#2180 - Jordan Peterson

29:34For lack of a better term, that's what we use. I don't think that's what they are at all. I think they are probably why we became people. I think they are probably why society advanced, and I think every great ancient culture probably celebrated them and used them. It seems like there's so much evidence out of Egypt, of the use of psilocybin, various different drugs, various different psychedelic experiences, the iconography of the pineal gland, seems to be a big part of multiple cultures, not just Egyptian, but even Catholicism. If you go to the Vatican, there's this enormous pine cone that is a statue there.

30:25I was very lucky when I went to the Vatican, we got a guide, we hired a private guide that was a scholar from France, and when he's not working on the summers, he gives these tours, and they're very thorough. He was brilliant, I wish I could remember his name. I should probably find it out and give him credit. Brilliant guide. He takes us through showing us all this artwork, incredible explaining why they had little penises, and explaining the whole thing that big penises were thought to be barbaric, and it was not representative of class and dignity and education. So we get to this pine cone, and he says to me, do you know what this represents?

31:06And I said, is it the pineal gland? And he goes, yes. This episode is brought to you by Life Lock. Tax season is already stressful. You shouldn't have to worry about identity theft on top of everything else. And trust me, it's a big worry, especially since during tax season, your sensitive info does a lot of traveling to places you can't control. It goes through payroll, your accountant, your tax consultant, and countless other data centers on its way to the IRS. Any of them can expose you to identity theft because they all have the info on your W2, just the ticket for criminals to steal your identity.

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33:20It's damn good. It's bold and sophisticated yet incredibly smooth finishing long and deep. It's authentically American representing uncompromising the world. It's a great opportunity for the rugged, the powerful and the passionate. Tap the banner to learn more or visit buffalotracedustillery .com. That's buffalotracedustillery .com. Distilled, aged and bottled by Buffalo Trace Distillery 90 proof. Franklin County, Kentucky, Buffalo Trace, American, family owned, independent and perfectly untamed. Then we start this conversation of why these Catholics would have this enormous representation of the pineal gland which they reference as the seed of the soul and that this gland, which is in the center of your brain, is thought to be literally a third eye.

34:18And on reptiles it actually has a cornea and a lens, this gland. Literally, it's exactly where the third eye of Eastern mysticism is. And they've got a representation of it right here. And it's thought to be where dimethyl tripdome is produced. And this whole connection to it is so old that it seems like you go back to the John Marker olegro stuff, you go back to the Dead Sea Scrolls which are the oldest version of the Bible, the only version that I believe the only version they have in Aramaic of all those stories. And if he's right, if John Marker olegro is right, it all kind of makes sense that these people were having these experiences much like the Greeks were with the Illusinean mysteries, much like multiple different cultures in the Amazon all over the world have experienced these profound ceremony experiences that lead to these journeys into the spirit world, these connections with high quality.

35:24And this is the higher consciousness, this something that when you're experiencing it seems very, very real, but also very preposterous when you try to explain it to people that aren't experienced. You know, it's like Hendrix, like are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have. Like it's that. Like with that understanding that that's possible, the world changes. Because now you know that that's possible. You could live your whole life and not know that the most shocking profound thing in existence is three hits away, three hits away. And all of a sudden you're in a completely different universe in 20, 30 seconds.

36:08That's nuts. And the fact that that is dismissed that people look at it as like, oh, you're just escaping reaction. And you're like, it might be the source of civilization itself. It might be the source of language. It might be the source of the expansion of the human mind over a period of two million years, the doubling of the human brain over a period of two million years, which Terence McKenna felt directly coincides with the shifting of the tropical rainforests turning into grasslands, which would force these primates to experiment with new food sources. And these unjolored cows that were everywhere that would shit.

36:51And then these psilocybin mushrooms would grow and there's shit observed primates flipping over these cow patties, looking for beetles and grubs and things to eat. It's everywhere. Like you can see it all over Africa. If there's something on that, they're going to try it out. And if these things are trying it out and they're doing this over a period of two million years and they develop language and culture and weapons and they start thinking about things and they become different than every animal around them. And this was the Buchananstone Dapthiri, which I'm sure you're familiar with. And Dennis McKenna, who is a legitimate scientist, Dennis explains it even better.

37:28Because he explains it with the actual mechanisms that your brain, the things that fire up when you encounter high dose psilocybin experiences that would lead you to the development of language, glossolalia, the connection of sounds and objects and bringing things together in a manner of communication. Also, they've realized that in low doses, it increases visual acuity. It makes people more amorous, makes people horneer. They're going to have more sex. They're going to be better hunters because they could see better. They're going to be more sensitive to the environment. They're going to be more aware.

38:06Edge detection is different. There's so many different things that happen that if you're thinking about what made people people, it's a mystery. We want to pretend that we understand things because of the fossil record and it's not sure we can't understand. But every now and then we find a new human that we didn't even know exists like Dennis Sovens. What was that? Not even 20 years ago, I don't think. So now there's a whole other branch of human beings that they weren't even aware of 20 years ago. Whatever the fuck happened that took us from all the other primates that are still here and made us this.

38:41It's pretty profound. And I have a feeling that psychedelics were at least involved in that process. That's my belief. And my belief is that the sweeping psychedelics act of 1970 that they passed essentially to target civil rights activists and anti -war activists. That's what they did. They wanted to go after the hippies. And they went after the hippies with MK Ultra with the Tom O 'Neill so brilliantly outlines in his book chaos. They went after it and they created the Manson family. They created that family. They taught that guy how to do that so that that guy would kill people. And he would be a psychopath.

39:21And now hippies would be psychopaths. And then all this anti -war shit would just get stopped by sensible people. Then schedule one everything. Everything. The psilocybin marijuana all down the board. Everything becomes schedule one. The most illegal of illegal things. So all these people who are experiencing all these Kenkeesy people and all the LSD people of the 60s, all those people become criminals instantly. And they just threw water on the whole movement. And it worked. It really worked. It was Nixon and all the people that were in charge back then. If you look at what happened from 1960 to 1980, this confusing era of the 70s where the effects are wearing off.

40:07And then you get into the 80s and everybody's doing coke and they have makeup on and big hair and the music sucks. It's like something happened. Something happened. And what happened was they completely removed the very thing that had changed culture so radically from the 50s to the 60s. Like I'm a gigantic fan of 1960s automobiles. I love them. There's something about the shapes of them. The way they sound. Part of it is that I grew up in the 80s and those are the cars we all wanted. When we were kids, if a guy drove by in a 1969 Camaro, we would all be like, whoa, look at that thing. But there's something about those shapes.

40:52There's something about the designs of those cars that resonate so strongly today. A 1990 car ain't worth shit. And what's your fucking 1990 car? 1990 Camaro. Get the fuck out of here with that thing. But if you have a 1968 Camaro, people will stop in a parking lot and stare at it. What is that? I think those guys were on drugs. I think all those guys were on drugs. I think the guy who created a Corvette had to be on drugs. These guys felt something the same way Hendrix felt something when he was on stage playing guitar and await nobody had ever heard before. That guy came out of nowhere and everybody was like, what the fuck is he doing?

41:33It was so different that Eric Clapton watched him for the first time and was like, I should probably quit playing guitar. Like, what the fuck am I doing compared to this guy? Like Jesus Christ, everybody was like humbled and confused by it. It's like a daily inspired 100 % 100 % and there's something about throwing water on that in the 1970s that I think has done a massive disservice to our civilization, a massive disservice. Because it's equated these things with people that have poor discipline and bad social skills and Nair duels who fail in society and that's not true. So in all these people that I know that are billionaires, I know people that are like super rich people that run these financial institutions.

42:24And I know a lot of like brilliant venture capitalist guys and brilliant tech guys and almost all of them are enthusiasts, almost all of them have had these experiences and they're all kind of quiet about them. And it's very unfortunate. It's very unfortunate because of these stupid laws that were passed 50 years ago. We've gotten ourselves in this weird crunch where we've made things illegal that could massively help people progress in life and sort things out if we could figure out how to manage them correctly. If we could run proper studies about what is the correct dose, is there a person that has a certain sort of biological make up that makes these drugs problematic?

43:14Should we find out? Maybe someone's allergic to them. There's many medications and many different compounds and many plants and natural things that people are allergic to. Let's avoid that. Let's try to figure out what works for some people, what doesn't work. Let's have legitimate counselors that could guide people through experiences. People that have experienced it themselves and can understand how to do this with intent and possibly aid your life. They have been shown to be hugely beneficial for soldiers, for our military men coming and women coming back from overseas experiencing horrific trauma to help them get past that and yet they're illegal still.

43:56We're both middle -aged men, right? So who is telling us what we can and can't do? This is preposterous. This is other men, our age, that haven't had these experiences maintaining this control on them in a completely ignorant way. They don't even know what they are. They don't know what these things are. They don't know what the experience is and yet they want it to be kept out of the hands of kids. We've got to keep it off the streets. We've got to keep drugs away from our society. And you don't know what you're talking about. It might be why we're here and it also, the absence of it, might be why we're so fucked up.

44:36It might be why we're so disconnected. Why we're so disjointed and our society is so hypocritical. I mean, the most pro -life people are also pro -death penalty. It's like across the board, everything. The people that want no crime but don't want to stop the emergence of crime by funding programs to try to fix the inner cities and they want to, there's our whole thing is disconnected. And I have a feeling that a big part of that is that we have not been given access to tools that have helped people literally become what we are today. And if you read Brian Murr, Rescue's work, and if he's correct, and these people that are studying the Illusionian mysteries and the literal emergence of democracy as we know it, probably all of it came out of psychedelic experiences.

45:33So I had Timothy Larry's old job at Harvard. That comes with a lot of weight. Yeah, and I knew some of the people that knew him. And so you could say that what happened in the 1960s, and this is relevant to the psychedelic experience, let's say, is that the emergence of mushrooms in particular and then LSD indicated to a swath of the population like Larry and like Ken Casey. And I think that's the reality that our perceptions were locked in kind of a box in a box that we didn't even really that we weren't even conscious of. I suppose that's the box of conformity. And the psychedelics released a wave of non conformity.

46:20And Larry crystallized that with his tune in, turn on and drop out. Now, there was a major problem with that, and that was partly what led to the kickback. So you might say that the first stage of something approximating a religious revelation is the understanding that your perceptions have been constrained by forms of conformity that were so extensive that you didn't even understand them. You didn't even know they were there. And so you're freed from that. And then maybe the first response to that is the celebration of an unlimited hedonistic freedom. But the problem with that is that freedom from constraint and hedonism is not freedom.

47:07It's just it's just subjugation to a kind of instinctive chaos. And that emerged with the hippie culture. And Larry in particular made a huge mistake when he said tune in, turn on and drop out. He should have said tune in, turn on and grow up. I'm dead serious about that because there's there's a different form of responsibility that emerges once you realize that you were constrained by a conformist box. Let's say like Moses when he was being a normal shepherd that you can step outside of that. But you don't step outside of that into worship of the golden calf like an hedonistic orgies. You step outside of that with more conscious upward aim.

47:55And if the use of transformative technologies like psychedelics isn't accompanied by that framework of enhanced responsibility, then it can degenerate into a kind of hedonistic chaos. And that's what the Nixon types were reacting to. They were terrified by it. And they had the reasons to be terrified because as you're intimating these technologies are unbelievably unbelievably potent and destabilizing. Now that destabilization can be used for better, let's say for better or for worse. And it should be used for better. That's complex. It's a very complex thing to manage. And so Carl Jung said that one of the main functions of religion was to stop people from having religious experiences.

48:45And what he meant by that was that a direct experience of the transcendent is enough to shake you to the foundation and to destabilize not only you, but your culture. This is why there's another scene in the story of accidents. But did you explain further like expand on what he was meaning by that, but the keep you from having religious experiences? Well, if everybody goes their own enlightened way, let's say there's no social cohesion. There's no unity of purpose. There's nothing but fragmentation. And part of the danger of the hippie movement in the 1960s was a counter social fragmentation. Now, so you can imagine, you know, things get so constrained that everybody's exactly the same.

49:29And that's a complete totalitarian catastrophe. But you can imagine the opposite catastrophe, which is that well, everyone's letting it all hang out and doing their own thing. And that's equally dangerous. And so there's some balance in the middle. Well, that's that balance between chaos and order that we were referring to earlier. It's also an ignorance of the structure that's involved in maintaining a society. Definitely. You need discipline and people need to work to maintain the society that you enjoy to be so free and to be a hippie. Yeah, well, you can imagine that that complex social order can be maintained by something like mindless obedience.

50:05Right. That's suboptimal. What you'd really want is enlightened responsibility. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. That's a great way to put it. Right. That's a very hard thing to pull off though, because it means that you have to leap out of the box of social constraint. And you have to take the responsibility onto yourself. Now, that's a hell of a lot better if you can manage it. But that is definitely not what Keezy or Larry, for example, preaching to the masses. It's like an admirable thing that people just should aspire to. It's the best possible. Let me give you another example of this. If you don't mind, I'm going to use another biblical story.

50:45Why would you have it? Biblically, the lights are flickering behind you. Almost like God is interacting with us. The spirits in the room, Jamie. Hopefully flickering. You haven't noticed it. Keep an eye on it. Hopefully they're the right spirits. Well, I think they always are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well. So in the story of Abraham, Abraham is a, he's an old man when the story starts. As soon as you started talking about Abraham, start flickering again. It's going out. What am I tricks on telling you that it's never happened before. This is wild. So Abraham is like 70 years old when the story starts.

51:21And we don't know anything about him. He's completely non -descript. He's a case of failure to launch. So as rich parents and he has everything he needs at hand. So he can live the life of a satiated infant. He's like, he's in the throes of what would you sell? Materialistic plenty. Okay. And the voice of God comes to him. Now, but it's characterized in a very particular manner. So God comes to Abraham as the call to adventure. And that's a very useful thing to know. So in the Moses story, God comes to Moses is that which attracts his interest and takes him off the beaten path. In the story of Abraham, God comes as a spirit of adventure.

51:57And God makes Abraham a deal. It's a very specific deal. And it's the best possible deal. This is the covenant, by the way. This is the covenant. So God tells Abraham, if you leave your zone of comfort, if you remove yourself from your father's tent, if you move away from the place of the city, from infantile materialistic satiation and go out into the terrible world. And you do that voluntarily. You have the adventure of your life. This is what will happen. You'll be a blessing to yourself that's genuine. So instead of being racked with self doubt and being self conscious and taking yourself apart with guilt and shame, you'll ride the wave of adventure and you'll feel that your life is a blessing.

52:41Not only will you feel that it will be a blessing. That's the first thing that will happen. The second thing will happen is that other people will notice and your name will become renowned and that will be valid. You'll be a blessing to other people in that regard. Your name will be upheld. So you'll stand out among your peers, but in a justifiable manner that's a consequence of your own intrinsic merit. The third thing that will happen is that you'll have the opportunity to establish something permanent for Abraham. It's a dynasty, right? He's offered the possibility of being the father of nations.

53:13And the fourth thing that happens is you'll do it in a way that's of cardinal benefit to everyone. And so what happens in that story? This is so cool. It's so remarkable. It's the answer to the selfish gene, by the way, as well. So what this story does is it takes the call to adventure, which is the instinct that makes children move out into the world. It's the spirit that you encourage if you're a good father. It lines that up and it says, if you follow that and let it pull you out of your zone of comfort, your life will be a blessing to you, your reputation will grow. You'll establish something permanent and you'll do that in a way that's good for everyone.

53:52Right? So that's a hell of a good deal. And that's the story of Abraham. Okay. So why is that relevant to the psychedelic debate? Because if you're going to move into the razon of the transcendent, you have to take on the requisite responsibility or the process of transcendence turns into something like a descent into unstructured chaos. And that's not an improvement. It's just a movement from tyranny into the desert. That's a good way of thinking about it symbolically. So in what happens in the Exodus story, because it also details out how this should be structured is that Moses has a vision of individual responsibility and social organization that's maximally responsibility based.

54:36So Moses tells the Pharaoh to let his people go, but that's not the phrase. The phrase is God said, tells Moses to say this, he's let my people go. So they may worship me in the desert. And so you move out of the tyranny. That's what happens, let's say in the throws of a psychedelic experience, is that the preconceptions are shattered. Now you're somewhere unstructured. Okay. Well, you can't worship what's unstructured. You have to find the proper structuring for your new freedom. The vision that's put forward in the book of Exodus is a vision of multi -dimensional, responsible identity. So you take on responsibility for your own life.

55:18You take on responsibility for the life of your wife or your husband. You take on responsibility for your family. You're a model for your community. You serve your state. You do what you can for your nation. And that's all united under your highest upward orientation. And that's ordered freedom. That's ordered freedom. It's not the same as the hedonistic freedom that the people like Nixon and the sort of right wing conservatives of the 1960s were terrified by that kind of hedonistic anarchy. It's not freedom. It erupted. I don't know where. I mean, we're right now in 2024. I want you to imagine 2014.

55:59It's the same. It's the same. There's nothing different other than the threat of AI and war and socially. The world's the same. You go from 1956 to 1966. You have a completely different world. Completely different world. Everyone's going crazy. The opposition to the Vietnam War has got people in the streets. Can Keezy, Tim Leary, Tune in, drop out all that. This world is changing in this radical way. There would be nothing like it. And in a lot of what you're saying about these experiences happening and people just disconnecting and not having discipline and structure and just experiencing these things and just disconnecting completely from society was the problem.

56:48That was the problem. It's a major problem. Well, it's still a problem now to some degree because people who are pursuing, let's say, non -conformist freedom don't understand that the replacement for freedom isn't hedonistic anarchy. And that's partly because it's self -defeating. It's also pointless. It's also pointless and meaningless. And it's partly pointless and meaningless because imagine, then this is part of the implication of the story of Abraham, is that the instinct of meaning comes to you when you pursue a path. That's a path way that specifies what would you say? The limitless development of your integrated psyche.

57:27But it's not just the psyche. It's the integration of the psyche with all the different levels of society. For example, in so far as you're well put together, you're going to be a highly functional husband to your wife. Like your own psychological organization, integration cannot be divorced from the union that you make with your wife. They're the same thing and then you can extend that to your kids. For you to get your act together means simultaneously that you establish the proper relationship with your wife and with your children. Those are the same thing. And then if you can manage that, you do the same thing with the broader community.

58:03It all stacks up musically. And so then mental health doesn't become how your psyche is organized internally, which is what the clinical psychologists misled people into believing it. It's more like the harmony that obtains from the psyche upward through society when everything is stacked up properly to the highest level possible of being. And that's another definition of God. So one of the things I tried to do in this book is to actually define what it is that we're arguing about because the old man in the sky superstition doesn't cover the territory. So for example, if you look at God in the story of Abraham and you say, do you believe in that God?

58:47What you're asking even though you might not know it is, do you believe that there is a call to adventure and that following that call will not only integrate you but serve society in the highest possible manner. And that's a very, that's a pretty straightforward question has very little to do with anything that's even vaguely superstitious. Like is that call there? You certainly rewarded in your children if you have the least bit of sense. And so I've been trying to define what it is that we're arguing about. And so there's another definition too that you see this in the story of Adam and Eve.

59:25So in the story of Adam and Eve, one of the ways God is characterized is as the spirit that calls you on your pride and presumption. So then you ask yourself, well, do you believe that exists? It's like how often in your own life has pride gone before a fall? Is there some spirit that's operative in being that shows you the error of your ways when you get ahead of yourself or not? And if the answer to that is no, you say, well, you have no conscience, nothing calls you on your moral impropriety, you're overreaching. No one wants to be near you if you're one of those people. That's for sure. And is that real?

1:00:12So one of the ways God is presented in the Old Testament is this dynamic between calling and conscience, right? So there's the calling that is indicated in the story of Abraham and Moses that pulls you forward to the adventure of your life. And the other side of that is the constraint of conscience that tells you when you're wandering off the straight and narrow path. That's more the voice of negative emotion and threat detection. And calling is more like the voice of positive emotion that pulls you forward and invites you. But you need the dynamic between those two. That's the pillar of light and the pillar of darkness that guides the Israelites across the desert.

1:00:51Jonathan Pazio helped me figure that out just flatten me when I when he laid it out because I could see the Taoist view of the world and the ancient Jewish view of the world stack on top of each other and the implication of the story is very straight. It's like you leave a tyranny and you're lost. What guides you when you're lost? The interaction between what calls you forward and upward and the constraints of your own conscience that warn you when you're deviating from the straight and narrow path. That's a definition of God that emerges from Exodus. And the balance of the mind to be able to figure out which is which and how to apply them.

1:01:28And the balance of the mind. This is why you have to have the least amount of problems in your life and keep your body as healthy as possible. So you don't have all these other things that are influencing the way you interact with the world. You got to have a balance of everything. All of it has to be kind of balanced together in order for you to have the judgment. Yes. Otherwise you can't see. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You have to see it. And it's hard. And you have to want to see it. Yeah. So why do you want to see it? Me? Yeah. It's just my instinct. That's just I follow my instincts with everything.

1:02:04I always have. Why? I don't know. But I think because I didn't have a lot of guidance when I was young and because you know, I was a latch cakehead and parents divorced, split, you know, a lot, a lot of moving. I think I developed my own appreciation of my instincts of my thought. And I had seen enough people by the time I was a young boy ruined their lives and make port. And I'd seen these poor decisions right in front of me. I'd seen poor thinking and excuse making and laziness. So you could see the negative responses. Yeah. I had seen all these things. And because I didn't feel protected, I genuinely felt like I was on my own and I had to figure things out of my own.

1:02:50I developed a very early trust and recognition of the importance of that. And it's led me through my entire life. Everything that I ever did that was like a big risk was like a calling to me. Every single thing that I ever did, from getting into martial arts, I went from not doing it to doing it every day all day, seven days a week. It was a calling. Like I was called, it was like my, my mind interfaced with whatever that was. Martial arts was and said, this is my ticket out of here. Like this is my ticket to be a different person. Was that discipline? What was the ticket? Do you think I don't even know if you call it discipline back then because it was more of an obsession.

1:03:32So when you're obsessed with something, it doesn't require discipline because you can't wait to do it again. Discipline, Mike Tyson said best. It was real calling for you. Mike Tyson said best. He said discipline is doing something you hate, but doing it like you love it. You know, like when you're in training camp, like Mike Tyson was for a big heavyweight fight, you're pushing the limits of your physical endurance and recovery because you're trying to achieve an adaptation. You can't maintain fight ready fitness all year round. One thing that people don't understand about like fight ready, like when a guy like Islam Makachev, who is the UFC lightweight champion, the pound for pound best fighter on earth, when that guy is fighting, when he gets into the cage on the day, whatever it is, that Saturday night, this is a peak of performance and training that cannot be maintained.

1:04:31He wants to catch it right when he's right there, when the body hasn't broken down yet, the immune system hasn't broken down yet, the endocrine system isn't fried, the adrenals aren't fried. You're getting it to right when your body can recover and it's forced to maintain this insane level of fitness, and then you have to take a break. Like you cannot maintain fight camp all year round. You will not be able to do it, your body will break down. So it's not what my point is, that requires discipline. Right, because that is no longer in the inspiration realm, you're in the obsession realm, you are, I'm sure, as well.

1:05:11But you're also in there's no fucking way you want to do it. There's no way you want to do more sprints. There's no way you want to do all this stuff. You must do it though. You must do the calisthenics. You must do the live wrestling drills. You must do the shark tank where they throw in a new fresh opponent every round for five rounds. So you're dealing with rested killers and you're exhausted. You have to do that. And that's not, that's pure discipline. And generally enforced discipline by coaches, because it's so rigid, it's so hard to do. You need someone over you with a stop or a hot score.

1:05:45Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. And everybody has to get up and go at it because even the most disciplined, their body recognizes they need a break. So that's pure discipline. What I had was this obsession that made that hard work easy. Right, right. So that's a key thing. So that's a key thing. Okay, so, so now imagine that underneath that there's a implicit or unconscious goal. Okay, so I'm saying this for a very specific reason. So the positive emotion that motivates people is always experienced in relationship to a goal. Now, this is a very important thing for everyone to understand because it means that if you don't have a goal, you have no positive emotion.

1:06:29And it also means that the higher your goal, the more positive emotion you experience when you're moving towards it because positive emotion signifies progress towards a goal. So you need a goal. The goal of the, what, deepest religious trend, the deepest religious traditions is the ultimate goal by definition. So the idea is that you need a goal. And so you should pick the utmost possible goal. That's another good definition of something like the kingdom of heaven or the realm of the divine, the ultimate goal. Now, you have a goal. And every time you see movement towards it, you're going to get what would you say?

1:07:07You're riding on the energy that's associated with movement towards that goal. That's dopamine, energetically mediated. That's the same systems that are affected by cocaine and methamphetamine and so forth, all the positive emotion drugs. So you need a goal. That goal. Now you can imagine this that if you're attentive to the action of your own instincts or the divine voice, I don't think those are distinguishable, then a goal is going to emerge that catalyzes a series of transformations. This is what happens to Abraham. So he has a series of adventures after he decides that he's going to go out in the world.

1:07:40And every adventure is marked by the erection of a sacrificial altar and a recommitment of his upward aim. Now there's two reasons for that. One is that he reminds himself that he's aiming upward and he's on an adventure. And the second is he admits to himself that with every transformation of character, something has to be sacrificed. So you know, so now I'm curious about this in your own life, right? So you started obsessively committing to martial arts. What did you have to give up to do that? Social life. Okay. What else? That's basically it. I was a kid. Okay, social life. I didn't really have responsibilities other than school.

1:08:21So I would leave from school and go right to training. Okay, so there's an there's an emergent idea in that story of adventure led transformation that with every profound transformation of character, something that's not appropriate has to be let go of. That's why by the way, that's why Abraham's story culminates in the sacrifice of his son. Because the sacrifices get higher in value as the developmental progression upward continues. And that's basically the story of individual development, right? Follow the call of adventure. Aim upward. Continually remind yourself of your fundamental goal. And then let go of everything that isn't appropriate as you transform forward.

1:09:06So Abraham ends up with a new name because of doing that. That's how different he becomes in the course of his adventure. It's like Jacob. Jacob becomes Israel and Abraham becomes Abraham because the consequence of him following the pathway of adventure, the calling is a transformation that's so complete. It's as if he's a different person. And now those stories are maps of that transformative process. So they culminate. They culminate in the Christian view of things with the ultimate sacrificial offering. So that's the idea that lurks in the New Testament is that the ultimate in transformation is brought about by your willingness to put absolutely everything on the line no matter what.

1:09:50Right? And that's very different view of the religious enterprise than something like defense against death anxiety. It's the ultimate adventure and that's the willingness to welcome everything about life that's terrible and painful and malevolent to welcome that with open arms to accept that. And that's predicated on a deeper idea, even, which is that sacrifices the basis of community, which is exactly right. Because you have to give up something to be in relationship to the future and to other people. Right. Right. So the biblical corpus is an examination of what would you say levels of sacrifice moving downward to the ultimate possible level of sacrifice.

1:10:33So in the Abrahamic story, Abraham is requested by God to offer up his son. Right now he does. He gets him back. The threat isn't carried through. And what does that mean?

1:10:50It means, first of all, that everything in your life, no matter what it is, including your relationships should be made subservient to the highest possible aim. It also means that a good father sacrifices his children to what's highest. That's the offering of your child to the world, the faithful offering of your child to the world. That's what Mary does. It's a famous statue of Mary in St. Peter's in Rome. Michelangelo made it when he was like 23, some ridiculous early age, brilliant statue. Mary is holding the body of her son broken in her arms, looking serene. He's an adult off the cross. It's like the female crucifixion.

1:11:31And the idea is that the good mother, the proper father offers their children to be broken by the world in the pursuit of what's highest. There it is. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. He was 23 when you made that. That is insane. God help. What were you doing when you were 23? Don't shitty jokes. Single block of marble. Yeah. And so, so see that that's that's that's an indication of sacred femininity because see the psychoanalyst said in the early part of the 20th century that the good mother necessarily fails. And so what does that mean? Well, every woman who brings a child into the world knows that the child is going to be broken by death and malevolence.

1:12:14Right. And so motherhood in the highest in its highest aspect is the offering of the child to the world to be broken. That's what's portrayed in the Abrahamic story too with regards to Abraham. To get to get your child back, you offer them to the world. That's a profound indication of faith, right? That life is worthwhile despite its suffering and its evil. And it's so good. Like the work, like look at his foot. Just look at the like the detail on the way the toe bends the heel. It's insane how good it is. He was so good. The fact that he figured out how to be that good at 23 years of age is just so shocking.

1:13:00Well, also so inspiring, you know, so inspiring, but stunning like stunning how good it is. Yes, and stunning what it means and words placed and the understanding of anatomy. Did he really wow insane. I mean, that guy left behind so much like what is that about? What is it? What is it about this these unique individuals like him that their work transcends time and that's life eternal. That that ability to transcend time. Yeah, yeah, thousands of years later. Well, so what happens in the Abrahamic story because it's relevant to your questions. So God offers Abraham the opportunity to be the father of nations.

1:13:52Okay, so imagine this, imagine this as a father. So we use father as a generic word, right? Everybody has a father. So there's a generic aspect to it. There's a role that you play if you're a father and then you could imagine there's a role you could play as a good father. And if you're a good father, you're you're radically encouraging and you encourage your children to go out into the world and prevail. You teach them to handle serpents. You don't protect them. You don't shelter them. You push them out and you say no matter what comes your way, kid, I've got confidence that you can handle it.

1:14:25No matter how terrible it is, no matter how challenging or daunting or malevolent it is, you've got it. And when you see your children doing that, if you're a good father, it fills you with what? It fills you with gratitude and love to see your children acting that out. Even at an early age, taking the risks of their first steps or climbing their first play structure or going out in the playground to make new friends when they're strangers or going off to school alone, all of that, you think. It's dangerous out there. It's like, good, go. I know you can handle it. Okay, so that's what Abraham plays out.

1:15:03He plays out that archetypal role. And the idea there, this is why I made reference earlier to the idea of the selfish gene. Dawkins characterized human reproduction as selfish. That's wrong because the human reproductive pattern is multi -generational. And if you want to establish the pattern of fatherhood that's going to cascade down the generations that will make your descendants successful in the multi -generational manner, then you follow this spirit adventure and you imbue your children with that confidence. And that's how that pattern that establishes the dynasty. So Abraham as the father of nations is established.

1:15:42So human reproduction is way more complex than just sex, far more complex. It's a multi -generational commitment. So now the promise that God makes to Abraham in part is that if you fall into that pattern of maximal adventure and courageous movement forward, that your life is imbued with a meaning that transcends time and that you embody something like an archetypal and eternal spirit. And that's the spirit of the father. That's why Abraham understands that he's made contact with the God of his ancestors. And if you're a good father, you have that spirit dwelling within you. And the Christian insistence is that that's the spirit's identical to the logos that bears the weight of the world on its shoulders voluntarily.

1:16:30And that that's what brings everything into being. Stunning, it's a stunning conceptualization. And I think it's right. It looks right to me. And the idea that sacrifices the basis of the community, that's just obvious. Like the fact that you're married. So what's the sacrificial gesture there? Well, all other women, that's sacrifice number one. Then it's not about you. It's also not about your wife. It's about the stability of your union across time. And it's about the stability of that. That union in so far is that's a reliable foundation for your children. So that's sacrificial too. You give up your whims in the presence so that the future stabilized.

1:17:13You give up your immaturity so that your children can thrive. That's all sacrificial gesture. And we figured that out. That's why we put the crucifix at the center of our society. Because we figured out even though we didn't know it, we figured out that the stability of the community is predicated on the willingness of the individual to sacrifice. And the exploration in the New Testament is the limits of sacrifice. Right. So do you think that that's what people think of what they think of the cross? It's very hard to know what people think about. I would say it depends on their level of sophistication.

1:17:52Right. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I don't think it's ever been explained to me that way. And I don't think most people think about it that way. When they think about it, they think Jesus died for our sins. There he is. Praise Jesus. Right. Right. It's a very formulaic surface level understanding. Well, I think it's partly because it's partly. And there's a merciful element of it. And this is what Jung was referring to when he said that religion helps protect people against religious experience. The full revelation of this significance, let's say of the imitation of Christ, which is supposed to be the foundation of Christian belief is in fact the demand that you walk the same pathway.

1:18:38And that's a terrible it's the most terrifying demand because so you'll describe the Christian passion as an archetypal tragedy. Now there was a reason for that. So think about it this way. Think about it technically. So imagine that 100 great storytellers told the most painful possible story. And then imagine that you aggregated all those stories and you distilled them into one story where all the terrible elements were present. Okay, so now you have a representation. You have a representation of the worst life can throw at you. Okay, so let's take that apart a bit. So the first thing that makes a tragedy tragic is that the tragedy befalls a good person.

1:19:25Because if a tragedy befalls a villain, it's just justice. It's not a tragedy. So it has to be a good person. So then to amplify that you would not only have the tragedy befall a good person. You have it befall a good person that everyone knew was good, but was not only good was the best and that was persecuted because he was good. So that sort of limits it out in that direction. And then you might say, well, what does he have to face while the answer would be, well, the worst life has to offer. Okay. Early death, early painful death, early painful humiliating unjust death at the hands of his friends at the hands of the mob under the thumb of a tyrant.

1:20:07Right. Brought about by people who knew that he was not only good, but the best of men. That's an archetypal tragedy. And then it doesn't limit out. So then you have the death that occurs in consequence of that and its voluntary acceptance, but that's not where it ends because the mythology surrounding the crucifixion story insists that Christ herald hell after the crucifixion which meant that he confronted not only death, but malevolence. It's self and in consequence transcended both. And so what's the underlying psychological message? It's something like the calling and the voice of conscience, informing people that in order to thrive properly in life and to become who you could be.

1:20:58If you could be everything you could be, you have to voluntarily take on the weight of the worst life has to offer, including the depths of malevolence itself. And you think, well, obviously, Joe, you know this, like how are you going to adapt to a situation you won't even admit to? Right. Well, so how could it be otherwise than for you to become everything that you could be? You have to embrace all of the catastrophes that life has to offer. How could it all? How could it be other than that? You're going to hide? You're going to pretend? Right. How is that going to work? No one thinks that'll work.

1:21:34Right. And so and you're right, there is this defensive element to the particularly the Protestant religious tradition, although I don't want to single out the Protestant specifically that insists that, you know, the work has already been done, but there's a lot of ambivalence about that in the Christian canon because there's an equal insistence that, no, you're supposed to, you're supposed to take all this on voluntarily. And that not only that, not only that, that that's, it's such an interesting idea because it makes so much sense psychologically. So imagine that as your courage grows so that you can confront more and more of the horror of life, that a spirit begins to develop within you, that gives you a strength that's commensurate with your daring, that's walking with God.

1:22:23That's the same thing. So the promise is that if you had the courage, something would be with you to allow you to bear up nobly under the burden. And all the clinical evidence supports that proclamation because what you see in people in the therapeutic transformation is that in so far as they're willing to confront what terrifies them voluntarily, they get stronger. And then imagine that there's nothing but a metaphysical limit to that. And I think that's right. I can't see how it cannot be right. It makes sense. It resonates with how we know people that have overcome great things in their life and become these very unusual and unique people.

1:23:07I got to pause because I have to use the restroom. But let's jump right back to the toilet. Where were we? Well, we were kind of bringing we who wrestle with God to a close, I would say. We've got other projects I want to talk to you about. Okay. All right. Sure. We're launching Peterson Academy today. So online university. We hope we'll see. We've got. We're launching with 20 courses best lectures in the world. Very, very high quality production. We invited the best lectures I could find down to Miami. Eight hour courses on the topic they really want highest possible production quality. And we're hoping we'll make a high level university level university equivalent education available to everyone for approximately 120th.

1:24:00So that's the plan. You want to see the opening the opening. Selvo. Sure. Yeah. Put it up. Put it up. Yeah. Yeah. Let's take a look. I ran this before my lectures this last tour. You got to put the headphones on. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I did. I decide to build an online university. Well. There is a crisis now in higher education. The president of Harvard University resigned today weeks. Is calling for the genocide of Jews violate and secluded conduct. We have a problem of affordability and cost spiraling student loans. We have a group think emerging and that warps the entire academic enterprise. I experimented with putting my lectures online and found that I could teach far more people at very low cost.

1:24:50And I thought well why not scale that.

1:24:57What I'm hoping to do is to find the best lectures in the world. And to bring them to as wide as possible an audience. He came to me and he basically said I want you to do the best course that you've always wanted to do. We want to bring you the highest quality education possible at the lowest possible price. It's extremely high level content that anybody can use to educate themselves and it's available to everybody. Well that would be good. I think it's funny because I got counseled at the university so I could try to return the favor.

1:25:33I think they're doing that to themselves right. Yeah well we couldn't have a better marketing campaign than the universities themselves. It's similar to what's going on with mainstream media. Yeah. It really is kind of the same thing. Yeah well it all derives from the same source right. Is the capture of higher education by this God forsaken ideology that's bizarre. Yeah. Bizarre how successful it is and how many people just are compliant. Yeah. That's for sure. That's for sure. Yeah well. Do you see it turning around though? It seems like it is a little. It seems like more people are pushing back against it now than ever.

1:26:15When you have institutions that are thoroughly captured it's very difficult to retrieve them. You know we've been arguing about this. I've been arguing about this with my team for Peterson Academy. I mean are there is it possible to rejuvenate the bricks and mortars institutions of a higher education? Well one answer to that is things that are dead rot and the universities seem to be rotting everywhere. And maybe that's because they're dead. Maybe it's because their time has come and it could be that that's the case. I mean I I hope not. I loved working at Harvard in particular. It was an amazing institution.

1:26:55I had a very good time at McGill. I had a good time at the University of Toronto. It's a real pain to see these institutions degenerate. But they're ideologically captured. That's not good. And thoroughly. And it's a very rotten ideology. It's the spirit of Cain. The resentful spirit of Cain. It's not good. They're unbelievably expensive. They take terrible advantage of their students. Plus the average quality of the educational experience is actually very low at most places. Not everywhere. Hillsdale College I think is a marked exception. But most places the lectures aren't good. And we're in a situation now.

1:27:32It's kind of like what happened with YouTube in a way. You know, YouTube enabled you for example and Spotify as well to emerge as an independent commentator. And you know you've cornered the market in some ways on that. There's no reason the universities could have seen this coming 20 years ago. They could have found their best lectures and they could have filmed their courses in the highest possible quality manner and taken advantage of this new communication technology. And they didn't. And that's not a good sign. You know, we've it's so funny. We bring our professors down to Miami. You know, professors from Oxford and Cambridge.

1:28:10And they're so relieved to come there. And the reason they're relieved to come there is because they're treated badly by their own institutions. These great professors. They're treated with contempt. They're paid miserably. That's especially the true the case in the UK. All we have to do is appreciate them. I can tell the professors who come to Peterson Academy. Like here's the deal. You can say exactly what you want. In exactly the way you want. You can teach what you love. We'll put a studio audience together that actually wants to listen to you. That's the only reason they're there. We'll offer you a financial deal that's better than you can get with any book.

1:28:46We'll give you more reach than you could ever also hope to get with any published manuscript. You can bring what you know to the world for next to nothing. We figure we can offer a university quality high level university quality equivalent for about $2 ,000 over four years. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. We have a great social media platform. So I don't know. You tell me what you think about this. So we've been wrestling with price, right? Because pricing something is very difficult. And part of the problem with social media platforms is that they're free. And you might say, well, that's not a problem. It's like it is a problem because things that are free get overrun by parasites instantly.

1:29:25And so you get the trolls, you get the bots, you get the bad corporate actors, you get the scam artists because there's no barrier to their participation. Right. And so we put a $450 cost on our offering per year for the early adopters that's available now. And we're hoping that the fact that there has to be a bit of a financial sacrifice in the front and will make our social media network high quality and clean because it's a little bit of skin in the game to participate. So we've taken the best elements of the popular social media networks and amalgamated that. And we're hoping that we can produce a community of people who are responsible and achievement oriented and upwards driving and intellectually curious and bring them together so they can form their own communities as well as participating in the lectures.

1:30:21And so we're I'm extremely excited about this. The courses we got lucky two A because we set up a production studio in Miami. And we have state of the art film crew and editors. But just when we started to film the AI illustration capacity came online and we filmed everyone against a white background. And so we can fill the whole background with with imagery and graphs and comments. So there's can you run a trailer for just pick one of the courses at random because this is actually how the courses look. So the trailers are very tightly edited but so are the courses. And so you so let me let me show you one of them.

1:31:03So you get a sense of what we've managed to accomplish.

1:31:09A lot of fascinating questions where do we come from where are we going what is the universe made of how can we possibly understand the grand landscape of the cosmos. When you look back in space you look back in time. It's amazing we've been able to do this to study the properties of the cosmos time scales of billions of years size scales billions of times bigger than our own. And now the question is can we go back to time equals zero can we go back to be four time equals zero and what does that even mean. I hope in this course to keep striving and asking these great questions because without great questions there can be no great answers and without great answers that can be no understanding.

1:31:53Wow Brian Keating. Fun Joe pretty bad. Well and I was so happy when I saw the trailers you know because Michaela and her husband Jordan Fuller they they've been working very diligently on this for about three years and they basically built it from scratch you know and I didn't have any idea how the courses would look you know because that's actually a pretty difficult thing to pull off but I'm very happy with the trailers they're extremely engaging every course has its own style sheet like so each course has its there's a there's an overarching style. So we're going to go back to the platform but every single course has its own illustration ethos and quality yeah well you can see them now would you be is this just for personal education or you will you be giving degrees we're going to we're going to approach that in two ways so we'll offer certification at different time spans so you know generally takes you four years to get a degree but you could imagine that it would be useful to have a one year certificate two year certificate three years.

1:32:55So you're a certificate four year certificate like there's no compelling reason why it has to be four years we'll keep very detailed records of our students academic progress and they'll be able to offer them directly to employers so we want to be able to assure employers that anybody who's gone through the certification process that's part in parcel of Peterson Academy has done the work and met the standards and the standards will be high now simultaneously we're working on technical accreditation. Right so that we can pull this so that we can have this operate as a standard university now there's trade offs on that because the accreditation processes themselves are captured by the same forces that have captured the universities and we're not going to compromise the quality of the offerings by cow towing to accreditation processes that are producing the same problem that we're trying to address.

1:33:47Now I'm in discussion with a number of different jurisdictions to move accreditation forward and if that happens it can also be applied retroactively so if we can figure out how to do it with an administration or a jurisdiction that's willing to do it and we don't have to compromise the quality then we'll go the classic accreditation route otherwise I'm just going to go directly to employers and say look we're going to be very very careful about who we grant certification to and you'll be able to rely on the certification from Peterson Academy as an indication of intellectual ability and also work ethic and we'll document that by the record keeping process that we use as part in parcel of the platform so I think we can do it we're going to do it one way or another.

1:34:32How are you going to be able to assure that these students because it's all remote right how are you going to be able to assure that they're actually doing the work that they're not utilizing AI like are you going to have them right thing. I can't tell you how but we're going to yeah well look I've tested tens of thousands of people online so I set up an online testing service that was used primarily by a company called the founder institute and we tested 50 ,000 people 60 ,000 people over five years in about seven different languages and we built and developed technology to capture people who are cheating so they don't know how we're capturing them and I'm not going to tell you but we know how to do it and you know I'm not going to tell you about how to do it.

1:35:13So and that's that's obviously a problem but it isn't an insoluble problem and I think we've already solved it so and then once we move towards more formal and stable accreditation there are lots of companies have emerged as a consequence of the covid lockdowns to make sure that remote compliance with testing requirements can be achieved so there's lots of ways to solve that problem. So it's very exciting. It's really exciting and it's you know there's all sorts of weird possibilities that emerge from this too because the technology now exists and we've had some of the videos converted already to have the lectures translated into the world's major languages and the technology that's cutting edge uses the professor's voice and intonation in the second language and matches the mouth movements.

1:36:01Yeah, they're going to do that as Spotify. Yeah, seamless. Man, it's seamless. They're doing it with podcasts. I think they're they're initially going to do Spanish, German and French. I believe those are the first three languages but they eventually will scale out. Yeah, so that's just like that's just incredible. It is unbelievable. Have someone teach a lecture in Russian and actually make the mouth movements and everything. Well, it's it's extremely exciting, especially in regard to the developing world because there's a lot of people who are not going to be able to do it. There's a, you know, there'll be more people in Nigeria by 2100 than are than in China and the median age of an African is 19.

1:36:40So there's an immense opportunity in the developing world to capture the market for higher education and it would be a wonderful thing to be able to bring this to the world and I just can't see why not. You know, the courses are very efficiently taught. We have AI mediated testing services and we can use the tests themselves as educational tools. You know, so we can imagine you have a test and you get a question wrong and you get feedback that it's wrong and it'll tell you where in the lecture and the reading material that you made the mistake so you can go back and review. And so even the testing itself will be educational and you know, we're hoping to develop a community that is composed of people who want to engage in lifelong learning and it also means that you don't have to be like 18 to 22 to attend this university.

1:37:25You can stay a part of it for the rest of your life. And we're hoping that spontaneous communities will develop and that we can bring people together for convention. So, you know, if we can get enough people on the platform, we'll have conventions in different cities where we bring our lecturers, you know, to a stadium or to a theater for a weekend and everybody who's part of the university can come and listen to their favorite lectures and we've got educational institutions who are already interested in partnering in that regard so that they can be brought to their institution for like summer time three day courses.

1:37:57And so, and it's so fun too because we can use video and audio and that's a wonderful thing as well because as you know well, far more people can listen and watch than can read. Now you have to read to partake in our courses as well, but it's a great opportunity. And it's so fun to have the professors come down there and be thrilled about it. Most of like we want the professors we already have to teach multiple courses because they're very good lecturers and they've, I think, all without exception enthusiastically agreed to continue participating because we took the idiot restrictions off them.

1:38:33It's like teach what you want to the people who want to listen, no holds barred. It's so fun. It's so fun. With the state of higher education, the way it is today, how does it recover or does it just get replaced? Well, I guess what I'm hoping at least that the Petersen Academy will do with the production quality of our courses is up the ante. It's like even if we fail financially because you know, we don't know how to price this. How the hell do you figure out something like that? We've argued about it a lot and we don't know what the potential financial market might be, but at minimum, you know, we'll be able to launch the courses independently if the platform itself doesn't take off.

1:39:17We're going to show Harvard and Stanford and Oxford and Cambridge what's possible with regards to lecturing with the new technology. I mean, they're stuck in like 1860. And you know, with these online large courses that places like MIT, for example, have launched, basically all they do is put up a camera and videotape a lecture. It's like, you can't do that. That's the YouTube and the technologies that allow for the dissemination of video, they have their own medium. Right. The medium is the message. You have to use the bloody technology. You can't stay stuck a century back, which is why we've done tight edits and filled in the backgrounds with images.

1:40:02And there's just no reason that that can't be everywhere. Right. So and why, why would you pay? Look, people probably pay $300 ,000 for an Ivy League education, because that's where they meet their wife or their husband when it gets right down to it. Is that really what it is? Well, Joe, look, you never know what an institution is doing. Okay, so what does the university do? Lectures, accreditation. Okay, but that's not all. It gives you an identity for four years while you sort your life out. It gives you an opportunity to mature away from your parents. It gives you the opportunity to build a new network of peers, not only living peers, but peers in the historical tradition.

1:40:44And it gives you an opportunity to meet the person that you might be with for the rest of your life. That's a big deal. And it's a selective opportunity because you bring bright kids together, we're hard working and they get a chance to meet each other. That might be the whole value of an Ivy League education. It's hard to specify these things. Now, we're trying to replicate that on Peterson Academy with the social media side. And, you know, that's a new technology. We don't know how it'll work, but the fact that it's selective and it won't be full of trolls and bots and bad corporate actors should mean that people will build build social networks that are of high value.

1:41:18Because that's one of the things obviously that's what you do in a bloody MBA program. You know, it's not what you learn at an MBA program that confers the value of the degree. It's the fact that it was bloody difficult to get in because the GMAT is an IQ test, essentially, and the social network you build in the MBA program. You carry that with you while we're doing what we can to replicate that online. And we're going to make sure that we offer potential employees a record of our students progress and success so that they have some sense that the person who they hire has done the apprenticeship work on their own necessary to accredite them as a, say, a valid student.

1:41:56And a hard worker. And I think we can do that. And I think we can do it more effectively than universities do it. I know how to measure these things. It's going to be very interesting if that becomes a criteria in which people are hired. You know, if someone, if it really does become a thing, and it becomes something where people are accepting that as an education and seeking people out in that regard, is going to be very interesting to see if more of those emerge. If you start a trend and then... Well, at minimum, we can assure a potential employer of two things. We didn't attract a woke crowd.

1:42:35And we didn't indoctrinate our bloody students. So that's not a bad minimum. You know, you can assure intelligence. You can assure a work ethic because they've completed the course material and properly. We can assure that's properly measured. But we can also say, here's a bunch of things they didn't learn. Right. And the courses are subversive in the most traditional possible way. So we have Larry Arn, for example, who's the president of Hillsdale. He did a lecture series on Churchill. Now, where are you going to go to university to get a lecture series on Churchill? And Arn was Churchill's primary biographer, one of his primary biographers.

1:43:11So that's a big deal. You know, we've got Nigel Baker from Oxbridge, lecturing on the legacy of UK colonialism. Well, you're not going to get that anywhere else. And he's a great lecture. And he's a brilliant man and very, very courageous. And Larry Arn is exactly the same category. So the technology we're using is revolutionary in a variety of different ways. The lectures are high quality, but the whole ethos of the educational offering is completely different than what is on offer. Say at the typical Ivy League, Harvard, for example, which is such a catastrophe. Like I was there at Harvard in the 1990s.

1:43:52I loved that place. It was really forward looking and aimed at excellence with very minor exceptions, like truly minor exceptions. It was a powerhouse man. And I went back to and saw a bunch of my old professor friends. Month ago, you know, and they've all joined free speech movement at Harvard, and they're fighting against thrown administration. And these were like the best professors I ever met in my life. And that's what they've been reduced to. When did it start specifically in the universities? Yes. It started with the incursion of what would you say, modified Marxism in the 1960s and then really accelerated in the 70s.

1:44:34It sort of went like this, you know how things fail, gradually, gradually, gradually, then suddenly, and hit a critical, it hit critical mass in terms of failure, probably around 2014, 15, pretty much when things blew up around me. That's why they blew up around me. And what do you think ultimately caused it to not course correct? What do you think ultimately caused these universities to give in to that? Okay, let's talk about ultimate. So let me tell you a story, an old story. So there's a myth from Mesopotamia called the Inuma Elish, which is one of the oldest stories that we have. And let me just lay out the story because these ancient myths capture the fundamental dynamics of culture.

1:45:23They're winnowed to do that. Okay, so the Mesopotamians believe that the world emerged as the interaction of two forces. We already alluded to them chaos in order. They had a god of order, Apsu. He was a male god. He's the patriarchal, patriarchy. That's, you can think of Apsu as the patriarchy. And a female god, Tiamat. Tiamat is a dragon and a dragon of chaos. And the word Tiamat is the same word, etymologically, as the word Tohu Vabohu. And that's the chaos that God makes the world out of at the beginning of time in the Hebrew accounts. Okay, so you have Apsu and Tiamat and they come together.

1:46:02Chaos in order come together. And they produce the first world. And in the Mesopotamian account of things, that's a world of higher -order gods. Now those higher -order gods forget their ancestors and go about their business. And they get increasingly fractious and undisciplined and noisy and hedonistic and immature. And at one point, they kill their father. And they try to live on his corpse. Right? So you see an echo of this. It's very complicated. You see an echo of this in the story of Pinocchio. You know, there's a scene in Pinocchio where Jepetto ends up in the body of a whale. Okay, so here's the underlying biological dynamic.

1:46:45It's so remarkable. So imagine a society sets itself up according to a set of principles. And it stores, it creates a giant storehouse of wealth. Okay, that's what a carcass is. Right? So if you're a primordial herder, your wealth is in the bodies of your herd animals. Okay. A body is a symbol of stored wealth. In the Mesopotamian pantheon, the careless kill their father and live on its corpse. Okay, that's what's happened to the universities. So since World War II, the West has gathered huge storehouses of value everywhere. Harvard's a great example. In Mensa, Daumont, remarkably valuable brand.

1:47:34Disney's another example. And what's happened is, and this happens all the time. If you have an unguarded storehouse of value, the parasites come marching in. Right? And they try to live on the corpse. Now they can for a while because it's a storehouse of value, but they kill the spirit. Now what happens in the Mesopotamian story is that chaos itself comes flooding back in the form of timeout, who's extremely the goddess of chaos, who's extremely angry that her husband has been sacrificed by the careless denizens of the world. Well, that's the death of God. So yeah, and the Savior emerges in the Mesopotamian story.

1:48:14It's so interesting. So the Savior that emerges to set things right has eyes all the way around his head. So he pays attention. And he speaks magic words. That's Marduk. And so the Mesopotamian Emperor was an avatar of Marduk. And he's the spirit of responsibility that sets the world right. Okay. So what are we seeing? We're seeing the invasion of storehouses of wealth by the parasites, fundamentally. Has that killed them? I don't, I can't think through how you would rescue an institution, a typical upper level university institution. What are you going to do? How are you going to do that? You're going to fire 80 % of the people?

1:48:56Who's going to do that? No one's going to do that. Now you could say, well, we'll make the EI initiative. They're kind of doing that in Florida. But all you do is change the words. I mean, that's what the postmodernists did with Marxism in the 1970s when it no longer was fashionable to worship Stalin. And if everybody realized that he was psychopathic murderer, all that happened was the French intellectuals changed the terminology. And they invented a form of Marxism that was even worse than Marxism, which was really quite the bloody achievement. Do I think they can be rejuvenated? I can't see how?

1:49:39Well, when you have people like the president of Harvard, that gets fired for plagiarism, but maintains the exact same salary and a different job. Yeah, as if demotion to a full Harvard professor was, well, you know, she's not suitable to be president, but she can still be a fully tenured professor at Harvard. It's really she can, eh, with that publication record. I just interviewed Carol Swain. Do you know who Carol Swain is? No. Black law professor who from whom gay plagiarized much of her work. Yeah, fun. So what do you do with an institution that's that far gone? You saw what those university professors did at Congress.

1:50:16Yeah. And they thought they were right. They didn't even look put upon. They looked no, sorry. They looked put upon and shocked when they were challenged by the congressman. They're not accustomed to being questioned and also to communicating outside of their bubble and their bubble, which where their opinion is held in high high steam. Yes, and everyone else is an idiot as far as they're concerned. Well, when the woman from Penn, when she was smiling, it was on it was answering these questions. It was, it was, I'd never seen anything like that. Like I knew that the universities had become warped.

1:50:50And the warped is very deep. So I talked about the misopotamian story. And there's a, there's another angle of deep warping. So the spirit of marks is a very old spirit. It was alive in the French Revolution. It was alive in the Soviet Revolution. It's, you can trace it all the way back to the story of Canaan Abel as far as I'm concerned. And the story of Canaan Abel is the story of the fundamental human dynamic after the fall of man. So in so far as we're historical creatures, the story of Adam of Canaan Abel lays out the essential psychological conflict that characterizes human beings. And so you have Canaan on the one side.

1:51:34So Canaan doesn't bring his best to the table. He makes second rate offerings and lies about it. And then they're not accepted by him or his fellow man or women or by society or by God. And then makes him bitter. And instead of learning, he takes this complaints to God. And he says something like, well, what the hell's going on here? I'm breaking myself in half, making my sacrificial offerings and everything's being rejected. What kind of stupid cosmos did you produce? And God says to him something very interesting and complicated. He says something like, you're blaming your bitterness on your failure.

1:52:17But and you have failed and you know it and you didn't have to. But it isn't your failure that's making you bitter. You've invited something into inhabit you that's turned you against yourself and what's good. He says to him, sin crouches at your door like a sexual arouse predatory animal. And you invited it into have its way with you. And there's a sexual metaphor there. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's it's rough, man. It's rough. You don't get to be a high school shooter till you've had a thousand hours of brooding over your misery. And so that's what God tells Canaan. And that's that makes him violently angry and murderous.

1:53:00And so he kills able he kills his own ideal and able you have cane who makes poor sacrifices and wines about it. He's the perennial victim shaking his fist at God in the world. Refusing to learn from his experiences. And he becomes and you have able who makes the right sacrifices and names upward. That's the pattern. Two spirits. That's the Joker and Batman. That's Lex Luthor and Superman. That's Voldemort and Harry Potter. It's Satan and Christ. Like it's it's this eternal recurrent pattern. And one of its manifestations is Marxism and another one of its manifestations is postmodernism. And so this is a very old story.

1:53:40It's a very old story. And you can understand Canaan's point, you know, because people do break themselves in half in life trying to struggle forward. And they're they're not successes in their own eyes and they're rejected by other people. It undermines their faith in being itself. You can understand that. But but you're called upon to bring your best to the table no matter what happens to you and to maintain your faith in your courage and to aim up. There's no excuses. Your past trauma. There's no excuses. Doesn't matter what it is. And so there's this battle. And what's happened in the universities is the universities have been captured by the resentful spirit of can.

1:54:24And so that's all flowered up with postmodern language. There's no ultimate unity. That's the claim of the postmodernists. There's no overarching narrative. It's like that's what the postmodernist claims skepticism with regards to meta narratives. It's like, well, what do you mean by that? You mean that everything culminates in disunity? That's your theory of being. So how the hell do we come together as a society then and around what? Well, everyone goes their own way. Yeah, that's called war. So there's some, is there a higher unity in which everything participates or not? Well, the postmodernists is like, no, have it your way.

1:55:01Nihilism, disunity, anxiety, hopelessness, social disintegration, conflict. That's that pathway. And that's, that's just where it starts. That's just, that's the optimistic view. So we're trying to present at Peterson Academy. And the other enterprises that I'm engaged in, we're trying to present a unified underlying vision and a traditional unifying underlying, underlying vision. And I think that it's, it's understandable. What we talked about it in the first part of this interview. I, once you understand that sacrifices the basis of community. And once you understand that there's a ultimate form of sacrifice.

1:55:48And that's what's demanded of you if you're going to strive upward. Then the contours of the religious story that undergirds the West fall into place. And that's a very remarkable thing to observe. And I think that's going to happen. I think that's, I think we're at the end of the enlightenment. And something new is striving mightily to emerge. Well, it's also interesting that these higher education institutes, even though they do have, you know, the way you're describing their extremely wealthy. They're extremely valuable. The name brand to them is still extremely potent. They have so many things going against them in terms of like an objective analysis of what's good for your education and what's good for preparing for your future.

1:56:43And then on top of that, they're burdened with this insane financial problem. The insane problem of first of all student loans. Being something you never get out of. And the fact that we all know that the human frontal lobe, especially on males, doesn't even fully develop into your 25. So you're kind of taking advantage of a developing mind and locking them into an insane burden of debt and ideology and ideology. And so you're strapped with debt. So you must work. And then you must work within these structures that have been infected by this ideology because everyone's coming out of the universities into those places, into those businesses and corporations.

1:57:28And they're deeper and deeper interwoven into the structure of these businesses to the point where they're inescapable. And then you can't leave because you have financial burdens. You have all the student loan debt to pay off. Right. Something is an alternative to that if it can become effective to the term like if people can get employment. You know, it's interesting like. Well, as soon as as soon as we determine the accreditation route, like I said, I'm an active communication with the number of people who are interested in accreditation, but I have to figure out if that's the right route. If it isn't, I'm going to work directly with interested employers to make sure that what our students obtain as a consequence of going through the Peterson Academy process is recognized by them as a marker of a high quality applicant.

1:58:19Yes. And I know that that problem is solvable because I know how to do that. Well, there's a lot of employers now that are kind of discounting the ideas of degrees. And Elon is a big one of them. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, there's quite a few people that you shouldn't dismiss someone as being qualified for a certain position just because they've gone through some very formal process. Not if the formal process isn't predicated on general cognitive ability and conscientiousness. Right. If it's predicated on bullshit and a grift, which a lot of it is, what do you think is going to happen with society in general, with the implementation of AI and the inevitable erosion of jobs?

1:59:05I don't know if the erosion of jobs is inevitable. No. Well, we've thought that before. Well, first of all, the first thing I would say is like, all bets are off. Right. All bets are off. Right. We're going to have hyper intelligent AI within five years. In fact, we already have it while I'm being pessimistic. Right. I've used chat GPT and GROC and some systems that my colleagues have developed from. We built our own large language models in -house. So I built a, my colleague, Victor Swift, built a large language model for me, trained on my books. And I used it to help me write this next book because I could come across biblical passages that I couldn't understand.

1:59:45And I could ask this AI system for a first pass interpretation and it could do a good job. Wow. And we're going to release that along with the book. Yeah, so that was really something. And I'll tell you, chat GPT and GROC were unbelievably useful as research assistants. So they're about as smart as high end undergraduates. They lie a lot and you have to corner them like mad to get them to provide you with information that's valid. What have you found them lying about? Oh, they make up references that don't exist. So for example, for chat GPT about a quarter of the academic references it produces for you don't exist.

2:00:20What? Yeah, yeah. Well, it doesn't know. Like it's, it will produce a reference for you that's completely plausible except that it doesn't exist. So if I ask chat GPT question, it'll answer and it'll give me the references because I ask for the references. Then I have to go and look up all the references and read them, first of all, because you're supposed to read the things you refer to. But also, I have to make sure that it's not wandered off into some hallucinatory pathway. But that'll be taken care of in no time flat as far as I'm concerned and musk has already got plans to do that. So what will the addition of these AI systems mean to us?

2:00:59God, well, I talked to Elon about this when we had our interview and it's going to depend to some degree Joe on how we train the damn things. So there's this problem called the alignment problem. That's how the engineers describe it, which is how do we know that these AI systems will have human interest in mind? And you think, okay, how do we make machines that have human interests in mind? And then you think, oh, well, we have the same problem with adolescents. How do we ensure that we train our children so that they have their own interests and broad social interests in mind? And the answer is the answer always has been that you provide them with a classic religious and humanities education, because that provides an axis of stability around which all other knowledge can be organized.

2:01:44Now, the problem with the large language models at the moment is they're hyper -trained on modern text, and so they're ideologically adult and woke. And so we've been experimenting with training LLMs on a more classic basis. So we trained one on the King James Bible, and we haven't released it, because I don't know what to think about it. It's like you can ask the King James Bible a question. I was like, what the hell does that mean? Right. Well, like seriously, what does that mean? And before we release it, we also want to make sure that we have it. We've developed the underlying technology properly.

2:02:22Okay, so what's the answer to your question? What AI will do will depend on the intent of the people who design it? Here's a terrifying thing. You tell me what you think about this. All right, so your thoughts are orienting phenomena. So you think so that you can lay out a pathway to a desired destination, and then you can evaluate the thought to see if that's a good strategy to get there. Okay, so there's an implication that comes along with that. A thought enters the theater of your imagination in relationship to your goal. So you can formulate that religious language. The spirit that answers your prayers, the nature of the spirit that answers your prayers will depend on the nature of your prayer.

2:03:13Yeah, that's for sure. Right. So imagine that you're harboring feelings of resentment and bitterness as you're plotting your economic pathway forward. And so you're trying to think about what you should do, but you have the spirit of resentment, bitterness sitting on your shoulder. The thoughts that enter your mind are going to be a consequence of your possession by that bitterness to the degree that you've allowed it to shape your goal. So here's a corollary of that. This is stunning. It's a stunning thing to understand. If you orient your aim upward in the highest manner, the spirit that informs your thought will be the spirit of the highest possible aim.

2:04:02And God, that's something to know, man. So that's what a religious practice, the fundamental religious practice is for. It's like get rid of the corrupt motivation, get rid of it, get rid of it, pray for the salvation of your soul. That you're aiming right because your aim is going to determine the content of your thoughts. And that is how it works technically. That's how it works neuropsychologically. Your thoughts are the handmaiden of your aim. Right, which is why we're always worried about sociopaths because they never abandoned that corrupt motivation. Yeah, well, they're basically the best way to think about the narcissists and the hedonists and the historic types and the borderlines and the anti -social personalities is that they never matured, courtically.

2:04:51So like children come into the world in a way as a bundle of competing sub -cortical motivations. And they're very powerful motivations. Anger, for example, you watch a two -year -old have a temper tantrum. It's quite the show. And they want short -term immediate gratification. Now, what happens as your cortex matures, you transcend those lower order instinctual motivations. That would be the Freudian id. And you start to regulate your behavior in relationship to your own future. So you stop doing stupid, pleasurable things in the moment that will compromise you. And you start to be able to incorporate the views of other people.

2:05:29That's how kids at three start to develop the ability to have friends. And the more sophisticated you get, the more other people and their perspectives are part of your perceptions. And the more the future is taken into account in your actions. And the cortex is actually there so that that can happen. And it has to happen in a social context because you have to pick up the society of your peers, obviously. And so conditions like psychopathy or even power seeking for that matter are conditions of radical immaturity. And so that's how you explain their emergence. And one of the things that's interesting about that is it provides a very powerful argument against moral relativism.

2:06:15So there's a real difference between maturation and immaturity. Maturation is productive and sustainable. And immaturity is divisive and destructive. And there's no if ands or buts about that. And so see, it's a different view of mental health. Because the classic therapist produced view of mental health is that mental health is sort of inside you. You know, it's in your psyche. It's in your mind. But it's not like your mental health is the harmony of your existence in relationship to the future and other people. Right? And that sense of well -being that can infuse you if you get the balance right isn't a reflection of the proper structuring of your function of your mind or your brain.

2:07:09It's a phenomena that emerges when everything is in its proper place and operating harmoniously. That's what you experience in music. Like music represents that. Everything in its proper place. That's what Adam is called upon by God to do in the story of Adam and Eve to subdue the world, subdue everything in its proper place so that the whole structure operates in a harmonious manner. As much more expanded view of what constitutes mental health. Anyways, education should serve that. Right? And so if you take the staff of Moses that's planted in a single place, the community grows around that. That's the same as the magic wand of Gandalf.

2:07:52That idea of a magic wand. It's the traditional ethos associated with transformation and sacrifice around which communities aggregate themselves. And the proper humanities and religious education inculcates that center structure so that knowledge can be organized around it. The last time we talked, I suggested to you that we see the world through a biblical lens. Literally see it. I mean literally it structures our perceptions. And I've investigated that far more deeply. And what seems to be the case with a corpus of stories like the biblical library is that if you know the stories, it structures your psyche so that you have a place to put information.

2:08:40And so that enables you to understand the current world and everything that's happening, but to place everything in the right context. And so the transmission of an unbroken cultural edifice, story -based edifice is the manner in which you solve the alignment problem. Unite your society, integrate your psyche, pursue what's meaningful and protect yourself from chaos and anxiety. So, and a solid education has been the traditional way of ensuring that that occurs. And so, well, that's what we hope we can offer with Peterson Academy. That's the purpose of my books as well to elucidate that. And so, can the universities do that?

2:09:27I don't think so. I don't know if they have that philosophy. The philosophy and the way you're laying it out resonates with me. I think it's accurate. I think it when I'm in harmony in my life, it all seems to make sense. It all works together. What you're saying, it just rings true. I don't know if it, if they're so infected with this ideology, that flies in the face. They rejected it all hard to, yes. The premise of the postmodernist is that there's no uniting metanerative. If you had to define postmodernism in one phrase, that would be it. And so, and so what have they done? Here's the association with Marxism.

2:10:13Okay, so the Marxists have a counter -narrative. It's the narrative of power. And it is a very powerful counter -narrative. Because if you don't put the proper uniting principle at the pinnacle, it's power emerges immediately. Because people play power games. You can attain a certain degree of success and a fair amount of domination by playing a power game. And so Marx observed that one of the cardinal power games is economic. And it is probably the cardinal power game. There's economic disparity. Those at the top do take advantage of their position at the top to stabilize their position. In a functional society, productive people are at the top.

2:10:55But even among those at the top, they're still power -seeking crooks. And so now Marx, of course, would say that everyone who's economically successful is a power -seeking crook. And you know, that's a great thing to believe if you're a resentful satanist like Marx. Well, so the losers look at the world. Well, that's for sure. But there is some justification in it because among the successful there are. Yes. Right. Okay. And a large percentage because that's the culture in which they're existing. Yeah. Well, a dangerous percentage. And a critique of power is always a valid critique. Okay. So what the postmodernists did when Marxism became ethically unacceptable.

2:11:34And that happened in the 1970s is they just, they metastasized it. They said, okay, we've got a victim victimizer narrative that's played out in the economic sphere. And that's basically Marxism. We'll just multiply that until the same interpretive framework can be applied to all possible group distinctions. That's basically intersectionality. So sex is an oppressor versus oppressed narrative. Gender is an oppressed versus oppressor narrative. Ethnicity, race, ability, attractiveness, height. Any qualitative distinction is now recast as a battle between oppressor and oppressed. It's an unbelievably brutal story.

2:12:17It's basically equivalent to the claim that the spirit of power is the ruler of the cosmos. How can they do all this and ignore the possibility of an oppressor like a male adopting the identity of the oppressed of a female. And entering into female spaces and oppressing females. You can see that it can't be dealt with because it's right. Well, that is why. Look, one of the things you see that's very characteristic of the utopian left is the absolute insistence that anyone oppressed is a victim. It's like, okay, we'll give the devil as to some oppressed people are victims. But some people who claim to be oppressed aren't victims.

2:13:08They're the worst kind of monsters that the most deranged imagination could barely conceptualize utopian naïve radical progressives, refuse their imagination for evil. And that delivers them into the hands of the absolute bloody psychopaths. Right. And they just don't see it. It's like, oh, those trans people, they're just striving to be free. It's like you wait, you wait until you have one of them in your house, buddy, and you're going to find out just exactly how naïve you are. So, so how do they protect themselves? They just deny the existence of malevolence or attributed to socio -economic inequality.

2:13:49All criminals are victims. It's like, no, first of all, lots of people who are victims aren't criminals. In fact, poverty does not cause criminality. That's a lie. And it's a very damaging lie to the poor. Because if poverty was equivalent to criminality, the logical thing to do is just to lock up all the poor. Right. Well, there are many pathways from poverty forward in one of them is criminality. But you can say the same thing about wealth. So the idea that that's basically a Marxist theory of causality is like, well, those people's oppression is what's causing their lack of law abiding what conducts.

2:14:30Like, no, no, wrong, seriously wrong, and dangerously wrong, and ridiculously naïve. That's not how the world works at all. Right. You're also, in a sense, you're encouraging this kind of behavior because you're not punishing people for it because you're saying it's not their fault. Or you're even valorizing it. Oh, you poor thing. Right. And you're allowing more of it to take place. Well, we know that so the dark tetrad types. So those are the subclinical psychopaths. Okay. So they're psychopathic. That makes them predatory and parasitic. That's the definition of a psychopath. Okay. They're narcissistic.

2:15:11So what does that mean? They want unearned social status. Right. They're Machiavellian. So what does that mean? It means that their use of language is subordinated to their demand for hedonistic gratification and power. So like you and I, in principle, we hope we're trying to pursue a threat of conversation that leads to further development, let's say for us and for the audience. But I could easily be in here thinking, okay, what the hell do I have to tell Joe to increase my social media status? Right. And to play this situation as a game to enhance my own status or to further my selfish desires.

2:15:49That's Machiavellian. That was the dark triad. And what further investigation revealed that you had to add an additional dimension to that to fully flesh out the picture, sadism, what's that positive delight in the unnecessary misery of others. That's the dark tetrad types. Well, dark tetrad types portrayed themselves as victims. Right. That's one of their Machiavellian strategies. So now you're in your question is, well, how do we segregate the real victims, so to speak, from the false victims. And one of the answers to that is like, beware of those who claim victimization as a justification for their moral, what would you say for the moral transgressions.

2:16:33I did this because I'm a victim. It's like really. Right. Really, that was your reason. Poor you. That's your story. You monster. There are no monsters. It's like, if you think there are no monsters, you're, you're naive and willfully blind to the point of delusion. And what would you call it? What do they say? There are none so blind as those who will not see that certainly applies on the malevolent side. And then from the point of view of if you're looking at the people that are committing crimes, there's the unfortunate reality that people mimic their environment. And if you grow up in an environment where there are no positive role models and you see nothing but rampant crime around you, even good people go down bad paths.

2:17:28You get. Okay. So anti social personality is somewhat heritable. There is some familial transmission. There, there is a role played by fatherlessness in particular. And that's perhaps because fatherless boys tend to turn towards a gang orientation. And the gangs of adolescents have a short term time horizon. So they future discount badly and that produces a proclivity for short term gratification. And that includes like idiot criminal behavior. Right. Yeah. So what you need in a father, you need someone who encourages, encourages intelligent upward aiming sacrifice and an orientation towards others and future development.

2:18:11That's what the spirit of the father really does is that encouragement. So and that what reward for delay of gratification. So that's another indication of the relationship between say upward striving moral orientation and maturity. If you're mature, you can delay gratification. What does that mean? It means you've integrated the future into your perceptions. Right. And that has to be socially scaffolded, especially for men. Women, they, they get initiated by nature in every society that we know of men have to be initiated. Right. Right. Because that catalyzation of maturity is a difficult thing.

2:18:57Difficult and unlikely, but, but possible and necessary. So, so how do you reach the people that are young adolescents that are trapped in that vicious cycle? Yeah. Well, I think I can tell you the answer to that. You know, a lot of young men have been watching and listening to the sorts of things that I've been writing about and producing. And I, every time someone comes up to me and tells me that reading, say, 12 rules for life had helped them. I ask why? It's like, okay, good. What, what changed? And the overwhelming pattern of response is something like, I started to understand the necessity of responsibility.

2:19:42Now, you might then ask, well, you hear from your parents, you, in principle, you hear from the school system, although that's probably gone that, you know, you should grow up and be responsible. Why did it make a difference? Why did it make a difference to you to read that in what I wrote? And the answer is, I think the answer is I didn't take the standard conservative approach. I didn't say, you should, you must, you ought, even though those things are true. I said, there's no difference between responsibility and adventure. That's a killer thing to know. The heavier the responsibility, the more profound the adventure.

2:20:21And so everyone knows that, but it's not, it's not catalyzed, eh? So I just watched the Hobbit Wild Back Classic Adventure story. And of course, what it's billbow to begin with, billbow. He's this little Hobbit, right? Said like Abraham, he's living his comfortable life and the wizard comes along and says, it's time for you to develop your shadow side, because of course he becomes a thief and to go on your adventure. And he agrees to do that. And it's a weighty adventure. He has to contend with the ring of power. Right? That's the ultimate intent. That's the temptation that Christ is offered by Satan in the desert, the temptation of power.

2:21:00And that's what, that's the temptation that Frodo has to billbow has to contend with. Well, he has this adventure. Well, what's the adventure? It's responsibility has to carry that ring. And it is one of the rings that unites everything power. It's just the malevolent ring that unites everything. And so I've been suggesting to young men in particular, it's like you want to get your life together. Take the path of maximal responsibility, not because you should, even though you should. That's not why. It's because that's the pathway of maximal adventure. So you say, well, what's the meaning of life?

2:21:37It's like, it's the meaning that reveals itself when you take the pathway of maximal responsibility. That's exactly the message of the crucifixion. That's precisely the message. Pathway of maximal responsibility. And that's a terrifying thing. There's no difference between that and the dragon and treasure stories that are unbelievably archaic. The greatest possible treasure is to be found where the danger is most intense. Right. Always. Right. The dragon guards the gold. Always. Right. Well, and so one thing to know is that if there's a dragon, there's a treasure somewhere. Really. Right. Really.

2:22:16Right. You know, my family and I have really learned this in the last six years because we were subject to continued and what would assaults in the public sphere that were designed to be deadly. And what do you mean by that? Designed you deadly? Oh interviews with journalists in particular snake journalists whose every single utterance is designed to entrap the person being interviewed into saying something that will devastate their reputation personally to enhance the status of the interviewer. Like the Kathy Newman conversation. Well, Kathy at least had a bit of a sense of humor, but, um, but the intent.

2:23:00Oh, you the intent. That's the serpent. Yeah. That's the intent. It's like, well, Nellie Bowles, who interviewed me for the New York Times, now part of the free press. She admitted that she said that her job out the New York Times, like the job of many of the reporters was to find someone demolish their reputation by any means necessary and elevate their status in consequence. Wow. Yeah. What a terrible job. Brutal. So isn't it terrifying that that that's the old gray lady. That's the most trusted respected source of news and that their intent was just to destroy. Yeah, it wasn't the news. It wasn't real journalism.

2:23:43The nuanced. Various elements of what a human being is the pros and cons, the goods, the bads, the ugly, the battle that they have. Not that. No, no, not an accurate assessment, not an objective analysis of the person. Just. Their status. Yeah. Well, that's part of the danger is that people know that now and people know who's doing that now. And then they go after them and you see that now. Yeah. And journalists say, oh, it's attack on journalism. Like, you're not doing journalism. You're doing hit pieces and took you're doing it under the guise of journalism. But it's not journalism. It's kind of evil.

2:24:27Yeah. It's kind of fucked up. Yeah, kind of. I've seen quite a bit of it where I'm like, especially with people that I know the actual story and what was really going on behind the scenes. I was like, this is mad. And this is wild. Well, we started to learn after this. It happened two or three times. Like, there's kind of a process. Say because you're exposed to that. And then there's an intermediary period where it looks like it might succeed. And that's very stressful. That's usually when people come out with their apologies. Right. Because they're just terrified. They're going to lose. Well, I did lose my job.

2:24:59And I lost my clinical practice. Right. So like the costs are real. So your situation in Canada was that they wanted you to sign up for reeducation. Oh, no, that's already that's that's the plan. Right. But I couldn't sign up. They said already that I have to do that. But we have an appeal in at the moment that's blocking it. And this is all just the only way that affects is what in Canada? What is it? I wouldn't they if I don't undergo the reeducation process successfully, they'll suspend my license. And well, also say why? You know, there's a lot of doctor Peterson is uneducable. He's unprofessional.

2:25:39He's violated the ethical tenants of his profession. Right. Just because you have a different perspective on things than they do. No, it's because I'm actually telling the truth that clinicians bloody well know and are too cowardly to admit. So, you know, they went after me for four reasons, probably one of them was the entire transcript of the last conversation I had with you. Whoops. Right. That was submitted as a complaint because I was talking about the climate lies. They went after me because of the comments I've made about the trans butchers and liars, the surgeons and the therapists who are enabling them.

2:26:17That's a major part of it. That's a major part of it. They went after me because I went after Trudeau and his former chief of staff. And what else? Those are the major three. There's probably four complaints aligned with each of those dimensions. And so that's cost me about a million dollars legal fees so far. So it's a very hard battle to fight. It's very annoying because the accusations continue to flow in even though that's a choice of the college. And I've already been sentenced to reeducation of indefinite duration. Right. Till they're satisfied that I've learned whatever the hell less and I'm supposed to learn.

2:26:58So that the only reason that isn't happening is because we now have an appeal in front of this Supreme Court in Canada. And so I don't think it'll succeed but we'll see. Is it important to you to maintain your license or is it important to you to win this? It's important. There's two things that are important to me. Likely one is I'm not going to let a pack of ideologically -addled moralists lying moralists who are facilitating the butchery and sterilization of children take away my license not without a war. So that's one thing. The second thing is I'm likely I'm in a prime position in Canada to undertake this battle against the woke licensing boards.

2:27:47Because I have the money and what the hell are they going to do to me? I'm not practicing. They can't take away my income. And likely they can't block in my reputation except among those who are willing to assume that the licensing colleges are playing a straight game. So really there's nothing they can do to me. Plus if it was only a personal thing apart from the fact that I'm not letting my license be taken by a pack of the intellectually -addled hypocrites. I don't really, there's a part of me that's deeply ashamed to be a psychologist at the moment. I'm so appalled by my compatriots. They know that this gender dysphoria pathology is a lie.

2:28:35They all know it. And they won't say anything. Now partly they won't say anything because the consequences for saying something are not trivial. But the consequences for not saying anything is that people like Chloe Cole end up with the rest cutoff when they're 15. Right? Well that actually matters.

2:28:55So practically speaking in a sense the battle doesn't mean anything to me because I'm fighting to remain a member of a club that I don't really want to be part of. But there is a, is there a principal at stake? Well there's a variety of principles at stake. And so if I stop or lose all of the woke licensing enterprises, they'll just have their sway. All the physicians in Canada are terrified to say what they think. Anybody who's governed by a professional college, they censor themselves like Matt. And it's really appalling for psychologists because all of the psychologists who are properly trained, they know that all of this is a lie.

2:29:39And not just a lie. A malevolent, vicious and destructive lie. Everything about its a lie. You know, Musk revealed the other day that the people, the professionals that were interacting with him in regard to his transitioning son told him that if he didn't abide by their dictates that his son was much more likely to commit suicide. But that's a lie. No one who's educated as a psychologist believes that to be true. No one at minimum, if you're educated what you understand is that underneath gender dysphoria is something more substantial, which is a proclivity towards depression and anxiety. If you're depressed and anxious, you have a higher risk of suicide.

2:30:21You have to account for that before you attribute any of the remainder to gender dysphoria as such. And everyone who's a psychologist also understands that body focused discomfort for women at puberty is normative. Because when women who have a higher probability of being depressed and anxious do become depressed and anxious, it preferentially takes the form of bodily discomfort. That's been known forever. So Chloe Cole, for example, no one explained that to her. No one sat her down and said, well, you're not afraid. She told me that the reason she decided to transition was because she kind of had a crush on Kardashian and that body type.

2:31:07You know, hyper curvy, hyper feminine and Chloe realized when she entered puberty that she was probably going to have a boyish figure. And Chloe's a very attractive person. She would have had no trouble attracting the attention of men. But you know, she was 11, 12, what the hell does she know? And she wasn't going to be the woman she had envisioned. She didn't really understand that, you know, there's a variety of female forms that men find attractive. That's for sure. And she certainly would have fallen into that category. She didn't know that it was typical for girls to undergo a fair bit of confusion when they hit puberty and that that would take the form of negative emotion.

2:31:47No one told her that. They just rushed her down the puberty blocking and surgical pathway. That's inexcusable. It's evil. Yet it is. It's the worst thing. It's the worst thing I've seen professionals do not only in my lifetime. I've studied atrocity for 40 years. I've never seen anything worse than what's happening right now. And that includes the sorts of things that were done in the camps in in Germany. At least the god damn Nazis admitted what they did was wrong. They tried to hide it. We trumpet it as a moral virtue. We're freeing the children. It's like, no, I don't think so. Mother's. I think what you're doing is sacrificing your child to the parading of your moral virtue.

2:32:24Oh, my son. He's so confused. He thinks I's a girl, but I still love him. That's how wonderful I am. Jesus Christ, you'll you have no idea how dark that is. It's dark. It's unbelievable. It's attached to an industry now. Yeah, that's very scary. There was an industry and an ideology. It was an article that was originally released where this person admitted that they said it was what was the exact phrase that the way they described gender transition as life saving medical care in order to get insurance for it. Yeah, yeah. Because otherwise insurance won't pay for it. So they were willing to describe it in that way to ensure that people would profit off of it, which is wild.

2:33:09It's it's. It's terrifying. And it's so strange because I never would have believed that this could happen. If you would ask me 20 years ago, if this was going to be a main concern that people worried about their children being roped into this ideology and convinced that they're. And then sterilized and mutilated. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yes. I know. I know. Well, I just no wonder people see even Michael Schellenberger who broke the W. Path files when we talked about the role the W. Path played in establishing their own ideology, the W. Path's ideology, adult butchery as the standard of care for the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association.

2:33:50Schellenberger said that after he had listened to Abigail Shryer and I talk about this trans mutilation, he was so appalled that he literally couldn't believe it. He just shelved it, said, there's no way this can be true. And I can understand that because the more you look into it, the worse it gets. It's unbelievably bad. These surgical procedures are so brutal and so experimental that they're. They're. I'm going to say it again. They're worse than what the Mangali types did in the concentration camps in the 30s and 40s. And that's a pretty goddamn low bar and it's no wonder people don't want to believe it.

2:34:32And people say the lefties I've talked to the centrist, well, it doesn't happen very often. It's like, oh, yeah, how often is too often? Like once is too often and it's not once. That's for sure. No, it's a policy. In fact, you're punished by your governing boards if you don't go along with it. And what about the recent law that they passed in California where the schools don't have to tell the parents that the child has transitioned at school. They hide that information from the parents. Well, they're just letting those children be free, you know, those ignored children, looking desperately for a pathway to what would you call it inclusion and celebration?

2:35:17Oh, you're so brave. And then they're encouraged. That's for sure. They're given positive feedback. Yes, definitely, especially if they're alienated kids to begin with. Yeah, who are unsettled in their identity. Yeah, right and aren't being guarded by anyone and are vulnerable. Right. Right. Right. Oh, yeah. And the parents are indoctrinated into this. Or terrified. Or terrified. Right. Yeah. Inductrinated or the munchows and bright proxy types who get off on the fact that they have a child that's such a burden, but are still really, you know, what would you say bearing up nobly under the weight?

2:35:52And that is a very dark inclination that is well documented. Yeah, well, that's the devouring mother. Yeah. That was what Freud warned about back in like 1880. Yeah. She's a little too close. You remember the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story. Yeah. Gingerbread house. That's a little bit too good to be true when you're lost. What's inside it? The witch that wants to fatten you up for her own and the dead. Yeah. That's the devouring mother. That's the maternal instinct gone mad. Right. Everything good is has the potential for pathology and proportion to its goodness. So Lucifer is the intellect gone mad.

2:36:35Right. The devouring mother is the mother who's a little too close to her kids. Right. Yeah. A little too close. Jesus brutal. Jill. It's just so stunning how widespread it is. At least UK is pulling back and this stuff, but they have socialized medicine. So they actually have to go on data and Canada hasn't pulled back, which is wild. Yeah. And I think that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Most of the European countries have woken up, but I don't think it's going to slow it much because there's a huge underground market and puberty blockers. Oh. You know, I've talked experts who figure that the ratio of people on black market puberty blockers to medically prescribe puberty blockers is at least 10 to 1.

2:37:23Oh, God. So they're just self administering this. Yeah. Right. Oh, God. And it's essentially chemical crustration drugs that they used to use on pedophiles. Oh, God. Yeah. That's for sure. That's what it is. And when you tell people that and they deny it because they don't know and then they find out it is so stunning. They also don't want to know. Right. And no wonder. Yeah. Anyways, that's why we're trying to educate people. Well, Jordan, I'm very happy you're doing this. I really am. It looks amazing. I think it's fantastic. I'm going to try some of them. I'll try some of your courses. It looks exciting.

2:38:05Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's go down a bit and I'll show you some of them. We got Brett and Heather Weinstein. So that's fun. Jonathan Pazzo on symbolism and Christianity. That's excellent. James Orr. He's from Cambridge lecturing on on Plato, Marion Tupi on the economics of human flourishing. That's very optimistic. Of course, there's Brett and Heather evolutionary inference. And is this available currently? It's it's up now, man. It's up now. Yeah. Yeah. The greatest leaders of history. That's a great course. That's very inspiring. John Verveki. I really like John. He's so damn. I'm smart. The boy crisis with Warren Farrell.

2:38:40I did a course on Nietzsche on Beyond Good Neville. Do you want to run that? That's a fun preview. Sure. Let's run that. We'll wrap it up with this. Okay. Okay. On books, I write in a single sentence what it takes other men a book to write that it wasn't egotistical because it happened to be true. Beyond Good Neville is a cardinal work, a pro -dromat of the entire intellectual and political history of the 20th century. Brilliant, romantic, insightful, deep, psyche -shattering, dancing bit of literary genius. He's had a remarkable impact on thought over the last 140 years. It's reasonable to say that he philosophized with a hammer because his thought is extraordinarily condensed to read Nietzsche is daunting psychologically.

2:39:38He's like a motivational speaker. He's practical in the way that philosophers seldom are. Nietzsche and philosophy is a call to arms. To familiarize yourself with him is to arm yourself against the sea of trouble. And since you will encounter a sea of troubles, you better pray that you're armed. And this is one way to do it. All right. How to philosophize with a hammer. Jordan, thank you very much, my friend. Hey, man. It's always a pleasure to see you. It was very fun watching on Kill Tony too. Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah, that was fun. And that was a good opportunity. You were great too. I can't wait for that to come out because it's fun.

2:40:19Oh, thanks, sir. It's always a pleasure to be on your show. Oh, it's a pleasure. Yeah. Bye, everybody.