're not living particularly meritorious lives and so the light shines

on them in their darkness? Yes, most likely. Yeah, yeah. We are four hours in here. So I think we should probably wrap this bit b bad boy up. Bring it home. Um tell everybody where they can your website is Jordan Peterson.com. Jordan B Peterson. Jordan B Peterson. And you can look up the the essay app at essay.app or on my website and If you go to my website you can find my list of recommended books. There's a hundred there and Don't tweet it, Jordan,'cause he's not gonna read it, right?

Yeah, I I hope not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hope not. And your podcast is still available on YouTube. Yeah, and Spotify. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And uh yeah, there's lots of good discussions on YouTube. If you like long form discussions I find people that I wanna talk to and they'll say yes and

then we have as interesting a conversation as I can manage and maybe I share that with Joe in that our that's our intent. Yes. And it is our intent and it's a pleasure and a privilege to do it and we try to live up to that responsibility. And uh Thank you, man. Thank you. Always always always good to see you. Looking forward to being here too and also, congratulations on your success. Thank you. Like I I've had senior political figures in Canada now tell me This is so often.

that they cannot say what they have to say in our current political situation because they cannot find a single media source in the entire country that they regard as trustworthy and reliable. And these are these aren't fringe political figures, like these are people who've had stellar political careers. And that's what they tell me point blank. And the same thing is happening in the United States.

And you're an antidote to that. All by yourself. I know you have help. I know you have help and and you have people around you. But it's a testament to your Integrity, man, and good for you. It's something that So keep it up. It's uh it's a odd place, man. I know. It's all by accident. That's the oddest part about it. Yeah, well sort of. I know. It's not by design, but it's not by accident.

It well being where I am is by accident. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That is by accident. It is not by design. It is by accident. I it is um I don't I could not have imagined a world where just talking to people about whatever subject matter, you know, is their area of expertise and asking questions and being curious could be that popular. It's very strange. And then also Yeah, but it wouldn't it be something if that was the way it is? Yeah. Wow. Wow, what would be so unique then?

Then I wouldn't uh Or maybe there'd be just more unique everywhere. That would be nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody else, pick up the slack, way up. Yeah. Yeah. Well I I've had visions of that sort of thing, you know, is that we're each called to a unique destiny and then it's not unique. It's like

Well, the world's inexhaustible and so we could each have a unique destiny. Well, one thing that does happen that I hope does happen and I didn't uh mean to set out to create a kind of a format or to pioneer a kind of a format but What I do hope is that the people who enjoy it and I know this is the case They're starting to do their own thing that's similar. You bet. And that will and I'm sure.

They're very articulate. They don't say like, they don't say you know, they don't say um They weigh their words, they're witty, they listen intently. And they're aiming up. And it's so and they're just lights, you know, it's like, oh man, you're going places, you're going places. Well intellectual curiosity is now because I think of long form podcasts, it's attractive. Where it was

thought of as something akin to daydreaming. Or mental masturbation. You bet you bet in practice. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's the opposite of that, man. And it's also a viable opportunity for a career.

Yeah. And all you have to do is be interesting. Yeah. It's the only opportunity for a career in any real sense because even if I tried to teach a friend of mine this and he eventually committed suicide for a variety of reasons and and he he managed it now and then but finally was overcome by his own by the demons that possessed him, let's say.

You know, he was a very smart man and but he hadn't made much of his education, and so he was in positions he felt were beneath him. And I tried to tell him that The idea that those positions were beneath him was his own blindness, because there was an infinite amount of possibility everywhere.

So like I worked in restaurants and I had lots of working class jobs, like thirty of them. Like lots. And I really liked working in restaurants. I was a dishwasher. I loved it once I got good at it. And the reason I loved it is I was a kid, fourteen and

I got treated as an adult'cause I worked hard, you know. And I loved that, man. That was so great to be treated as an adult, a legitimate contributor. You bet, you bet. And then Because I worked hard and was interested, the cook in the first restaurant who was a German chef, he taught me to cook. It's like then I was a short order cook and I was like fifteen and so that was really fun'cause it was fun to work in the kitchen and and the place was full of jokes and tricks all the time.

And I learned how to cook and I learned how to handle the domestic environment and clean and put things in order, but also to work with people. And I had really good friendships with those people. And that fostered all sorts of opportunities for me. There is an infinite amount of possibility in that dishwashing job. Because I wasn't just I wasn't in a bloody box with people pushing dishes in through a slot. I was in this dynamic environment where people were trying to

be hospitable, which is really, really hard, you know, on a mass scale under a lot of pressure,'cause restaurants can be high pressure jobs because of the rushes that go with it. There was n there was everything in the world was in that restaurant. If you had eyes to see it, like dozens of my friends, I think it was literally dozens, came to that restaurant to get a job as a dishwasher, and every single one of them quit. So it's like they were in the same restaurant. Yeah.

I had a very similar experience. When I was young, I w I worked at a place called Newport Creamery. And uh I was a short order cook. Yeah. And uh a lot of you guys would get Yeah. I enjoyed it. I enjoy I made friends with the people that worked there and hung out with them. We had fun times together. And it was also like it taught you that You know, like you had a long shift. Yeah. Taught you the value of hard work. There was something to it. Yeah. Scrubbing the the grill and

You know, all the shit that you had to do and clean up before you could be a little bit more than a little bit. The bartender from next door, I was really mouthy and he'd come over now and then and he'd say something and I'd mouth off in some like spectacularly horrible way and he used to stuff me in the ice machine and I could fit. It was so annoying'cause I could hardly get out, you know. But they also used to drop me behind the uh the big grill. And to clean out the grease behind it?

Yeah, yeah. So but there's value in shitty jobs. There really is. There's value in struggle. You learn. You learn and then it sucks at the top of the stuff. Well and you know those working class jobs. They were fun in a way. Now I had fun with my colleagues at Harvard.

They were fun. They were they joke. We had fun in our faculty meetings. That was back when you were allowed to joke. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But those I liked those meetings'cause the faculty at Harvard at that time at the nineties, they had a good attitude towards meetings. That was pre internet, that's why. It was like

We're here to get this done as fast as we possibly can and if you have something intelligent, say say it. And if you're funny, that's okay too. But otherwise shut up and if you object, we'll put you on a committee and you can do the work outside the meeting. Ellen Langer was there at the time. She was a famous social psychologist and she had a vicious wit.

And Ellen's role was the meeting would progress and then she'd say something completely outrageous and everyone would laugh and then we'd have the meeting some more and then she'd say something else completely outrageous and there was a real sense of humor and among my colleagues And Brendan Maher who who knew Timothy Leary, we had meetings of the personality and psychopathology subdivision and

It was really fun. It was fun. And I didn't experience that much in the intellectual realm once I was a faculty member, but I did there. But in those working class jobs Like that humor and camaraderie. Yeah, well and it's it's so core to it and it can it can it elevates the entire experience beyond the relative

basicness of the job. Yes. So and I look when I look back on my adolescent life, um, there wasn't a lot to do in this small town when it was forty below for like three months of the year. Um And a lot of what we did was pretty dissolute. A lot of those teenage parties were pretty goddamn dim places, you know, in the dark, the music so loud no one could talk, everybody too drunk, kinda nihilistic. to the core, a lot of drugs, not so fun. But going to work That was fun.

And it gave me a it gave me a community of productivity, you know. So that was good. And so and that's there in front of ya. You have a lowly job. It's like it's like this. Hey man, people are boring. Everyone I talk to is so boring. Maybe it's you. No no. For sure it's you. If you listen to people I learned this in my clinical practice. If you learn to listen to people, they are so goddamn interesting

You can hardly even stand it. And so if you're surrounded by people who are dull, try listening more. They start telling you their story? People are so weird. Even the even so called simple people, it's like think people are simple, you try building one. They're not so simple. Even people that you know, wouldn't register in some sense on any normal social barometer. You sit one of those people down and you have them tell

have them tell you their life story, oh my God. It's so interesting that it's like it's traumatically interesting. I gotta wrap this up. All right, man. I'm very sorry, but we uh Oh you gave me four hours, Joe. It was a lot of fun. More. Four hours and fifteen minutes now. All right. Thank you, Jordan. I appreciate you very much. Hey.