#1933 - Jordan Peterson

Joe Rogan Wildcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan experience. I didn't even notice you have a a two-tone suit going on. You're a wild man. Please do. Okay. Well what's happening with that? Company made this for me, LGFG. They made me a dozen suit.

Heaven and hell suit. So it's quite fun. Which one's hell? I'll show you in a sec. So this is hell's red, Joe. Come on. But that's not really red. Well it's like a magenta. Yeah, it's okay, hell's magenta. Okay, hell's magic. Yeah, it's designer hell. Ah you know. So this is made out of sheep's wool and this is made out of goat's wool. So that's pretty funny. And then in here you've got your base.

Uh lightning. Okay. Yeah. So I don't think I've ever seen a man walk around with a I think you're one Am I one up? Up. Are you? No, that's good. Double breasted. Fancy. Yeah. Oh no. I was gonna wear it today. I thought about wearing it. It's uh it's a black suit with platinum suit. Uh wires in it, which is kinda cool. And inside it's got black and white images really harsh sharf sharp, harsh graphic images of you and Brett Weinstein and Ben Shapiro and Russell Brand and

You know. Sam Harris too thing. That's Sam's in there too. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I still have hope for Sam Harris. Yeah, me too. Me too. Yeah, I hope he c I hope he makes a comeback. I mean he's not really going away. He's just got some weird opinions. Yeah, well. But there's there's plenty of that floating around. Well, you know, I think when you have like complex, fascinating brains, they go off in all kinds of different directions.

Don't you think? This is this is one of the dangers of being creative, right? Most creative ideas are wrong. And a good section of those wrong ones are fatal. But now and then you get one that's necessary. Yeah, we were talking about uh Twitter files before uh we got rolling and uh what the new stuff is. So the the new stuff has something to do with AI and uh

Some sort of content moderation? Oh yeah. Well Tabby released some Twitter files today on well on or o on Twitter obviously and they're going through the code. Now I don't understand the technical details but You know, you don't exactly know when you see the output of a of a of a code generated system, exactly what rules it's using to sort the information. I suppose that's the equivalent of shadow banning.

And there's all sorts of there was apparently all sorts of directives built into the code to amplify certain kinds of messages and, you know, de amplify others. And so apparently Musk is doing what he can to to uh clean that up. Uh Ruben reported that the other day. Yeah. Then Tybee today he was talking more about

the whole uh Russian collusion fabrication. Yeah. So that's also real fun. Well how about the one guy that was going after Trump who it turned out was actually in collusion with the Russians. Oh yeah, that's a rough one. Yeah. Yeah. Well the best defense is a good offense, you know, and so I guess. I guess. Yeah, I guess. I know. But in a crazy world. Why would anybody not think that that was gonna come around to get them?

Uh it's amazing how often people don't think that, you know, what they're doing isn't gonna isn't gonna end up aimed squarely at them. Well this Twitter thing, right? Like they never suspected that someone like Elon was gonna come along and buy Twitter. And then in an unheard of tactic.

have a bunch of journalists review everything in all their Slack meetings and all their emails, look under the code, look under the wiring under the machine and find out how it was actually running and Why I mean w the the fact that a anyone would ever think that any of this stuff is a good idea, that people don't understand like the dangers of censorship.

They don't understand what where this leads to. Yeah, well we're seeing a little bit of that emerge on the right now, you know, which is kinda frightening to me. So I I'm an admirer in many ways of what's going on in Florida, you know, with DeSantis. But him and Rufo, who I also think has got a bit of a clue, are

try and to what would you say, limit or even ban critical race theory and the problem with that is you can't define it, right? Right. So how do you how do you control something you can't define? And the the answer is you battle it out on the battleground of ideas.

Because as soon as you start to try to define it and then try to censor it, well, first of all that's just gonna grow'cause that's how those things work. You know, like where does where does critical race theory shade into Marxism? Well, who the hell knows? Where does Marxism shade into socialism. That's an even harder question. Then where does socialism shade into, you know, just being on the side of the working class?

Well all that's fuzzy beyond belief. And so once you get to the point where the government has to step in and regulate, say what education systems are doing, you're already in deep trouble. And'cause it can't I don't see how it can really be done. 'Cause I c I can't define critical race theory. You know, I mean y more or less you can get some sense of the cloud of ideas that's associated with it.

But trying to draw the lines, how are you gonna do that? And then of course you enable Inevitably, no matter what your goal is to begin with, you're gonna control a certain form, let's say, of pathological communication, misinformation. That's just gonna play into the hands of people who like to censor and that's just as likely on the right as it is on the left. So no, it's a real dangerous game.

It's open to interpretation. Yeah, well it's often even hard, except in retrospect, to understand a lot of what these things actually are, you know,'cause new clouds of ideas emerge and they kinda have an animating spirit and They ha they have a set of associated

What would you say? Presumptions and you can often only see what that is in retrospect. You know, it took me a long time to understand eg whatever existentialism was enough to sort of define it phenomenology, these different schools of thought that occupied the thoughts of uh of psychological investigators over a couple of centuries, postmodernism, modernism, you know.

it's it's not an easy thing to to extract out the gist of those and define them plus plus as I said they have very fuzzy boundaries so Well what I saw with DeSantis was there was uh he had a concern that they that it wasn't just black history that they were putting into this critical race theory, but that he saw that there was queer theory. Which was in this thing that they were teaching in school like what does that have any how does that have anything to do with black history?

Like why is queer theory inserted in the world? Yeah, well I think I think the way those are linked is essentially through what you might regard as well it's an implicit Marxism, but it's even deeper than Marxism. So if you're a Marxist, you basically You have a heuristic that simplifies the world and that heuristic is that you can understand any social relationship from well, from an intimate relationship all the way up to the state by just dividing the

parties, let's call them the narrative partners in a discussion or an interaction into those who are oppressed and victimized and those who are taking advantage of them and profiting. That's basic Marxist theory of economics. And there's obviously some truth in that, because when systems become corrupt, that's how they operate.

It's exploitation and victimization. And every system tends towards corruption and so and if you're if your eyes are o open a little bit or if you're let's call it if you've moved from naivety to cynicism, then you can see every interaction as a power dynamic. And then that drives as soon as you have that established, that idea that the basic relationship is one of power.

Well then you can see, well, there's no difference between what's happened to queer people in relationship to those in power and what's happened to black people in relationship to those in power. It's but it's united by that underlying that's why I always make a case for the domination of something like

postmodernism and Marxism. You know, I've been criticized for that, but I think it's an accurate association. The postmodernists figured out, and they were right about this, that we see the world through a story. Now that turns out to be something unbelievably complicated and I think all the top end neuroscientists like Carl Friston are

what what do you call converging on this presumption that you have to see the world through a story. And the postmodernists actually figured that out. The French postmodernists, you know, Foucault and Derrida and people like that. But then they did something that was a sleight of hand and

And this was this all happened in the nineteen seventies. They said, Well, we have to see the world through a story, and even if you're a scientist, you're not exactly objective because there's a narrative driving you. work that you might be unaw unaware of. That's your implicit narrative. That's what might be implicitly biasing you. But um

They jumped to the conclusion that the underlying narrative was one of power. It's basically that all human relationships are predicated on power. And y you know, there isn't a more cynical viewpoint than that. And it's easy to take apart, you know, i if you think about it for a moment in a in a practical sense. If your marriage is just based on power.

First of all, it's an unpleasant place'cause it's tyrant it's tyrant and slave. And second, like good luck with that. Cause people aren't that easy to tyrannize, you know, like maybe you have a willing slave in your wife, but I doubt it. if you're just trying to play power games with her, she's gonna fight back with everything she's got. And then if you have friends It's like r that's a relationship of mutual exploitation, is it?

Then you're just a bully with henchmen and they're gonna stab you in the back the first chance they get. You're a mob man. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well worse than that even a dictator. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a dictator. You're a dictator, you know. Uh and Well that's your definition of success. Yeah, what is success? I mean how uh are you the biggest devil in hell. Yeah. Are you happy? Yeah. Right. Well the leader of a bad place might be the person who's worst off.

Yeah. In some fundamental sense, right? They're the most corrupt. Isn't that funny though the the way we define success is power and and money. Like those that like you you look how successful they are. Yeah. Power and money. Well a complete absence of love and trust and respect and Yeah, well it's basically not really how people operate. So there's an anthropological literature on the formation of elders in uh in say Yeah.

Who becomes an elder? And if you were a Marxist cynic, you'd say, well, those who used exploitation to dominate, like the priestly class or something like that. And that goes along with the supposition that You know, religion is the opiate of the masses. And some of that's obviously true, but a lot of it isn't. The elders aren't that at all. They're they're the people who others go to spontaneously to act as well. Yeah. And then you ask well who do people naturally gravitate towards for counsel?

And the answer is well. productive, generous people who've managed their interpersonal relationships well. Because who the hell else would you go ask for advice if you had any sense? Like you might go ask the local dictator and kowtow to him if you need a favor to take somebody out, but if you're actually asking for counsel You're gonna ask someone who's decent and who's generous and who plays a reciprocal game. It's also the case this is worth knowing too.

The problem with a power game is that it's not playable, not in the final analysis. So Franz DeWall, the du Dutch primatologist, has shown even pretty clearly in chimpanzees, you know, you think the roughest, toughest Chimpanzee rules the damn roost and he pounds everybody flat and he gets a access to the females. And there's a little bit of truth to that because

Female chimps aren't sexually choosy, but the male chimps will chase weaker males away from them. And so if you are more powerful physically as a male chimp, you do have preferential mating applications. But the problem with being a brute, even if you're a chimp, is that you have an off day and two of the chimps that you oppress band together and tear you into pieces. And so what DeWall found found was that in chimp troops

the stable alpha can sometimes even be the smallest male of the troop. He'll ally himself with some of the dominant females and makes networks that are essentially friendships, reciprocal friendships, and that gives him a stable position, not of power but of authority. And that's definitely the case in functional human societies. It's not based on power. Now, it's tricky because if it degenerates, then it degenerates into a relationship of power.

You know, and so that means the critics who make the claim that everything's about power. are right in some sense when they're talking about nothing but corruption, but they're really one hundred percent seriously wrong about the idea that it's power relation that constitutes the basis for the organization of any social interaction.

You know, it doesn't work in your marriage, doesn't work with your friends, doesn't work with your children, doesn't work with your business partners, doesn't work with your customers. It doesn't work with politicians, although Here's another twist that's complicated. So imagine you have a population of people who basically cooperate reciprocally.

So, you know, I do you a favor, you do me one, and maybe we figure out how to advance each other across time. That's a good game, right? Fair trade plus advancement. That's a good definition for a good marriage. Okay, but now you have a community of people like that together. Okay, now it opens up an ecological niche, and the niche is psychopathy.

And the psychopath comes in and pretends that he's a productive, generous reciprocator. But he's not. He's just an instrumental manipulator. But he can get away with it because there's enough wealth generated by the cooperators, you know, the honest cooperators. so that there's a space for someone to exploit the system. And that stabilizes that four percent of the population.

So, you know, across the world four percent are of people are close enough to clinically diagnosable psychopaths. And that's probably better than being, you know, paralyzed by fear and anxiety and just staying in your bed. better in terms of reproductive success, let's say, and maybe even success in general. But it's not a good game because in the real world

Most psychopaths get found out pretty quickly. So, you know, you can screw somebody once and maybe twice, but then they figure it out and then word gets around. And so in the real world, two things happen. Psychopaths have to be itinerant. So they can find new people to exploit. And the other thing that happens is generally non psychopathic males who are fairly aggressive keep the psychopaths under control.

And so part of the reason that women like men who have some capacity for aggression, but who are still productive and reciprocal is that men who are productive and reciprocal who have some capacity for aggression can keep the real monsters at bay. So it's hard on women, eh? They have to navigate that really thin line between productive generosity

And the capacity for aggression. That's a really tough thing to navigate. That's basically the story of Beauty and the Beast, the Disney movie, right? Because Gaston is a narcissistic psychologist. And the beast is someone capable of aggression, but he's not tamed into a reciprocal relationship. It's also the basis of the most fundamental female pornographic fantasy. And the Google guys figured that out, you know, fifteen years ago when they analyzed billions of

sex fantasy searches by men and women. Men go for visual imagery, but women go for story. And the story's the same. It You know, innocent young woman, uh with a lot to offer, but kinda hidden, find some male five categories of men, vampire, werewolf, pirate. surgeon, billionaire, and he's, you know, kind of an aggressive guy, but he's capable of being tamed into an intimate relationship. That's the standard female pornographic fantasy, and it's pretty much the standard fantasy of romance.

And so you can see, you know, what are women are trying to do in that situation is they're trying to find some guy that's got the capacity for mayhem, but that's under control, but who can integrate that into a productive, generous, reciprocal relationship. And so Well. It's fascinating because th the the capacity for violence and the capacity for aggression is one of the things that's been

actively muted in our male population. Yeah. Well it's a it's There's a bunch of reasons for that and I some of them. turn into positive feedback loops like there's sort of self fulfilling prophecies. So there's a lot of women out there who've never had a positive relationship with any male in their life. Right, and maybe not only not a positive relationship, but really a series of pretty negative relationships.

And so women like that are very leery of any expression of male ability of any sort, because they can't distinguish productive competence from arbitrary power. And because they're trying to defend themselves, because they've been hurt repeatedly, maybe they come from broken families and catastrophically arranged neighborhoods.

You know, one of the tactics that can be used in that situation is just to try to do everything you can to distance yourself as much as you can from any display of male ability, because it can't be distinguished from psychopathy.

Can't be distinguished from the use of power. It takes a sophisticated woman to be able to make that distinction. So the other thing you see too is that young women are much more likely to be seduced by psychopaths than older women. Because the psychopaths mimic competence. That's what a narcissist does too. They're all they're confident.

And women read confidence as a marker of competence and that's reasonable, but that opens up the what would you it opens up a space for exploitation because if you can mimic confidence That's false confidence, narcissistic false confidence. Then you look competent and that works particularly well on naive young women. And of course they get exploited by people like that and they think, Well, that's what men are like. Right.

Men women like that, you know, they have boys and then they're afraid of the boys whenever they express anything looking like masculine competence and they basically emasculate the boys and then the boys get bitter and then they mistreat women and the whole bloody thing. spirals out of control. And so and that's where we are. That's where we are. What a strange place to be, isn't it? Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah. Well unintended consequence of familial breakdown. That's a huge part

So we decided to have this conversation because of what's going on with you in Canada. Oh yeah. And that your clinical psychology license is in jeopardy because you have opinion about politics that they disagree with, which is a very dangerous and bizarre turn of events. Well it's your fault actually, you know. I told you I think a w a week or so ago when we talked about

Okay, so let me give you some background here. So I want to know how it's my fault. I will. I'll tell you, tell you. A lot of things are your fault as it turns out. So Yeah, yeah. So the the College of Psychologists has basically levied what are equivalent to about thirteen lawsuits against me simultaneously. Now the reason I call them lawsuits is because

They're actions undertaken on behalf of a complainant. Now the complainant can be anyone anywhere in the world who complains about me for any reason. They don't have to be former clients. They don't even have to be anybody I've ever met. They don't even have to have met anybody I've ever met. So you know it's So it could be someone online. So which is really quite interesting. And what are the complaints? Well Okay, l let's see. Uh

The one complaint is about the tweet I made about Eleanor Elliott Page and when I said that a criminal physician cut off her breasts and that pride was the sin, so now I'm in trouble again'cause I just said the same thing. One was about uh Sports Illustrated. cover where that featured that overweight model and I tweeted out Not Beautiful and um I guess that was something like fat shaming. I don't remember exactly what the

what the what the charge was. And then I criticized Justin Trudeau and a former staff member of Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern. I made a joke about her Coming I was going to New Zealand and the New Zealand leftist press was freaking out and I made this joke about bringing my alt right trolls to New Zealand and and then I put in parentheses or maybe they're just, you know, ordinary people who are trying to clean up their rooms. So apparently that was

casting the profession into disgrace. And then they submitted one complainant from the US. You know, I don't know how to defend myself against that because apparently everything I say and apparently everything you say too is bringing the profession of psychology into disgrace. And I think they're most upset in that case about uh my comments about the inadequacy of climate model.

And so, you know, what that has to do with my clinical practice is questionable to say the least. And so anyways, does that cover it? Yeah, it seems like this climate thing is a very rigid ideology that one must subscribe to wholesale. Yeah. It's a actually it's a it's a pseudo it's a partial pseudo religion, and and and I I mean that technically.

I'm gonna write about this to some degree and I'm writing a new book which will come out November called We Who Wrestle With God and I'll cover that in this. But Alex Epstein, who wrote Fossil Fuel Future recently, to comments about this a bit. So the basic And so this is the set of initial presumptions.

That's a way of thinking about it. You know, we were talking about how ideas are structured earlier. The Marxists believe that everything's about power. There's a narrative at the base of any belief system and the climate uh the climate r pseudo religion is based on characterization of nature as something like a hapless, uh what would you call hapless, defenseless, fragile virgin.

the uh the industrial activity of mankind is is characterized as something like a rapacious Uh power mad uh ri yeah, yeah, yeah, uh demolisher of natural virginity and beauty, and then the human being is the individual is characterized as nothing but a you know, a devouring mouth whose activity runs contrary to the

to the untrammeled beauty of the planet and that supports the activity of the tyrannical patriarchy. That's basically it. And so the reason that narrative has force is because it draws on underlying religious archetypes and so Uh to characterize the world properly, you do need to characterize the positive aspect of nature.

Because you have to live in something approximating a reciprocal harmony with nature. Because if you just eat everything and, you know, devour everything in your local landscape, well, then you die. So that's a bad idea. So you have to have some sense of the value of nature. Now you also have some have to have some sense of the fact that if you were dropped in the jungle naked in the Amazon, you'd be dead in about forty eight hours.

So you also need a figure to characterize the negative element of nature, and that's completely absent from the environmental myth. That's part of what makes it pathological. And then with regard to the rapacious tyranny, let's say, well You know, any industrial system or any human organization can exploit the natural world to the point where that's not sustainable and it can become oppressive and tyrannical. That's the evil king, ancient part of

religious mythology going back as far back as we can chase it. So you need a representation of the negative aspect of society. Because, you know, you go to s you send your kids to school and they kinda get turned into these cookie cutter kids and that crushes their innate uh what would you say, difference and beauty and it's all the pain of having to be socialized and You have to understand that there is this oppressive element of culture.

And so, but then, you know, you should also wake up and and notice that you've got the wise king too and that means you put you plug in your damn toaster in the morning and the electricity works and you go out on the street and everyone isn't rioting and You know, there's workmen who are knee deep knee deep in the sludge trying to keep everything going and you're not starving to death like everybody on the planet was in eighteen sixty. And so a little gratitude for the positive

end of the patriarchy is in order too, and that's completely absent in the environmental view. And then with regard to the individual, it's like, well Of course you can be a selfish, impulsive, hedonistic consumer. And you can facilitate the rapacious tyranny as a consequence of that, rape the planet, but by the same token, you know, we're not a cancer on the face of the earth. We're not a m virus that's mutating and taking out the planet.

You know, and we're not trapped in a Melthusian nightmare and you gotta give credit where it's due. And you know, there's an element of people of everyone that's noble and and generous and kind and productive and capable of living

in a well ordered state in something like sustainable and productive harmony with nature. You only get half that story. Now if you have no comprehensive underlying cultural narrative, which is increasingly the case in our society, and someone offers you when you're attaining age your half the religious story.

That'll just snap you up in a second, because it helps you order your relationship with the world. It gives you a pathway too, eh? So Jean Piaget, the great developmental psychologist He called the last stage of adolescence the Messianic period, the messianic stage.

Now, most people don't talk much about that, I think, because they're they don't know what to make of Piaget's claim, but he was a real genius, Jean Piaget. And he said, you know, when when you're making that transition from from the group identity that you're chasing as a teenager to becoming an individual. No and that's not a journey everyone takes,'cause lots of people just get lost in group identity. You're gonna be looking for a pathway that's essentially heroic.

And what that pathway should be is that you identify with your culture deeply, you are socialized deeply into the traditions of your culture, but you're also capable of transcending it. You know, so then you become a culture creator as well as a as as a disciplined member of culture. But young people need to be offered something like a well, a vision of destiny in order to catalyze their identity. And we're very, very bad at that.

Except on the ideological front. So the woke types come along and say, you know, the planet's a virgin, the great father's a tyrant, you could be a hero if you just stood up to that. And the kids think, well, I'd like to do something important with my life, and so they're just Caught into that immediately. But because it's a one-sided story, it's well it's an i a one-sided st a one-sided religious story is an ideology.

And a great representation of that is what they've done with Greta Thornburg. Yeah, exactly. Exactly so funny, you know,'cause I thought ten years ago I thought we live in the delusion of a of a disturbed thirteen year old girl. How did that happen? And then, you know, Greta Thunberg showed up and I thought, Oh well there we go. We've now we've got the we've got the the thirteen year old. I feel sorry for her, you know, because

She was chased into this apocalyptic terror that we're trying to enforce on all our kids. And then you think about her position, you know, so now she's all afraid. And her mother's facilitating that like mad. And then, you know, w she announces her fear, her neurotic fear essentially, it's driven by negative emotion. And you know, Macron says to her, Oh my God, Greta, you're absolutely right and bows. It's like what the hell's a girl to think?

You know, because what she really wants is to freak out a bit and for someone calm and reasonable to say, Hey look, kid, you know. The apocalypse has always been on us. It's always the case that the future has the possibility of being dreadful, but you know, we've conquered terrible things in the past and overcome massive obstacles, and there's no reason at all not to assume that we can do the same thing. That's a very important point.

Yeah. It's it's such an important point because there's never been a time ever where everything was perfect. Well that's for sure. There's never been a time ever environmentally where the earth was stable. No, if if you go I mean, stable you know, currently you can kinda like guess what the weather's gonna be. But if you look at like models of like thousands of years.

It's never been flat. It's always been up and down. Many times. Yeah. So yeah, yeah. Well Brandle Carlson was saying there's been times in our like distant past where the CO two levels and the oxygen levels were so fucked up that we were close to losing all life on Earth. Right, right. And then this can this can happen. See the the the antithesis To that is to believe in something like the paradisal, the intrinsic paradisal stability of well-balanced mother nature. Right. It's like, yeah.

A bit, but no, not really. There's a lot of variability. A lot. And of course that kind of variability. That's hard on people because you want a certain amount of stability so you don't die. Right, but it it doesn't deny that human beings have an impact on this either.

But no, no. Well this is why like this is why I really respect Bjorn Lomberg, you know, because Lomberg's hard to grasp because he forces you to think complexly. You know, he says well we don't have one problem carbon dioxide, which is you know, I don't even think it's Clear that carbon dioxide is actually a problem, but we can leave that aside. That'll get me in trouble with the College of Psychologists again. But you know, Lomberg says it's

Yeah, it's a fa it's a factor, yeah, yeah. But there's lots of factors and God only knows what the most pressing problems that confront us truly are. When I I wandered through the ecological sustainability literature about ten years ago and You know, I concluded couple of things. One was that the best way forward to a sustainable planet

is to make everyone who's poor rich as fast as you possibly can. Because it turns out if you get people above about five thousand dollars a year in average GDP, they start taking a long term view of the future. Instead of scrabbing around in the dirt trying to get lunch, you know, until

You're gonna burn everything up around you to stay alive if you have to. Right. But if you if you got a bit of wealth and now you can think over you know, maybe a twenty year period, which is quite the damn luxury, then you actually start being concerned about

you know, the quality, the aesthetic quality of the local environment. And so I was so excited when I found that data because I thought, Oh, this is so cool. It means that we could have our cake and eat it too. We could work really hard to provide cheap, reliable energy, you know, at the lowest cost possible to the widest number of people worldwide, and the emergent consequence of that would be the whole planet would clean itself up. So that wouldn't that be great,'cause we could make our goal

The eradication of absolute poverty, which we actually done pretty good at eliminating over the last fifteen years, but we could really make that a goal. And then one of the consequences, that inevitable consequences, would be a greener and and healthier planet. And then you think, well why aren't we doing that? And that's a question.

And I think part of the reason is that we're not going to be able I've been trying to understand the driving ideas underneath this globalist utopian tyranny that seems to be developing from the top down and I think it's driven at least in part by this religious vision that I already described, you know, that you have to construe culture itself, especially industrial culture, as the tyrannical father raping and pillaging everything in its way.

unbelievably dangerous way to think, too one sided. And uh the the the idea that you have to impose limits to growth on people in order to have a sustainable planet. And that's allied with a view that probably stems all the way back to people like Paul Ehrlich in the nineteen sixties, who really believe really believe

truly, that maybe the planet should only have five hundred million people on it, or a billion, you know, in relative poverty, or two billion, barely scrape and buy because otherwise they're gonna be wrecking everything and you know, controlled by some top down authority that make

bloody well sure that no one's consuming too much. And so when I look at ideas like that, that first assumption, you know, the planet has too many people on it, it's like I don't like to hear people say that'cause when I hear that I think, Okay, buddy

Who exactly are you thinking about getting rid of? Oh well it's not like that. It's like, yeah, it's like that. It has to be like that. It is absolutely like that. And so, you know, it's easy to get all paranoid conspiracy theorists about the WEF say and maybe there's some utility in that, but

You know, I don't think anybody is sitting at Davos going, well we have got we got to scrap seven billion people. But If the underlying narrative is the one I just described, you know, virginal planet, tyrannical patriarchy and rapacious individual, and you believe, well, we're overpopulated, like Paul Ehrlich has believed. It's really literally the mid nineteen sixties, then

How is it not going to be that the policies that you craft stemming from that narrative are colored by the belief that there's far too many people? And like I've already felt that I've been at war for the last six months.

And I would say it's war because What I observed happening in Europe when I was there last was that well, and you can see this, you don't have to be in Europe to see it, but it's more direct if you're there, is that it's pretty damn clear that the globalist utopians are willing to sacrifice the poor for the sake of the planet. You know, and they're doing that by cranking energy prices up through the roof, and that means that people die. Lomburg has estimated that

Three maybe you have to turn your thermostat down by three degrees, right? Save the planet. We don't have enough energy. We'll pay you not to use your electricity between five and six, which is what they're doing in the UK. You turn your damn thermostat down three degrees, that sounds like nothing. But if you're old

That radically increases the probability that you'll get a respiratory disease and die. You know, and if the Europeans would have had a cold winter, and that could still happen, Lomberg estimated it'd wipe out one hundred and thirty five thousand people. It's like, well, you know, we're just making energy more expensive. It's like, what do you mean you're just doing that? So imagine the economic system. It's a pyramid. There's a bunch of people at the top.

They have almost all the money. That's par for the course for any productive system. Any system that's productive ends up with a distribution. It's pretty it's like a law of nature. And then you move farther down the pyramid till you get down to the bottom where most of the people are, and they're barely clinging on to the edge of reality, right? It doesn't take much of a crisis to tip them into, you know, debt.

And then you crank up energy prices. Well what happens is you just take a bunch of those people at the bottom of the distribution, the poor that the left is so, you know, hypothetically concerned with, and you just they're just done. They go from barely hanging on to not hanging on. And their kids go from having some ghost of a chance of opportunity to having none. And I could see this coming. You really saw it happening in Germany and the UK, you know, where we have this

R absolute rat's nest of way more expensive energy. And and this is where it gets extremely perverse, you know, you might say. Okay, look. We have to save the future poor. And so now some of the present poor are gonna have to suffer. Well that's convenient for you if you happen not to be one of those poor people, but let's give the devil his due and say, Okay. It's like that'd be fine with me not really. That'd be fine with me if

W the consequence of your actions, raising energy prices, for example, actually pro produced an improvement in those things you wanted to improve. So for example, energy is more expensive, but now the air is cleaner. But that isn't what's happening in Germany. Right. What's happening in Germany is energy is like five times as expensive and the coal plants are back on. So it's like even by your own criteria for success.

You failed and you did it at the expense of the poor. And you know the World Bank estimated, I don't remember how many months ago, it's probably nine months ago, that we're putting three hundred and fifty million people at on the brink of starvation because we're cranking energy prices.

And so for me, it's like that's three hundred and fifty million people. That's three times as many as the communists killed, you know, in their six decades of trying. And if your if your cure for the planet is, well, you know We gotta put three hundred and fifty million poor people in jeopardy just so that things are hypothetically better in a hundred years, I think.

Yeah, I don't think so, buddy. And also, it's a little bit too convenient for me that your prescriptions to save the planet are accompanied by this is insistence that the only way forward to that is to give you all the power. It's like there's a bit of a moral hazard in that, don't you think? It's like I'm just saving the planet. Give me all the power.

You want to save the planet? Or do you want the power? And let's let's put the first the second one first because the probability that you're a saint or the Messiah is pretty damn low. So that's the danger of the Davos crowd. It's a very bizarre narrative that doesn't get challenged and I I don't hear this very nuanced complex perspective like the what you're laying out right now. I don't hear that often. No, I don't hear it at all.

I hear from you and maybe a couple other people that I I actively seek out. But you would think that when you're dealing with such a complex issue that you would want to see Yeah, yeah, like in in well okay. Well so let's say let's think about what what mitigates against that. Okay, so first of all

Young people are looking for a you know a productive and and visionary pathway forward. We already covered that a bit. But then there's the there's a dark side of that too, and the dark side of that for everyone is that Our reputations are very important to us. They're our most crucial currency, you know. And what that means is that we're tempted to elevate our reputations in an undeserved manner.

And we do that to gain social status with very little work. And and so we're tilted towards being tempted by theories that provide us with an easy way forward to that. And so one is, well, I'm a good person. Well how do I know that? Well I'm concerned about the planet. Well the plan That's a complex problem, the planet, right? That's a trillion problems, not one. I'm concerned about the planet, therefore I'm good.

But that's complicated, you got to take it apart. No, you don't. You just say Well, the planet only has one problem. Well what? Untrammeled industrial activity and the rapacious nature of the consumer. Too much carbon dioxide. Okay, I'm against carbon dioxide. Well, bang, you're the messiah. You know, with no work. And then someone Lomberg comes along and says, Hold on there, guys. We got like thirty problems, not one.

We need to rank order the problems and we need to do a differentiated analysis and your idiot interventions are gonna cause nothing but unintended consequences and no one wants to hear that because number one, it's complicated. You gotta read the damn book and you gotta think through his arguments. And number two

Well now where are you going to get your cheap moral virtue? You can't just be the Messiah by waving a band you know, waving a banner that says I don't like carbon dioxide. And so that that runs against a very, very deep narcissism. And so that's part of what Stands in opposition to people, especially people like Lomberg. Like gr greatly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well social media is a great place to garner unearned

social reputation. I mean in in it can be gamed and it is gamed. And we also even know the nature of the people who game it. There's a whole emergent psychological literature concentrating on dark tetrad traits. So Could walk through that a little bit? So the standard personality models that produced the big five: extroversion, eroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, they were derived.

Sort of with a primitive AI, that's a way of thinking about it, that looked for patterns of description across huge corpuses of linguistic data. How do people talk about each other? It turns out they talk about each other Using five dimensions. described. But the people who derived the Big Five didn't use evaluative descriptors. They threw anything out that looked like a value judgment.

So for example, you might say of someone he's a good person, and you might say of someone else he's a malevolent person. Those descriptors weren't included in the Big Five corpus because they were trying to derive a model of normative personality. Okay, so but that meant that the pathological personality wasn't encapsulated or well defined. Now, this guy Robert Hare, who worked at University of British Columbia, world's leading authority on psychopathy,

And he interviewed th hundreds and hundreds of psychopaths and was always fooled by them by the way. And then he had a student, Dale Paulus, who works at UBC, and Paulus developed a model of Personality that base was based on pathology, like on the dark side. And uh he called that the dark triad. Machiavellianism.

That means uh Machiavellian is someone who so let's say if I was Machiavellian in our discussions, what I would have done was think before I came here, I thought, well, you know, what can Joe offer me? And then I think, well, how can I play Joe with my language so I'm most likely to get what I'm you know, the narrow, impulsive, selfish thing that I'm aiming at right now. So that's how a Machiavellian operates. A narcissist, that's the next thing.

part of the dark triad, is someone who wants social status without doing any of the work. They want all the attention. If you're dating a narcissist or in a relationship with a narcissist, they'll alienate all your family members and your friends so that they get all the attention. And that'll just be the first of the games they play with you. Then you have psychopathy, and the psychopaths are parasitical predators.

And so the predator will take whatever you've got and the parasite will live off you. And then here's a parasitical ideological statement. Property is theft. a classic Marxist trope. Why would you say that? Well, if I want to live off you The way I'm going to justify that ethically is by claiming, well, you know, Joe, look how privileged you are, you've got all this money. You just you just took that from the oppressed.

And if I'm manipulating you so that I get some of your money, that's only just because first of all it's exactly what you did, and second of all, well why not spread some of that wealth around? So that's Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, dark triad. They've expanded that recently to add another dimension that was missing, sadism.

And the sadist takes positive delight in causing pain to others, and the Lulz culture L U L Z, the Lulz culture online is a culture of sadistic Machiavellian narcissism. Lulz meaning like people are joking around shitposting. Yeah, yeah. I did it for the lulls, and it's the plural of L O Laugh Out Loud. But like if you look at the Urban Dictionary, for example, the definition of lulls is positive delight in the suffering of others.

Yeah, sadistic. And and bloody well social media just facilitates like Right. You you have to have like six or seven things going on before it's clear that you're manifesting this underlying tetrad of personality traits. Like if you use the odd acronym and you're throwing out a you know, a joke at someone. That this is a habitual pattern of doing nothing but provoking people online.

And using deception and lies to do it to attract attention to yourself. You know, it has to be a very consistent pattern. But Paulos, first of all, and his crew of researchers and people who've been influenced by'em have laid out this four dimensional structure of the dark side, let's say. And they've shown that hyper users of social media Instagram for example and and people who do a lot of anonymous shit posting

are characterized by, you know, what what would you call it, uh domination by those four traits. And part of the reason for that, this is very, very dangerous to our whole society, I think, is that You gotta ask yourself what keeps the psychopaths under control in the normal population? And the answer seems to be especially on the male side, is that narcissistic aggressive men get

put in their place by non narcissistic aggressive men. And that usually has to do with something like the threat of physical intervention. You know how it is if you get a bunch of guys together I can make a joke about you. You know, and I could even make a joke that was uh that sort of put you down. But uh the joke would have to be funny You'd have to have the opportunity to reciprocate and you'd have to believe that I was doing it in good spirit.

Because if I just use the opportunity to, you know, stick the knife in, we're not going to get along with each other very long. And we know that and men know that when they talk to each other. And so part of what keeps Dialogue among men civilized is the possibility that it won't be civilized if it goes two sideways. And everybody knows that. But there is none of that online, because anybody can post anything about anyone, no matter how denigrating and derisive.

Especially if they do it anonymously, and there is zero consequence. In fact, quite the opposite. If they're good at it, they get a lot of attention, and the social media companies will monetize it. And so not only is it not inhibitive, It's actually facilitated. And this isn't a trivial problem, because if the psychopaths multiply enough, they take the whole society out. So I think virtualization enables psychopaths.

And it's worse than just the trolling bit. That's bad enough because it pollutes political dialogue and it makes everyone think that everything is more unstable than it really is. But online criminality is actually a terrible Play.

You know, I don't think there's an old person in North America who isn't being targeted by some gang of psychopaths who's, you know, documented all of their interests and their locale and who knows how much money's in their bank account and who's doing everything they possibly can at every second to leverage access. That's just happening continually. So that's certainly algorithms, right? For a lot of people that get trapped into these

sort of situations where people are constantly throwing at them things that are opportunities for them to either make money or get this or avoid paying. Yeah, get a refund. You bet. Or they befriend them. You know, they get they get it in and some lonely old character who's not co functioning cognitively quite quite like he used to. You know, he gets sucked in by someone pretending to be his friend and offered a great investment opportunity.

Yeah, yeah. And it's very, very, very difficult to track this sort of thing online. So you get the real enabling of the criminals because how the hell if they're anonymous, how the hell do you keep them you know, how do you hold them to to account? But and then a secondary derivation of that is something like trolling and that's really not so good either because

if the psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian sadists are dominating the political discourse, then ordinary people look at that and think, Oh my God, everything's going to hell. Everyone's really extreme and really it's a non random sample and so

You know. I I can really see this in my own life, you know, because if you just looked at me virtually you'd think like I was the world's most embattled person in some way, you know, maybe not the world's most, but I'm up in the top ten maybe. But in my real life then that like I don't have any problems. You know, I go around from town to town or from city to city and every interaction I have with people on the street is positive. They either don't know me, which is fine.

Or they do and then we have a positive interaction. And I've only had like three negative interactions with people in real life in the last six years. In fact, they stand out'cause they're not fun, but they're extremely rare. But online it's like, well, fifty percent of the people oppose Jordan Peterson. It's like, no, they don't. It's not it's not even one percent.

It's a we we're building a virtual world that doesn't sample the real world very well, and that's not much different from building a delusion. So not good. Very, very uns very unsettling. That's Twitter. Yeah, yeah. Well certainly Twitter before Elon Musk came over. Yeah, well Twitter's better, but it's still quite the snake pit. Yeah. You know, I I what I one of the things I I think might be done about that see I don't think that I've I've made this claim on Twitter that's not a good thing.

that uh there's something cowardly about anonymous posting. And I I'm not going to retract that'cause I believe that in ninety nine percent of the cases that's true. Now people say, well You know, if you're a whistleblower you have to be anonymous and what about people in totalitarian states and or in in a company? Well, same that's the whistleblowing problem, I think. Yeah, one percent of anonymous posters are heroes, but night eighty percent of them are Machiavellian. And so

Well m m but but y there's also the factor of people that don't want to get in trouble at work. Yeah, I know, I know. Well that's kind of the whistleblower problem. But not even whistleblowers. I mean people that just have opinions that might get them in trouble with the College of Psychologists in Ontario, for example.

Yeah, and so well I think one of the ways of handling that technically, what I'd like to see happen at Twitter, for example, you know, not that I'm in a position to know because I know it's complicated, is I think the anonymous types should be separated from the real people.

So you could go visit them and see what they have to say, but the verified people, you know, their comments are either at the top or in a different place. Because I don't think that you can I don't think that we can set up a playable game online. When the anonymous trolls have the same rights as the verified responsible people. And I also think, and I don't know what you think about this, Joe, but you know

Let's say you want to be a whistleblower or you want to say something that's going to get you in trouble at work, so you want to do it anonymously. It's like well, maybe you're shirking your responsibility. Because maybe you have a responsibility, you know, and I could be persuaded.

Alternatively, but maybe you have a responsibility if you have something to say, to say it in your own voice and to put yourself behind it. You know, and maybe take maybe you're taking the easy way out by not doing that. And you know, I don't want to say that about every single person who posts anonymously, but you know Tyranny emerges when normal, honest people

Are now afraid to say what they think. And when the tyranny's complete in a totalitarian state, no one ever says what they think about anything. Everyone lies all the time. And I see part of the pathway to that, the unwillingness of ordinary people to take the consequences of their truthful speech. You know, and I also think that's detrimental to them because I think that you find the adventure in your life. I think this is certainly true of you.

You find the adventure in your life by standing behind your word. Like that's you, right? Those are your words if you're telling the truth. That's actually you and there's gonna be consequences. And sometimes they're gonna be negative. But do you really think that the consequences of telling the truth in your own voice are negative? You think the world's structured like that?

Jesus, that's a dismal view, man. Well it depends on the amount of autonomy you have. It depends on the amount of the amount of resources you have. I mean, like look take for example uh nurse. Nurses who had contracted COVID during the pandemic and had developed natural immunity. There was already studies that showed that that natural immunity was superior to the immunity that was imparted by the vaccine, but yet they were being mandated.

to take this vaccine and a lot of them had some serious apprehensions about it that were logical. based on people that they knew that had adverse reactions. And now we're finding out more and more how common those adverse reactions were. Now if these women stepped up or these men who were nurses stepped up and and said something about it publicly, they would be fired. I had lots of clients who were in that position. You know, they were they're at work.

And they're being tyrannized by some well, sometimes it was DEI types and sometimes it was just diversity economic. inclusivity and equity. You know, the the woke the woke ideologues and not letting them say what they wanted to say politically. And sometimes they are just being tyrannized by garden variety narcissists, you know, their bosses were that sort. Yeah. And uh

It was crushing them. And you know, it's easy to say to people like that, well just stand up to your boss, but they often were rather constrained in their employment opportunities and they had families. And so you can't tell people, well, just go shoot off your mouth stupidly, get fired and taken out and mobbed and let your family starve. That's pretty dumb strategy. But what we would always do in in the therapeutic endeavor

with someone in a situation like that was to situate themselves in their life so that they could afford to abide by their own truth. And so that might mean if you're in a job, let's say, where you you don't have freedom of expression, You know, you get your s your resume or your C V polished up so that if necessary you could make a lateral move relatively quickly. Maybe you send out some job applications just to test the market and if you're not marketable, maybe you pop up your skills.

And then maybe if you're in a position where you're vulnerable because someone else has got control over your tongue, maybe you work real hard to put some other ground under your feet so that you can't be taken out so easily. You know, like when I oppose the the uh Bill C sixteen in Canada, the mandatory pronoun bill. Like I knew, first of all, I knew that that would cause a psychological epidemic. I told the Senate that back in two thousand and two thousand and seventeen.

said, You guys don't know what you're doing here, you're gonna confuse a lot of adolescent young women and for every girl you hypothetically save who has body dysmorphia, and that'll be a vanishingly small number of people who are actually saved, you're gonna doom like three hundred. Of course that's exactly what's happened. That's why the Tavistock Clinic shut down in the UK, you know, and so there was that. But but I also had set myself up, you know, because I had three streams of income.

I had my university salary, I had a clinical practice, and I had a business. And that wasn't accidental. You know, I knew from my clinical practice that if you wanted to say what you had to say, you had to put yourself in a position where you couldn't be easily taken out by the mob or the tyrant.

And then I would say, well, if you're not in a position where you can afford to say what you have to say, then that's an indication that you haven't positioned yourself optimally existentially, you haven't positioned yourself optimally in life. You're too Your your fundamental f your foundation is too weak.

And so, you know, maybe it'll take you three years to fix that, you know, so that now you've you're grounded firmly so that a casual objection from your boss or even being fired isn't going to take you out. It's not like that's easy. But I mean abiding by the truth isn't easy. The only thing but it's a lot more preferable than abiding by falsehood. That's the problem, right? Of course abiding by the truth isn't easy.

But, you know, what sort of devil do you let into your head if you abide by falsehood? And some of that might be just not saying what you have to say. And that's not just, you know. Mostly we regard sins of commission as more egregious than sins of omission. You know, an outright lie is worse than just failure to say what you know to be the truth. But enough peop when enough people are silent

about things they know they have something to say about, something to say, something about, then you have a tyranny. And so Well, we haven't sorted through all this, you know, very well in our society, but I think it's morally incumbent on all of us to set up our lives so that we can afford to tell the truth. Mm and if you can't, well then you think no, you're you're

You haven't got the ha the hatches battened down, right? The walls of your towers, your fort aren't high enough. You're not properly armed. And you should be. 'Cause you know the mob's coming for you, and so is the chaos of nature, and you bloody well better be prepared. And so I think if you're anonymous, you're you're depriving yourself of the necessity. Two.

to put yourself in a position where you can you can tell the truth. Now think about what happened to you. Now you tell me you tell me what you think about this. I mean, I've been watching you for a long time and it's quite remarkable seeing the impact that you've had that keeps increasing across time. You know, but my

My experience with you is that, you know, you have your opinions, your perspective, and you'll put them forward. But mostly what you do is you ask people questions that you actually have as questions. Right. Far as I can tell, you're mostly trying to figure out what the hell's going on. And so that's honest. It's honest exposation. It's an honest

it's honestly exposes your own ignorance as well and you know you can take the audience along as a consequence of that. And for you the consequence has been you know, you've gone from Just doing this podcast sort of a side thing for you, at least when it started, to be in I don't know if there's anybody who has more impact as a single individual on the media environment worldwide than you do.

And that's all a consequence of actually truthfully admitting your own ignorance and saying what you had to say. And I know you were set up to do that'cause you had multiple streams of income, you know, and you couldn't easily be taken out. You'd already accomplished things in multitude of spheres, but think of the consequence of that. You think, well, would that happen to anybody who did everything they could to ask stupid questions and tell the truth? The answer is maybe.

You know, so you don't do that, you hide and you have your reasons, you know, your family's at risk. It's like fair enough, man, but you you deprive yourself of the great adventure of your life. and you contribute by remaining silent to pathho pathologization of the whole society. So Well that doesn't seem like a very good route to me. But it's a very, very complex situation for someone who has put all their eggs in one basket. Like particularly someone who's a nurse.

Yeah, you bet. Yeah. Maybe single m is a single mother and in Canada right now, a nurse whose name unfortunately I forget who's being hauled over the coals by her college for uh, you know, making the radical claim that there are only two sexes and so I know and and you know, part of the reason I'm pursuing this action

With regard to the Ontario College of Psychologists, well there's two reasons really w three. One is, you know, leave me the hell alone, guys, you've been on my case nonstop for seven years. Not once before that, in twenty years of practice. There's no complaints ever levied against me.

It wasn't until I started to become, you know, relatively well known publicly that the college came after me. And seven years of that gets to be a bit much, especially now that there's thirteen lawsuits compiled up and All of them are for political opinions and half of them have been put forward on false grounds. But but even that's not enough for me to engage in the battle.

The reason I'm engaging in the battle is well first of all, you want me to do social media retraining so I communicate better according to your experts? It's like experts by what criteria exactly. What's a social media communication expert? You got any documentation that that even exists as a field? And how do you know that if you have that social media expert train me, that I'm gonna be a better therapist? There's no body of data that suggests that in the least.

So I'm not going down that route. Oh yeah, so I've already been sentenced, right? So this isn't a threat by the call. This is what what the situation already is. I haven't been hauled in front of their disciplinary board yet, but they've already convicted me of disgracing the profession and sentenced me to an indefinite period of re education.

And that's the second most serious punishment that they can levy against a professional. The first is to take away the license. The second is to undergo this retraining and to publicly announce the necessity for that, which they've already done in my case. And so now I have to sit down with these experts at my expense.

for an indefinite period of time until I'm trained properly, whatever the hell that means, by the criteria of the so-called experts and the college. And that isn't pending an investigation. That's already in place. It's such a wild request too. Retraining. Just even the way they phrase it. It's so bizarre, so Orwellian.

Yeah. Yeah, well like I said it's your fault, you know, because it's the whole transcript of our last conversation. I don't imagine they'll be that happy with this one. So but the other reason I'm pursuing it and to the degree that I'm able to keep my head cleared during this process'cause it definitely makes me angry and really made me angry over Christmas when I was spending Christmas going through the minutiae of all these bloody lawsuits trying to figure out what the hell they were up to.

instead of, you know, taking a bit of a break and having some time with my family. And so I was very upset about that. But to the degree that I'm upset about it, I'm not doing it right, eh? Because this can't be personal. Can't be about me. Part of the reason that I want to pursue this and part of the reason we're pursuing an objection to what they're doing on Charter of Rights grounds in Canada is because they're interfering with my freedom of conscience and speech.

And again, it isn't even the case that the reason that that's a problem is because it's about me. The reason it's a problem is because the colleges in general, like the regulatory boards of professionals, are doing this to everyone: lawyers, physicians, teachers, massage therapists. There's all these licensed professions. And if you're if you're a licensed profession, the government establishes a board of your peers to regulate conduct of the professionals. Now in in a functional time

All that happens then is that generally the people who get in trouble get in trouble with their own clients, right? With the people they've been dealing with directly, and then the board steps in on the side of the person who's been injured by a you know, a pathologically practicing professional, and fair enough. But now it's been weaponized. And it's now it's been weaponized as a political tool too. And it's not like activists don't know that.

You know, and it's so preposterous because I have twenty million people following me on social media, you know, and uh God only knows how many views of my videos, for example, or the interviews you and I have done. Tens of millions. And like the the what? How many people complain? twenty out of millions? And then the college didn't have to pursue those complaints. They can invet they have to investigate them.

So I don't know what they're doing now because of course they've been inundated by thousands of complaints about their own behavior, so I have no idea what they're gonna do about that. But they didn't have to investigate. They chose to investigate. And as I said, they did that despite the fact that half the complainants claimed to be my clients and weren't. So what we have here is we have thirteen people who complained about me hypothetically doing harm to someone they didn't know.

to someone who they didn't know anyone who knew on as a consequence of things I said on social media, and that all of them, not only were they fourth hand claims of harm, Which, you know, no psychologist would ever claim that a fourth hand account of harm constituted a valid measurement. So the bloody college is violating its own measurement standards by even pursuing this.

But so not only are they based on fourth hand information, and then an outright lie, which is they were clients of mine, they're they're also predicated on the assumption that It's okay to go after a professional for expressing political criticism. Cause like literally half of them are. Well, I said something about Trudeau. I said something about one of his top aides. I said something about Jacinda Ardurn. I said something about

an Ottawa City Councillor in relationship to the trucker convoy. You know, I said something about climate. Every single one of the complaints is political. And so why is that a problem? Well, see if you can figure it out for yourself. That'd be the first answer. And the second is

I have a friend in Canada, very well known physician, international reputation, and a reasonably decent secondary income stream. And when this all hit, I reached out to him. He's a very brave guy. He's done a lot of writing that could easily get him in trouble. I said, look, maybe I could get you and Bruce Party, this lawyer at uh Queen's University, who's going after the Essentially the college that functions for lawyers, they said we should do three letters.

same time, saying they know that the colleges are chilling free speech in Canada with psychologists, with s with physicians and with lawyers, and he said he didn't have his house in order enough to dare to take on the call. And the problem with that is that I don't know anybody in Canada who's a physician that's more well situated than him or braver, and even he was loath to do it. He'll do it eventually, but not now. And so here's the situation we're in for all you who are listening.

If you go to see a professional when you have a crisis, psychologist or a physician or a lawyer, let's say, you bloody well better hope those people are telling you the truth. So here's an example. Let's say you got a 13-year-old girl and she has body dysmorphia. That's very common among thirteen-year-old girls, especially if they hit puberty early, because when women hit puberty, their levels of negative emotion go up. That's very well established clinical finding.

And the reason for that, likely, is that when women hit puberty, the world becomes more dangerous to them, right?'Cause they're sexually vulnerable. And that's also when you get body dimorphism developed, so men get bigger than women and so you know, women

should be more intimidated in relationship to physical combat because they're not strong enough to prevail. So they should be a little more anxious about that. And so they're sexually vulnerable. So they should be a little more anxious about that. And then also They should be a little more anxious'cause they have to take care of infants.

And if you're going to take care of an infant, you should be a little more sensitive to threat, because the infant is extremely vulnerable. So anyways, that kicks into in women when they hit puberty. It's very well documented. This is why women have three to five times the rates of anxiety and depression worldwide. It's because their baseline levels of negative emotion are higher. Okay, so So now but that also translates into something very specific for women.

So anxiety and depression, shame, guilt, all those negative emotions, they make you self conscious. And self consciousness takes the form of bodily bodily shame in women, much more than in men. So if you're a girl and you hit puberty early, so you're dealing with the complexities of all that when you're still pretty immature, and you get and your negative emotion goes up, the probability that you're going to negatively evaluate your body is virtually one hundred percent. There's no difference

Especially in women, between feeling bad about their bodies and being high in negative emotion. It's the same thing. So I just interviewed this Chloe Cole who's detransitioning and suing her medical so called medical professionals who rushed her into a double mastectomy at fifteen and w the wounds have never properly healed, by the way, and so that's her life.

You know, and I basically ran her through a clinical interview. I said, Hey, kiddo, you know, when you were twelve and miserable about your body, what the hell was going on? She said Well you know I I thought more like a boy. She's a little autistic, so she's more thing oriented than people oriented.

And so she didn't get along with girls that well. And then she was dreaming that she'd turn out like Kim Kardashian, but she turned out to have kind of a boyish figure. And then she thought, Well, I'll never really be a good, you know, full woman so Maybe I should be a boy, and she started to toy with that, and then she went to her medical professionals with this body dysmorphia, and instead of sitting her down and saying, Look, kid, you hit puberty kinda early. You got a couple of

partially autistic personality style that that makes you a little more comfortable with boys than girls. And every girl there is suffers body dysmorphia at your age. So just you tap her cool, you know, the fact that you're embarrassed about yourself and feeling inadequate, it's like that doesn't mean you're marked out as pathological. It certainly doesn't mean you're a boy. No one ever told her that. That's like basic information, man. They just rush her along the pathway. At thirteen, she said.

And then a double mastectomy at fifteen. Like what w how did this happen and how did this happen so quickly? Well, this is partly tied up with this issue of the college. So so here's one way into it. So now Professionals are bound by law to offer gender affirming advice. They're bound by law. Okay, so this is what this means.

If you bring your thirteen year old in to be evaluated by a physician or a psychologist who ha and maybe she has high levels of neuroticism, tilting towards depression and anxiety And then that's making itself manifest in bodily discomfort. Now that's being shaped by this cultural Fad that insists that if you feel uncomfortable in your body, it's because you're of the opposite gender. That's the psychological epidemic part.

And we can talk about that in a little bit more detail. But now you're duty bound by law, if you're a professional, to say, Oh, you think you're a boy? Yeah, absolutely. You absolutely one hundred percent you are. What can we do to facilitate that move forward? And that all got what would you call what? Pushed into the law under the guise of the elimination of conversion therapy.

So unbeliev now the problem with that is you see If you're a therapist or a physician, you don't affirm someone's identity. That's not your job. And your job is not to deny their identity either. Your job is to help them explore their identity and hopefully to develop it. And so someone comes to you Maybe they have body dysmorphia.

And so maybe they're anorexic. That's a form of body dysmorphia. And so the first thing you do, if you have any sense, is you note that that's stemming out of an underlying more global proclivity to suffer from depression and anxiety. So that's the big elephant in the room. So if the trans activist types say, well, the body dysmorphic types are more likely to have suicidal thoughts, it's not because they have body dysmorphia. It's because

They're prone to depression and anxiety and depressed and anxious people are more likely to have suicidal thoughts. And maybe body dysmorphia adds a bit to that, but nobody really knows. Probably adds some. But the fundamental issue is one of depression and anxiety. It's now you're suffering from You know, unspecified self consciousness and the culture twists around to offer you a narrative. And the narrative is

Oh well, you're in the wrong body. And then the carrot is, and this is part of the gets extraordinarily pathological, is a lot of these kids who are suffering from this alienation are unpopular. And so and now they're being enticed. It's like, yeah, well, y you're not unpopular. You're interestingly special.

So if you just take this carrot, you know, you're the opposite sex, all of a sudden you're not a victim, you're a brave, what would you call, you're a brave seeker after your redemptive identity. And now you can be elevated. And you can be treated specially and my God, you know, if you're an unpopular teenager

How could anything be possibly more attractive than that? And then you also think, well why are teenagers gullible in that way? You know, why do they go along with the crowd? And the answer to that is That's what you're supposed to do when you're a teenager. That's your job, right? Because first of all, you're with your parents. And you're not yet a fully fledged individual.

And so what you have to do is you have to become part of the group. And if you're not part of the group, well maybe you're a stellar, you know, creative genius and you're exceptional in that matter, but more likely you're just a loser who couldn't fit in. And that sucks. That's for sure. So your job when you're a teenager is to fit in.

As every teenager knows, you know, and maybe not just to fit in, but you know, to fit in in a positive way that elevates the community. But let it we could just settle for fitting in. And so t teenagers are wired to go along with the crowd and then if the crowd is offering something pathological, and that happens all the time, you get a psychological epidemic.

And I knew that, I told you, I t I told the Senate this in twenty seventeen. And why did I know? Well, I knew the literature. They we've tracked psychological epidemics going back three hundred years. Three hundred years. Here's some of them. Multiple personality disorder. It cycles in society. Disappears, then there's one case, then it spreads like mad. Then there's multiple personality disorder everywhere. Teenage girls mostly.

Then people get skeptical about it, and it dies, and maybe it disappears for a whole generation or two. Then a case pops up. Just does this. That's happened for three hundred years. Um cutting. was a psychological epidemic. Bulimia was a psychological epidemic.

Anorexia was a psychological epidemic. The satanic daycare ritual abuse accusations that came out in the nineteen eighties, that was a psychological epidemic. And the the rule basically is that if you If you confuse people about a fundamental element of their identity, then those who are already so confused they're barely hanging on are gonna fall prey to that and all hell's gonna break loose. And that's exactly what's happened in the you know in the transit

In the trans situation. But the difference between this one as opposed to the other ones like multiple personality disorder is that this one is being reinforced culturally. like y you you are rewarded. Yeah, well the multiple personality disorder that happened there too because

you'd get a lot of attention from media, especially the early the people who who are the first who display the first symptoms of multiple personality disorder. You know, you get a psychologist or a psychiatrist or an alienist if you go back far enough Who reports this fascinating case of multiple personality? And you know, there are people who are dissociated. So they kinda have multiple personalities. They're united by memory. They're usually creative people.

'Cause creative people have multiple personalities. That's what makes them creative. They're not the same from day to day. You could even say they have fluid identities. You know, and so the claims of the gender types that some people have fluid identities, it's like yeah, creative people do. They're the purple haired types with like nose rings and tattoos.

That's all part of trade openness. You combine that with high neuroticism, negative emotion, then you get people who are fluid in their identity who are also prone to depression and anxiety. So y th that's that's also crystal clear. And so well so Look, if you're an outsider, will you want to be a dull and contemptible outsider? Or do you want to be an interesting and compelling and nouveau exciting outsider? You know, if you're a teenage girl and you've been unpopular.

That's brutal, yeah,'cause you know, you get tied up with those mean girls. They shun you and exclude you. It's absolutely brutal. You know, you're just living a peripheral existence. You got no friends, everyone's contemptuous of you. And maybe that's partly'cause you have some Something that marks you out from the norm like a tilt towards autism, because a lot of the people it was just released with the Tavistock staff, you know, the Tavistock closed down in the UK. That was the big gender

Surgery performing institute in the UK. Government closed it down. So Yeah, because they knew that they they figured out in the UK that wow. transgender transformation requests were skyrocketing. And even the people at the clinic knew that they were rushing people along the transformation pipeline way faster than they should have without proper clinical evaluation.

There's a thousand lawsuits out against the TAF stock in the UK now. A thousand. Uh yeah, out of I think thirty thousand uh transition processes. So what is the difference between the way the UK is processing this versus the way we are? Well, we're still where the UK was three or four years ago.

We haven't woken up to the fact that, you know, all hell's going to break loose on this front with people like Chloe Cole, you know, launching launching lawsuits. That's the only thing that's ever going to stop this. Lawsuits. Lawsuits, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Or jail sentences.

So like it's absolutely appalling. This is part of the reason that I've also part of the reason that I felt like I've been at war for like six months. It's so crazy though. This what you're saying here, although it's backed by the literature, it's it's obvious you have an expertise in this area. This is a transphobic. Well it's even worse than that, you know, because the data and this was known let's say ten years ago before this all became an issue. Kenzaker in in Toronto.

He was the world's leading authority on transgenderism. You know, he divided it into two parts. There's the autogynaphilic types, those are the guys who get sexual kicks from dressing up in women's clothing and then go dr do drag queen story hour and say, Well, we're just, you know, pristine and pure. It's like, no, you're not.

You're getting a sexual kick from dressing up in women's clothing, and let's not bloody well forget it. And you can't even say that now, but every clinician worth his salt knew that for decades, and then there's another subpopulation, and those are usually gender nonconforming kicks.

And you know, a like a conservative sceptic might say there's no such thing. It's like, no, there there is. So your typical gender non conforming kid would be this would be the perfect target for this, would be Feminine boy or a masculine girl who's high in trade openness, so has kind of a mutable identity, who's also high in neuroticism. And there's lots of kids like that.

And so they don't fit in that well with their peer group. You know, they're tomboy girls or feminine boys. And then if you track a lot of them some of them develop body dysmorphia, they're not very happy with themselves at puberty'cause they don't fit in.

But Zucker showed very clearly he ran the transgender treatment clinic at Cam H in Toronto for decades and he was one of the world's leading authorities in terms of publication. I think he was the editor of the Le Lead Journal for years. They just took him out in Canada.

fired him and disgraced him and he battled on the lawsuit front for like ten years and was eventually vindicated, but he didn't have a political bone in his body. He was a clinician through and through, you know. He wasn't playing political games. documenting autogynephilia. That was just clinical reality. Now it's y it's become verbotent to even suggest such a thing. Oh, there's nothing sexual about this. It's like, yeah, right.

You're dressing up in lingerie before your mirror at home, tucking your dick between your legs, imagining you have a vagina for a sexual kick, although there's nothing sexual about that. Yeah, right. Bloody absolute liars. Now, then you have the kids who don't fit in on the gender front. That's a different pathway. But with them

If you leave them alone, so do no harm, leave them alone. Ninety percent of them accept their body, their sex by age eighteen or nineteen. And eighty percent of them Are gay. So what that also means is and the gay community's gonna wake up to this sooner or later is that Most of the kids being sterilized and mutilated are gay. Eighty percent of them. So I don't see how the LGBT alliance is gonna hold up under that sort of reality. So Yeah. That's for sure, man. What a crazy thing.

Since we haven't gone far enough yet. So here we'll do a little bit of arithmetic. So a while back Disney executive m mentioned on video, this is when Florida went after Disney was all when this was happening. She came out and said, I think she was head of domestic programming for Disney.

She said, Well I have two children, five and seven, one is trans and the other is pansexual. And I just thought mathematically right away, it's like the chance you have a trans kid is one in three thousand. That's not a very high chance. And let's say the chance that you have pansexual kid is the same, whatever pansexual means, I don't even know how to calculate those odds, but whatever that is, is rarer than trans because no one ever even heard about it until five years ago.

So the joint probability that you have a trans kid and a pansexual kid is one in nine million. The odds that you're a pathological narcissist sacrificing your own children to the glorification of your compassion is eight million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine to one.

So like do you have a trans kid and a pansexual kid? Or are you a devouring mother? Well, you can look at the odds and decide for yourself. Jesus. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. No kidding. Look, man, Freud was no dummy. When he pointed to the fact that the devouring mother was one of the major impediments to proper human development, He knew that, looking deep into the darkest family. and seeing this proclivity of the overprotective mother to destroy the developing integrity of the child.

to keep the child infantile, to cling to that relationship instead of developing a life for herself and letting the child go flourish. That's Hansel and Gretel. Right? You're lost in the woods. Why? Well your family's broken up. And you have an evil stepmother. So now you're lost in the woods. What's your abuse rate if you have a step parent? One hundred times normal.

So you're lost in the woods. Well, what happens? Well, you come across a gingerbread house. Well that's pretty damn convenient. You need a house. It's a little it's more than you could even hope for. It's not just a house. It's a house made out of candy. Well what's inside a house made out of candy? A witch who wants to fatten you up and eat you. And that's the Devouring Mother, you know, and that's an old fairy tale. Yeah. No kidding.

Yeah, and so you know, we could we could dwell on that for a minute too. One of the things we won't honestly discuss in our society, one of many, is the fundamental nature of female political psychopathology. You know, and there's male political psychopathology, obviously. That's what the feminists complain about all the time when they talk about the oppressive patriarchy, you know, toxic masculinity. There's no shortage of toxic masculinity.

So is there any toxic femininity? Well not if the feminine is just the, you know, oppressed virgin. goddess who's nature, but how about we don't live in that fantasy world? And we know yeah, there's female political pathology, the tendency to infil infantilize everyone.

And the tendency to assume that everyone who doesn't go along with the infantilization is properly characterized as a predator. And so, you know, you wonder why are the universities turning into extended daycares? Well, a lot of the a lot of the reason for that is that Women who don't have anything better to do are turning the university students into the infants they never had. So

Yeah. Jesus. I don't know when we'll be able to be mature enough to have that conversation, you know, twenty years from now. logical way of discussing these problems. So I I tweeted out, I don't know if you saw this, that I was gonna make an announcement on your show today and so I s I set up an international consortium

based in London. I can't tell you all the details yet. But we're we're we're trying to put together Something like an alternative vision of the future, say an alternative to that kind of apocalyptic narrative that's being put forward at least implicitly by organizations like the WEF, you know, and that's the virginal planet, rapacious tyrant.

you know, all devouring consumer religion. And it's more like something like, Well, we want to ask people six key questions. Okay, so How do we get energy and resources at the lowest possible cost, as rapidly as possible, to the largest number of people around the world?

That's one question. And so there's a presumption in the question, and and here's one of the presumptions. You don't get to save the planet by making energy prices so expensive that no one poor can afford them. That's off the table. So if you want to develop alternative energy sources, no problem. You know, because hey man, the more energy sources we have, the better. But you don't get to impose your utopian vision in the service of your narcissism on the poor.

We're gonna try to make the poor rich, can I try to alleviate absolute poverty? Pro human view on environmental stewardship front, that's the next question. What are the major problems that are confronting us? How do we take a sophisticated multidimensional view of that? How do we prioritize our attempts to establish our states and our international relationships properly.

So that we prioritize human well being, you know, in harmony with nature to the degree that's possible, but human focused and not predicated on the idea that there are too many goddamn mouths on the planet to feed and that you're evil if you just think about having children. So then on the governance front, this is where it gets kind of more left wing I would say, is none of the people involved in this

consortium so far are very thrilled with global corporate fascist government media and uh and cor and uh corporation collusion. You know, and we're seeing this at the high end. It's like a Tower of Babel. Is that the the powerful players in the world are increasingly collaborating to impose a top down vision of the future on everyone, and that's a future that's predicated on a zero growth model.

the idea that, well, we'd need five planets really to support everyone at the current standard of living that obtains in the West. So the best pathway forward is to deny loans by the World Bank to developing countries so they can't develop you know, energy sources, which all that'll mean is they're gonna burn wood and coal, obviously. So so that's the third question is, you know, how do we arrange systems of governance to stop

the march of something like pathological gigantism. This is why I like people like Russell Brand and also you to some degree politically, you know, because you guys are very What would you say? sensitive to the danger of that kind of corrupt collusion, that regulatory capture that occurs when corporate entities and media entities And governmental entities are all in bed together, like the FDA and the C D C and and so forth and so on without end. So that's

That's the third question. The fourth question is what do we put forward as a vision on the family policy front to facilitate the What would you call it? The encouragement and the maintenance of long-term monogamous couples who are child centered, and to make increasing the birth rate part of that policy. to put policies in place that would support long term stable monogamous families, two parent families and child centered. You know, because

in the West,'cause we're very immature, we think that the purpose of a marriage is the happiness of the people who are involved in the marriage, the husband and the wife. And that's just not the purpose of marriage at all. The purpose is long term facilitation of their

psychological and spiritual development and the establishment of an environment that's beneficial to children. That's a responsible way of thinking about it and so we need to have a serious conversation about what that means. And you know, it's tricky because Like I think the ideal has to be.

long term committed monogamous heterosexual relationships. And I had a big conversation with this about this with Dave Rubin. You know, Rubin's gay and he's married and th hi him and his partner now have two infants and we talked through how that was. It was a very hard thing for them to arrange.

obviously. Why? Well, they're both male. So that poses a severe problem on the reproductive front, right? And so they manage that. They have two infants, but it's very complex and it isn't it's obviously not a solution to the problem of relationship and reproduction that's duplicatable across long large numbers of people. It just takes too many resources. Now, I do think we have to have an ideal at the center of every concept. But the ideal can't be too rigid, you know, because people

People aren't perfect. You know, in my own family there's lots of people who are divorced, lots of people in lots of people's families there are people who are gay. You know, there are lots of people in unhappy marriages. Nobody attains the ideal. So the ideal has to be surrounded by a fringe of tolerance, but that doesn't mean you sacrifice the ideal. And the ideal has to be. Well we know there's a literature on fatherlessness. You know, it's a bloody catastrophe, fatherless.

For obvious reasons. You know, human children are complicated. You think you can maybe if you struggle madly as a single parent, you could do a decent job and lots of single parents do, but You're asking a lot, you know, for a woman to work.

fifty hours a week and then spend another forty hours with their kids and to do both of those optimally with no help. You know, and we know perfectly well that when women get divorced, especially if they have kids, they tend to fall down the economic hierarchy. So it's very difficult. So that's another one of the policies. Then another question. We're trying to make these into questions rather than

You know, we have the answer. The other question is, well, it's pretty clear that we have to live inside a story. And one story is power rules everything. But that's not a very good story. It's a very pathological story. It's more like a confession too, if that's the story you insist on. So you think power governs everything, do you? Okay, I know what you're like.

So that's what you truly believe. See, I believe the spirit of voluntary play governs everything, not the spirit of power. It's like voluntary association. That's what we're doing in this conversation. You know, we're playing towards an end and we're doing it voluntarily and we're taking everybody along for the ride. No one's forced to do it. So that's the other thing. No compulsion here. It's gotta be invitation.

And so we're trying to work out what the story has to be. And on that front, I just finished uh seminar in Miami and it the first eight parts of it were released on the Daily Wire three months ago, Exodus Seminar. We walked through the story of Exodus. Exodus means exhodos, means the way forward. So it's the archetypal narrative of

progression from tyranny and chaos into the future. That's what the story is. And we uh we did half of it, released it on the Daily Wire, eight episodes, two hours long. And we just recorded the last eight Two weeks ago, and that was an absolute blast. I had really stellar people participating. Man, I learned so much. I learned so much it's gonna take

two years to digest it. But uh the Daily Wire's gonna release it all on YouTube for free, starting in two months, one episode a week for sixteen weeks and then we're gonna keep it on YouTube and the Daily Wire for free for four months. And so and it it lays out a vision of uh of appropriate governance as an al that's an alternative to tyranny and to chaos. So in in the Exodus story

So here here's this is this is very germane to the notion of what might constitute a proper story. So the question that you put forward in your life is something like what spirit should guide you as you move ahead? And he might say, Well I don't need a spirit to guide me. It's like yeah, you don't have that offer. Some spirit guides you, might be your stomach.

Might be you might be a worshiper of the god Priapas, right? He's the god of giant erections. That's what happens if your whole identity is staked on your sexuality. It's like some spirit is gonna guide you. That's life. The question is What is the highest spirit that could guide you? So in the Exodus story

The proposition of the story is the highest spirit that could guide you is the spirit that objects to tyranny and that calls the enslaved to freedom. And that's the representation of God in every day. So that's what God is in the Exodus story. Now that's not all that God is in the biblical stories, but that's God in the Exodus story. And so That is the god that shall be.

If you abide by that God, then you believe that tyranny is implicitly wrong, even if you tyrannize yourself, and that there's something implicitly virtuous about striving for freedom, especially if you're enslaved. So anyways, that's the voice that speaks to Moses, and the voice tells Moses to

Tell the Pharaoh, the tyrant, to let his people go. That's that famous line, Let my people go. But the line is actually Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the desert. Okay, so anyways God through Moses calls the Israelites out of the world. Tyranny. And he punishes the tyrant. And so if you believe that fate punishes tyrants, you're already immersed in the Exodus story to some degree. Okay, so now the Israelites leave the tyr tyranny. You'd think, hey man, great freedom.

'Cause now you're out of the tyranny. But that isn't how life works. This is why people won't drop their tyrannical presuppositions. Because you go out of the tyranny. Into the desert, not to the promises. Desert first. And where it's what's the desert? Everyone's lost, no one knows which way to go, everyone fights, everyone turns to the worship of false idols. Everyone wants the tyrant to reassert himself.

That's the situation we're in. In the aftermath of the death of God in the West. And so So that's really useful to know'cause one of the things you might wanna know in your life is why do people cling to their own tyrannical presuppositions? And the answer is, well, at least they're orienting structures, pathological as they might be. If you drop them, you're not redeemed, you're just lost. And the idea that being lost is freedom

That's a preposterous idea. No one lost is free. They're just enveloped in chaos. Okay, so what happens in the Exodus story is now the Israelites are out in the desert wandering around for like generations and uh they get all fractious and fight and bitch and complain and start worshiping false idols and Um, they're scrapping with each other, and that's because they have the habits of slaves. They don't know how to govern themselves. And so they ask Moses to sit as a judge, and so he does.

The story's very unclear about this, but for a long time, years and years, morning, dawn till midnight. He's judging the Israelites like mad and adjudicating their squabbles. And uh imagine what he's doing, eh? If you had to make peace, between a thousand people who were squabbling with their, you know, their wife or their or their friends or their enemies. You have to render judgment on that. You know, and for judgment to work the people Who are judged have to see the judgment as just.

Because otherwise you have to impose it by force, right? So if I hear you arguing with someone and I try to mediate, I have to come up with a solution that you'll both accept. That means I have to extract out of that chaos some principle of order. Imagine you do that thousand times or five thousand times. So now you start to understand the nature of the principles of order.

Okay, so now two things happen. Jethro, who's Moses' father-in-law, comes along. He's a Midianite, a foreigner, and he says, You got to stop doing You can't sit as judge on the Israelites. There are two reasons. They need the responsibility. And you shouldn't turn yourself into another Pharaoh. So if you take all the responsibility onto yourself, you become a tyrant, and the Israelites stay slaves. So he says to Jethro, this is a signal moment in the development of Western culture by the time.

He says you take the Israelites, you divide them into groups of ten, and you have each of the ten elect an elder, and then you take the groups of elders, and you have them elect a meta elder, and you do that all the way up to ten thousand. And then you have the judgments that are necessary rendered at the lowest level of the hierarchy possible.

So, you know, if I'm arguing with you, first we go to our elder. And then if the elder can't figure it out, he gets the elders together and maybe they render judgment. If they can't, it goes to the council of elder elders and all the way up until If it isn't mediated by the time you have the groupings of ten thousand, then Moses gets to win. And that's called subsidiarity. And the idea is you have to produce a hierarchy of responsibility, distributed responsibility.

as an antithist to tyranny and to the desert. And that's the model for good governance. And that's symbolically equivalent to Mount Sinai, and it's also the model of the Ark of the Covenant and the and the Tabernacle. So Jonathan Pageot did a l lovely job of explaining that in this. And so And so part of the model that we're trying to put forward in this

group that I'm describing is based on this principle of subsidiarity and the idea that we wanna encourage everyone to take as much responsibility as possible at the most local level possible, right? So take responsibility for yourself. until you're good enough at that so you can take responsibility maybe for a wife and then if you're good enough at that maybe you can extend that to some kids and then maybe you can serve your local community and then maybe you can

Serve your state and maybe if you really get good at it, you could serve your nation. Right? But you're taking the responsibility, and here's the basic rule all the responsibility you abdicate will be taken up by type. That's the That's the cardinal rule of social organization. And so we're trying to build out this story that's based on the deepest elements of Western tradition, that's an an antidote to the Well, to the to the false claim that it's only power that rules.

Because it's not. That's not right. And there is a model of of proper governance in there, this idea of a hierarchical structure of responsibility. It's the proper computational structure. It's not top down tyranny with fractionated individuals. And it's not utter chaos. It's ordered freedom. And that's what God tells Moses to tell the Pharaoh when he says, Let my people go. Let my people go, no tyranny, so that they may celebrate me in the desert.

It's ordered freedom and it's the ordered freedom that comes along with being oriented towards the highest possible good. And so we're trying to work all that out. Now we're gonna have a conference in London. October thirty first, November first and November second. We're gonna bring about two thousand people together. That's an invited list. We wanna bring in people who are cultural figures and political figures, business figures and uh

invite them to this discussion. And but we want to make that completely public and we wanna open up the organization to broad membership, as broad as possible and then, you know it's a success, then we'll open up the conferences as the years progress to larger and larger numbers of people. But we can't you know, we don't have the expertise or the wherewithal to manage that, first off. But we've got the venue.

Already set up in London. I've got all sorts of people on board in Australia and all through Europe and through the UK and all through the United States, South America. All sorts of people are interested in participating. And so we want to help put forward a vision that's enticing and inviting. It's like imagine you could have the world you want it. You know, none of this Malthusian limits to growth nonsense. We get our act together.

Everyone can have it can have enough, and maybe more than enough. There'll be enough educational opportunity for everyone. No one'll be scrabbling away in the dirt, burning dung, poisoning themselves. Enough food for everyone. There's also an idea in Exodus, and this is a very good idea, that if people organize themselves properly, so they're oriented on a transcendent axis and they're oriented towards their fellow man.

You serve what's highest and you also abide by the principle of reciprocity in relationship to other people. If we organize ourselves in that manner, there's no limit to the abundance the natural world can produce. That's the actual generator of genuine wealth, sustainable wealth, you know, that balances order and chaos properly, that balances nature and culture properly. So the core idea is something like you get the Hierarchy of social organization, right.

It generates unlimited wealth. And we've already seen that to a large degree, you know, we've lifted more people out of poverty in the last fifteen years than really what it's unparalleled. you know, seven out of eight billion people now have either have the minimum they need or something exceeding that. And instead of, you know, starving to death by the billions, which is what everybody who was on the Malthusian side predicted back in the nineteen sixties.

And so I've been working on this for a long time. I've got a good group of core people who seem to be, you know, reliable and not motivated, we hope and pray by something approaching, you know, narcissistic egotism and everybody's sworn to.

Try to make this as decentralized as possible on the principle that the more responsibility you can offload to people, the better everything will work. That's a fundamentally conservative principle, like a small c conservative principle, right? So you need a higher You offload responsibility to the local where possible. I think that's it's a good principle. Let's hold that thought'cause I got a P. Um and I wanna I wanna explore that more. But yeah I do have to use the bathroom.

So back to this uh thing that you're do first of all, what are you calling this? I can't tell you that yet. You're you so you're trying to w one of the things you were saying is you're trying to generate a store. Yeah, we're trying to invite everybody to the table and we're trying to get the right story and we'll know it's the right story because people will say voluntarily, Yeah, I could really go What do you mean by story when you're saying the right story?

Okay. Well, I I would say it's something if you want to think about it archetypically, it's something like a vision of the promised land. A structure. Yeah. Yeah. Well you you have to s okay. We could talk about that technically. A story is a description of a hierarchy sorry, a story is a description of a hierarchy of attentional prioritization.

So what do I mean by that? There's an infinite number of things to look at in the world. So perception seems technically impossible, because you just drown in the complexity. That's what happens in a psychedelic trip. You drown in the complexity. And it's real. Now m usually that's shielded from you. It's veiled from you, like God is veiled from you. It's the same thing. And so it's veiled by the fact that you regard some things as more important than others.

And you do that implicitly. And so for example, right now, you're devoting most of your cognitive and perceptual resources to my face and to what I'm saying. Right. Now there's a m lot of things you could be looking at in this room or thinking about, right? There's an infinite number of things. But you're not. You're weighting some things more Heavily. Now why? Well, why are we having this conversation? Well, I could ask you, why are we having this conversation?

'Cause I'm curious. I want to know how you think. Okay. I want to know what your plans are. What goal do you think your curiosity serves? uh better understanding of what you're trying to accomplish. Okay. Okay. Why do you think other people are interested in that? Because they're gonna watch this. Why do you think people are interested Because what you're saying makes sense and uh it we also recognize that there is

There's a real flaw in um the way our society is constructed and there's a real genuine threat in allowing these power structures to sort of m maintain this narrative and create this narrative that's based upon them gaining control over resources, our economics, our energy and socially what we do w and what we don't do. Okay. So now that serves them. Okay. So do you see that partially what you're involved in insofar as you're doing it right is something like What would you say in the

a cautionary tale about the possibility of tyranny. Yes. Okay, so you can see how that ties into an architectal story, right? And I think that's the big threat. Now that's what people are terrified of when they see

Klaus Schwab standing there with a Darth Vader outfit telling people that they're gonna eat bugs. Okay. And so and you're using the technology of free communication as an antidote to that? Yes. Okay. So then I would say archetypically what you're doing is you're doing something like Serving the divine word that makes habitable order out of chaos as an antidote to tyranny.

That's a story. And that it's a deep story. And if you weren't acting out a deep story, you wouldn't have tens of millions of people listening to you. The fact that that's like it's like J.K. Rowling's like, why is she so popular? Well, she told an archetypal story, masterful. It has a religious substructure. It just got people, you know, like hundreds of millions of people and produced billions of dollars.

You have to see the world through a story. You act out a story. And the the reason we like stories is because it's actually pretty hard to see the world and it's really useful to see the world the way other people see it, just in case they know something you don't. And so we're telling each other stories all the time. We're acting out stories. A description of the pattern we're acting out, that is a story.

You know, and when you go to a movie, maybe you see the hero on the screen. You know, it's James Bond and that's well that's the same It's the same narrative in some sense. It's you know, it's a bit more stereotyped, but Bond is, you know, this sophisticated, aggressive guy who's got his aggression under control, who's fighting the hydra.

And it's not the Hydra and James Bond. I don't remember the name of the underground organization there, but it's a Hydra for the Marvel heroes. The Hydra is an amalgam of tyranny and chaos. Hydra with head of snakes, paralyzes you when you look at it. It's an archetypal narrative. And you and the the fundamental question of life is what is the proper orienting narrative? That's the same question as What God do you worship?

It's the reason I entitled my next book We Who Wrestle With God,'cause you're stuck with that no matter what. You're wrestling with one God or another all the time. God's an animating spirit. That's one way of thinking about it. It's more than that, but that's one way of thinking about it. And so I constantly look to these old stories, these archetypal stories, you know, as a student of Jung, let's say, to find out what the proper orienting pathway is. And that's embedded in tradition.

You know, the stories that have lasted. Richard Dawkins would have got to this conclusion if he would have pursued his thought far enough. Because an archetype is a This is a stable meme. Propagates across time.

And there's some memes, some stories, let's say, that stabilize you as an individual, they f they re restrict your anxiety, they provide you with hope, they make you productive and generous, and when they're extended, they produce a structure that unites That unites people and produces productive peace.

You know, and it's not by fluke, for example, that the America itself is founded in no small part on the motivational force of something like the Exodus narrative. That was certainly the case for the Civil Rights Movement. It has to be that way because Exodus is an archetypal story about the establishment of proper order as an alternative to the tyrant and the desert. So everyone is always doing that in their life, whether they know it or not.

You know, and you do it extremely well, if you don't mind the insult of a compliment. And I think the reason for that is that For whatever reason, you are acutely aware of your own ignorance and always trying to rectify it. And I would say that's a reflection of a practice of humility.

You know, I know you're a competent guy and you're no pushover and so calling you humble is kind of a weird thing to do, but one of the things that I've been very pleased about constantly when talking to you is it's j it's a conversation, man. You know what are we trying to do? Trying to make things clear. We're trying to figure out what the hell's going on. We're trying to say what we think. We're trying to jointly make each other wiser.

You know, hopefully to the degree we were able to manage it and we're inviting people along for the ride. And they seem pretty happy about that. And that's partly because people aren't just oriented by power. You know, there's all these truckers out there who are listening to this podcast while they're driving their rigs across the country, you know.

What are they trying to do? They're trying to get their acts together. They're trying to understand. You know, they're trying to take their proper position in the social world. And that's a fundamentally compelling It's not a drive. It's an orienting and integrating spirit. It's the same as the spirit of Yahweh in the Old Testament. It's exactly the same thing. It's the same thing. So one of the things I learned about the biblical narrative, this is so cool. This is what the next book's about.

So imagine there's two possible states. One of disunity and and chaos, you're going in every direction at the same time, and one of relative unity. Now the unity can turn into tear. And uh the multiplicity can turn into chaos. Those are the two dangers. But imagine there's a proper unity that stops you from being anxious.

Anxious anxiety is a marker of it internal disunity of narrative. And I already talked about that with this Carl Friston, for example, who's the world's most cited neuroscientist. I asked him. I asked him if perceptions were micro narratives, and he said yes, and that's quite something. That isn't how we've looked at the world for the last three thousand years. In any case, to the degree that you're not angry, Something is uniting all the directions you could take.

Now to the degree that you're not at odds with everyone else. You know, in the chaotic state of nature where everyone's at everyone's throat, it's because there's a a mode of perception and action that unites you socially. So you can be united psychologically. And you're not a house that's built on sand, and you can be united socially. Imagine there's a spirit that is that that characterizes that unity. So the biblical corpus is an attempt to. Portray that

Spirit. And it does it using a technique called metonymy. So metaphor is something being something else. This is like that, or this is that. It's a way of taking what you know to explain what you don't know. But metonymy is A technique where you take one story that seems to have one moral and you juxtapose it with another and maybe do that with sequence of stories, and then there's an implication that there's a meta story that emerges across all the orders of the world.

And that's what the biblical corpus is, because no one wrote it, not in any real sense, and the processes by which it aggregated are mysterious. They extend over thousands and thousands of years. But here's what the store the book is. It's a library, not a book. Here's what the library is. There's a proclivity towards monotheistic unity that unites us psychologically and socially. And it emerges out of a plurality of potential gods.

It emerges from the bottom up. Now you could argue that it descends from the top down too, but I'm not going to get into that at the moment. The question emerges. How do you understand that unifying animating spirit? And the answer is well it's beyond our comprehension and we can more or less approach it with a story. So here here's some examples. So in In uh the story of Adam and Eve, God is the spirit that you walk with when you're unself conscious in a properly tended garden.

And you might say, well, do you believe in that? It's like, well, do you have a garden? Most people want a garden. They want a house. They want a little fenced off plot. They want to go be able to go back there and relax and recreate, right? Unself consciously. Okay, so whatever's happening when you're there, that's what that is.

That walking unself-consciously with the spirit of the paradisal garden. So that's one picture of God. Then in the story of Cain and Abel, you have another picture, which is God is the spirit that punishes you if you make Poor sacrifice. You say, well what does that mean? It's like, are you giving it your all or not?

Are you playing both sides of the fen both sides of the fence? Are you just, you know, chipping in when you have to and trying to go along for a free ride? And that's what happens with Cain. He gets all bitter about it. Because his sacrifices are rejected. So God is the spirit that rejects false sacrifices. And what happens to Cain? He gets bitter and then murderous and then his descendants become genocidal. That's the Cain and Abel story in like two paragraphs.

Soul. Then you have the story of Noah and the And so Noah, in Noah, God is the spirit that calls the wise of his time, because Noah is portrayed as someone wise in his generation. So for his time and place he's a wise man. He has the sense that the storms are coming and it's time to batten down the damn hatches. And so like in your own life.

Maybe your eyes are open to some degree and you think a storm is coming. You have an intuition that a storm is coming is do you prepare or do you ignore that? Because those are your options. If you prepare, then you're manifesting s faith in that spirit. So that's the spirit in Noah, in the Tower of Babel. You have God as The spirit that punishes the technological pretensions of mankind. So men get together to build a tower that stretches to the heavens.

And they want to do that to replace the transcendence. The mystery of being with their own presumptions. And what happens is no one can talk to each other anymore. That's the state we're in right now. That's why Matt Walsh can make a movie that's entitled What is a Woman? We can't even agree on that. That's the Tower of Babel. And so then you have the story of Abraham, and God is presented in that story as the spirit that calls the overprotected and and privileged.

Happens to Abraham, you know, he's eighty three, he lives in his father's tent, eats peeled grapes, he doesn't have to do anything. And this voice makes itself manifest within him and says, Get the hell up off your comfortable bed, get out there in the world.

Suffer your adventure. And you know, Abraham's life is just he leaves. It's not like it It's no promised land for him, it's like starvation and tyranny and war and the Egyptian rulers conspire to steal his wife and you know it's brutal life. But it's life, it's adventure. And so then you think, well, all of this is an attempt to characterize Yahweh. the Jewish God with whom the Jews have a relationship. All of these stories are an attempt to characterize that, and so you could say, well

What is the spirit that you walk with unself consciously in the well tedded garden, and the spirit that calls you to adventure and the spirit that punishes tyranny? That'd be the Exodus story. What do they have in common? That's Yahweh, whatever.

And so then there's an attempt to characterize the nature of that spirit. And then there's a twist on that in the New Testament, which is a amazing twist. It's an amazing twist,'cause the conclusion is that The spirit of Yahweh, portrayed in all these different ways, is the same spirit that calls people to voluntarily bear the catastrophe of their

And that that's the union of God and man. That's the idea. So it's a hypothesis. It's like, Well, is is that the same God? So imagine that, you know, you're confronting your horizon of possibility and tragedy as bravely and honestly as you can. Well that's the spirit of Yahweh making itself manifest within you. And if you do that properly, then you can bear up under that load. Soul. That's a way better story than power. You know so

Looking at it psychologically, try to strip it to the degree that it's possible of its religious overtones. You can't strip it completely. Because, you know, there there's an open question. So imagine that there's a pattern of existence that you know Well then you have an open question is well how much does that reflect the structure of being itself?

There's a Greek idea of the logos that's intrinsic in the world, that there's an order in the world, right, that we can discover, and that manifest makes itself manifest from the bottom up. And that's the logos of the world, the logic of the world. And it's certainly possible that the logic of the world as expressed in human existence is the same as this

spirit of Yahwah that's transmuted in the New Testament into the Logos. And you know the what happened I did a lecture about this at Ephesus in in Turkey. That was five Which was where the logos was discussed three thousand years ago, the Greek logos. So what you have in Western culture is you have this Greek idea that there's an intrinsic order in the universe bottom up.

And then the Christians come along and say, Well, there's also an intrinsic order in the psychological realm, and then Western culture is the juxtaposition of those two, the claim that those are the same thing. And so that would be the same claim as If you if you're honestly if you honestly and truthfully confront the tragic limitations of your life, you'll discover the truth of the implicit order and that will redeem you. And that's the fundamental claim of science, for example.

So even science, insofar as it's a practice, is embedded in this tradition. So well that's a way better story. It's the greatest story ever told. And this idea that you're putting together. How did how do you go about structuring something like this? And how do you go about getting people to agree upon the parameters and how it it should be uh implemented like

Well you kinda figure out you figure it out as you go. Well I'll tell you what's happened. Okay. Okay, just because some of it's already happened. So I was traveling through Eastern Europe Last year I thought. to all these countries that had been communist not that long ago. And I was fortunate'cause I was meeting like thirty to fifty people in each country. I had a team of people who were setting up meetings for me of cultural and political leaders in each country.

have dinner with them or an event, you know, and talk to everybody and I was listening to what their concerns were and throughout Eastern Europe it was the same concern. And the concern was what the hell are you guys toying with in the West? You know, this this woke.

Neo Marxism. They're terrified of that in Eastern Europe because you know it was just nineteen eighty nine, not that long ago. They said, I don't know what you guys are doing, don't you know where that goes? Very pro American, by the way, all through Eastern Europe. Unbelievably pro American. And everybody that I met said, like we're really afraid of what's happening in the West.

Reliable. Oh I think it's the logos fundamentally, but you know, if you differentiated that one of the things that's really quite amazing about the US and I think it's it's unique really, is that Your society is fundamentally not envious. Now there's plenty in it. One thing about you Americans is you're actually capable of admiring success and and you're capable of trying to replicate it for yourselves and your children and you actually

Well we think it's possible. But there's not a caste system. That's a faith. Yes. It's a faith. You believe that that's not only do you believe that that's possible, you believe that it's appropriate. Yes. And celebrated. And that's no different than worshipped fundamentally.

And so that's trivial. That is what is attractive. Yeah. Well partly too because you remember like one of the countries I went to visit was Albania and Albania was the worst of the Soviet countries. And that's a hard contest to win. Like there are

caverns all over Albania that the government dug out because the whole story there was Albania was the richest, most desirable country in the world and they were absolutely surrounded by enemies. It was like the ultimate paranoid Paranoid totalitarian states. You know, and they're they're not very happy about the devastation that wreaked for sixty years. And you know, they look to the west

to the best part of the West and think, God, don't lose that, guys. Like we had the totalitarian utopia and it wasn't I wouldn't recommend it. So I'm going through all these countries. And people are telling me this.

concern they have. And then they also say, well we feel like we're voices crying in the wilderness, like we're we're concerned about the direction of the culture war, let's say. But If we say anything about it we get taken out by the mob and but then I went to like fourteen countries and everyone said the same thing and I thought, well, if there's if the same thing is happening in fourteen countries

You're not a voice crying in the wilderness, you're just people who aren't communicating very well with each other. So I thought, well why isn't there an international organization that's really central? traditionalist small c conservatives and classic liberals alike. You know, we don't want the ultra nationalist types because y they go off the deep end in one particular way and you know the the the radical leftist globalist utopians who are under the

the grip of the Marxist idea. It's that's a very small minority of people. There's a huge number of people in the reasonable middle, but they don't seem to They've abdicated their responsibility. So then I started talking when I went through Europe. I said, Well, you know, I'm thinking about organizing a convention where I could bring people together to talk about A different vision, and also maybe to share specific policy ideas that worked, right? So that's more concrete. And everyone I talked

said I'd really be interested in that. I'll change my schedule. I'll do everything I can to help. And that just happened in every country. And so I thought, well that's You know, this is a preposterous idea. And what should happen is that people, you know, maybe they're pleased to meet me and they give some lip service to the idea and it just ends there. destiny of most ideas. That isn't what happened. Then I went to the UK and started talking about it, and exactly the same thing happened.

Sign me up, man, what can I do? Then I went to Washington. I talked to the Republican Study Committee about this, and they make policy for the Republicans, and the same thing happened. Whole bunch of Republicans. We'll change our schedule, make sure you have the conference at some time when the House isn't sitting so we can attend. Is there anything I can do to help? And I realized then, you know, the conservative type

They're pretty good at implementing. They're pretty good incremental movers because they're conscientious, but they're not very good at vision. And so they get reactionary, you know, and what happens on the Republican side is they're always pointing to the left, saying, You go too far, you go too far but

There's no vision, so it's hard for them to attract young people. But it turns out if you put forward something that approximates an an invitational vision, they're just all over that like a no time flat. So then how to implement it? Well, we got together a group of people in London twice, very diverse group of people, and uh we

hashed out these five questions that I presented to you and everyone basically agreed, despite a wide range of political opinions in the room. Said, yeah, those seem to be the key questions. And then we we figured out that we needed to put this

forward as an as an invitation and not as a top down, you know, compulsion based you have to do this or the planet's going to be doomed. It has to be an invitation. And so and now we're trying to work out the details. And well the first real move will be to open this up to public participation, figure out how to do that.

to get a dialogue going, but then also to have this conference October thirty first, November first and November second in London. And uh I plan to do three lectures at night there. Um one on the crisis of the West, one on environmental stewardship, and one on metaphysics. A public lecture to kinda anchor the convention. We've got, I think, the Apollo in London already set up. And uh you know, and our goal God willing, is that we develop a vision that people

Everyone says, Yeah, I'm in. I'm in. What can I do? Instead of the vision being, You're emitting too much carbon dioxide there, buddy, and enough cars and comedians for you. Yeah. So we'll see. But the thing that's been striking is how Rapidly this came together and how motivated people were to participate.

People from Australia, for example, who have lots to do, the people who came. They flew all the way from Australia for a two day meeting three weeks ago to discuss this. They were only there for two days. People came from Washington and from all over Europe. It's weird. But I think the reason is and you know you can you know this is that what do they say, the people perish for lack of vision. Absolutely.

And this vision we're being offered is this dire bloody apocalypse and you know, we have to limit our consumption, we have to make energy expensive. Everyone can't have enough. We have to accept limits. There's too many people on the planet. We have to run around like frightened tyrants to clamp everything down. It's like

All that's doing it's demoralizing young men like mad. You know, young people aren't even having relationships anymore,'cause especially the men, if they're not bloody patriarchal tyrants, they're virgin raping planetary despoilers. You know, it's like what kind of vision is that for young men? It just makes them sick. You know, and I've seen believe me, I've seen plenty of that.

Their people are so grateful if you provide them with an alternative that says, you know, that ambitious striving that you have within you. That's that could be that's something that's making itself manifest in the past. in the optimal way as as something that's the highest, not just a manifestation of your tyrannical, patriarchal, rapacious nature. That's what we tell young men.

Like nonstop from the time they're three onward. And then what, you know? Then they're all timid shells of themselves embarrassed about everything they want and do. They don't even have enough.

buying to approach a woman and try to establish a relationship, you know, they're in love with Tinkerbell the Porn Fairy instead. It's horrible. And so we're hoping to put forward a vision that That's an invitation, you know, to the table and with the idea that if we got our act together, especially given our technological power, God only knows what sort of world we could build.

You know, but definitely one where there was enough for everybody, enough of everything basic and enough opportunity educational resources. I'm working with Bjorn Lomberg on this, so I'm very happy about that because Bjorn, like, he's the real thing, you know, he's done the work. So that's very good to have him on board.

Yeah, I really enjoyed talking to him. Yeah. I got a couple other projects underway. I can tell you about them. Subsidiary organization. Mm. You know, like I got a lot of people around me who are doing their work. You know, so if I don't micromanage And provide people with maximal autonomy and try to get committed people. You can distribute the effort, which you have to, as much as possible, and then who knows what's possible.

So I'm working with my son. We have this app called Essay, which we launched back in November that teaches people how to write while they use it. And he just developed dark mode for that. That was released this week and we got about eight Subscribers on that. Dark mode means you can use it at night without blinding yourself. And so it teaches you how to It teaches you how to write while you use it. It's a word processor, but it teaches you how to write and to think.

If you learn to write, you learn to think. And it teaches you how to edit, you know, to concentrate on each word, to evaluate every phrase, to evaluate every sentence, to evaluate the organization of sentences within paragraphs and paragraphs within sequence properties. And to think about how to produce a set of thoughts and then how to critically evaluate them. So that's fun. That's going very well. We have, like I said, about eight thousand.

about eighty thousand users. And so that's a good project'cause we'd like to teach a million people to write. I think the ordinary person if they used S instead of a standard word processor, the first thing they wrote would be the best thing they ever wrote, right off the bat. Because we built the tools right into the software, like it steps you through Well well one of the features for example is a very important thing.

Um so imagine that you uh imagine that you want to write about something, whatever it is, the first question is, what what c what problem are you trying to solve? What And then there's an injunction in the documentation. If the question that you're trying to solve doesn't grip you, then you're starting the whole bloody thing off with a big thing.

Like it has to be something you care about. It has to be something that grips you. So it has to be a question you want the answer to, like the questions you ask in the podcast. Then what? Well then you write down what you think. And if you don't know enough, go read. And then write down what you think. And don't worry about ordering it. Just get it down. And then it steps you through. It's like, okay, here's a paragraph. Break the paragraph into seven

Now, here's a little box that opens up. Write five variants of the sentence. Shorten it, make it more concise, write five variants. makes that sentence precise. When you get a better sentence, hit click and it'll snap into the essay. Then there's another module that helps you move the sentences around. So here's your paragraph Well, maybe there are too many sentences in it and the sentences aren't in the right place. Order the sentences so that each paragraph is like a little coherent.

And so then do the same thing with the paragraphs. If you run through the so we ask people, separate production from editing. Get the s get the question right. Do your research. Separate production from editing. Overproduce, then edit. Edit for words. Did you use the right word in every

Is every word the right word? Is every phrase the right phrase? Are the phrases organized into proper sentences? Are the sentences sequenced properly? And so that's the editing. That's and that's there's no difference between that really and critical thing. so that's the that's the

And I used that process for my students, earlier iterations of this, and by the third draft of the essays they wrote, there was the best essays they ever wrote in their life. Like this actually works. It's how I write, by the way, for whatever whatever utility that is. It is how I write. I tried to formalize that. And then with my daughter, Michaela, I've started this Peterson Academy, and our plan, this is a funny plan, we want to drive the cost of a bachelor's degree down to$4,000.

And so we've got thirty professors on board so far. I've been able to identify stellar lecturers from all over the world. We bought a studio in Miami, we have the professors come there, we try to be very hospitable and to treat them well, which doesn't generally happen at universities, by the way. And uh they lecture four they give four two hour lectures on whatever they really want to teach about.

They have a lot of autonomy, you know, we're not constraining them. Says the rule is we'll put an audience together for you in the studio. We want you to teach what you love at the edge of your ability. And uh we'll offer that to as many people as we possibly can. We're pursuing accreditation. With f through a variety of different avenues. So we hope to be able to what we'll do is take two or three of those

eight hour lectures, bundle them together. That'll give you one university credit. We wanna we wanna get actual credit for it. And then we're planning as well, we hope. So imagine we sell We we have charge of tuition um and we'll try to keep that low cost. Like I said, we want to knock the cost of the whole degree down to four thousand dollars. That's ninety five percent reduction in cost. That's the plan.

And then if you're in the developed world, we'd like to offer you the opportunity to pair yourself with a student in the developing world who couldn't afford it and we'll put give that we'll give them the the opportunity for free, but they'll be like your part So that should pretty much who don't have access to high quality university level education, a real in, and we are talking to some different institutions, you know, mortar and brick institutions.

About how accreditation might be pursued and how we could partner with them to also offer people other elements of the university experience that you can't easily virtue. And we've developed a good app that is adds a social component to it so that people can discuss the lectures while they're while they're watching them and you know can make social contacts and maybe have meetup groups in different

So we wanna universalize higher education. And then we're gonna we're gonna set the grading system in stone. So the grade you'll get for this university will be your performance. So there'll be no grade in So what we're hoping too is that it's not a little bit more than a little bit

We're going to also, you know, amalgamate it with this essay program so that all our graduates will be able to write. We're hoping that a degree from this university will indicate to employers a true level of confidence. That's the plan. And we've got like I said, we have thirty professors on board already. I recorded three lectures for it now, one on the Sermon on the Mount, so that was really fun. One on

It'll be a two part one, but I did the first half of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and I did a eight hour summary of my book, Maps of Meaning. And so we have all sorts of other people who are, you know, from Cambridge. And then people from outside the Academy too who are brilliant. Jonathan Pageot just did a series on symbolic thought. He's absolutely brilliant, deepest religious thinker I've ever.

Old Testament prophet, man. Something to see. So we're gonna roll that out, we hope in November. And you know, I'm working with the Daily Wire and that seems to be going great too. They've been great partners. They leave me the hell alone. I can still do my YouTube channel and offer it for nothing. You know, I do some extra work for them behind the scenes. I do a thirty minute interview after my my YouTube interviews.

Wall, and I've done a bunch of documentaries for them, some on Western civilization. They've they've been really good partners. They like I said, they leave me alone and they help me. That's a pretty good deal. So So and my wife and I are cruising all around the world, you know, doing these lectures all the time. That's fun. It's ridiculous.

And she's getting really good at it too. She opens the show. She usually tells about a ten minute story about one of the rules from my latest book. Ties that in with her life. And so she's getting to be a real good public speaker. So that's really fun. She's got a good comedic.

And my son's gonna tour with us starting on the thirtieth. He's a musician and I've had a musician, David Cotter, open my shows for the last thirty lectures and he plays classical guitar. So he does a twenty minute set while everyone's coming in to sit down. It's an amazing amount of things you're doing. Like how do you have this energy? Like where are you getting all the energy to do all this stuff? It's gotta be overwhelmed. Well, I'm not sick anymore. Well that helps.

Yeah. Well you seem this is you seem to be ever felt. You seem better now than you were even when I saw you a while ago. Oh definitely. Yeah. Yeah yeah. I've never done an interview y with you where Wow. You know, like the best I ever got with you. You seem great. You seem like completely there. Much better. Well, it's hard to be completely there. There are people who would debate that. Right. But Yeah, but it's the the lectures, it's such an adventure.

It's so it's so crazy. It's so positive. You know, I don't talk about political things much at the lectures. I'll make a joke now and then that's about it, but mostly it's metaphysical exploration, you know. people come there because for the same reason they listen to you. Trying to figure something out. Yeah. Well there's a deep hunger for that.

'Ca th there are a lot of people that don't feel served by the narrative that they're being fed. Yeah. And they also don't feel like there's anyone around them that they aspire to. There's no one around them that seems to be living a life that looks satisfying or Aaron Powell Yeah. And that's more th it it so one of the things so I was doing a different lecture every night.

seventy minutes and then doing a Q and A and that was wearing me out because it was sort of like writing a whole book chapter every night, you know,'cause I wanna really want to do something different. And you know, I draw from stories. We just try a straight QA. And that doesn't take as much preparation. And I kinda like the pressure.

Mm-hmm. And uh people like that just as much. And so that made it a bit more sustainable. But was uh what was also cool and we didn't we didn't realize this, people like to see her and I interact. You know? And that was a r real revelation to us both, because we were doing it more for reasons of of necessity, you know, knowing that people would like the QA's, but it simplified things and because we're

I don't know how many shows we did last year. It's like two hundred maybe? Like a lot. All over the place. So it's it's Man, it's time to get to the next venue and be prepared. So it was tiring. But one of the things that happened was that people were seemed really pleased. to see us interacting. And we realized that there's a lot of people out there who never really s had a good model of couples communication ever. And that's pretty sad.

So yeah, there's there's plenty of wandering around in the desert. Yeah. But I'll tell you something else that's cool. You know, when I first did this back in two thousand and eighteen. Did a meet and greet after and I'd say a third of the people were in pretty bad emotional decisions.

know, often when they came to m meet me after the lectures they were in tears or, you know, they had some pretty brutal story to relate and it's pretty emotionally grueling to see that night after night. And now There's way more women who come, there's way more couples, and the guys are way more than

So that's pretty cool. You know, and lots of them especially the ones that get the meet and greet tickets, they've been listening for five or six years and they've really been And so most of the stories I hear now are stories like I was in a pretty rough place

You know, now I have this girlfriend and we're getting married or we're just having our first child and now I have a business and here's what I'm doing that's really working and they're all standing up and you know half of them are in suits or three piece suits and that's something I mean that's partly why we keep doing So positive. That's an overwhelming responsibility too, right? Like the the the feeling behind that that you've had this enormously positive impact on these people's lives.

And then that's not something you set out to do as a person. Like this is almost something that was thrust upon you as an adult. I mean, you became very famous as a professor. who was, you know, fairly anonymous. You just teaching and then all of a sudden you've been thrust into the public conversation worldwide. Yeah. Yeah. Well it it's some of it It's what would you say? It's utterly unpredictable and it's utterly surreal and entirely predictable.

Both at the same time because like I knew that what I was dealing with when I was working at Harvard, when I was writing maps of meaning, I knew that Core. I knew it. And I could tell partly because of the effect it was having on my students when I was teaching. Because I was watching that. And the typical comment for my course evaluation was: this course changed.

And so and that's a pretty radical claim. And you know, I had twenty years of that practicing doing that and then I started lecturing on T V Ontario because my classes were popular and that got an audience and then you know, I had a pretty big corpus of work. Well that brought a huge audience in, partly for the scandal, but I had all that content. So they came for the scandal but stayed for the content. But it it is there is an element of predictability to it.

I am a clinician, so I'm interested in helping people and that's a deep. And part of that's curiosity and part of that's fear ahead. speak. Um I'm I've always been interested in being an educator. I like lecturing. I like having students. And so you know I'm a clinical educator. And then I started playing with YouTube and turned out that

You know, and then there's this hunger for a uniting narrative that well was identified by people like Carl Jung, you know, sixty years ago. So there's an element of it in some way that's inevitable. God died, you know, that's needed. Well that sets up a certain kind of stage, a certain kind of hunger. You know, it's the hunger for the revivication of the dead father in in our

And that's responsibility most fundamentally. It's discipline. That's the sort of thing Jocko pushes, you know, on you two. Young men they're clamoring for disciplined responsibility, weirdly enough. But you're wise enough to know that's not true. It's the there's a thing that men need, um they need difficult tasks and they need to know that they can overcome difficult tasks. And and through that you develop your

your human potential. You develop w what you're capable of doing. And if you don't encounter those things in life, you you remain feeble. And you may feeble even Yeah. And very uh not just immature but Um insecure. Well y and not just insecure, but insecure, then bitter. Yeah. Then resentful. Then dangerous. Yes. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. The alternative Weak, insecure, bitter men are not harmless.

No. And they try to damage people. Oh yeah. Yeah. And they try to damage people oftentimes because in comparison to those people they're trying to damage. they feel they f they come up short. They don't like it. They don't like the feeling. Yeah. And they they try to Destroy the thing that makes them feel bad. Adam and Eve are made by God. They don't count. The first two human beings are fragile. Engaged in a war of envy that degenerates into the flood and the Tower of Babel. It's stunning.

It's so relatable. I mean, if you are a person that, you know, strives to work hard and accomplish things and you have grand ambition you will find so many people that try to destroy that. Yeah, but but I mean d l mean what's your life like when you go out in public? People are friendly.

Ninety nine percent, more, more than ninety nine percent. But I'm friendly. Yeah, f I know, I know. But still it's remarkable, right? I mean because you you you're you're uh what would you you're an axis of contention online I mean you're very good at handling people. I've watched how you treat people.

But but it is the case that when you go out in public, I mean how many bad encounters have you had with people in public? Very few. Very, very few. Right. Yeah. Well that's the same with me. Yeah. But it's also like when I'm in public, I'm in public doing my things. What if you're just walking around on the street though? People are friendly. Yeah. Yeah. And th I suspect that's true wherever you go.

At least in part and sometimes almost completely by envy. But most people aren't like that. And even the people who are like that mostly aren't like that one hundred percent. Right. That's the thing, right? Is that people are different depending upon the circumstances. And I think most of the people that you either even interact with negatively online if you choose to interact with them at all.

But most of the people that will post things negatively about you online, if you could be alone with them and have a conversation with them, just a one on one conversation where you could find common ground. Oh most yeah, like most most student activists If you went to their parents' house for dinner with them you'd think, well that kid's like eighty five percent like every other kid. That's a good way of thinking about it too, you know, because

If you don't understand this you get conspiratorial. So Imagine there's a system of ideas. We're talking about the system of ideas that might motivate some of the WEF, you know, top down shenanigans and we talked about the religious substrate and the idea that the planet has too many people on it. It's not it's not like there's anybody there. Who's fully possessed by those ideas? It's the ideas have a relationship.

That's part and parcel of the set of ideas. And each person is a partial carrier of those ideas. But if you get two hundred people in a room who are partial carriers of that set of ideas, You've got the whole set of ideas there, and that's an animating spirit, then it acts like a conspiracy. And that isn't to say that there aren't sometimes also actual conspiracies. But it's very different interest useful to separate out the conspiratorial nature of a set of dynamic ideas.

from the people who are partial carriers of the ideas. So Jung, Carl Jung said at one point, uh people don't have ideas. Ideas have people. And there's a religious idea that's reflective of that, that the cosmos is a battle between principalities. So that'd be like a battle between spirits. And there's there's a real truth in that because the culture war we're in right now.

This is why what's happening on the conservative front, say in Florida, has some danger. It's like, Well, we want to ban CRT. It's like well. That's a war that has to be raged in the realm of the abstract. It has to be rag it has to be raged in, you know, metaphorically in heaven. It's not as soon as you concretize it, you fall prey to the same pathology. You'll end up Enabling sensors.

Yeah, it has to be discussed. It has to be thrashed out in the realm of ideas. Absolutely. You ha you can't defeat bad ideas. I don't think you can defeat bad ideas with law. You have to defeat bad ideas I think you have to defeat bad ideas with a better vision, actually. I don't even think you can defeat battles. in some sense. Right.'Cause there's always the danger that while fighting them you turn into a monster.

You know, what's that Nietzschean statement? If you gaze too don't forget that when you gaze into an abyss. that the abyss also gazes into you and that someone who spends all their time fighting monsters can easily turn into a monster themselves. Well isn't it also that there's different people at different stages of their lives

that will adopt these ideas because they seem the most attractive at the time. And it doesn't necessarily mean that that person will hang on to that their whole life. And oftentimes people shed terrible ideas that they have adopted early in their life because they've recognized the flaws. And the only way to recognize it. And the only way to recognize those flaws is to have those flaws Aaron Powell Well what happens, you know, when you have an honest conversation that's m engrossing.

is that you're actually optimizing abstract debt. So, you know, maybe you have your head's full of stupid ideas. Why are they stupid? We go act'em out and you die. So that's why they're stupid or you suffer. And so what you hope happens is you can kill off those ideas before they possess you to the point where you act them out.

So what do you do? You go test them in conversation. And hopefully, you know, you and I we've been talking all day and hopefully the consequence of that is that we both come away from this discussion. Somewhat less stupid and blind than we were. And the reason that that happened is because each of us have let go of some presumptions that were tyrannical.

You know, not enough to you know, if you lose your whole system of belief it just takes you out, you're in the desert. But you can do that optimally. So just the right amount of you is dying. Then you have to do that to sustain your life. To sustain your life biologically, parts of you were dying all the time, like unrestricted growth is just cancer.

Right. So you have to optimally die all the time to live. And it's the same on the idea front. And you experience optimal death and growth in meaningful conversation. You know, you can do that while thinking too, but most people think by talking. In fact, thinking is internalized talking. So most people think by talking.

Yeah, yeah. Well but it's also one of the things that makes it exciting, right?'Cause if it's real then people are long for the and it's cool because I kinda do the same thing in my lectures. I don't prepare my lectures. I have a question in mind that I'm trying to answer. Then I go on stage and I try to answer the question or investigate the question at least, you know, and as I've got better at it.

Usually what happens is I go a bunch of different places And then I can snap it together at the end and that's fun. Like all these plates are in the air and you can't do it. Sure. Bring them all together at the end. It's like the punch final punchline of a comedian set. Exactly like that. Yeah, it is. It's exactly like that. When bits are constructed.

Yeah yeah well it to dispense with what's unnecessary, right? To get to the gist and to tie it together. And it's so fun when you can land on your feet. I've been watching Tammy do. She's learning how to tell a story on stage, you know, and her stories are about ten minutes long. She has an opening.

lays out some narrative and says, Well here's, you know, how we could explore this and now and then she can go and snap. It's nice. Oh, it's so nice. Yeah. It's like you got to the point. Yeah. And the point, eh? That's the direction. That's the moral of the story. Jokes do that all the time. Yeah. So I think the closest thing to what I do on stage is probably what I'm saying. Although you guys usually run through a prepared set, but you have a university.

potential jokes, right? And my suspicions are that you're watching how the audience is reacting and crafting what you're selecting to you know to bring everybody on board. And you want to tell a story that has a narrative arc. It comes to a conclusion. Have you noticed in your podcast that if you're really paying attention to the dialogue that the podcast has a narrative arc all by itself. Yes. It's so cool, eh? Yeah. That it'll you'll see, Oh, we're halfway done and then

Well now here's the natural ending. Yes. And so and that's cool that that narrative emerges just as a consequence of focused attention, but it's definitely the case. Yeah. Yeah, it's um it's a a very fascinating way to explore life publicly.

Right. It's a very fascinating way to explore life publicly and um allow other people to take in some of these thoughts and form their own. Yep.'Cause that's what a lot of people are doing. They're they're listening to this and they're they're actually a thinking about various aspects that resonate with their own life and then applying their own unique

view of the world to that. Yeah. And you know, and seeing how they could maybe uh how use it to enhance them or whatever they disagree on, why why they disagree on it. Yeah. And solidify that position and then all as well. And the the good podcast It presents people with some new information, which it was part of why I love doing podcasts, like it's such a privilege and you know. Well that's a pretty good deal. Yeah. And so you get to have that experience of learning and but at the same time

You can model the exploration of ideas. And so then people they learn two things. They learn whatever the facts of the matter are, let's say, but they also learn how to conduct an exploratory dialogue and both of those if you can learn those both at the same time, that's perfect. Right. You know? And that's really you're basically using the Socratic method of instruction. 'Cause the Socratic method was all incorrect.

Like you're not asking the audience, but you are essentially, because you're a proxy for the audience. Like, I don't know what this means. Do you want to explain it? Well, oftentimes I am too, because I might not even I might know what the answer is, but I have to ask it anyway because I want other people to know it. Right. So instead of saying it, I have to ask. Yeah.

And I have to and also it's like I wanna know how people think and how they come to these conclusions, which is really fascinating. in and of itself because uh everyone's path to whatever th their own conclusions are are very different. Yes, yes. Well that one of the things you learn in therapy as a therapist is You can't really provide people with the answer. So maybe, you know, someone will come to me with a set of problems and I'll think, Well, I know.

And I could just tell them. But what happens if you tell them is they just don't do it. Right. So what you wanna do is you wanna ask them a bunch of questions about the problem and about what they might view as a hypothetical solution. And then they develop the intermediary steps along the way to the conclusion. Then they're actually likely to act it out. Same thing happens. You have to walk people through the process and you know a lot of what well what we both do I think in our podcast.

We invite people along for the ride, right? Instead of presenting a package of pre-programmed options. Yeah, of course. one and you're gonna have a viewpoint, so that's you know as long as you're not playing games with that or any more than you you know than you can avoid. Yeah. Yeah, it's uh for me this has been like an unexpected education in a v a very bizarre way. When when I first started doing it, I didn't think I was gonna get educated. I thought I was just gonna

Have fun with my friends and fuck around. Mm-hmm. And then along the line bringing guests on and then it just sort of evolved on its own. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I always I often think that this thing made itself. Yeah. As bizarre as that sounds. Well y okay. It made itself in some way. But you followed the golden thread of what was meaningful and interesting. You know, and that is a spirit.

That's the golden thread that leads you out of the maze. You know, and something you'll be conducting a podcast and something'll grip you and you think, oh, there's something there and then maybe if you're awake and aware, then you start doing more of that, you know. And that has a light.

So that's what happens in the story of Exodus when Moses encounters the burning bush.'Cause it's a bush, eh? It's not an oak tree that's three hundred feet tall. Right. It's just a bush. And so the story goes, Moses is walking along and something catches his eye. And he didn't have to go over and look, but it catches his eye.

The hell's that? And then he goes over and he starts to pay attention. And the more he pays attention, the more the more the voice of God manifests itself to him. That's what that story means. then that's the gold beckoning in the distance. It captures your interest. And then if you pursue that, like it leads you into the depth.

We've t I I don't know if we've talked about this before, but what do you think about those scholars in Israel that believe that the burning bush was some sort of a psychedelic experience? Oh well, I I think we have no idea how Psychedelic experience shaped religious presumption. Absolutely. I interviewed him. Oh yeah. I mean look that we know that the shamanic tradition, which is

God only knows how many tens of thousands of years old. You know, it might be is it millions of years old? Maybe. You know, human beings have been using fire for two million years. It's like it could be really, really old. And the the shamanic tradition is definitely a psychedelic tradition. And one of the things Morerescu did was show quite clearly that the the all of Greek culture

embedded in what looks like a collective psychedelic experience. And so Yeah, I think that I think the evidence like Murcia Eliad, a great religious scholar, studied shamanism and he thought that the use of psychedelics was a degeneration of the original tradition, but I don't think that's true at all. I think that the psychedelic tradition is part and parcel of the universal religious heritage of mankind.

Like, I don't know what that means. You know, I've talked to people like Robin Carhart Harris, who studies the neurology of psychedelic experience, and he said that what it does is produce something akin to a to a a hyperstretch. experience. So imagine you're extremely stressed, like your life's in danger. And so you have to open yourself up to the possibility of radically new ideas, while a psychedelic substance puts you in that state of mind.

And so that can be hellish because you can you you can collapse into like a catastrophic fight or flight defensive response and magnified by the hallucinogen, then you're just in hell. But that isn't o the only necessary outcome. And so the psychedelic experience definitely mimics something like radical learning. And it does inf it also seems to reduce the effect of memory on perception. 'Cause most of what you see in the world is memory.

It's just a short that's why, you know, when you look at a word, printed word, you read the word. You can't not read the word. That's because you you see in the memory. You're not seeing like when I look at the sign behind you, I'm not lost in the yellow in the details. I see the Joe Rogan experience. It's part and parcel of the perception. It's all memory. What a psychedelic does in part is remove the inhibition of memory from perception.

And that re immerses you in the complex world and shows you how remarkable and beyond comprehension everything really is. That's real. But uh The question is what to do with that. Turn on tune in. Turn on, tune in, drop up. That devastated the whole culture that idea. It's like, well, if we just shed our presuppositions and the whole industrial nightmare, we'd all be freedom loving hippies wandering around in Eden. It's like no. I wanted to do a line of psychedelic products, uh

Turn on, tune in, grow up. Right. I think that's Much much funnier, much better. Yeah, and that's also possible. That's a possible path through this sort of uh quest for spiritual enlightenment. And it's not it The the Timothy Leary thing was

I mean, it was dismissed by a lot of other psychedelic pioneers of the time. They they saw the flaws. Oh yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. The people who were already experimenting with ideas of proper set. And also they knew that back in the early sixties. Yeah. And also the people that had no desire to run a group of like minded people, which Leary did.

It also I think you fell into the cult of personality. Yeah. And you think you have all the answers. Yeah. It's very dangerous. Yeah, especially if you combine Yeah. Yes. Yes. That's that turns out to be a problem. Right. And the the intoxicating grip of that the the power that you have over these people, which is very And if you are a guru, you know, air quotes, and y you're the person doing that, like how many of them just start cults? And how many of them, you know, it winds up being sexual?

I think he was asked about what Huxley was doing and Jung Beware of unearned wisdom. Mm. Right. Very smart. Yeah. Unearned unearned wisdom. Wiz all almost all wisdom comes at a price and a long, long road to get to that. Yeah, right. Yeah. It's not a quick fix. There's no quick fixes. This idea that you're just gonna trip balls and figure it all out. Yeah and then you've got it. No, that's no at all. No. And everyone that I know that thinks they've figured it out are are the most lost.

In the Eleusinian mysteries. Yes. He said, I know that I don't know. You know, he was radically open to the revelation of his own ignorance, and certainly psychedelics can provide that. It's like, oh I I don't have a clue. Yeah. Yeah, that's the first step.

That's the the first lesson you learn is you don't know shit. Yeah. And also the just the the overwhelming understanding that this is available, that this experience is available and and it's so alien to m modern experien just an an average everyday experience. That this thing is behind the veil, man. Yeah, and it's right there. Yeah, well maybe this time, you know, there are wise people working on that front like Roland Griff.

Uh you know, he's he's approached this with a lot more reverence and respect than more casual. Maybe this time, you know, God willing, we'll get it right and introduce these strange angels. Right. And I think one of the best gateways to that is dealing with people uh who have trauma. Uh soldiers with m uh you know PTSD where they're doing with M D M A therapy and also other people that have had violent experiences in their life with M DMA. Yeah. It's helped them to recover.

People deal with, you know, paralyzing death anxiety. Diagnosis and those studies they're very they're very dry. You know, we we gave psilocybin to a group of the people. And you know, the implication is somehow that's a chemical transformation. And of course, to some degree it is, because it was induced by a chemical, but there's a mystery there. Well, what happened to those people in that six hours that transformed their vision of death? Right? That's uh

And what happens during the most profound psychedelic experiences? Are you actually in the presence of God? I mean, is it are there moments during those things where you kind of see it? You know, the that the veil does get lifted and you do briefly for a moment. Yeah. Well I think the same thing happens to you to some degree when you fall in love. Hm. You know, like when y you you're in love with your kid. You see them better.

You see deeper into them than you've ever seen into anyone. So love is the partial lift. Yeah and I think that's true of romantic love too is you you see into the soul of the other person, so to speak, you see what they could be. And they see what you could be, and you fall in love with that possibility. And that's not a delusion. It's not a chemical delusion. It's the basis of life itself.

I think it also applies to all love. I mean just love for your fellow human being. Just the and approaching people. Yeah, if you can manage it. But approaching people in that way. Yeah. Even people that have wronged you, even people that are you know, that are lost.

Yeah. Yeah, it's really good to remember that. You know, one of the things I try to do with my family when we get, you know, pr sporadically attacked, often by people who really would like to, let's say, take me out and along with me. We sit and talk until we find a pathway forward that is characterized by the least amount of you know, desire for revenge and anger possible. After contemplating the the anger and the revenge quite deeply.

You know,'cause you have to let that voice have its say too. No. It's a horrible path to go down. It also there's a a a extreme desire um to feed that monster. And that's that's what's dangerous with people. I mean that's a narrative that's been going on for I mean it's such a satisfying narrative too. Like the revenge film or the revenge novel. Well yeah, and it's hard to distinguish that from justice, you know, because you don't want the wrongdoer to escape scot free. Right. You know, so

It's a very thin line. But with regards to your enemies, it's like well What what do you hope maybe for your enemies? Well you hope they wouldn't be enemies. That would be good. Wouldn't it be better if they were allies? That would really be good. Would it be okay if they only suffered enough to learn? You know, assuming they're wrong and you're right, and I would be careful about that assumption. But sometimes, you know, you do get attacked by people who are not.

clearly bad actors, it'd still be better if you could have what you really wanted. It'd still be better if they could be transformed into people who could see the light. And oftentimes their suffering is their knowledge that they were wrong. And when people have wrongly attacked you, they and then realize it. They have to realize in themselves this flaw that they have in their personality. That's horrible. That's why tyrants double down, man.

You know, even when God Himself reveals himself to the Pharaoh, essentially Yeah. That's what people do. When we're talking about groups like the World Economic Forum, don't you think there's also there's a there's a draw to that I don't know if it's people like Trudeau or people that go there. You're you're at the it's the in crowd. Oh yeah You're you're with the people that are the the big decision makers that are going to be in power. You're with the people that know where the bunker is.

If if the nuclear bombs drop. You're with the people that are making the decisions that are shaping pol politics behind the scenes. that are manipulating the relationships between corporations and politicians and lawmakers and across the board. And so there's this desire that people always have to be a part of the in crowd or uh the the part of the secret group that's running things. Which is why groups that are running things are so dangerous.

Oh yeah, man, absolutely. I mean the last thing that we're hoping is that we create a new thing that just turns into another WE. Right. You know, regardless of what we want. And it's a tricky problem because there has to be some degree of international communication and consent. We all do live on the same planet and we're pretty integrated now and so there has to be something approximately. Well, like I said, an international conversation. But the danger is the Tower of Babylon.

And the danger is that even engaging in that conversation, let alone leading it leading it you know, just ends up producing exactly the same outcome. And that's hopefully we have people who are wise enough to

who first of all not want that for themselves because they know about the danger. You know, the danger is you lose yourself in in a real sense and and and also who are humble enough in uh With regard to their conception of their own ignorance, that they actually do genuinely want to hear what other people Aaron Powell So you need extraordinary people to be a part of this thing. Part of the endeavor is to

help everyone reveal what's extraordinarily extraordinary within them. Yes. Like that that's there in everyone. Yeah. And I've seen like I've seen extraordinary people in the worst people who were laboring under lives that were so bloody dreadful that it would take you a year just to describe it, who were still doing everything they could to aim up you know. Poor people.

psychotic people, alcoholic relatives, devastated community, ill, like brutalized, horrible childhood, no friends. Yes. You know, and still looking around to see if they could find something good to do. And you would never wish those circumstances upon anyone Because most people don't survive them. Yeah. But a few people get through those with incredible character. For sure. Like Yon Me Park. Yeah.

An amazing example. Like her her childhood, her life experience in North Korea is one of the most horrific stories I've ever heard in my life. But because of that, because of that horrif the horrific nature of the experiences that she had, she came out of this with this extraordinary character. He was in a residential school in Canada and it was one of the ones that were genuinely bad and it was like it was bad. It was like Auschwitz level, bad. It was really bad and he was brutalized, man.

And you know, he was devastated. But but it's incredible how through that adversity you create this extraordinary person. And that extraordinary person could be a great light to so many other people that are going through terrible times and define themselves. by the terrible circumstances that they find themselves in which is a real problem with people. Yeah well that's part of that victim narrative. Yeah. You know, and one of the things that's so comical about the ex

That's really what happens to the Israelites when they're in the desert, is they they turn into whiny backbiting victims. That's what happens. And it's like it's the same thing three thousand years ago. It's like we don't know where we are, we're lost, we're we're we're resentful about it. We wish the tyranny would return. And aren't we hard done by and and uh and and gossip?

Same old story, Matt. It it really is the same old story. Yeah. And this constant quest for meeting and understanding and fulfillment and a life worth living. Yeah well thing I think the thing that's really been catalyzed for me, you know, over the course of my life, but particularly in the last five or six years, is that I don't think there is

And I mean real in every way. I mean real as a manifestation of the central structure of the material world, real metaphysically, real psychedelically, real practically. So and I think that instinct that orients you towards meaning, that's the deepest connection you have to what is most real. You know, because people say, well life isn't meaningful and it's as just means you're a reductionist materialist atheist in your initial presupposition.

It's easy to flip that and say, No, no, the instinct that orients you towards engagement and meaning, that is the most real thing there is. Yes. So and I believe that. It's it's also what helps you stay on the straight and arrow when you're in pain. So how can anything be more real than that? You know, what orients you when you're seeing?

There's a definition of real. Real is that which orients you properly when you're suffering. So, you know, that's not a the same claim as, you know, the object's real. Right. Right. It's different ideas. But it's still real. It's more real. It's very real. Yeah. Yeah. And we are all I mean, the thing that we have in common is we're all just human. And if we're all human, there's always going to be this weird weirdness to exist.

And trying to figure out why and what it is and and also recognizing that some of the people that have defined why are so inherently flawed and they're very selfish in their definitions and you know, you have to kinda sort that out and parse through it. And one of the things that's been amazing about having a podcast is to present people with these d different minds that have found their own way through it.

Yeah, that's funny. Yeah. That's what I loved about being a clinician too, is to see how different and crazy and strange and interesting people really are if you listen to'em. It's like you know, I had law. Pretty much. They weren't people who would ever be put on a pedestal. You know, they were people who were in the dirt suffering away. But man, if you listen to them, they were so

Mm. So that was a good thing to learn. And that you see, you know, you find gold in very unexpected places. Like I learned a lot from some of my most damaged clients. Hm, I would imagine. Yeah, well and how how much people could still strive towards what was good even if they had every reason to be you know, it's a little bit more than a little

think no matter what they did you think, yeah, it's no wonder you did that'cause look what you went through. Right. But they didn't turn out to be serious sexual slayers. Our prisons are filled with people like that, right? Yep. Well Jordan, we just did another three hours that flew by.

Yep. Good to see you, Joe. It's great to see you. Thank you. I appreciate you very much. The moment that that that was happening, I had to reach out to you because I'm like, this is just so bizarre and crazy and it just it's Yeah, it's my fault. So I had to have yawn. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right, let's go get something to eat. All right, um so when this does launch and when it's official, and when we we could talk about it further, we will. Okay. Thank you. Good, good. Thank you, my friend.