#2308 - Jordan Peterson

27:45I've had many friends ruin their fucking lives And then they go through divorces and you've said this best that one of the things that women are very good at is reputation destruction. I've seen that happen. So imagine you are legally entangled with someone who at one point in time you loved intimately and now that person is trying to destroy every aspect of your life and you have to pay for their lawyers. So you have to pay for the general of the army that's trying to destroy your kingdom. And I've seen this happen to many of my friends. And that is why people are afraid of marriage. That's why people are afraid of commitment.

28:30Because the disastrous implications of like, what can happen if it goes sideways? Like what can happen if you wind up hating each other? And what can happen if you just lie to yourself and you trick you, like, want some of the hesitations that I had for getting married is most of my friends that got married when I was young all went through horrible divorces. When I was on news radio, Dave Foley, Stephen Rue and Phil Hartman were all going through it, all going through it in different levels of psychosis. Obviously, Phil Hartman's being the worst because his wife shot him when he was leaving her, by the way.

29:11He decided to leave her and he tried to leave her a few times and she shot him in his sleep and then she shot herself. It's a horrible, horrible story. But Stephen Roo went through it and they you know they'd confide in me and be like oh Jesus Christ The amount of money these women were trying to get from them when they knew that they couldn't afford this so what are the dirty tricks that will happen with divorce lawyers with People that are on sitcoms is When you get on a sitcom if you're an actor and you get on a sitcom it is the most stable job, the greatest job in show business for a lot of them.

29:50Because you're going to get a steady check, you're going to do 24, maybe 26 episodes a year. You're making more money than you've ever made in your whole life. But then you get divorced. So what happens is it gets set up where your ex -wife wants a percentage of what you're making at this very unrealistic level where you're never going to achieve this again. And for Dave Foley, it was so bad that at one point in time, I don't believe he was allowed to go back to Canada. I don't know if that's changed, but the judge literally told him when he told the judge, like, I don't have that kind of money anymore.

30:28I don't have the potential for earning. I was on a hit sitcom, like not even a hit sitcom, but I was on a sitcom on NBC paid a lot of money. And that was the only time I made that kind of money. that judge said to him, your obligation to pay has no relation to your ability to pay. That's Canadian judges for you. Just insin - Those are words you never want to hear even once in your life. I love him. So I was going through this pain not like he was, but just like, oh my God. Oh my God. So there's three people that I was very close to. And then most of the other people that I knew, you know, I knew so many people.

31:08Fortunately, my mother and my stepfather have a great relationship and they have for a long time. So I had that modeled. Like they were always very close and they didn't fight, which is really nice. It was really nice to have that as a model. You know, like I where I realized, okay, it's not everybody's not at each other's throat all the time. And some people actually do enjoy spending time together. You know Tammy and I on the tour she started to introduce me two years ago and to talk about some of the things we're doing in the family some of our family business talk about Peterson Academy talk about essay and so she'd go out on the stage and Was that the first time she had ever gone on stage if you do enormous crowds?

31:54Yeah, well, so so first of all she did that and then we replaced the the business discussion, because we were just doing an update about the family, you know, and so she'd do that. We replaced that with ads and then she started to talk. She talked about the rules, say, in 12 rules for life, or some of the religious things I've been dealing with lately and she'd relate that to something in her own life. And then she does the Q &A at the end of the lecture. And part of that was just, she was along with me and part of that was, Michaela was introducing me for a while and then had to go back to her work.

32:26And so we slaughtered Tammy in because it seemed like a good business decision, but one of the things we figured out very quickly that was really a shock to us was that people really liked especially the Q &As when because what people will offer their questions electronically on this platform called Slido, which is a very good platform for such things. And then Tammy would they could upvote the questions and then Tammy would sort them and and asked me questions kind of from the top down that were thematically relevant to the lecture that I had given. But we found very quickly that people really liked that because they hadn't seen a couple engage in civilized discussion ever.

33:12Seriously, like it was really shocking, Joe. Like, you know, I was shocked when I first started touring by how demoralized people were. like that really, that was really striking and painful to see that on such a mass scale. And then also to see how little encouragement it took to have a really major effect. I mean, there's a positive aspect to that too, but there's also a tragic aspect. It's like, you mean, you just need to have some encouragement. And that was enough, and you never got that, like even once, that's rough when you see that in thousands of people. And it was the same thing. We thought it was the same thing with regards to seeing a functional couple, at least even that model, because Tammy asked me questions.

33:57And she thinks about the questions. And then sometimes she comments, but not that much, but she actually listens to the answers. And she wants to hear the answer. And so, and that dynamic is being played out on stage. And people found that very heartening. And that shows you, well, you said, you know, yourself, and this is why I brought it up, because you had the example from your from your stepfather and your mom of this long -term relationship that worked. How the hell do you orient yourself if you haven't seen that anywhere? Right, and then you consider relationships just like all the bad ones and you're going to be burdened and locked into that.

34:36Did you ever see that video where Alec Baldwin and his wife are on the red carpet and they're being interviewed and they're asking them questions and the wife starts talking and Alex chimes in about something and she said, you're not talking, I'm talking. When I'm talking, you're not talking. On camera and you watch this, you're like, yo, that's what everyone's scared of. Right, that's what I'm definitely talking about. You wanna talk about the tition tyranny, the tyranny of being trapped in a relationship like that is like, oh, and sometimes one person is so, overbearing that the other person just sort of submits to it, right?

35:18And then you're just like, I don't even want to, I don't want to do it. I don't want to deal with this. And so then you just trapped and this person is insulting you and humiliating you publicly. That was the case with Phil Hartman. I got to see that. We would all go, like we went to a party once and I remember she was talking about ex -boyfriends that she lives pickup trucks because her ex -boyfriends had pickup trucks and they would climb into the back of these pickup trucks. and I was like, what the fuck? But she was doing it on purpose to make him squirm and make him uncomfortable. And she would say things like talk about how he's old.

35:53Oh, he's old, he doesn't like to do anything. It was just public humiliation in front of friends. Where you're in this arena where he can't say anything. He can't just go, what the fuck are you talking about? Like why are you talking to me like that? Like why are we doing this? He can't do that because he's public and he's out with us. Maybe you should do it anyways. Probably should do it. Yeah, probably. We're all out and Phil was all about appearances. How it's like. One of the things that he was afraid of with getting married was that he was just starting to break into films. And a lot of the films that he was doing were very family -friendly films.

36:30And it helped that he was a family man. If he was a... Right, so he had an act. He had to sustain too. He had an image. And this was critical in Hollywood. like they had ideas of who you were, okay, you're a family man. Okay, good, good, good. And so if you have this radical change in life or no longer you're a family man, and if you wanna be honest about it and you wanna say, I was in a toxic relationship and some of it was me and some of it was her and this is what happened, like, whoa, now you're opening up the world to this big can of worms, better to keep that can sealed. This episode is brought to you by Farmer's Dog.

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38:27Squarespace Design Intelligence empowers anyone to build beautiful, more personalized websites tailored to your unique needs. And with Squarespace payments, it's super easy to manage payments with just a few clicks. Plus, with Squarespace's integrated and optimized SEO tools, there's all the help you need to get people to your site. Head to squarespace .com slash Emma for a free trial and use code Emma to save 10 % on your first purchase. Yeah well it's generally better not to have your your fights in public and it's certainly better you know I mean I've been thinking about this commandment to honor your mother and father now I've been thinking about what that means I read this book called Angeliz Auschis by Frank McCourt and Frank had a really alcoholic father like like an Irish alcoholic father back in the family had and they lived in terrible poverty and the sister died and like it was rough.

39:30But he said his father was often sober in the morning and he established a relationship with like good morning sober father and kind of put alcoholic drunken nighttime father in a different bin and he could get the benefit of having a father in consequence of that. And that honoring, that's also something that you want to do within a marriage, right? Because your wife is your friend and your lover, but she's also your wife and and you're her husband and that means that a part of keeping that marriage working is honor. And part of the honor is that you don't do that sort of thing in public. Right.

40:11Right. Because you're million. And that's that's the public. Well, that's also in some ways independent. In a way, it's independent of who your wife for husband is. It's like, you know, you can imagine two people fighting in public and one of them or both of them really deserving to have that fight as people. But then to keep the marriage intact, you have to remember, well, this is my wife. She's not just my friend. She's not just someone I know. She's my wife. And we shouldn't be doing primate dominance hierarchy maneuvering in public. We shouldn't be competing for power because is that's gonna destroy the marriage.

40:47So that's part of that honoring, I think, is to remember the role and to keep it, well, sacred is right. I think sacrosanct. Here's another one. Don't ever insult each other, even though you want to. Like you want to like be mean sometimes. Like people get mean to you, you want to be mean back. I don't do that with my friends, so I don't do that with anyone else. I don't want to do that. That's why I don't do it online. I don't get involved in these like hissy -pussy fits online, particularly on Twitter. I just don't think that's the prime place for such things. That's all it is. First of all, again, as someone who looks at everyone like a child or like a baby, I don't...

41:33I'm not angry that people do that. I understand the appeal of it. If I was 15 and Twitter was around, I would be tweeting at every fucking celebrity, saying you're a loser, jump in front of a bus. I would say things just to try to get a reaction out of them. I think a lot of kids do. I think a lot of people don't feel like they have a voice and one way to be heard is to be insulting and one way to heard is to be negative. If you look at the majority of discourse on social media in regards to hot button issues, it's disrespectful. It's contentious, it's shitty and insulting. And I've decided, like, over time in my life to not do that.

42:18I don't want to do that. I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in that kind of conflict. like I see real conflict all the time as an MMA commentator, you know, I see the most violent legal conflict other than war all the time. That's conflict. That's like real conflict and resolution and, you know, purposeful agreed upon conflict. like regular like back and forth and salt. Wouldn't it be better to figure out what you agree and disagree on and why and talk? Like why can't we all figure out how to do that? That should be a discipline you learn at an early age. Most of the issues that people have, if the person comes at you insulting and aggressive, either that person is ignorant or they're playing a game, okay, and the game is to get your emotions up, to get you reactive and to be reacting to them instead of acting.

43:21The game is like if someone's hyper aggressive in a fight, the game is to put you on the defensive. So they don't, like the best defense is a good offense. You learn that early on in fighting. So you learn that you can be very offensive and then the person never has a chance to get their game going. That's the case with conversations too. So there's like, there's a gamesmanship to this kind of communication where it's not just communicating. It's communicating, but it's essentially intellectual one -upsmanship and sparring. You're sparring, you're scoring points. I try to dunk on each other. And I get that, I've done that before.

44:01I've engaged in it, it's never satisfying. It always feels gross, even if you win, it's gross. Like I said this before, like even like publicly things that I've felt like I had to do, Like the Carlos Mincee conflict that I had way back in 2007 were accused of stealing material and it became this viral video and then a bunch of other comedians jumped in and we all agree there was a real problem. It was a real problem because he was very famous and he was being protected by these agencies who were profiting off of him being famous. They didn't want that train to stop. I still, to this day, wonder if I would ever do that again because the negativity that became my way from people that were fans of his was so overwhelming if you're paying attention to it's like what did I open up like look even though I knew it was necessary like what and that is also why people are negative because they want they want to stop you from engaging in conflict that's going to hurt them you know so they try to hurt you as much as possible so you're like hesitant to do it I don't know what you're into those waters who's dangerous Phil with sharks.

45:08Well, you could imagine maybe, I think, and I think this is worth delving into in some depth, you could imagine that there are various ways of attaining status, renowned reputation. Status isn't exactly the right word because reputation is better, because you can have a reputation that you deserve, right? And so people do work for reputation and all things considered that's a good thing. Earned reputation, as the best. Earned reputation, or some other trellitation where they had Jordan, that guy. That's a unique human being, and that's a real reputation. Right, right, okay. So people want it. Right, right, and it's also, there isn't anything more valuable that you can have than that.

45:54Not even close. This is why by the way, this is very cool. It's a bit of an aside, but it makes, it's worth bringing up. In the Gospels, Christ tells people to store up treasure in heaven where it doesn't rust, where the thieves can't steal it. That's reputational treasure. Right? So the idea is that if you conduct yourself impeccably, you'll develop a storehouse of reputation that will withstand all catastrophe. Nothing can... There's no place you can put your wealth that's more effective than that. It's the least Violatable place and that's right. It's it's right right and so but the problem is and this is a really tricky problem And you're touching on it is that the reputation game can be game Okay, so when your reputation rises rises your serotonin levels rise and that makes you less sensitive to negative emotion and more sensitive Depositive emotion so that's a really good deal And what that also means is that there's a high psychological benefit to status increase, reputational increase, and a real cost to reputational decrease.

47:04That's partly why people don't like losing face, for example, because their emotions disregulate. Okay, so now the best way to play that game is to establish a genuine reputation. And the best way to do that, you've done this by the way. I figured out this year on my lectures that I'm always trying to answer a question on stage So that's a quest and I'm bringing the audience along in a quest and it's a real quest because I'm actually trying to figure something out And I do that in real time and that's a very different game That's a very different conversational game than the status battle game Yeah, cuz I could come on here.

47:42I don't know if it would work But I could come on here and I could try to show that I was smarter than Joe Rogan Now I've watched you and that's a very difficult thing to pull off, but hypothetically that could be my aim And I could play Garcha questions and I could lead you into the problem The problem is that wouldn't work because I'm willing to accept that you're smarter than me First of all, I talk to a lot of people that are smarter than me and I like it. It's enjoyable I don't ever feel uncomfortable talking to people that are smarter than me. Yeah, I want to know some things that they can tell me on certain things.

48:15I want to educate myself. I want to be, I want to see how their mind works. I want to be blown away. I don't want to compete with them intellectually. There's times in my life where I would have fallen into that trap. Well, I think that's what's made you popular and forced for good is that you are on a quest. And that quest, the consequence of that quest, if undertaken properly is reputational enhancement. And people who can't or won't do that, they default power games. And that's the default to power. But it's worsened with social media. Because if you're, if, if you meet someone and they're playing a power game with you, you can just decide not to have anything to do with them anymore, or you can put a stop to it if you need to.

49:06But on social media, you can't because they're distant from you, and they're often also anonymous. And so they can play power games to enhance their reputational status falsely with no consequences. And the social media is right with that. And it's really a problem. Like I think that virtualization has enabled the psychopaths without a doubt. Yeah, well, without a doubt. That's a terrible thing because the psychopathic types, they're always the death of everything. I'm seeing this come up on the right now. So imagine this, I've been working on a new theory of political psychopathology and I like it quite a lot.

49:44Is this where the term the woke right comes in? Yeah, well, Lindsay is pointing at that, but he hasn't got the diagnosis exactly right. So it isn't woke, that's not the issue. It's not exactly, I think one level. I think one level. I think one level is like similar types of behavior. He is talking about that. Yeah, no, what's your point? Woke just lets you clarify in your head. Oh, it's like that. Yeah, but the problem is like antifa. Yeah, absolutely But the problem is is that that argument is Predicated on the claim that the ideas are the problem like the woke ideas for example on the right or the left But that's not the problem the problem is that 45 % of the population something like that is is cluster B, that's the DSM five terms, histrionic, narcissistic, antisocial, psychopathic, or they have, and they have dark tetrad traits, they're Machiavellian, they're sadistic.

50:41That's about 4%. Okay, so the question is how do these people maneuver? And the answer is they go to where the power is, and they adopt those ideas, and they put themselves even on the forefront of that. But the ideas are completely irrelevant. All they're doing is they're the Pharisees, they're the modern version of the Pharisees, they're the people who use God's name in vain, right? As they proclaim moral virtue. Doesn't matter whether it's right or left or Christian or Jewish or Islam, they invade the idea space and then they use that those ideas as false weapons to advance their narcissistic advantage.

51:18And so then you have the problem and And the rights going to face this more and more particularly because the left had to face it when they were in powers. How do you identify the psychopathic parasites, 4 % of the population who are clothed in your clothing and waving your flags, but who are only in it for narcissistic benefit. They know the people who studied the dark triad, these were people who originally studied psychopaths and they moved into ordinary personality, so to speak, on the fringes. They showed that the non -criminal psychopaths, so the fringe cases, are Machiavellian. They use their language to manipulate.

51:59They're narcissistic. They want uttering reputation. That's what a narcissist wants. And they're psychopathic, which makes them predators or parasites. That's pretty bad, those three things. But they had to expand the nomenclature after a while because they found that they were also sadistic, which implied that if you're Machiavellian and narcissistic and psychopathic, you develop a sufficiently bad view of your fellow man that their undeserved pain is a source of pleasure to you. And that's what's being enabled online. Because we've evolved real specific mechanisms to keep such things under control and face -to -face interaction.

52:41Lack of anonymity, for example, within a community. Psychopaths in the real world, they wander. They have to move from place to place because people who figure out who they are. And they're held responsible. They're particularly held responsible by men. But online, they escape from that protective, They escaped from that system of constraints and they have free reign and they can find other people like them very rapidly and they can gang together. And so this is like, I can really see this starting to happen on the right. Like I've been tracking psychopathic behavior on the right for probably four years, something like that, especially on the anti -Semitic side because that's really where it's head first.

53:24And why is that? There's nothing more annoying than a successful minority Right now that's part of it. I'm gonna here. I might as well get myself in trouble right away, too Yeah, for sure. Well, this is a real subject. Yeah, it's a real terrible subject It's interesting because if you don't criticize it enough you're compromised If you criticize you know, it's like When it comes to anti -semitism, like it's one of those things where you can't separate.

54:01It's a religion and it's also a race and it's also a government. That's where things get weird. And then there's also the concept of intelligence agencies and compromise that also gets attached to with the manipulation of world markets and money and there's a lot to unpack. And then there's regular Jewish people. Have nothing to do with that. Well the Jews too are very successful. And so what you would expect from a purely statistical point of view is you'd expect them to be overrepresented at the extreme. They're also a walled garden, right? Meaning, it's very difficult to join. They don't proselytize.

54:40They don't try to get you to join. and they're all very tightly knit. They call themselves the clan. They're all locked in, Jewish clan, not KKK. The problem with that term has been compromised by the Ku Kuk Kuk's clan, but I mean it as terms of tribe. Well, community. Yeah, community. They're very tight knit in that regard. They stick together. Well, so if you understand the history, obviously, of Nazi Germany and of persecution in Eastern Europe, like yeah, you have to. Yeah, of course. Yeah, well, all these complex things are multi -dimensional. I mean, I watched your whole conversation with Douglas, and I thought you guys did a very credible job.

55:21All three of you of navigating unbelievably choppy waters. So that's the first thing I'd like to say, because one of the things I was trying to figure out when I was watching that is, do I think I could have done a better job of any of you? And I certainly didn't walk away from it with that idea in mind. But then underneath all that, I thought there's really a really unbelievably tricky problem here And I think that's why it's made it it it poked up into Well, you also set that conversation up But it it poked up and made itself manifest in that conversation and the issue is How do you identify this episode is brought to by Zippercruder in a survey?

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58:28And so then the question is, how do you draw the line? And that's kind of what I was, because I've been watching these right wing, they're not right wing. These psychopathic types manipulate the edge of the conservative movement for their own gain. And a lot of that's cloaked in anti -Semitic guys. There's plenty of anti -Semitism on the left, too, by the way. So it's not unique to the right particularly now. Yes, yes, particularly now. And so, you know, you've let your curiosity guide you, your curiosity and your desire for knowledge, this quest, you've, you've let that guide you as a podcaster.

59:06And I'm by the way, I'm trying to work through exactly the same sort of thing. How do you know, given your radical increase in stature over the last 10 years. How do you know when you're curiosity and even your skepticism about the fact that things aren't the way that people say they are because that's certainly being demonstrated in the last 10 years. How should anyone decide what guardrails to put up? Like what do you look for? Do you have a conceptual system worked out for that? like and what what do you mean in one way? Well how do I look for in terms of people to talk to? Yeah yeah yeah because you have this insanely immense platform and you're inviting people onto it and you know you said to Douglas and I know this to be true that you're not really thinking about the outcome exactly you're thinking about this is an interesting person to talk to and I'd like to go on that quest but then you have the additional conundrum we're trying to work this out in the daily wire side of things too, not to say that that's exactly the same situation.

1:00:13It's like, once you gain in reach and authority, then how do you know that how do you take great care that the people you're talking to aren't? What would you say? Eliciting or feeding a subculture, Yeah, that's right. That hasn't got the proper aims. I guess the legacy media probably worked that out by having people mediators, right? And guests. And that was also back when we could rely on the structures of authority in some sense to filter. And now we're in this shelter, shelter world where everything is up for media. The legacy media is the worst at that now. Yeah, I know. They're the worst at that.

1:01:06fascinating, you know, it really is. It's really fascinating when you lose faith in a New York Times piece. You know, it's like you go like, well, this is bullshit. I know this. I know what they're doing. I know they're just, this is editorial bullshit. And that didn't used to be the case. I don't think. But then I go back to like what I learned about the Woodward Bernstein Nixon thing at Watergate that was all essentially an intelligent in operation, have you ever looked into that? Not at all. Bill Murray on the podcast, and Bill Murray said, one of the wildest things. He read the first five pages of Bob Woodward's biography on John Belushi, Wired.

1:01:48He read the first five pages, he's like, he goes, oh my God, they framed Nixon. Oh really? Wow. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, no kidding. What they wrote about my friend was so not true. It was so wildly off. He said, John Belushi was a lightweight. John Belushi'd have a couple of drinks, and he'd be fucked up. He wasn't like a big part of you that time he did that speedball is probably the only time he ever did it in his life But Woodward had him painted as this maniacal off the rails just drug -addled monster And he knew that did not be true. He was very close to blue sheet for a long time And so he was like, oh my god, they framed Nixon No, and I told him the whole story You know what Tucker Carlson had told me about woodward being an intelligence asset and then that was his first job ever as a journalist was Watergate and that there's FBI guys that were involved in it and the break -in and the whole thing was tried they tried to get Nixon out of there the most popular president in the history of the country in terms of the vote and they were successful they got him out of there and it's probably be cut or likely because Nixon was very concerned with who killed Kennedy and he wanted to find out and he wanted to get that information out and apparently he had been talking about it.

1:03:02I know who did it. He didn't want it happening to him, obviously. And he knew it could. If you're a president, you know, a couple of guys ago, you know, just one of the most popular presidents, at least posthumously popular presidents. I know he was very polarizing while he was in office, but was shot in the head in the middle of Dallas. And you think that the government might have had something to do with it. Like that could, that could fuck with your head, obviously. Yeah. Well, there, and there's many things like that. I mean, you saw the government website that came up two days ago about COVID.

1:03:38Yes. Okay. Wild. Wild. Yeah. That's wild for sure. What are you supposed to do with that? All the things that have, would have gotten you fired if you were a professor and you said them four years ago, you would have 100 % got fired for espousing any of these ideas that turned out to be true. You would have gotten kicked off of YouTube. You would have gotten, you know, there was a lot, there was a lot going on there, you know, which is like I feel so fortunate that right at the height of COVID was also when I had gone over to Spotify. Spotify is a Swedish company. They're different, they're different.

1:04:20They don't, they're much more rational and they're not overwhelmed by this identity -politics shit and they aren't overwhelmed by our weird political binary system of good guy, bad guy, depending on which side you're on. And they were like, what are you talking about? Like this is great. We don't censor our rappers. The Swedes also didn't lock down. Yes, they didn't lock down. They were also like, we don't censor our rappers. Like we don't tell the rap lyrics, Some of my favorite rap lyrics are horrendous. But it's just like my favorite movies are Tarantino movies. The dialogue is horrendous. It doesn't mean that these are horrendous people that are putting together this.

1:05:04Tarantino's a wonderful guy. He's fun to be around. He's great. I've had dinner with him, brought him to the comedy club. He's great. He's not a bad person, but he is an artist and he's creating this thing. And this thing is going to show you aspects of humanity that you know to be true, but they're horrific. That's the same with rap lyrics. It's the same with a lot of things, and Spotify's position was, we're not censoring. That's not what we're in the business of promoting art. Like we sell art, and we're not interested in censoring art. Essentially. And it turns out, luckily, we were all right.

1:05:42We were all correct, you know, and now the government shows it on their fucking website, which is crazy. Have you seen it, Jamie? Pull it up because it's bananas. And look at this lab. Yeah, right. By the way, you know, I know that he would bring up the vaccines when he was on his rallies and people would boo. when he was on the campaign trail. People would boo, and I think he was like confused by that. I think he's a little, I don't wanna say he's out of touch, but there's too many things for him to be thinking about. For him to be paying attention in what people really think about the vaccines and vaccine injuries and mandates.

1:06:26And just the psychological warfare that was played on the American people. You remember that very famous White House post that they made for the vaccinated, you've done your job before the unvaccinated, you're looking forward to a winter of severe illness and death and the hospitals that you will overwhelm. Like that was the White House telling you something when it was in Omnicron by that point, which was like a cold. Like it was crazy. The deaths had dropped off radically, but they were so in bed with the pharmaceutical companies that they were like, you gotta do it. You gotta get vaccinated.

1:07:04and if you don't, you're looking for the death and severe illness. Like, imagine, this is, you're not basing this on real statistics, you're not basing this on science. You're just basing this on this control, this fear element that you're trying to impose upon people. Until, okay, so that's an interesting point there too, that issue of control and fear. You know, I started this, I was part of a group that started this organization in the UK called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. We had our second convention in November, which went very nicely, by the way. So you're doing a positive counter to the world that can happen?

1:07:43Yeah, well we have some rules. And one rule is you don't use force or fear, right? Use invitation. So can I tell you a story about that? Please do. Please do. Okay, so I've been touring about this new book of mine, right? We who wrestle with God, and it's I've been lecturing about lots of the things I know, but I've been using biblical stories mostly to provide an analytical frame because that's what stories do. They provide a frame. And there's a great story in the continuing Exodus story, the story of Moses and the Israelites, where Moses has led his people away from the tyrant and away from their own slavery because there's a dynamic in that story between those two things.

1:08:32No tyrants without slaves. Or you might say no tyrants without willing slaves. And so the Israelites have to get away from the tyrant, but then it's across the Red Sea of chaos and blood and into the desert for four years. You don't escape from the tyrant if you're a slave without paying a price and maybe for three generations. It's rough. So Moses is trying to get these people to stop being slaves and to take responsibility so they don't need a tyrant. And so he's kind of got there, and they're on the edge of the Promised Land, right? And so they're almost at the end of their voyage, and they run out of water.

1:09:09They're still in the desert. They run out of water, and they get all whiny and bitchy about the fact that they had to go across the desert, and it was way better under the tyrant, and that Moses is nothing but a corrupt patriarch, and he's only power mad, and they foment some rebellion. And anyways, it's a pretty ugly situation. And the Israelites go to Moses and they say, look, we're really starving. We're thirsting for water. We're going to die. Do you think you can have a chat with God and see if he'll do something about this? And God tells Moses to go to some rocks in the desert and to ask them to bring water forth.

1:09:46And so he goes with his people to these rocks. And instead of asking, he takes this staff of his. This staff is a really important thing. It's like your staff, if you have an organization, same derivation. But it's also the magic wand of Gandalf. It's the flag you plant in new territory. It's the tree of life. It's the living tradition that has a spirit inside it, and that's a serpent. And that's the serpent that eats all the serpents of the Egyptian, tyrants, magic magicians. That's the staff. It's his rod of his authority. and he instead of asking the rocks, he hits them twice with the staff, so he forces them.

1:10:30And God tells them that in consequence of that, number one, he's going to die, and number two, he's not going to get to the promised land. Right, right, right. So there's this insistence. It's really interesting. Well, it's a crucial insistence, and it's very important in this time, I think, to understand what this means. So Moses is a leader. He's the archetypal leader, and he He realizes his responsibility in the encounter with the burning bush, which is something that attracts his attention that he takes with great seriousness and not transforms it. And so then he becomes the leader who stands up against the tyrant and frees the slaves and takes them through chaos into the desert.

1:11:08And his temptation as leader is to use force. So when he's a young man, for example, he kills a Egyptian aristocrat who was tormenting a Hebrew slave, and that's why he asked leave Egypt. He's tempted by power because he's a leader. And then at the end, even though he's done all these things, he's been an upstanding man and done gone beyond his call of duty. And he's right at the point where he attains victory, to enter the promised land, and he uses force once. When God tells him to use invitation, to use his words, the logos, to use words, to use invitation. And that's enough so that he's dead.

1:11:46So is his brother Aaron? That's his political arm. and he doesn't enter the promised land. And then in the Gospels, of course, Christ foregoes power altogether. The temptation in the desert, one of the three temptations is the temptation for use of power. So one of the things that maybe we could conclude from all this given the context of what you said is that you can tell the tyrants, they use fear and compulsion, and they don't use invitation. So one of the rules we put together for arc was invitation only. Play, we're going to do this playfully, and we're not going to use force or fear, ever.

1:12:22You have to use invitation. And so I don't know what you think about that is a distinguished, imagine it's a distinguishing, it's the distinguishing characteristic between the wannabe tyrants and the true leaders. The true leaders say, here's an offer, would you accept this of your own free will? And the tyrants say, the apocalypse is coming and everything and we are allowed to do everything to forestall it right including control you and everything that you do yeah and that's how they get people to fall in line they fall in line through fear yeah well fear and force it's like also you know you have to do this because the apocalypse is looming which is always in a way true always there's always well there's not always an apocalypse of one form or another looming.

1:13:10The question is, what do you do about it? And terrifying people who can tell them anywhere in the world right now, right? You might be experiencing the apocalypse right now if you live in Gaza. Yeah, I wanted to be experiencing the apocalypse right now if you're in Yemen, if you're a Houthi, right? The end of the world is always coming, right? And for you, for me, for everybody. Yeah, right. So you can always look into the future and conjure up an apocalyptic scenario and maybe even that in itself isn't a Sin, although I think it is there's another but if you yet then turn to fear and compulsion As your means of governance then you're a tyrant.

1:13:49I don't care what you're excused. It has to be invitational That's when it gets scary when you see governments telling people that they have to fall in line or these are horrible consequences For you not agreeing to what we're saying. Yeah Yeah, and then if you don't do this, you're a part of the problem. Right. Exactly. Well, and if the apocalypse that's generated in that way is of sufficient magnitude, there's no limit to the amount of power that can be exerted because obviously the rationale is there. They have to do it, right? Like this is the rationale to stop Trump, right? You're trying to stop Hitler.

1:14:22Right? Right? Well, there was also why First Amendment use the law use law fair use whatever. Yeah, use whatever. This is one of the things that worries me about Canada at the moment. You know, I know when we talked a couple of weeks ago, I expressed my concern about what was happening in Canada. It doesn't look good. Well, I read Carney's book, Values. I read it twice, and I understood it. And Carney says in that book, well, he says, he's an advocate of centralized planning. ESG, he was a huge ESG advocate. He organized many large corporations to go down this central planning governance route because the market wasn't pricing everything properly.

1:15:06And so central planners had to step in and black, rock, and vanguard and places like that. We're big parts of that. Don't know if they were directly affected by Carney, but it's the same thing. And they've stepped away from that. And he's a big DEI advocate. And he's also a net zero advocate. And Carney says in his book, this is a good example of this. And I think also a good example of this kind of narcissism that we talked about earlier. Every single financial decision that every individual or organization makes has to prioritize decarbonization above all else. Or else. And there will be many, he doesn't say casualties, but he implies that.

1:15:43There'll be many who pay a price along the way, but it's necessary, you know, because you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And then he says 75 % of the world's fossil fuels have to stay in the ground. And this is who Canadians are seriously thinking about electing. Right. Why does he say the fossil fuels have to stay on the ground? Too much carbon. You know, you know, the real problem with that is the same problem with the COVID narrative is that they don't allow any descent, they don't allow any data that conflicts with the narrative. And they don't want to look at any possible, like both of them are complicated.

1:16:25They're not similar in a lot, but there are because they're top -down tyrannical tools using fear and compulsion so They did in during the COVID times nobody wanted to look at any alternative treatments that didn't want to look at Health metabolic health. They didn't want to look at any factors other than vaccination and compliance With carbon no one wants to look at I'm sure you saw that Washington Post study of the last Was it 50 million years, the graph that shows the temperature of Earth? Have you seen it? We're in a cooling period. And that was always what, I mean, during the 1970s, Leonard Nimoy, when you had that in search -of -show?

1:17:07One of the things that they covered was that we are at the verge of an ice age. Now terrifying, an ice age is. Yeah, well, the conclusion you draw about climate and carbon dioxide is entirely dependent on where you put the origin point of your graph. So if you go back 150 years ago carbon dioxide is increased if you go back 500 million years ago Which is quite a lot longer? We're in a drought like a serious carbon dioxide drought, right? And also carbon dioxide is the fuel of plants. Yes, they turns out that they like it Well, you know the global green greening data. Well, when we had said well, well, you know one of the things I learned as a scientist was that But there's usually an explanation or two that accounts for a phenomenon so completely that almost everything else is noise.

1:17:58Like the Mahah movement, make America healthy again. The fundamental issue is insulin resistance. Like, that's the fundamental plague of, say, North America. And everything else is noise. It's not unimportant noise, but insulin resistance is the major contributor. Here, on the climate side, when I look at the data, the thing that leaps out for me is greening. The planet is 20 % greener than it was 30 years ago. Okay, 20%. This is NASA data. I'm not inventing this. Okay. And then the next question, you think, oh, 20%. If 20 % of the plants had vanished, you'd be sure we'd heard about that. Yes.

1:18:39Okay. So, and agricultural output's got up 13%. Now, whether all that additional carbon dioxide is a function of human activity, that's still debatable. It doesn't matter. There isn't association between the carbon dioxide, rees, rise, and the plant propagation. Okay, it's even more particular than that because a lot of the greening has occurred in semi -arid areas, so areas around deserts. The reason for that is that if there's more carbon dioxide, the plants can close their breathing pores more and they don't lose water. And so not only is there 20 % more vegetation, which is a lot, I think it's twice the area of the United States that's green.

1:19:22That's a lot of greed. And where our agricultural production is more effective. And the places that have greened were the very places that the deserts were supposed to expand into. And so, right, because they've greened, they've shrunk, not grown. Now, you know, you could say, well, that rate of change has its problems and you know rates of change have their problems. But I don't see another data point that's anywhere nearest. Stunning is that. I think it's a really important point where you said that if we lost 20 % of the plans, people would be freaking out. Oh my God. Well, and rightly so. rightly so.

1:19:58But yet it's not even discussed because again, it's one of those things that invades the narrative. Right. It's one of those pesky facts, those pesky truths that gets in the way of the thing that you're saying, well the apocalypse is coming. Yeah, well that's the thing about the narrative is like, okay, so now we talked about the psychopaths who manipulate belief systems for their own advantage, right? The people who use God's name and vein, the Pharisees who want to dress in religious clothing and obtain status and consequence, they're Christ's number one enemies in the Gospels by the way, those people.

1:20:34They're the ones who conspire to crucify Him, right? the religious pretenders. So this has been going on for a very long period of time. So the climate apocalypse narrative is perfectly situated to, what would you say, to to serve the perspective, to serve the purposes of the narcissists, the Machiavellians, the the psychopaths and the sadists, because it's a infinitely expanding existential threat that can be used as an excuse for anything. Yes. And it also provides a perfect cloak for any amount of power maneuvering. It's like, I want to make your shower heads put out a needle spray so that you're cold all the time while you have a shower, while you're doing something you do every day that could otherwise be highly enjoyable.

1:21:26Why do I get to invade your life to that degree? Well because the planets at stake, Joe, and who are you to privilege your shower comfort? something that trivial over the fate of the entire planet. Well, you can use that argument at every single level. You know, Trump came out with this executive statement just a few days ago about shower heads, and everybody kind of laughed about that, and I thought, no, he has an eye for petty tyranny, right? For petty tyranny. And there's very little that's more petty than, well, I think the showerhead example is a perfect one. And then you also think, look, if they're willing to control your life at that level of detail, What are they not willing to control?

1:22:06It's like you're concerned about my shower heads, like we're out of water, which were not at all. So what won't you control? So you think while the psychopaths are edge cases, they'll move wherever the power is. They find a narrative that can be used to strike fear in the hearts of people and to justify compulsion. They ally themselves with that belief claim and then they ratchet themselves up status hierarchies without any Reptrue reputational validity riding on that edge of fear and power Right right. I wrote an article. It hasn't been published yet in the telegraph because I got hell a a lot after one of our podcasts.

1:22:51You may know this, but the climate change stuff. That's right. The whole bloody transcript was sent to the college as an indication that I was out of my wheelhouse. You know, and maybe I stepped a bit out of my wheelhouse when we had that discussion because I'm not a climate scientist, whatever the hell that is, by the way, because you have to know a lot to be a climate scientist and an economist on top of that. So today I'm talking about something that's a lot more psychological. The climate Apocalypse narrative is a social contagion that's driven by power mad psychopaths who are hell bent on using fear and compulsion to make sure everyone steps in line so that they can continue with their acquisition of undeserved power.

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1:25:40Ready to bring calm to the chaos? Go to shipstation .com and use the code JRE to sign up for your free trial. Yeah, well, that's the advantage of using fear and compulsion, right? It's like, well, I have to go along with this because my leaders who had built up a certain degree of credibility are telling me that the apocalypse is nigh. And who am I to? Well, first of all, question because God, there's a hard thing to figure out. You know, what's the global effect of human activity on the climate for the next hundred years? Well, good luck figuring that out. But this is why making it more psychological this time.

1:26:18It's like the climate fluctuates and for complex reasons. But that doesn't mean that you get to look like 100 years into the future. And you get to conjure up an apocalyptic narrative, and you get to say, we're the only people that can save you, and you get to say, you have to change every single thing you do in your life and prioritize our concern above all else, including even the wellbeing of your own children, or the economic future of the Africans, for example, don't get to use fossil fuels, right? You don't get to do that. You don't get to do that using fear and compulsion. Not only that.

1:26:52He's being done by people who have been wrong about everything. Every step of the way. Every step of the way. Yeah, well, then they just play a slight hand game there. They're okay. We got the time frame wrong, Joe. It's not 20 years. It's not even just 40 years. It's not even just climate change. It's basically everything. Public health, agriculture, you name it. Yeah. Everything. Everything's a thing. The water supply. That sets us back into this conundrum that you and Douglas and Dave were addressing. It's like, okay, two conundrums, like three. How do you pursue your interest in a landscape that's been shorn of reliable expert input?

1:27:28Who do you rely on? If you don't know who to rely on, how do you keep the bloody psychopaths at bay? You know, in the conspiracy theorist mongers and the people who aren't trying to discover the truth, but who are using the conspiratorial edge, let's say? The grompers. Yeah, the gripers for that matter, right? These are people who are clearly playing power games for their own benefit and they're spinning up these conspiratorial narratives and writing on them and Occupying them in this this parasitical manner. This is gonna be a huge It this is a huge problem already on the right wing side I don't you know, I don't even know what the hell that is anymore because I don't know what the left is and I don't know what the right is But we need to claim the center Yeah, well, that's also what we're trying to do with arc like what is the center?

1:28:17The center is a kind of way we can all meet up. Well, and I think that's doable. Well, let's specify it even more. Okay. The center is a place you'd go if you were invited. Right? Right, exactly. While that also ties back into this idea of play, you know, like, Piaget figured this out when he was watching Little Kids. So, if a little boy wants to play house with a little girl, which is generally a good idea, if you want to play house with a woman, at some point in your life, if you better get that right, it's a very serious game. What's the first rule? She has to want to play. Right, what's the second rule?

1:28:53You have to play with her in a manner that makes her want to play with you again, right? I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of what constitutes objective standards of morality. You know how Sam Harris was obsessed with malevolence and he wanted to ground morality in objective science because he thought that would give us a firm standing place. But he went down the wrong scientific rabbit hole, I think. I think if you understand this relationship with play and iteration then you have the core of morality. So and Piaget by the way, this is part of what would you say? This is the larger.

1:29:29This is the philosophical edge of his theory. This is actually what he's trying to accomplish. How do you decide if an arrangement is good versus bad or good versus evil? Well, Piaget went to children to find that out. It's like, okay, you want to set up a game. Why? A game is the first social, it's the foundation of social interaction, right? Play a game with one other person, one other person, and then maybe you can play a game with a bunch of people, and then you can play a game with one person or a bunch of people across a long period of time, and then you could do it in a way that it improves.

1:30:03Okay, so now, so what are the rules? If you're a little boy, she has to want to play. And then you have to play with her in a way so that she wants to play with you again. If you do that, then you have a friend. And that iterates now so you can imagine that there's a structure of voluntary play that's really quite stringent, but this is what you do on your podcast. Seriously, and that's why it's so attractive to people. You know, and that's the core of what you might call objective morality. It's like there's a very limited number of ways to play, to offer a game that someone else wants to play.

1:30:36And then there's a very limited number of ways to play that game so that they want to keep playing with you. And then you could, if you add that additional constraint of improvement across the games, you've got the straight narrow path. Then it's marked by, we're really trying to do this at ARC. We want to offer a vision that people people want to accept or or even thrilled to accept because that's even better, right? A game that you'd be thrilled to play. So one of the things we're doing on the energy side, I'm going to an event with Alex Epstein here in two days, talked to energy executives about this, you know?

1:31:14Well, what kind of world do you want to see? Well, how about a world where there's so much energy that poor people can afford it? How that be for a vision? Like, have you got a problem with that? Well, poor people can't have energy because that'll destroy the planet. It's like, no, poor people can't have that energy because you'd have to let go of the game that you're playing as a narcissistic psychopath. That's elevating your status inappropriately and you're perfectly willing to sacrifice the world's poor to continue your grip on power. How about that for a psychological interpretation? Right.

1:31:47And how about this as an alternative? Why don't we do everything we can to drive energy costs down to the lowest degree that's sustainable, like in a market economy? me and make energy available to everyone so that we eradicate absolute poverty. Why wouldn't the left line up again around that? Because the left hypothetically serves the poor. It's like, nothing serves the poor better than an ethos. First, we're going to get that right because we're also interested in getting the story right. But after that, on the material side, there's nothing more important than the barrier. Right. I don't think people on the left are getting that message.

1:32:23I don't think they're hearing that this is exactly what third world countries need is a reliable source of energy and industry to elevate themselves out of poverty. They're not. They're not getting that, but it's not the problem of the people that are on the left, like the general followers. Well, it might be a problem that's facilitated by the psychopathic fringe types. Like, look, I think it's not offered to them as my point. Yeah, the question is why not? And the reason is like this is part of the, you talked to Lomburg, right, to Bjorn. And Bjorn's pretty good on this or very good on this I should say, you know, to give him credit.

1:33:02And he would like to see a world where, and he's part of Arc. He'd like to see a world where we make energy abundance at all priority. It's probably the only way you're going to pull third world countries out of dire poverty. Well, it's also as far as I can tell the only way that you pull them out of environmental catastrophe. Right. Because if you want to produce an environmental catastrophe, a true environmental catastrophe, how about a three or four year famine so that everyone there kills all the animals, for example, or dies, right? So we also know that if you get people above $5 ,000 a year GDP, then they start paying attention to long -term environmental sustainability because they don't have to scrabble around in the dirt for the next meal.

1:33:44So then we could say, well, how about we have a future of sufficient abundance so that no one is deprived of energy or or opportunity for their children? Right. Well, that sounds that sounds like an invitation. Now if you hate people and you think the industrial enterprise is a stain on the planet and that were viruses or cancer on the planet, then you're gonna have a problem with that But my sense too is that if we had enough energy, we could make all the deserts bloom. I was watching a video on pollution in India about the amount of garbage that gets thrown in rivers in India. It was staggering, just staggering to watch, that somehow or another, through because the population is so large and there's so many poor people and there's a lack of hope, but whatever it is, they're just throwing their garbage in the rivers, and their rivers are just overwhelmed with, if there's ever like a symbol of thing, people that have been led the wrong way, like bad leadership, bad planning, bad underlying story, everything, that's it.

1:34:57When you look in your river and it's all you see is water bottles, all you see is floating plastic, that's the whole river, and you know that if you get in that water, you're gonna get sick. And yet no one looks at it. This is number one priority. Like, what do you always say? Clean your room. Make your bed. Like, right? Yeah. What's going on? Like? Well, and you want to incentivize people to pay attention to the local environment. And you do that in part by ensuring that they're not living so close to the edge of catastrophe that they can only think about today. Right. And if you start from the mindset that, can I tell you another story?

1:35:34Sure. Okay. He told me all the stories. That's asked questions. All right. This is a really cool story. Okay. This is how to set the world right this story So I've been traveling around lecturing about my book and I wrote a chapter on Abraham in that book and Abraham Is the father of in principle Islam Christianity and Judaism right? He's the father of nations. That's how the story goes so When God God comes to Abraham in a very particular way It's one of the ways God is characterized in the Old Testament. So this is like a definition of God, right? It's not a testament to God. It's a definition of what God is.

1:36:12Okay, so Abraham, he doesn't hear anything about God till he's like 70. And he's already living in privileged paradise because his father and his mother are rich. And so he doesn't have to lift a finger. If life is about having your needs met, Abraham's God had covered. and so he lives like a satiated infant till he's 70 and then a voice comes to him and it says, you are required by the God of your ancestors to leave your zone of comfort, to leave the wealth of your father, to leave your nation, to leave your language, to go out into the world and have your terrible adventure. And if you do that, so now imagine that's the call to adventure.

1:37:01If you do that, these things will happen. This is the covenant that God makes to the Abrahamic people. It's so cool. I just talked to Brett Weinstein about this from an evolutionary biological perspective on the road, because I wanted him to evaluate the story. I'm going to tell you from an evolutionary perspective. So God, God is the voice that says to Abraham, if you follow the call of adventure, you'll be a blessing to yourself. So that's the meaning of life, right? To have the adventure. You'll do this in a way. Yeah, yeah, because adventure is compelling, responsible, romantic adventure is the most compelling pathway.

1:37:37Right? And if it's intense enough, it justifies the suffering. Right? It's a reason to, it's a reason to get up in the morning, even if you're in pain. Okay, then he says there's another thing that will happen too, which is that your name will become known among your people for valid reasons. So that's that genuine reputation that we talked about. So if you follow the pattern of adventure properly, you'll be a blessing to yourself and your name will become known among your people for valid reasons. So that's a good deal. You'll do this in a way that will maximize the probability that you'll establish something of permanence or even eternal permanence.

1:38:16So Abraham is offered, he accepts the call and makes the proper sacrifices along the way. God says, your descendants will be allowed number of the stars. So he establishes the pattern of fatherhood that best propagates down the generations, which is the same as following the pathway of adventure. Then he says, you'll do this in a way that will make sure no one can stand before you. Right? So that if you adhere to that adventurous spirit and you propagate it, all the enemies will, all enemies will either be converted into friends or flee before you. And then you'll do it in a way that brings abundance to everyone.

1:38:56And so now this is the question I'd ask Brett, so imagine this. So imagine that we have an instinct in us or divine voice. I don't care which of those you use an instinct within us that calls us to develop, right? That puts us on the edge and that's not the same as looking for infantile satiation or the gratification of our needs. It's generally this call to expand yourself and to be on the edge and to develop. That if you did that to follow that instinct then you'd be a blessing to yourself. your name would become known among your people, you'd establish something of permanent significance, no one could stand before you, and it would bring abundance to everyone.

1:39:36Right? And then in the Abrahamic story, what happens is that as Abraham accepts that, goes out in the world, and then he has a series of adventures, each of which requires a more complete sacrifice. Because as you develop under the influence of this call, what you're required to do is to live more carefully in accordance with your expanding domain of opportunity. And that's the pathway forward. So I asked bread about that because this is different than the self -ashean idea, right? It's like there's an instinct within us that calls us to develop, that pulls us out into the world. And if we follow it religiously and we make the proper sacrifices along the way, then those five things will happen around us.

1:40:23And that speaks of a concordance which has to be there, has to be there between the spirit that develops us and the pathway that brings maximal benefit to the natural and the social world. And I can't see how that can be the case. If we're adapted to the world, that has to be the case. right? It has to be that if we followed the instinct that would best put us together psychologically, this quest, this adventure, that would also be the spirit that set the world in order, right? And that spirit, that whole thing, that's what's defined as God in that in that particular story. Hmm, that resonates.

1:41:01Well, I can't see the alternative is preposterous, right? The alternative is that we don't have an instinct to develop, like, and you know that's wrong. You just have to watch children and you know that's wrong. You just have to watch yourself and the curiosity that you have and the desire for novelty and for learning. You know that's there. That's what you followed to make this show. Definitely. And so the alternative is that instinct doesn't exist. That's a stupid theory. Or what brings you into the world is done at the expensive other people in a way that won't enhance your reputation in a way that has nothing to do with anything permanent, right?

1:41:42Then it would be sort of you against the world. That would be like a power orientation. You can get your way in the world, but you have to manipulate, you have to lie, you have to use compulsion, you have to use fear. You can't just rely on the quest, say, or your adventure. And I think you can. I think you can. I think you better. Or else, There's that too. It's interesting because you're talking about tyrants, right? And you're talking about people of extreme power and how that corrupts. And in that case, there's a large percentage of those people that are violating all those things that you said, because they do manipulate and they do rely on fear.

1:42:23Well, you know, Nietzsche was an advocate of the will to power, right? So you can imagine that there's a variety of potential motivating forces and one would be hedonic pleasure. That's the golden calf worshippers, by the way. So that's just short -term hedonism. And that doesn't work. And by work, I mean, it doesn't iterate socially. It's like if it's all about you and what some women you want now, first of all, that's not going to serve you well tomorrow. And I don't want to be anywhere near you. Like you're an over, you're literally an overgrown two -year -old. And that gets pretty ugly by the time you're 40.

1:42:58So the whole golden calf thing? No, that's just off the table. But isn't it kind of celebrated amongst certain high achievers, particularly in the business world, like that hedonistic sociopathic drive to constantly get more numbers on the ledger? Yeah, well, I don't know if that's exactly. He'd reason my safe. Green is good, that's wall street. Yeah, yeah. That's Michael Douglas, right? Green is good. Yeah, well, okay, let's delve into that for a minute. Okay, so I'm not advocating. I know you're not. You can turn to hedonism. You can fall into nihilism. You can turn to hedonism or you can turn to power.

1:43:38Okay, this Abrahamic covenant is different than power. It's adventure. That's romantic adventure actually. That's not the only definition of God in the Old Testament by the way. There's something deeper than that that it refers to. So those are the options. Now you said, don't the achievers, you know, who are stacking up numbers. It's like they found a way forward to attain status, but they, but they've fixated on, they've fixated on an element that shouldn't be fundamental. They're not trying to store up the treasure in heaven. They're trying to store up the treasure on earth, and that's better than not doing it.

1:44:16See, this is another thing we need to understand, because I've spent a lot of time, for example, trying to figure out why people are attracted to Andrew Tate. And I know why they're attracted to Andrew Tate. They'd rather be Andrew Tate than an in -sell. And they're right, right? It's best to give the devil is due. Like if you had to choose between being kind of flabby and unhealthy and resentful and in your basement, looking at pornography, hating women because all of them reject you all the time and you deserve it. And you're ineffectual and the future looks pretty damn gloomy. And then you see Andrew Tate, who's tough and hyper -masculine in an almost manner that's almost a parody and wealthy and famous and apparently has women as at his disposal with a fair bit of stress on the idea of disposal, you'd think, well, I'd much rather be him than me.

1:45:18That's the incorporation of the shadow from the Jungian perspective. It's like, it's right. And you think about the number of men they're in cells. The thing about men also, if they get rejected a lot, they associate women with pain. Yeah. And then they get angry at those women because those women caused them pain. Like, it's just very simple equation. Of course, that's how you get a manhater. Or excuse me, that's how you get a womanhater. And the same could be said for, that's how you get a manhater, right? You associate manhate with rejection and cruelty. And then there are all the way. Young men in particular are more likely to be rejected.

1:45:56Young women may have difficulty finding the ideal man, but they don't face the same degree of universal rejection. So it's hard on young men. Well, they're not the pursuers, right? As much. Young women, aren't. Right, right, well and women are the gatekeepers fundamentally of sex. So that's their that's their essential power That's also the power of chastity and that's the scary thing about acquiring wealth as the wealth allows you to bypass the Genetic social hierarchy Yeah, well, I talked to I talked to Russell Brand about this a lot You know women through themselves at him How that work out for him not great, you know, it threw him into great spiritual confusion It it was empty and hollow and that's worth knowing to see because you might say to the people who are interested in the shadow figures and Tate plays that role The master of women, let's say Why not do that?

1:46:54Because you need an answer to that if it's certainly when it's better than being lonely isolated bitter and ineffectual that's for sure well, it's because because you don't confuse a stepping stone with pinnacle. That's why. There's way more beyond that. I mean, you're a tough guy. You went through your disciplinary processes on the physical side, in particular, the intellectual side, too. I might add, you know, you've got what Tate has to offer, but you're respectable. Why? Why? A completely different background than him. First of all. And also, my feeling in life is whenever you can be nice.

1:47:51That's like a general guy. Getting nice or good. I mean, both. Okay. Nice as well. I get the posturing, I get how it would be attractive to young men. I get it if I was a young man, I would certainly be drawn to him and I was to many fighters. And I accepted a lot of personality flaws and people that admired as fighters because they were very successful at doing this one insanely difficult thing. Right, right. And oftentimes that requires a certain amount of narcissism. It requires a certain amount of internal focus. Ironically enough, not at the championship level. Ironically enough, it gets you close, but it doesn't get you to be the king.

1:48:37The kings are almost... Precisely. Universally disciplined, focused, and generally kind. There's some of the nicest people, the best, at the most difficult thing athletically to do. And the most difficult, your concrete. Why do you think that is? I think you have to be. Why? Why? Why? Why is it? Yamato Bessashi wrote about this in the book of Five Rings. You must have balance in everything in life. If you have imbalance, you can get pretty far because you're so specialized. Right. You're so driven. Yep. But you will fall prey to the balanced man. Yeah. Well, that's exactly. That's exactly my point.

1:49:20You will also recognize characteristics in him that you envy and that you wish you had yourself. Like if you're a narcissist and a sociopath, you know you are and you can't really be proud of yourself. You can't write. You don't have the benefit of the positive feedback that you get from true kindness to others. You don't have that. You also know that your reputation is founded on sand. And one of the ways to rationalize that is, well, everyone does that. Everyone's like that now. but then you don't trust or like anyone. Right. And then you're really alone. That's for sure. Yeah. And then if you do achieve success, it's hollow because you realize like, so you know, you just outlined there the progression that Carl Jung identified as characteristic of individuation, right?

1:50:07With the second thing that you said, so imagine that you start, you start at an in -sell, right? You're ineffectual and you're rejected as a young man. Now, exceptions, but let's just play that out as the the unhappy majority. Okay, now you look for a shadow figure to sharpen you up to toughen you up and to make you strive at least along one dimension. Right? And so then you do that. Well, then the next thing that happens in the union stage progression is for a man, its integration of the animal, which is the feminine part, and its integration, It's not replacement. It's like, oh, well, then you discover the utility of empathy and compassion and kindness and mercy and care Well still being able to deal out justice, let's say and so then you bridge that gap and then that integration You just said even among fighters.

1:51:01That's what puts them in the highest place Right, that's right. That's right So but it's hard for the people It's hard for those who are completely disaffected and also quite angry about it You know, the people who are interested in the pathway that Tate offers, they're not so unhappy that he's hard on women because they're pretty mad at women and so you know if it's the bitch or me then I'll pick me, you know, right exactly exactly exactly and so and it is very crucial to get this progression correct because is monsters better than Wimp. Right. But the question is, what's better than monster?

1:51:44And so it's very interesting that you made those comments on the fighting side because you wouldn't necessarily think that it would be true in that world as well. Well, one of the best examples is your countryman, George St. Pierre, one of the greatest of all time, one of the nicest guys I've ever met. And if you didn't know that he was one of the greatest fighters of all time, you would never guess it. You would never guess at talking to him. He's curious. He's interesting. He's intelligent. He's very well read He has a He's always Interested in different things. He's constantly searching for new information and as a martial artist He is still on a quest of improvement even though he's retired from competing always trains constantly training a quest for new information.

1:52:31Okay, so let me tell you a story about that. Please. All right, so this is the story that comes up at the beginning of Moses when he turns into a leader. So it's about how you turn into a leader. Okay, so he's already killed a man and he's left Egypt because of it. So now he's in this land called Midian and he goes there and he chases some ruffians away from a well for these two girls who are drawing water and they go and tell their father and he says to them, bring this young man home to have dinner. So he does and then he gets married to them and then he becomes a shepherd. And this is crucial because the shepherd's an image that runs through the biblical corpus, right?

1:53:09Shepherds at that time lived by themselves in the wilderness on their wits and they kept the wolves in the lions' appae with primitive weapons. So these were tough guys and they cared for the most vulnerable. So a shepherd is an image of optimized ordinary masculinity. Take care of yourself, you can keep the monsters at bay and you attend to the most vulnerable. So Moses has got that. He's a shepherd, he's a successful shepherd. So now he's out there one day, wander around Mount Sinai and Mount Sinai or Mount Horab. That's the place where heaven and earth touch. So that's where the messengers of the divine descend to Earth.

1:53:49And so he's out there and something attracts his attention, makes him curious. That's the burning bush. It's not a forest fire, it's not something you can't ignore. It's something alive because that's a bush, a tree is a symbol of life, and it's burning because things that are alive burn, right? That's metabolism and an intensification of that, like a psychedelic intensification of that. That's what the burning bush is. And that's what glimmers to Moses. and he steps off the beaten track, right, to investigate what drives his curiosity. And so then he goes off the beaten track and he starts to delve deeply into the mysteries of the burning bush.

1:54:29And at some point he realizes he's on sacred ground, he takes off his shoes. That's a symbol of willingness to transform identity, because shoes signify identity, right? They're part of your costume, your working man's costume. And so then he continues to commune with the burning bush, he gets deeper and deeper into something. He makes himself a specialist by following what compels him and delving deeply into it. And when he gets deep enough into it, to the bottom, the voice of eternity speaks to him and says, you're now no longer who you were. You're now a leader. You have to go back to your people.

1:55:05You have to stand up against the tyrant. You have to tell the slaves that they need to leave their tyranny and their slavery and serve me in the wilderness and you have to do that now. And Moses says, I can't because I can't speak. I'm slow of tongue and God says basically, that's your problem. And with me on your side, we can sort that out. And don't you have a brother, Aaron, and can't he speak? It's like, bring him along for the ride. And so that's when Moses becomes a leader, right? And so that's the pattern. It's like ordinary masculinity. Those are the dwarves that Snow White serves before she meets the prince by the way, the ordinary masculine, right?

1:55:48So and those dwarves protect her from the evil queen that wants to suppress her by feeding her a poisoned apple. So Snow White has to learn to serve the ordinary man before she can find a prince. Yeah, something Disney missed completely in the last story. So, so what's the pattern? Well, you discipline yourself so you become a shepherd and then you follow what compels you off the path, then you take it seriously and get to the bottom of it and then that transforms you and thus transformed you can face the tyrant.

1:56:27You You can lead the slaves, cross chaos and blood. That's the Red Sea and then through the desert. You said two things. You said that the good fighters have learned to integrate their civilized side. Otherwise they don't get to be great and that they continue the pathway of self -improvement. They continue to pursue what's calling to them. That's another definition of God in the Old Testament. by the way, what calls to you. That's the burning bush, the spirit of the burning bushes, what entices you, what grabs your interest, what attracts your curiosity. And that's identical, that biblical claim is that's the same thing as the spirit of adventure.

1:57:11It's the same thing that speaks to Noah. Noah is a good man, and a voice comes to him and says, all hell's a broke break loose. And he believes his intuition because he's a good man, and can you rely on himself? So it makes the ark, right? And he brings his family aboard and culture and nature and reestablishes humanity. That's the pathway of the leader too. What does your take on, there's a University in Jerusalem that had this theory that the burning bush was the Akasha bush. Akasha bush is rich in DMT. Well, I think that, look, I think that hallucinogens strip memory from perception. So you see the world in all its blazing glory.

1:57:57Huxley figured that out with the doors of perception. That's really what that is apparently what psychedelics do, psychopharmacologically. They mimic a high stress condition and they strip memory from perception so that you can return to the source and revitalize your perceptions. right? So the probability that there's some overlap between that and the burning bush is high. It's high. So to speak. High. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll tell you, I'll tell you one more thing, one more story, okay? If that's all right with you. So something else I figured out that I tried on Brett. So imagine you could take the hedonistic path, you could take the power path, you could take the nihilistic path.

1:58:45And then you might say, well, that's the only three options. That's kind of what the postmodernists believe. That's kind of what the nihilists and the postmodernists, the Nietzscheans believe, power, hedonism, nihilism, those are your options. There's no uniting narrative above that. Okay, so in the story of Cain and Abel, two patterns are laid out that are different than that. One is Cain's pattern, one's Abel's pattern. So these are the first two people that are the live in the world, right? Because Adam and Eve are made by God. You can there in Paradise or were. Cain and Abel are the first two people.

1:59:26So Abel brings his best to the table. So he takes the best animal in his flock and he takes the best cut and the best part of the cut and he offers that to God. So he literally brings his best to the table. That's what he sacrifices. And Cain doesn't. So Cain's sacrifices are rejected by God. And God tells him, if you brought your best to the table, you'd be accepted. And Cain gets bitter and resentful and invites temptation in to possess him. So that spirit of resentment possesses him, and then he becomes murderous. He kills his brother and his descendants become genocidal. And then you have the flood.

2:00:11And so that pattern of sacrifice is established right at the beginning of the biblical texts. Abel versus Cain. Abel brings the best to the table and that satisfies God. So one question. God actually asks Cain this. When Cain complains, it says, if you, wouldn't you be accepted if you were doing your best? So that's a question of conscience, right? If you're in extreme misery and your life is hollow and empty and you're bitter and resentful. It's like, you bring in your best to the table because the covenant proclaims that if you did you'd be accepted. Yeah. So clearly. Okay, so now the question is what constitutes, now you know you have to sacrifice.

2:00:55So sacrifice becomes the foundation of the state, not power, not hedonism, it's sacrifice. And then that motif is played out through the whole Bible and that's what culminates in the New Testament. right? Total sacrifice as the foundation of the community. That's right. And like, I don't know how to what sense to make out of the metaphysics of the religious realm, you know, because that's beyond me and everyone. The world is a strange place and we could leave it at that. But the idea that, see, Christ is the exemplar of voluntary self -sacrifice, right? It won't turn to power, won't deviate from his course, faces the worst of all possible death to sense to hell itself.

2:01:37That's the pattern of life lived with no reserve. And that's the foundation of the free state. That's right. I tried that on Brett, he told me when we first met on the tour that he felt that the biblical narratives were anachronistic, you know, that they were written in a time that was no longer relevant to us. But he decided by the end of our three days together that if you got to the core of the message it's alive, right? That's the living spirit inside the bush you might say. So here's even the weirder thing. So imagine, it's pretty obvious that Christ is a symbol of voluntary self -sacrifice.

2:02:20I don't think it doesn't really come as a shock to anyone, but the weird thing is we put that symbol at the center of our churches and at the centers of our towns for 2 ,000 years, not really knowing why. And the reason is that voluntary cell sacrifice is the foundation of the integrated psyche and the stable, productive, and abundant community. And that's right. It's right. And so, well, it's been exciting to have the opportunity over the last nine months to go talked to people about that because I've talked to about 150 ,000 people, I guess, public lectures. That to me is one of the most fascinating aspects of Christianity.

2:03:04Regardless of whether or not you think logically these things took place. Logically these stories are a completely accurate depiction of exactly what, if you follow the principles, it's incredibly beneficial to your spiritual life as a person. Well that's a kind of interesting proof isn't it? It means that there's truth in it. Well there's certainly the spirit that makes life more abundant. That's exactly right. These are weird stories because the way they're true is very sophisticated. They're true always. is. That's different than a story about the past. Like the truest story is always happening.

2:03:53The story of Moses is exactly like that. Like the pattern of leadership development that's embedded in the Exodus story. That is how leaders develop if they're real leaders. And their temptation is power, but that's not their motivation. That's their temptation. Right. That's a very important distinction. And that's always the case with leaders. And if they fall prey to the temptation of power no matter what their accomplishments. They're not going to complete the task. Right. And so there's a cool element at the end of that story too, you know, when Moses, just before Moses dies, he picks a scout from each tribe, 12 tribes, and he sends them to Canaan, which is the future.

2:04:34That's a good way of thinking about it. It's the potential place we could reside where everything was worked out, the land of milk and honey. He sends 12 scouts there. And ten of them come back and say, they tell a fierce story. Say, it's insurmountable, the challenges that lie ahead of us. There's no way we can master this. We should have never crossed the desert. We should have stayed under the thumbs of the tyrants. We should have never tried to be anything more than slaves, because now we're doomed. And two of them say, no, if we maintain our upward orientation and our covenant, nothing can stand in our way.

2:05:13We can make the deserts bloom. Moses dies, those two scouts, and so do all the Israelites who are convinced by the unfaithful scouts, and the scouts die, and the two people who go on to the Promised Land, our Caleb and Joshua, and they lead the Israelites. The faithful Israelites into the Promised Land. Those are the people who have the courage to confront the future in a faithful and What would you say? Faithful, hopeful, and courageous manner. They're the inheritors of the future. Caleb Joshua. Joshua's name is the same as Christ's name. It's the same name. Now it's not fluke, right? That's one of those echoes or precursors to the story.

2:05:58There's an ethos that leads you into the premise, promised land, and what's the ethos? the spirit of voluntary self -sacrifice. You give up something for a social relationship. Of course, you give up being primary. You do the same thing at the social level. And when you do that, it integrates you and it sets the world straight. And that's built into the biblical story. It's right at its core. So... Pause that thought. I'm going to use the restroom. We'll come back. Yep. We're back. So it's great fun to explain these things to people on the tour because it sorts them out. Well it's very fascinating.

2:06:37Yeah that's for sure. And the fact that these stories have existed for so long so it's interesting. You know that's that's where it gets really weird. Yeah. Well they've they've they've adapted to the contours of our memory and our imagination. Yeah. So you find them compelling and they stick to your memory. So I'm going to tell you what else I'm up to. Okay. What are you up to? Well, the first thing I want to do is thank you. So we launched Peterson Academy in September and we talked about it and it's been a stunning success. We have 40 ,000 students. That's amazing. We think we're the most rapidly capitalized.

2:07:16We're one of the most rapidly capitalized companies ever, especially with our degree of investment because we run a lean show. We have great professors. We have a great social media site. We had to kick 10 people off it. We have 15 ,000 active users. 10 people were dragging itself. What were they doing? They were causing trouble, Joe. They were causing trouble. Well, or immature or or out for or didn't know how to conduct themselves. Yeah. That's all it took and now everyone is sharing ideas and and make my daughter and her husband they keep a close eye on this. That's great. We're we have secured funding to the point where we are dropping the price from 599 to 399 a year as of today.

2:08:06Right. So that should make it accessible to a lot more people. And we're even more convinced than we were that this has to be the future of higher education. So when we were doing our due diligence for the fundraising, we discovered that 40 % of courses at university are now online. And we've investigated some of those courses. Many of them are PowerPoint presentations and that's all. And so that's the university experience for full tuition. And we literally have the best professors in the world and unmatched production quality. So, and we're filling in the social element too because we want people to be able to meet the social media platform because that's very positive platform.

2:08:53We've already had our first couple announce themselves, which was quite fun. And we're going to do in -person events our first plan, we're going to do a cruise. Can I ask you this? Yeah, what has what has your journey been like to go from Relative obscurity as a professor in Toronto to Becoming this person who you are now sort of a worldwide educator outside of the standard system of academia but also subject to intense international scrutiny character distortions, complete, complete, vol - like what they've done to change your positions or something like you are probably the most intentionally misrepresented person I know, intentionally misrepresent.

2:09:52We see it with a lot of other people too, but with you it's, it's, it's malicious, you seen it. But yet you have this desire inside of you to spread information and to educate and learn and learn. I'm learning on the stage. What is it like? How old were you when I first met you? It was like two thousand three. 15 right? Somewhere around. 10 years ago, 53. You were just, you were just encountering notoriety, just encountering attention and with all the trappings that come with that. What has that been like, like navigating that thing? It's very unusual that a person becomes world famous, you know, at 50.

2:10:46For ideas? Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. Well, first, I mean, it was exhilarating and painful to begin with. It was exhilarating because I knew the ideas that I was teaching at Harvard and at the U of T were revolutionary. I could never believe, I never could get over the fact that they allowed me to teach. Like, it was just, but the students loved my courses and I was very diligent, you know, so I, I stayed in my traces, so to speak. And I wasn't a revolutionary for the sake of revolutionary argumentation. and I was teaching about totalitarianism and great evil. And so it was hard to make a moral case against me.

2:11:24And no one was really inclined to, you know, they were happy with my teaching. So, and as were the students. And I had a clinical practice, which was quite extensive. But then when I first started to lecture much more broadly, we rented a theater and I did a series on Genesis. That was the first foray out into the public space. And it sold out. Well, that was when I started to encounter pain, I would say, at a crowd level. That was rough, Joe. Because I'm pretty good at getting people to open up to me right away. I mean, I learned that as a clinician, you know, and have thousands of people do that.

2:12:02That's pretty rough. Now it was a good thing, like all things considered, because people would tell me how miserable they were, how discouraged and how side -lined and often how bitter, how addicted, how imprisoned, rough stories, and then tell me how much they had improved. But that was also, there was a tragic element to that because it didn't take that much, you know, to tap them into the right orientation. And so there was sadness in that to see all these people who were demoralized. thousands of them and then to see how that could be rectified and yet hadn't been. That was rough. I really, I'm sure that was what there's many things that made me sick.

2:12:53I had a pre -existing condition that was autoimmune, but seeing all that, that was pretty rough. But knowing that it was possible to rectify it, well Well, that's, there's nothing better than that. Like, you know, wherever I go now, it's so interesting. Wherever I go now, I'm among friends. It's very strange. And I have security people and they keep an eye on me and all the interactions I have with people are positive. And I always take time for people, you know, because, well, if they're, they've been positively impacted by something that I've read or said and they're trying to get their lives together.

2:13:36there, it's like, how about we encourage that? Right? Because more of that would be real good. And if we had enough of that, then more of that would be real good and real necessary. Yeah. And so, good for everyone too. Hey, absolutely. That's that abundance. It's like, you got your act together great. That'll be real good for you. Be great for your girlfriend. Be great for your kids. Be great for your community. Absolutely. And it's, well, you know, the Christian ethos, the emphasis is redemption one soul at a time. Well, I'm a psychologist, you know? That's what I think. One person at a time, because everyone's connected way more intensely than we think.

2:14:15And so there's no such thing as a trivial person. And there's no such thing as a trivial sin or a trivial accomplishment for that matter. And so, and I know that. I know that. I studied totalitarianism for a long time. I know how it comes about. It comes about when everyone lies about everything all the time and the way you stop that is by not lying and that's how it stops. So what's it like painful and insanely exhilarating at the same time and you know the balance is shifted over the years to the exhilaration. Once I go out on top of it, once I got my health under control, which required pretty stringent discipline like I eat steak and When I deviate from that thing start to fall apart around me pretty quick.

2:15:05This isn't a crazy the that alone is polarizing You're eating all the steak. You're contributing to the downfall of civilization You're destroying the environment. Don't you know that cows are the number one producer? I know I know I know I got to stop eating meat. I don't eat too much meat. That's why the world's me while China I know that's opening up coal plants every week Solarios. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's just another okay. So it's also surreal and That's one element the diet thing just alone not just alone is surreal. I mean my daughter was so sick and Now she's great isn't a crazy.

2:15:42It's crazy. Well my wife is on this carnivore diet too and like it's been unbelievably good for her. It's unbelievably good for almost everybody. Yeah, that's what's really nice. Well, it's crazy for the mind. Oh yeah. Well, your brain likes to run on ketones as it turns out. Yeah, it really does. I felt when I, you know, I've done it back and forth, but when I'm on it strictly, you know, like when I go back to it, one of the things I notice immediately, so I have like an extra gear intellectually. My brain's stamina. Yeah, more stamina. We're going to run a study on IQ test people. Really? Yeah, because my system, we don't know, but yeah, there's two studies planned.

2:16:22One on one group will be people with immunological disorders, try carnivore, keto and ordinary diet, random assignation, but we're also going to give them personality and IQ test. You should do it with junk food. I'd be fascinated to see people pre like go the the right way first and then try junk food Yeah, sort of like it'd be good to do an a b a b design. That is what was that supersize me? Yeah, yeah that documentary Yeah, where the guy just it's clear it's absolutely crystal clear that we eat too many carbohydrates like the food Bearmet is upside down. Yes clearly and then on top of that environmental pollutants and all the other issues we have with additives.

2:17:04And this is to me is one of the more exciting things about this current administration is the Make America Health Again movement and eliminate fluoride from the water. Eliminate all these, I think there's a new list of ingredients that most of them are banned in Europe and a lot of other places and are legal in America. It's insanity and it doesn't make any sense. And oftentimes the arguments don't even make sense as to why they continue to produce it because they produce the same products for Canada, for instance, where Canada has better laws when it comes to the additives. So they produce the ones in Canada where they don't have the negative dangerous additives.

2:17:45And yet they still make this argument that to force them to stop doing that in America will cause great economic harm. Well, it's clearly the case that we have an obesity, diabetes, and mental health epidemic. and the probability that all of those are associated with insulin resistance and immunological reactions seems to me to be probably herbicides and pesticides as well. Yeah, well, there's a cascading, there's a cascade of differential effects. Undoubtedly, some people are more sensitive to those things as well. I was watching a documentary that I sent to Jamie about China. know, and one of the, you know, China innovates at such a level, like, such a fascinating level that, you know, because they're integrated with the government, which I'm not saying is a good thing, but because of that, the sort of unlimited growth, because the growth is designed for the state.

2:18:41Like, everyone's all involved in it. One of the things they're doing is integrating rice farms with crayfish farms. So they figured out a way to stop using herbicides and pesticides and instead farm these two things together. So they have the rice and then they have the crayfish. The crayfish feed off the excess material from the rice but also keep the water nitrogen and carbon rich and so the rice is more nutrient rich and Soil is more nutrient rich and then they're bringing in fish and crabs as well. So they're harvesting all of these different things that people eat along with the rice all in together and they've created, you just sort of like what they've done with regenerative agriculture, like white oaks, pastures and polyface farms and different regenerative agriculture establishments in America, but they're doing it with rice to avoid using herbicides and pesticides.

2:19:47And hopefully the new administration under Kennedy will be able to figure out how to prioritize these things. So some of them happen. I, my concern, I suppose, it's not my concern. A concern is that they'll try to do too many things at once. You know, and that's why I focused when we talked earlier today about insulin resistance super. Right. That's it and you can't change at all like that's there's gonna be resistance on all fronts But one person at a time as you're saying like when you when you have this message and you talk to people About things that you've done that have made you healthier that message resonates and then one person time tries that Their friends join in and the next thing you know You've got a large percentage of healthy people that are listening to you which is amazing.

2:20:37Well, I've seen that again at the shows. Like one of the things that's also changed across the years is that the proportion of people who are in trouble at my shows is decreasing. And partly that's because many of the guys who come, generally with their wife and often with a child have put themselves together. And then they're happy about that and they tell me the story. And so that's great. Like there's nothing better than traveling all around the world and having people come up to you and say That they weren't doing so well, right? Their lives are way better now and thank you. Yes, that's beautiful That's a good deal.

2:21:17That's a great deal Those are my favorite stories that I hear from people that listen to the podcast They're like I've listened to podcasts. I lost 60 pounds. I start working out every day I'm much healthier. I'm drinking a lot of water I'm taking a lot of lights and vitamins and and just my mental health has improved because of the daily exercise, I'm a different person. I'm on the right path. Yeah, well, so that's very interesting too, a that the fact that that's actually, you said those are the best stories that you can hear. I love those stories. Well, it shows you something about non -heednistic motivation.

2:21:49It's like, imagine what you could have, if you could have anything you wanted. Well, maybe, you know, your imagination would drift first to the hedonistic side or maybe the power side, for that matter. It's like, no, how about you can wander around anywhere in the world Some isolated field with a castle on it in Serbia and people that you've never seen will come up to you and say I was having a pretty damn dismal time of that all things considered and I listened to what you wrote and said and In consequence I put my life together and their wife is standing beside them going. Yeah, he's really in a lot better shape Thank you a lot.

2:22:25It's like yeah No, those those are great. That's a good deal. That's a great deal. Yeah, so when you ask what it's like Well, it's like a lot of that. You know, and do you feel a burden? Do you feel like a sense of responsibility that is at times overwhelming because of this responsibility that you have? I think I felt more for a good while, the pain of it. It wasn't the responsibility. Well, the intense connection you have to these people that are... Well, the responsibility, I, the responsibility, makes you careful. You know, how careful are you? Be careful. Yeah. Yeah. Why? Because you have a responsibility.

2:23:08Yeah. But that's okay. Yeah. Well, that's part of that additional sacrifice that seems natural to me. Okay. What do you mean? That with, you know, the concept with great power comes with great responsibility. It just seems normal. Right. It seems normal. Well, it has to be the case, right? I mean, as your field of opportunity expands, if your field of responsibility doesn't expand, you'll collapse and you pay a higher price for stupidity at larger scales of opportunity. Yes. Obviously. And so get your act together and, you know, and is that a burden? Voluntarily undertaking responsibility isn't a burden.

2:23:52It's an opportunity, right? That doesn't mean it's not easy, but easy. I don't know what easy is. What's easy? Pointless misery? That's not easy. Like life with no meaning is one of the hardest things. Absolutely. So I guess the reason you pick up your cross and walk uphill is because that's the best thing you can do all things considered. I mean that's why Christ says that His burden is light, that His yoke is light. It's like, huh, you're supposed to take up your cross and walk up hill towards death and hell, let's say, but that's light. Okay, why? Because because there's no better pathway than voluntarily undertaking responsibility.

2:24:40Well, definitely that's psychologically impeccable statement. There's no difference statistically speaking between thinking about yourself and being miserable. self -consciousness. They're the same thing. Right, right. Which is a giant problem with social media. Terrible problem. Accelerant to misery. Yeah, yeah, it's, sure. As soon as you're focused on you, the narrow you now, you're self -conscious, you stumble on stage, you can't play your musical instrument, you can't write a bike, you can't box, right? You're not in the flow. Why? Because you're not serving the right thing. Like when I go on stage, I remember first of all, I have music at the beginning of my shows.

2:25:23I have great musicians. Well, I don't play it. I have a musician from Cambridge. Yeah, my son sometimes plays for us, which is really fun. So it's not songs. It's just music. Well, Julian plays, he plays his country music on a guitar and a couple of his own compositions. So it's been fun to have them along with it because he's quite good at it. And so that's really, that's really great. But the music, the, the, the Dave, the guy who plays for me, he, um, he starts out plays classical gas. And he's kind of like a one -man band. He plays classical guitar, but he's, he's got electronic instruments around him.

2:26:03And he can fill up the theater or the stadium. He likes playing stadiums. And he ends with inception on electric guitar, which is pretty hard core rock All things considered and it gets everybody focused, you know, and then when I'm lecturing I have a question and I know that's a quest and it's real because I pick something important that I would like the answer to and then I explore that with the audience and I'm not self -conscious and the reason for that is it's not about me. It's about trying to answer the question. And even more importantly, trying to get the damn question right to begin with, right?

2:26:46Because you've got to get the question right, man. That's the crucial issue. Then the words come to you. What did I figure out? The spirit of your aim is what answers your prayers. Here's a brutal idea for you. Right, right, right. Right. So if you want to defeat your wife, the spirit of power will tell you what to say. Right. Yeah. Right is right, man. Right. There's a terrifying thing to know. So if you aim upward, high enough, then the spirit of upward aim reveals itself to you in words. That's right. In words and intent, and that's exactly right. So it's great. Like it's a lot. You know, you know, that it's a lot.

2:27:34Yeah, I had a different journey though. My journey was like a slow drip of fame, which I think was very healthy. It's a good way to do it so you could adjust to it. Yeah, well, you also mostly escaped from reputation savaging, right? I mean, you've had, I'm not saying completely because people have gone after you, but I got a real flurry of early hate around Bill C. 16, which I was 100 % right about you. But it was you're a lightning rod. You were the patriarchy. You were the one to point to that was going to reinforce these established norms that are not supportive of the minimalized and marginalized communities.

2:28:18You were cruelty. You were the cruel white man. What did that kind to call you mean mean white man which is by the way you've already lost we would that's you're throwing pejoratives out there like that in a debate like that's the thing that I was talking about like when someone tries to establish insults and get you on your back it's offense it's offense to put you in a defensive position so that you cannot do your best yeah well it's also So to pull the rug out from underneath it, so you collapse your reputation permanently, and that redounds to the person's credit. Also, it's established and narrative to the audience that's listening to you.

2:29:02Now you have to look at this person under this light, because I've done so eloquently described him as this thing. And then he will be defensive about that, because he does, oh, I am not. And then you look even more like that thing. Yeah, yeah, it's a very unappended way of progressing. Which is, luckily I don't like that. Not only do I not like that, I don't think that's necessary. I don't think it's necessary as the person doing it. I certainly don't think it's necessary to respond to that. I don't think it does anyone any good. I don't think it's good for society as a whole, and it's definitely not good for exploring ideas.

2:29:42I wonder what you do with the psychopaths. also you're trying to win versus trying to express your perspective with as much clarity and as much thought as possible. You're trying to do your very best to examine these things from a selfless perspective, from a truly objective perspective. Well, it's a truly quest perspective, I think. So it's not exactly objective. It's more like, because you don't have access to that. But what you can say is, well, I'm genuinely puzzled about this. And I would genuinely like to search for the answer. Right. When it be ideal, if you were having a debate where someone said something that you agreed with and you're like, wow, he's got a really good point.

2:30:30And you, instead of refuting that person, exploring that with them, which is one of the reasons I don't like debates per se. I like conversations. Yeah. Because in conversations, if you don't have a pre -determined narrative that you want to enforce, instead you have your thoughts, you have your ideas, and you're not married to them. And these are just thoughts. And you put them out there, and then you can encounter a very unique human being who has a way of describing and thinking about things that will open your mind to new possibilities, which is what we all should strive for. We should all strive to be illuminated, to learn from new things.

2:31:17But yet, we close those off because that is a point that your enemy is trying to score. Well, and you will not give them that. Well, it's also because people aren't really very well -versed in how to do this. You know, it's like... So one of the huge advantages of your podcast and of the podcast world in general, I would say is that you model how to do that. You know, it's like, and there's an intense religious ethos under that. So okay, so what does it mean? You start without pride in humility. It's like, what the hell do I know? Or maybe more precisely, there's probably some things I could still learn that would be beneficial.

2:31:57Okay? You know, you're interested in the topic and you're desire to know more. So that's the quest elements like you're after something, right? You don't know what it is, but it's more development. It's more wisdom. It's more information, right? And you know what sure where it's gonna be, okay? So now you're the sort of person who could learn and that has something to learn and now you have a quest in mind. Okay, so now that's that's the frame for your actions. Well, if you're talking to someone who's also doing that, well, then those are the words that come. Yeah, right? And they come, they come in a compelling way to you and to the participant and in a way that's compelling enough so that they can tell other people.

2:32:40That's the Holy Spirit, by the way, that's that phenomenon from a religious perspective. That's exactly what it is. It's kind of like you sit before the talk and rehearse what words you're going to say. They just, it's here. No, I never do. Right. I don't think I should. No. I know well that sometimes that's a problem because you breach subjects that you weren't really prepared to talk about and you might not have a fully formed Ideal about it. Yeah, you know, you're not exact. Oh, if I thought about that, what would I have said differently? You know, yeah, but you kind of have to find that out along the way.

2:33:14Yes, right, you know, and that way you're You know, you have a right to stumble over your own ignorance for sure how the hell do you know it's there before you reveal it? Well, not only that, I don't think the audience truly trusts you unless they feel authenticity in that quest as it were, that desire to try to understand, like, what is it that you believe and why do you believe what you believe? And where did you come to these conclusions? How? What journey did you go on? What ideas did you dismiss? What ideas were holding you back? What ideas did you realize were just a personal weakness that you were protecting yourself from reality, protecting yourself from the reality of bad choices and past mistakes.

2:34:00What are you doing to stop that from entering into your current state of mind? And that kind of thinking people can mirror and they can listen to So you talk about these things and say, I do that. Okay, I gotta stop doing that. Okay, okay, this is how I can clarify the way I view things. And this is why I'm tripping myself up because I keep trying to win conversations. I keep trying to be right all the time, which is impossible. Especially the way of human. It's elevating your status in the conversation as a consequence of abstract victory instead Instead of increasing your wisdom and enhancing your reputation as a sojourner towards the truth.

2:34:51Yes. And it's especially difficult for young people because you don't have enough life experience to have made these mistakes and corrected them and learned and grown and have the humility to recognize that process. Right. Instead you see other people that are successful or whatever it is and you want that right now. Yeah Yeah, yeah, and that's wrong too because you don't want that right now You want to learn how to have that so that when you want to win the lottery, but you don't no Definitely you don't right because everybody wants to win the lottery. Yeah, one of the worst things that can happen And what do young people have They can listen and they can ask questions Right.

2:35:33And you know, they say when the student is ready, the teacher will come. Well, how does that play out in the world? Well, if you admit to your ignorance and you ask genuine stupid questions, you will rapidly encounter people who are more than happy to share their wisdom with you. Like, people love having mentees, right? They like to be able to share their wisdom and their experience, unfortunately, even if they don't have it. That's where it becomes a problem, the false prophet. Yeah, well that's right. Well that's the false guru. Yeah, right. The people that don't have the answers to their own lives, so they try to give other people answers to their lives.

2:36:14Well that's also the psychopath problem, is that, you know, what about the people who are feigning competence? Right. Yeah, right. Well, that's a real problem. Yeah, it's a real problem. That's a deadly problem and it's massively elevated on social media. Yes. Well, it used to be a gigantic problem in martial arts. The fake martial artists. There was a lot of them. Sure. That's the eternal parasite problem. Yes. So organisms build up a storehouse of value, a carcass, let's say, like a whale carcass, for example. and inevitably the parasites move into invaded, inevitably. And that's so consistent of pattern that sex evolved to stop it.

2:37:08House out. Well, parasites can reproduce faster than their hosts because they're simpler. And so they can swarm the host quite rapidly, especially if the host clones itself because the host then stays identical physiologically across the generations so the parasites can optimize to colonize the host and that's the end of it. If you reproduce sexually you mix your genes up 50 per... you pay a price, you lose 50 % of your genetic specific genetic heritage but the advantages you stay ahead of the parasites. So sex evolved to outwit the parasites and a huge part of what we're seeing around us and this is probably a consequence at the lowest level, base level.

2:37:53We've had a phenomenal boom in wealth since World War II. Phenomenal. We stored wealth everywhere, like in Harvard, at a $53 billion endowment. Well, the parasites found the wealth everywhere. And they've invaded like mad. That's a great example. Hey, Harrison, it's an academia. It's a great example. What your name is? Media, Unurban. Legacy media? Yes. Science has been invaded that way. The political, this is a major problem. And so how do you protect yourself against the parasitical exploiters? Well, you could recognize parasitical behavior. When everything gets chalked off to racism and white supremacy.

2:38:32When they start using these pejoratives, they start throwing those around for everything. That's one of the ways you recognize it. That's right. You're a parasite. You're not really doing science. You're not really doing academics. Well, one of the hallmarks of identification from the clinical literature for the cluster B types, and so they have a parasitical element, histrionic, narcissistic, psychopathic, criminal, right? That's cluster B. They use false claims of victimization to manipulate. Yes. And so this is a particularly pernicious pathway because they parasitize empathy. Right. And the left is unbelievably susceptible to that because the left is full of empathic people.

2:39:17And so those who parasitize empathy have a field day on the left. Right. Because the left is generally thought to be more educated, more compassionate, kinder, looking out for marginalized people. That's part of the ethics of it. The ethic is pretty straightforward. Anything that cries is a baby. It's like, no. Some things that cry are monsters. Right, right. Well, let's take the case of Nicole Asturgeon, the Scottish Prime Minister, the previous Scottish Prime Minister. Any man who wants to can be a woman, it's like, okay, any man, do you mean any man, do you? Yeah. Have you encountered the nightmare men?

2:40:02Oh, they don't exist, they're all victims. You just bloody well wait till you encounter one. You'll change your story very rapidly. And for the naïve and sheltered empaths of the radical left, they're either psychopaths, so they're wolves and sheep clothing, or they're people that are so naïve that the, what would you say, red -riding hoods, grandmother can definitely have this way with them. Yes, that's literally something that I use as an example in my Netflix special. I said, I think there are people that feel like they're trapped in a woman's body. And then there's also people that are out of their fucking mind.

2:40:40They're crazy. And that they're not just history. But what I pointed to the all -thread history, when you wanted to make a killer in a movie scarier, you put a bit of dress, like Norman Bates and Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and I used a big bad wolf. I'm like, it's literally a wolf dressed up like a woman. Like that's literally what it is. and they've somehow or another completely abandoned this one aspect of masculinity that's one of the more terrifying is the predatory pervert. And they've given the predatory pervert a privileged position. Right. Right. And that's one of the craziest things about it is they've completely...

2:41:29abandon the idea of the pedophile and the monster and the sexual pervert and then the attacker, the assaultor, the person who, when you give a guy, you say, all you have to do is say you're a woman, now you have access to where the women's spaces, all the women's spaces, you could victimize them, you could fight them, you could beat them in sports, you could dominate them in all games, bizarre, bizarre that no one's caught onto that. And that's that's for sure. That's the weirder. That's the more cult like and even you could say religious aspect of Leftist things. It's an original sin. Eve clutches the serpent to her breast Like that's a serpent.

2:42:11It's poison. You don't get to love it. Right. It's a monster. Right. Right And a guy wearing a dress with an erection of the women's wearer. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah or or worse Yeah, or worse or worse or a lot worse. Yeah Well, right. And you know, there are no shortage of naive people who've never really encountered a monster and have no imagination for it. And but there's also people that are willing to justify the monster's behavior because the monster is a part of a protected class now. Yeah, well, that's part of that. Which is crazy. The cluster B types use proclamation of victimization to parasitize.

2:42:45That's part of their clinical pathology. And they're so... Or me, I get to do anything. And they're so common. Yep. That's what's really crazy. And why is it that academia is overwhelmed by people like this? Is it because it's it's vulnerable to Parasites? Sure. Why not it was the storehouse of unguarded value? You know Without any religious principles. Well, also yeah, there's that too and yeah, and with and with no real gatekeepers Right, right right like the parasite problems a very deep problem So so I can even maybe I can even give you an example of that This is a hard one, but I'll try. In the Pinocchio movie, this also happens in Jonah, the story of Jonah.

2:43:30Remember, Chipetto ends up in a whale. It's like, what the hell? There's no explanation for that in the story. It's like he's out looking for Pinocchio, and now he's in a whale. While a whale is a giant carcass, right? And so when something dies, it's spirit, what do you say? It's spirit is then embedded in a carcass. That's a good way of thinking about it. That's why Pinocchio has to go into the belly of the whale to free Jepetto and finish his transformation is that when things deteriorate, right? You have these carcasses lying around with their dead spirits, the spirit of what gave rise to them is still inside there.

2:44:08And the job is to go into the carcass and to revitalize the spirit that produced it and not to parasitize it. Right. Boy, I don't know how you got that out of Pinocchio in the whale. Well, I'm going to follow you on this one. I'm like, wow. Jepego ends up languishing in the whale, right? So imagine that there's a spirit in the universities that gave rise to these great great storehouses of value. And that spirit has disintegrated. And now it's inside the the storehouse. That's a good way of thinking about it. Inside the storehouse, your job is someone who wants to become real is to go into the storehouses of value that have been bequeathed to us by the past, and to discover and revitalize the spirit that gave rise to them, not to parasitize them.

2:44:53And when they parasitize them. They strip them to their bones and there's nothing left. And they do it obviously, right? There's plagiarism, there's all these different, and all that stuff. All scientific papers. Yeah, and all that stuff gets gained. They'll think it's swept under the rug because the people that are doing it are part of their protected class. Yeah. So they protect the parasites like this is my lampry. Yeah, like don't yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is my baby like the woman from Harvard They fired her but they give her an equal paying job. It could also be Joe and might as well get in trouble for this too.

2:45:24Let's go well Because women are more agreeable They're let more prone to manipulation by psychopath because their primary ethos is is nurturing for a naive woman every victim is a baby. It's like fine. 90 % of them are victims. You could even say that about criminals. You go to the run of the male prison and there's going to be people in there and you heard their lives, you think, oh my God, no wonder. And then there's another core group that's like, oh, I see, I see who you are. You're, you're, uh, if I saw one, if I saw inside your skull for five seconds, I'd have post -traumatic stress disorder.

2:46:14I never recover. Right? Those people don't exist. It's like, oh, oh, yes, they exist. Yeah, they exist. Yeah, yeah. And they're, and they're very good at crying like infants. right and then the mothers the naive mothers come flooding out the women the women dominate the universities from the 1960s onward it's like income the parasites and they're enabled and what are they enabled by? Fascinating thanks to me when parasites are confronted and they laugh like one of the things about academic parasites when you challenge their believes He's like, you don't know what you're talking about. I saw this with the anti -Semitism on campus thing when women were confronted by these statements like death to the Jews on campus, whether or not this is hate speech.

2:47:12And I saw it with, I believe it was Josh Howley, the woman was saying some women can give birth and some men can give birth as well. Some men have period. Like this kind of like, and I guess your line of questioning is very transphobic and opens people up to violence. Right. With a laugh. With a laugh and a smile, diminishing of your position by mockery. It's contempt. Yeah. Yeah. What they're saying doesn't make any fucking sense to anybody rational. But they're so, they're so embedded in this system that they've really believed that they have the kind of control over Congress that they have over the classmates there.

2:47:57This is like standard behavior for them mocking and dismissing Other ideas that counter to theirs right well, and there's plenty of reward for that disseminated in the universities Yes, and so that's part of their how do you fix that? with a 10 -year -old. No, I'm serious. I believe you. I believe you. It's not like I'm thrilled about the fact that Harvard is having a war with Donald Trump. And I'm less thrilled with the fact that I hope Donald Trump wins. I worked at Harvard. It was a great place. I'm not happy at all that these institutions have become what they've become. And if I could see a way forward to revitalizing them, then, but what are you going to do?

2:48:38like the administration took over the universities and parasitized the tuition fees and the tax dollars. Then the Woke Mob parasitized the administration. And here we are. Now what are you going to do about that? All these tenured professors who are progressive and they're way less progressive than the administrators? You're going to fix that? How? How? Even in principle, I don't see it how. Well, so what we decided to do, we've been working on this for 10 years, it's like, well, what do universities do? Well, they educate, they offer lectures, they allow, they have a place where people can congregate, they help people mature, they explain the world, they encourage people to aim up, they teach people to write, my son runs this essay app, we're trying to teach kids to write, we're integrating that with Peterson Academy, so they can learn to think, That's our solution.

2:49:40Will it work? The world's pretty dynamic place. It's working real well at the moment. You know, and well, people need some sort of an alternative to that system. If you recognize what that system is, especially if you're participating in it and you're opposed to all of it and you're trapped in it and it is vital to your success that you accept some of it? How else can you get through? How can you get this degree and maintain some level of sovereignty over your mind and your ideas? It's a horrible trap. I've met a lot of people that I think are very rational, reasonable people that at least some of that stuck in their head.

2:50:24Oh yeah. Well, when we did some research trying to see what predicted politically correct authoritarianism, It was last piece of research I did before my research lab, you know, ceased to be a viable entity, let's say, what predicted, so politically correct authoritarianism was that hyper -compassionate leftism, but conjoined with willingness to use force to put the doctrines forward, force and fear. So it's tyrannical compassion. That's exactly that. What are the predictors? Low verbal intelligence. That's the first one. Second one was being female. The third one was having a feminine temperament.

2:51:03The fourth one was ever having taken even one politically correct course. Wow. Yeah, right. And so I've thought that through for a long time. It's like well, what's what's the female relationship? Because that's it. That's a crucial one. The the female dominated disciplines are the most woke by far. Wow. So I think it's because of that basic ethos of compassion. All who cry are babies. Well, look, that's the right default for women. You know, like wise women, my wife is one of these women. She was a very good mother. She never thought adult men were babies. Like one of the things that's quite striking about my wife is that if you're a useless man, she doesn't feel sorry for you.

2:51:50You're not a baby.

2:51:54Now, And so she got to be, she's discriminating in her empathy. And we're in a situation now where people think that indiscriminate empathy is a virtue. That's Eve's sin. See Eve literally, Eve wants to put the feminine ethos at the top of the hierarchy of value. That replaces God, right? And that causes the fall. And then Adam, he's such a cock. That's exactly it. Is that he goes along with her. He doesn't stand up and tell her that maybe she shouldn't be listening to poisonous serpents. He doesn't. He consumes with her what she delivers so that she'll be his friend. Because you know how useful men like that are.

2:52:37And then when the fall happens, he complains to God that he made, that God made Eve and cursed him with her. That's the story. So it's not, it's not just women. It's, and we, we're going to get this straight. women with their drive towards indiscriminate compassion so that even the serpents are their children. It's men too who won't say they always say yes dear whatever whatever you want. Yes, weak men, weak men who enable the who don't help the women set boundaries. Now you've got to do that as a man you know like when you have a when you and your wife have a baby for the first nine months every Every time the baby cries, it's right.

2:53:18You respond to a baby's cries as if it's right 100 % of the time because human infants are so dependent and utterly unable to fend for themselves. So that sets up a very powerful feminine dynamic. It's like, if it cries, take care of it. Okay. So what are the men for? It's like, if it cries, take care of it, accept that. That's a false cry. And you see that with kids, they'll start playing with that by the time they're nine or ten hundred and so, right? Yes, of course. And so you differentiate. It's like, oh no, that's not a baby. That's a snake. Well, are you sure it's not a baby? It's like, no, no snake, for sure, snake, poisonous snake in fact.

2:54:00Right. Well, I'm feeling pretty sorry for it. It's like, save your compassion for the truly needy and leave the snakes to me. Right? And Adam doesn't do that. Is it a function of a society that's almost, I wanna say too successful and empathetic and there's too much abundance that you have more of this crying. Look, no, but you have more parasitical behavior. Why? Well, everyone's got pretty comfortable because we've been in a high trust society for a long time. It's like, oh, everybody's trustworthy. It's like, no, a few people in a few countries are trustworthy most of the time and that's really hard.

2:54:43Right. And there's stringent preconditions. Right. So everyone's trustworthy. And now there's all these piles of wealth lying around everywhere. It's like parasite dream, especially when it's unguarded. And so it's enabled by the women and unguarded by the men. And both are at fault, right? And that you see that in the genesis account, to. It's like Eve clutches the serpent to her breast, but Adam fails to help her distinguish. Plenty of these parasitic men as well. Oh yeah, they're the worst. The worst men cry victim and look for sympathy from women. There was a famous mass murder. No, serial killer who did that.

2:55:22The the lawyer, very t -bundi, Ted Bundy. You know what his trick was? He had a VW if I remember correctly. He had a cast that he could take on and off. So he put his hood up, maybe it wasn't a VW. He put his hood up because his car didn't work. And he did it around places where he knew there were young women. And then he enticed them to stop because, wow, poor Ted. Because he's crippled and his car doesn't work. And then, and then, well, and then the woman learned very painfully the difference between a monster and a baby. Right. Brutal. He was a bad guy. There are some bad people. And a fair number of them like to dress in women's clothing, let's say.

2:56:06Yeah. Yeah. That's really uncomfortable for people. If they have this idea that's embedded in their consciousness about what's going on to accept that. Of course, it's in fact accepting that when that reality is thrust upon you, unaware you develop post -traumatic stress disorder, right? Because it's naive people who encounter malevolence develop PTSD. That's the pathway. So if you want to make your children susceptible to PTSD, like all these kids that are triggered by everything, make them extremely naive and then let them encounter malevolence, right? Because you're supposed to teach them to handle serpents, right?

2:56:48To identify them and handle them. And that means they have to learn about the nature of the world and the girls to differentiate between snakes and babies. Right, right, and babies and men. And the man who worms his way into your dreams because he's a dependent infant, he's a snake. And your sympathy is wasted on him. Yes, there certainly are. Man, I tell you, those riots that used to gather around me, you know, when, And that was mostly 2017 before I stopped speaking at universities mostly. The women were pretty bad, harpy, city, man, and this self -righteous feminine toxic compassion, just screeching at the top of its lungs, but the men that were with them.

2:57:35Oh my God, I didn't even, I didn't want to be within three feet of them. You know, it's like, I'll be your friend. You see those people on the net talking to children. You're a happy friend. When your family abandons you, I'm here for you. They don't understand, not like me. We could be closer than anybody has been with you.

2:57:59That just barely scrapes the surface of awful. Like awful is a long, long ways down. Yeah. So, part of what's happened in the universities, and it's a terrible thing to say, well, there's lot of things. Storehouse of wealth, radical increase in the number of students served,

2:58:26radical feminization of the institutions, and weakness on the part of the man who should have been guardian of the gates, all of that. And is it repairable? I don't think so. She's, she's, I think once the parasites, once the parasites have the corpse, what are going to do, how are you going to bring Lazarus back from the dead? You know, I don't think so. I think it's time for something new. You need academic dewormer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what critical thinking was supposed to be, Joe. So you think it needs to, so something needs to be emerged like your academy as an alternative? Well, the thing is it already is emerging, right?

2:59:07Because to universities, these, of course, they're going to do this as they spiral downward. They're going to turn to cost cutting. Well, they're not going to cut the administration, obviously, because they make the decisions about who's going to be cut. So they're going to turn to low cost alternatives to having courses. And so they're already doing that. Let's put our courses online. Well, fair enough, except they're terrible. They're terrible. We got the best professors and the best production quality. And so you've designed it for online versus just having a power plant. Right, we have a plan mapped out.

2:59:46We'll have a full equivalent of a four year distribution of courses. We'll have that within, we think, two years, something like that. Four new courses a month at the moment. We're putting out 32 hours of original content a month. It's very, well, people can go look. It looks great. And that's because it's great. Michaela and her husband, they're unbelievably picky about the professors and about everything. They watch the social media. They watch the look. They watch the images. They watch the ads. You know, we're trying to make, do everything 100 % and then we're trying to make it as inexpensive as possible.

3:00:29So we're raising money because we want to translate it into multiple languages Because wouldn't it be lovely to offer that to the developing world? With free market economics instead of Marxist economics so that people could learn to be entrepreneurs That'd be great for Africa, especially if we could get energy prices down and maybe everybody could be rich And not just materially rich, right? Because that's not enough if you're materially rich and you're spiritually poor Your money just serves to destroy you and fast. So that's not wealth. Right. And yeah, right. You know that you've met people that that's happened to.

3:01:07Oh, yeah. Money is not the cure for poverty. No, you're naive if you think that. No, it's not the cure for happy for being discontent either. But it does offer you freedom if you use it correctly and opportunity and opportunity. So give you some relief from stress, which can give you some kind of happiness, but it's not the goal. No, no, well it has to be put in an ethical framework or it'll just... Look, money's opportunity, that's a way of thinking about it. And if you're going to the devil and you have money, you just go to the devil faster. I saw that lots of times in my clinical practice.

3:01:44And maybe if you're aiming upward, then money can be a force multiplier. And it can be. You know, you can make a good, you can, you can establish a solid institution that's, provides mentorship and opportunity for people and actually that's more, that's the most fun to do that. It's by far the most fun to do that, to make something of genuine value. Why wouldn't you do that? Only if you were cynical and unenabled, why not make something that works? That's So that's much more entertaining. All things considered. And so when we're trying to do this with ARC, and it's going real well, you know, and you are very helpful there too, you know, that podcast that we did, there were lots of reasons that the climate apocalypse narrative has been falling radically apart, but that podcast that you and I did was definitely one of them, you know, and I've interviewed a lot of good scientists who, they're not climate skeptics, you know, that's a stupid term and Longberg's a good example of that.

3:02:42It is. like climate denier. It's right up there with vaccine. That's such a manipulative thing. Yeah, it's like, oh, you're like the Nazis who object to Jews being baked. That's your argument, is it? Really? That's your argument, you scum rat. You're gonna use that as a moral lever. That's your level of ethos. That's your argumentation. You're gonna take the worst slur you can possibly imagine, and you're gonna use it to devastate someone's reputation publicly, because you don't have a leg to stand on, because you're the kind of tyrant who uses fear to monger power. That's you. There's a psychological interpretation of the climate apocalypse scandal.

3:03:22And it's killing, it's destroying Germany. It's destroying the UK. And then Germany, like, didn't they shut down a bunch of their nuclear plants? Yeah. Yeah, and they replaced them with leg -night coal. right, the dirtiest burning coal. So they're in a situation where they pollute more for more unstable energy that's delivered by tyrants. Well, well outsourcing their industry to China, it's a very bad idea, right, whose building coal plants at a rate that is so fast that everything the West does to ameliorate carbon is utterly irrelevant, utterly irrelevant. Yeah, and that's an uncomfortable truth that these climate cultists just don't they don't need address.

3:04:12They won't even entertain any information contrary to the narrative. They won't even let it in. Of course not because they'd upset the game. I'm not really happy. Most of the people that are involved in the game don't even understand the game. They don't even understand what's really not just at stake but the actual facts that they're arguing for. Well, Karni's a good example this in Canada to return to that. Yeah. You know? Is he going to win?

3:04:41It seems like he's supposedly indicate that and maybe with a majority government and I can see why. A Canadians were accustomed to having everything go pretty well and we could be morally superior to you Americans because that was also fun. And we'll never forego that opportunity and Trump has provided it in spades in the last month. So we look at Carney and we don't pay any attention to politics and we certainly don't read his god damn book. And so we see someone who looks like a banker from the 1990s when everything was just fine in Canada and Canadians were just as rich as Americans and the whole country was stable and peaceful and we think well you know we kind of made a mistake on Justin turned out he was little incompetent little narcissistic and maybe we shouldn't have voted for him just because he legalized marijuana because that's actually what brought him into power the first time.

3:05:28And so we kind of made a mistake but now look we've learned and we're not going to be fooled by narcissistic pretenders and Mark Carney used to be governor of Bank of England, you know, and that's pretty good. That's a pretty good resume and it certainly looks like that. And yet he believes that 75 % of the fossil fuels in the world should be left in the ground and that there's no there's nothing that should guide your purchasing decision by force other than decarbonization. But it seemed to me at least from a observer from afar that Pierre was getting steam. Oh yeah. It looked like he was going to win.

3:06:03Oh, and they see it too. Well, two things happened. Well, two things happened. Trudeau resigned. Oh yeah, the liberals were headed for extinction. It was going to be the worst defeat of a governing party in Canada ever. They might have lost their official party status. So it was, they were done. Well, they pivoted, brought in Karni, who'd been advising Trudeau. He's put himself up as an outsider, a competent outsider, a lot of private experience in the private domain, you know, a steady hand at the helm. It's like, you were a Trudeau's economic advisor for 10 years, 10 years. And there's going to be more of the same under you.

3:06:47And now you're pretending to be an industrialist, even though you were one of the leaders, the world's leading authorities on DEI, ESG, and net zero. That's Mark Carney. All you have to just read his book, which people don't, of course, because it's a book. You know, first three chapters will do the trick. Oh, now, either he's decided that every single thing he ever believed was wrong, right to the core, and hasn't apologized or let anyone know that. And now he's actually Mr. In the industry, which is how he's presenting himself to Canadians or Or he believes what he's always believed or he's a wolf wearing grandma's dress Yeah, he's a benevolent wolf.

3:07:29Well, that's that's why the wolf wears grandma's dress Yeah, it's like there's no one nicer than me. So how does Canada correct course? Mom People either correct course by waking up or by experiencing severe pain And it looks to me like we've chosen the severe pain route, you know? We already make 60 cents we already produce 60 cents to every dollar you Americans produce even though we were at parity 10 years ago and so after Four more years of carney we could easily have that down to 50 cents Spiraling housing prices a lot of social instability in Canada especially since after October 7th. Do you think that's so?

3:08:14All my Jewish friends in Toronto are terrified. Yeah. That's not fun. I don't like seeing that. No. No, it's awful. It's awful. And all those psychopaths who've been parading around their moral virtues since October 7th, they're plenty emboldened, plenty, plenty. And I'll give you a little example of Canada. So we had the English leadership debate week ago. and the powers that be who organized the debate, the legacy media types, with CBC radically involved, couldn't figure out how to exclude rebel media. You know, that right -wing news, kind of tabloid news group from Canada, Ezra Levante, who's been buzzing about for 10 years, causing trouble like a right -wing tabloid journalist, which is what he is.

3:09:03Well, they didn't want him in the press scrum for the leaders after the debate. So they canceled it. They canceled the journalists' interviews of the four leading contenders for Prime Minister in Canada because some right -wing tabloid journalists, they've had a newspaper or a media empire for 10 years. I don't care what you think of it. It's not the point. The point is they canceled the journalists' scrum after the English language. debate. That's so impressive. And no one complained. That but doesn't make sense. Like if you're a presidential candidate and you're in count or prime minister candidate and you're encountering someone that has an opposing perspective, you should have really good answers.

3:09:55That's it. Oh, look, if you're if you're guys leading, why ask questions? That's the legacy median candidates, It's the CBC. It's state -funded, right? Right to the core. 1 .4 bit, think about this, Joe. This is our bloody state media. It's so funny. 1 .4 billion dollars in direct government subsidy and $600 million in federal advertising per year. $2 billion. Go to the CBC website on YouTube. You look at their last 20 videos. I'll guarantee that not a single one of them has more than 200 views. Shhh. Right, which means the people who made the video clips didn't watch them. Right. That's what you get for $2 billion.

3:10:34Now, everyone in Canada, who's older than 55, watches legacy media. And Paulie have said he defunded CBC. So you can imagine they're not exactly covering him in a positive way. I watched the debate where he kept getting talked over. Yeah. Jag Meat Singh. He's such fun with his pink turban. He's such a fashion icon. Luckily, he's going to lose his own seat. and his party is going to be devastated. That's the socialist. They're going to be devastated so badly that they won't have official party status. But it's incredible to watch that in Canada where I've always thought at least your discourse is much more polite.

3:11:12Yeah, wise. Was. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of there's a lot of mopping up to do in Canada. Well, and the country and you know, the man who started the reform party in Canada, so that was the populist end of the conservative movement 20 years ago, maybe a little longer, eventually reunited with the conservatives, Ernest Manning or Preston Manning, son of an Alberta premier, premier of Alberta for like 40 years, he wrote an article in the Globe and Mail which was the, it's the Canadian Liberal establishment newspaper and I mean liberal by the classic you know old school small -el liberal, centrist sort of newspaper, saying that Manitoba, Albert and Saskatchewan should have an immediate constitutional convention immediately on Karni's ascension to the throne.

3:12:03Quebec doesn't want pipelines traversing its territory. Quebec, one of the, I don't know if you noticed this, but one of the participants in the debate was a Canadian separatist. We literally have a Canadian federal party, federal, localized in Quebec, whose stated intent is to break up the country. Hasn't that always been the case with Quebec though? For a good while it was provincial, right? I mean, they had a provincial party, like a state party, right? Okay, fair enough, have your state separatist party. It's for your state. Oh no, we wanna have a national party. We wanna be represented in the House of Commons as separatists.

3:12:46Yeah, so the country's in, it's very sad. And I was hoping they could be the 51st day. Yeah, well then well, that's what that was so two things back to that. That was the big one. Carney, Carney showed up just in the nick of time to save the burning damsel from the train tracks or whatever the hall it is and the rhetoric and then Trump he just timed it so badly and he didn't know he didn't know what would it would do. He didn't know but that's also how do you not know that people have national pride. Yeah, he knew that, but he didn't know what the electoral consequences would be. He didn't know that that would shift them to the liberals so radically.

3:13:29And he's going to pay for that because once Carney is elected, if that happens, Trump will not have a more seasoned enemy in the West. Right. Carney is very well connected, very, especially in Europe and the UK very well. So, and... And Europe and the UK is a mess. Yeah, you might say that. Oh, that's for sure. We've highlighted all the arrests in the UK over social media posts. And most people have no idea. Constantine Kessin is great with the books. Explaining all that to people. It's so funny when he compares it to Russia. Yeah. He says how many people got arrested in Russia? How many people you got arrested in the UK?

3:14:11and most people are, oh, none, right? No, 4 ,000. Yeah. Like what? Yeah. Oh yeah, it's unbelievable. Well, and you just see this everywhere. You just see this everywhere. So they've implemented these 20 mile -hour speed limits everywhere. And so. 20 miles an hour. Yeah. Yeah, because Joe, that's a bike. You don't really need a car. Like, what are you doing that's so important that you need a car? Like, if I have to go to a climate meeting, well, I get a car. But the peasants, they don't really need cars. They don't need heat either. Not not that much heat. Maybe they can stop grandma from freezing.

3:14:45One of the fairly things about Bernie Sanders and his anti -Olegarch tour is they're doing it on private jets. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So we were in the UK not long ago for this art conference and we rented a truck and And whenever it went over 20 miles an hour, it beeped at you just like seat belt things beeped. Oh, God. And then if you, if you go more than two miles an hour of the speed limit and you get caught, then that knocks one third of your license off. If you do that three times, you don't have a license for a year. Yeah. B B B B B. Climate, climate, knocking, climate, knock. Yeah.

3:15:33Yeah. You can tell Tyrant Joe, they use fear and compulsion and they hate comedians and cars. Right. There's Tyrant checklist. Hates cars, check. No sense of humor, check. Uses fear, check. Uses force, check. Psychopath. Right. I hate to end this on a bleak note. Well, let's end it on a positive note. Okay. Okay. So what's positive? young people are flocking back to churches across the West and more to the conservative churches and the only thing we have to buttress us into the future against the Islamists and the Marxists and the nihilists and the hedonists is our return to our core traditions without that we're done and so happening and in big numbers.

3:16:28And so that's really quite something. The back has been broken of the climate apocalypse narrative. There's plenty of mopping up to do, but half the people know that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark and that that particular apocalypse is probably not worth giving up all your freedoms for. We've seen a lot of progress on the arc front, like a lot of the things that we've been putting forward, the better story. So that's a return to the foundations of Western civilization that made our society the sort of place that dispossessed people will go to voluntarily. There's lots of people who are starting to understand that that's seriously worth preserving.

3:17:14Energy executives are waking up as far as I can see to the fact that they could help the world's poor in a serious way. And if they want to moralize, that would be a, if they want to act morally, that would be a good place to start. There's lots of people who are working to produce abundance. Your country, the US, you guys are unbelievably good at that. Way better than any other country in the world. And you generally deliver in times of crisis. And you might just do that again. And so, and then I would say underneath all that, you know, you said you, you're pretty happy to encourage people. You're very happy when you hear that your show has been helpful to people.

3:17:55And there's lots of people who are consciously trying to aim up and more and more of them all the time. And if enough of enough enough people do that, we won't need to learn through pain and And we can bring abundance everywhere in the world, and we can make the next 50 years an unparalleled success. And we need the faith and courage of Joshua and Caleb to do that. Of course, the future is full of giants and disasters. But if we aim up and we speak the words of truth that make good order out of chaos, then anything's possible. Sure. All right. Beautiful. Always enjoy this. Always enjoy our conversations.

3:18:48I appreciate you very much. I appreciate our friendship. It's been great. No one you all these years and watching this crazy journey that you've been on. I'm glad you're doing great. Yeah, Joe. Same thing for you, man. Like, thanks a lot. And thanks for your help with Peterson Academy, too. My pleasure. Very helpful. All right. Much appreciated. By the end.