#2180 - Jordan Peterson

Well, when you start to be a professor, you're not that much difference in age from your students. To begin with, it's a good way of laying out a demarcation, and that was helpful. That's useful, you know, people like to know how the hierarchies are delineated.

And professors like to think that they're everybody's buddy, but that's not the right relationship. And so that was helpful. And then when I went on tour in 2018, you know, I realized that I was going to speak live in front of several hundred thousand people over the course of the tour. And I thought, you've got to think, when you have an opportunity like that, that if you had the least amount of sense, you'd pull out all the stops. So I bought some expensive suits.

And then one of the things that happened in consequence of that was that people started to come to the lectures in suits. And so about, I'd say about 40 of the audience dresses formally. And lots of the young guys who come, they tell me when I meet them afterwards in the meet and greets. For example, that they bought their first suit to come to the lectures. And so, you know, I wouldn't have ever expected that. And then Dimitri showed up about two years ago with his portfolio of suits.

He designed one for each of the rules for my first book, and he put the rule underneath the collar at the back and designed the lining. Custom lining on all the suits as well. And so I gave him a crack at it because he put so much work into it and that worked out real well. He's very, very creative.

Yeah, that two-colour suit, there's lamb's wool on one side and goat's wool on the other, and it's a heaven and hell suit.

So that's the story, man.

So what does that mean? Well, look, man, well, you know, look here. Part of the reason that you're so successful, in my opinion, is because you actually say what you think like. You're not putting on a show. Actually, you have no reason to put on a show.

You put on a whole bunch of shows and they've already been successful, you know? And you're actually asking the questions, that are genuine questions and people can trust you because of that. And that means that you're letting the words emerge as they come to you, and each of doing that with each word. That's a decision, you know? Because you can use your language to manipulate, and you can use your language to for your own, say, hedonistic purposes, or to gain power.

Or you can just say what you think. Every, like, all of those different choices are a decision, that's a wrestling, that's a moral decision, and it shines in every word.

And so it's super important. That's part of the reason why in the Christian canon, the word is the basis of reality, right? It's the force that, it's the process that generates the order, that's good out of possibility and chaos, right? And so that's and Israel, the word Israel means we, who are we who wrestle with God.

So that's the chosen people, right? And so what that means, at a deeper level even, is that if you're genuinely wrestling with your conscience.

Then you're someone who's chosen by God, and I think that's, that's right, that's accurate.

And I think that's true. That's that's why in the opening chapters of Genesis, we're described as formulated in the image of God. We're like a microcosm of the process that gives rise to order itself. It's a very different view than the than the bottom-up materialistic view, let's say, of the of the enlightenment in the scientific world. It's a different way of looking at things.

It's the notion that what is in front of you is a field of indeterminate possibility. It's got some implicit structure, as the scientists insist, but it's it's open. And you grapple with it, like you grapple with your dawning conscience in the morning, consciousness in the morning. What confronts you in the morning is a field of possibility. And you approach that with a a certain kind of orientation, and you use your words and your linguistic capacity to think to shape that possibility. And if you do that properly, then you make this is the Genesis 1 insistence. Again, you make the order that's good or very good, and that depends on your orientation. So, in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, which is an instruction manual, Christ tells his listeners how to orient themselves in the world properly.

So, he says, first, aim with all your heart at the highest good you can imagine. Now you'll get better at that as your vision clears, but that's the orientation to do what's right now. You might say, like Pontius, Pilate said, Well, what is right, what is truth?

But most people know the difference between right and wrong, you know, at least step by step, what would move you forward and upward, so you orient yourself to the highest possible upward place? Then you make the assumption that other people have the same intrinsic value that you do, so that's your initial aim and presumption.

And then you pay attention to the moment, and that's well, that's. That's often the statement that gets Christ confused with the hippies, you know, to consider the lilies of the field, who don't toil or spin. But that's not the instruction, the instruction is to aim up with everything.

And then, having that firmly in mind, to pay attention as much attention as you can to each moment. To allow the words to come to you. That best suit that upward. Aim not to subordinate your language to your own machinations or manipulations, or your own hedonistic desire, but towards what's right. And if you do that, then what emerges out of possibility is akin to the garden to the original garden in Genesis 1. And it's the order that's good.

Truth, truthful language brings about the order that's good and that's.

Well, I, that's a very accurate way of portraying the role consciousness plays in bringing about reality. So, and that's it's not. That viewpoint, by the way, isn't limited to the Judeo-Christian canon. You see the same thing in the Taoist representation, because in the Taoist world, you have a domain of order, that's the black serpent, and you have a domain of chaos.

Sorry, I have it reversed. The domain of order is the white serpent, and the domain of chaos or possibility is the black serpent. In the Taoist image, the two snakes head to tail and your job is to walk the line between them.

And you can tell when you're walking that line, because that's where things are maximally meaningful. And so that's another element of this vision, which is that if you orient yourself with upward aim and you straddle the line between order and chaos, then things become maximally meaningful around you. So, and Musk, you know, I just did a podcast with Elon Musk. And he talked about resolving his existential crisis, the existential crisis that he experienced when he was about 11 or 12. It was a crisis of faith, essentially.

And the way that he resolved that, and then motivated himself so intensely, was by understanding that. If he pursued the path of the expansion of knowledge, that that would be intrinsically meaningful. That's the path of growth, that's the path of adventure, all of that, it's aligned with what matures you and makes you more responsible and sets the world in order.

And that the instinct of meaning signifies all that, and so I've written a lot about that in this new book. We who wrestle with God, and that's what I've been lecturing about in 60 different cities, walking through these biblical stories one by one. Partly because we have this wrestling match going on in our culture, let's say, between the nihilists and the atheists and the true believers, you might say. And one of the faults of that war is that no one stops to.

Elucidate or delineate exactly what it is that we're arguing about. So you have people like Dawkins. They parody the traditional conceptions of God, a superstitious being, nothing more than a defense against death, anxiety or the opiate of the masses. The Old Man in the Sky. The conceptualization of God in the Old Testament and the New Testament is unbelievably sophisticated. And to reduce it to that kind of parody is a stunning disservice. Dawkins is an.

It's like, how much time do you have left? What are you going to do? Are you going to just not try it forever? are you just going to dismiss everything forever? And I feel like people that dismiss things like that. This reductionist perspective, you're essentially saying you have the answers.

And to dismiss the whole question of God, or of whatever you want to call it, higher power, a creator of the universe, the universe itself as a conscious entity, whatever it is, to dismiss it just because you're trying to decipher the writings of fairly comparatively unsophisticated people. Because we're talking about people from many, many thousands of years ago, without access to the information we have today. And then you're also dealing with the fact that many of these stories were of an oral tradition for over a thousand years before they were ever written down. So to just dismiss that as superstition and silliness, without any curiosity about the root of these things, why they resonate with people. And to just say that this is superstitious nonsense that people choose to believe in, and this reductionist perspective of the known reality that we currently exist in. It's a foolish way of interfacing with something, and it's shocking when a obviously brilliant man has a foolish way of interfacing with a very complex situation. Well, it's especially.

Can I tell you a story? Sure, okay, it's a good story for the psychedelic experience, perhaps at least as an analogue. So, in the story of Exodus, there's a number of circumstances under which Moses has an encounter with God.

And they're very useful stories to understand because they point you to how that can make itself manifest in your own life. So the first real encounter that Moses has with God is in the story of the Burning Bush, and by this time, Moses is an adult. He's left his home, he's gone out, and he's got married.

He's apprenticed as a shepherd, which was a very, very hard job in those days. Because shepherds not only had to protect the weakest and serve them, but also keep the lions and the wolves at bay by themselves, out in the wilderness. It was a very hard job and Moses has mastered this. So he's grown up and he's adopted a role that's like a standard social role, you know, he's a husband, he's a shepherd, he's an adult.

Okay, and so kudos to him, but then one day he's out in the wilderness by the Holy Mountain. I think it's Horeb in that story, but the Holy Mountain is always the place where heaven and earth touch. And so there are all sorts of transformation stories that occur in the biblical accounts. At Mount Horeb, or at Mount Sinai, where God and Earth meet. And he's out near the Holy mountain, and something attracts his attention.

And he goes off the beaten path to investigate. Okay, so that's the first thing, that's the first bit of wisdom to derive from the story. You'll have your role, and you should have your role as a socialized adult, right? So you're kind of a type that way, maybe even a cookie cutter type, but you've adopted this.

Mature social role It doesn't make you a full individual, but it's better than being immature and staying in your father's tent, for example. Which is what Abraham does until he's very old. So something attracts Moses attention and he goes off to investigate, Okay, so, and then he sees that it's a burning bush, and so what's a burning bush?

Well, it's the tree of life, and life is often represented as a branching tree. And it's on fire, because it's compelling, because fire is compelling, and fire is alive, and it's a symbol of life. Because everything that is alive burns. That's what metabolism is, and so a burning bush is, like life itself, intensified to the ultimate degree. And that's what attracts Moses attention.

And he gets closer and closer to it. Which means he investigates more and more deeply. And as he investigates more deeply, he starts to understand that. He's nearing the depths. He's on sacred ground, he takes off his shoes, and that's an indication of his willingness to transform in identity. And he continues to investigate, and then the voice of being itself speaks to him from the depths.

And it tells him that it reveals itself to him as the ground of being itself. And it transforms him into the leader who invites his people away from slavery and who stands up against tyranny. And so that's the story of Moses baptism, and so what does that mean for the ordinary person? Well, it means that you need to grow up and adopt a role.

You need to mature, you need to become an adult, you need to be a good man in your time. But then you have to pay attention to see what attracts your attention, what calls to you.

Because there's an autonomy about that, right? You don't get to pick what interests you, it picks you. And you can respond to that call and investigate or reject it. Those are your options.

And if you reject it, you stay in your box, but if you follow it, something will call to you. And then if you investigate that, that will transform you, and if you investigate it deeply enough, it'll transform you into the person who can stand up against tyranny and who can lead his people away from slavery. And that's how God is defined in that story.

God is the thing that calls to you to take you out of your role. That will shape the manner in which your psyche transforms itself as a consequence of your diligent investigation into what calls to you. And so that's the God that's portrayed, that's one image of the God that's portrayed in the Old Testament.

And this is where Moses is encountering God. Have you read any of that stuff?

So it strips your perceptions of their inhibition by memory. That's a good way of thinking about it, so that you see what's there instead of your habits of perception. And so it's a way of amplifying, you could think of it as a way of amplifying what's represented in the biblical corpus as a calling. And the thing that's odd about the calling, well, you know, when you're, you can think about it this way.

When you're when you're laying out a podcast, when you're participating in a podcast, you're following a golden thread, right? You're following where your interest takes you and your curiosity takes you. And that's not something you can pre-plan, it's something that happens in the moment.

So imagine that you're focused on your goal of having the most interesting conversation possible and communicating what's derived to the broadest number of people. So that's the overarching goal. Okay, now you focus on the moment and a spirit arises within you. That's a good way of thinking about it. That's the logos.

A spirit arises within you that leads you on a pathway. That's an investigation into the truth, that's part of that calling.

The psychedelic chemicals, they they heighten that, they heighten the manifestation of the underlying mystery. That's another way of thinking about it. They do that neurochemically.

And so now, what's the association between that and religious revelation in the Bible? We don't know, we don't know.

And that these mushrooms, because they would show up so quickly, you know, if it rains, if you go to bed, you could look out at just your lawn, and it's complete grass, not a mushroom in sight. And you can go to bed and then wake up in the morning and there'll be big mushrooms there. It's really weird and that these things when they would eat these psilocybin mushrooms, that would appear out of nowhere. They genuinely were referring to them as God, that this was like a gift from God, and that was tracing back to the origin of the word Christ.

But it's very tortured. Like to really understand and to be able to dispute it. You'd have to have a deep understanding of Aramaic. You'd have to have a deep understanding of Aramaic, you'd have to have a deep understanding of the original doctrines, like, what is the actual translation?

What does it mean? You'd have to understand the ancient Hebrew version of it. How does it differ?

So words had numerical value, like the word God and the word love apparently have the same numerical value. That is a bizarre concept for us to try to wrap our heads around a language. Which, you know, that words also have numbers in them, that your letters also mean numbers, and that there's value certain numerical value to certain words.

And that you would use them in the context of these conversations, you would understand where. I don't understand, I don't have that, I have English, it's like we have math, we have language.

They're separate, and you're missing something in what they're trying to say. So what John Marco Allegro is doing? He's taking the oldest version of these stories on record, right? He's taking the Dead Sea scrolls, he's taking stuff that's literally written on animal skins. And one of the ways that they deciphered it.

To try to put it all together, they had to take the DNA samples of these parchments to try to figure out which ones are from which cows. They're from different cows. And that's part of the way they figured out how to put all the stuff together. This guy studies this for 14 years and he was the only ordained minister that was a part of this deciphering committee.

I think there was 14 people, I don't remember how many people, it might have been 20. But it was the only one of them that was agnostic. So he had become when he had started studying theology, he kind of lost his faith.

Apparently he started realizing there's so many versions of these stories that are coming from different places. He became sort of like, Hey, I think I'm agnostic. I'm just going to step back and have this approach of not knowing, not having a doctrine.

Not having an ideology that I'm attaching myself to. And so then when he goes through all of the this is a straight-laced scientist, by the way. It's not like some guy looking for psychedelics to be a part of everything. It's a very serious book, right?

And there's a lot of those people that are doing that. They're looking for psychedelics to be a part of everything, sort of to validate or justify their own use of these things. He wasn't doing that at all, and he wasn't like Wasson. Where a guy who went down and experienced the psychedelic experiences in Mexico and then came back and described them for mainstream literature.

This guy was doing it like a scholar and his whole purpose was just to decipher the dead sea scrolls. But it was so compelling to him. When it was over, he had to break ranks and he had to write this book.

And then they took that book out of circulation, I believe. Find out what happened with the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Because he published another book shortly afterwards, that was The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. And I think it felt to me when I read that one, it's almost like he has to write a book because they took the other one away.

Because it's kind of like saying most of the same stuff. But he believed that what they were writing about a lot of it was fertility rituals and psychedelic experiences. And that they were hiding a lot of these stories, like they were hiding the knowledge underneath these stories in parables and all these different ways to try to obscure it from the Romans and obscure it from the people that conquered them. So they wouldn't know the secrets of this thing, this ritual in which they would experience God.

Benzodiazepine is a drug xanax.

There's a million of them, they're all different, and they're all drugs, and the idea that psychedelics are a drug. For lack of a better term, that's what we use. I don't think that's what they are at all. I think they are probably why we became people.

I think they are probably why society advanced, and I think every great ancient culture probably celebrated them and used them. It seems like there's so much evidence out of Egypt of the use of psilocybin, various different drugs, various different psychedelic experiences.

The iconography of the Pineal gland seems to be a big part of multiple cultures, not just Egyptian, but even Catholicism. If you go to the Vatican, there's this enormous pine cone that is a statue there, and I was very lucky when I went to the Vatican. We got a guide, we hired a private guide that was a scholar from France.

And when he's not working in the summers, he gives these tours and they're very thorough. And he was a brilliant guy. I wish I could remember his name, I should probably find it out to give him credit.

Brilliant guy. So he takes us through, showing us all this artwork that's incredibly beautiful. Explaining why they had little penises, he was explaining the whole thing that big penises were thought to be barbaric. It was not representative of someone of class and dignity and education. And so we get to this pine cone.

And he says to me, he goes, Do you know what this represents? and I said, Is it the Pineal Gland? and he goes, Yes. And then we start this conversation of why these Catholics would have this enormous representation of the Pineal Gland, which they reference as the seed of the soul. And that this gland, which is in the center of your brain, is thought to be literally a third eye.

And on reptiles, it actually has a cornea and a lens. This gland, like, literally, it's exactly where the third eye of eastern mysticism is, and they've got a representation of it right here. And it's thought to be where dimethyltryptamine is produced.

And this whole connection to it is so old that it seems like you go back to the John Marco Allegro stuff. You go back to the Dead Sea scrolls. Which are the oldest version of the Bible, the only version that I believe, the only version they have in Aramaic of all those stories. And if he's right, if John Marco Allegro is right, it all kind of makes sense. That these people were having these experiences, much like the Greeks were with the Eleusinian mysteries, much like multiple different cultures in the Amazon. All over the world have experienced these profound ceremony experiences that lead to these journeys into the spirit world, these connections with higher consciousness. This something that when you're experiencing, it seems very, very real, but also very preposterous. When you try to explain it to people that aren't experienced, you know, it's like Hendrix, like, Are you experienced?

Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have. Like, it's that with that understanding that that's possible, the world changes, because now you know that that's possible.

You could live your whole life and not know that. The most shocking, profound thing in existence is three hits away, three hits away. And all of a sudden you're in a completely different universe in 20, 30 seconds. That's nuts and the fact that that is.

Dismissed that people look at it as like, Oh, you're just escaping reality. It might be the source of civilization itself, it might be the source of language. It might be the source of the expansion of the human mind over a period of two million years. The doubling of the human brain over a period of two million years, which Terence McKenna felt directly coincides with the shifting of the tropical rainforest turning into grasslands, which would force these primates to experiment with new food sources. And these undulate cows that were everywhere, that would shit, and then these psilocybin mushrooms would grow, and they're shit, observed primates flipping over these cow patties, looking for beetles and grubs and things to eat, it's everywhere.

You could see it all over Africa. If there's something on that, they're going to try it out, and if these things are trying it out. And they're doing this over a period of two million years. And they develop language and culture and weapons, and they start thinking about things, and they become different than every animal around them. And this was McKenna's stone-dape theory, which I'm sure you're familiar with, and Dennis McKenna, who is a legitimate scientist. Dennis explains it even better because he explains it with the actual mechanisms that your brain, the things that fire up when you encounter high-dose psilocybin experiences.

That would lead you to the development of language glossolalia, the connection of sounds and objects, and bringing things together in a manner of communication. Also, they realize that in low doses, it increases visual acuity, it makes people more amorous, makes people hornier, they're going to have more sex.

They're going to be better hunters because they can see better, they're going to be more sensitive to the environment, they're going to be more aware. Edge detection is different. There's so many different things that happen that if you're thinking about what made people, people, it's a mystery.

We want to pretend that we understand things because of the fossil record, and this and that, sure, we kind of understand. But every now and then we find a new human that we didn't even know exists, like Dennis Ovens. What was that? Not even 20 years ago, I don't think so. Now there's a whole other branch of human beings that they weren't even aware of 20 years ago.

Whatever the fuck happened, that took us from all the other primates that are still here and made us this. It's pretty profound. I have a feeling that psychedelics were at least involved in that process. That's my belief. My belief is that the Sweeping Psychedelics Act of 1970 that they passed essentially to target civil rights activists and anti-war activists. That's what they did. They wanted to go after the hippies.

They went after the hippies with MK Ultra, with Tom O'Neill so brilliantly outlines in his book Chaos. They went after it, and they created the Manson family. They created that family. They taught that guy how to do that so that that guy would kill people and he would be a psychopath, and now hippies would be psychopaths.

And then all this anti-war shit would just get stopped by sensible people. Then Schedule 1'd, everything, everything psilocybin, marijuana, all down the board, everything becomes schedule 1'd.

The most illegal of illegal things. So all these people who are experienced, all these Ken Kesey people, and you know, all the LSD people of the 60's, all those people become criminals instantly. And they just threw water on the whole movement and it worked, it really worked.

It was Nixon and all the people that were in charge back then. If you look at what happened from 1960 to 1980, this confusing era of the 70's, where the effects are wearing off. And then you get into the 80's. And everybody's doing coke, and they have makeup on and big hair, and the music sucks. Something happened, something happened, and what happened was they completely removed the very thing that had changed culture so radically from the 50's to the 60's. I'm a gigantic fan of 1960's automobiles.

I love them, there's something about the shapes of them, the way they sound. Part of it is that I grew up in the 80's and those are the cars we all wanted when we were kids. If a guy drove by in a 1969 Camaro, we would all be like, Whoa, look at it, look at that thing.

There's something about those shapes, there's something about the designs of those cars that resonate so strongly today. A 1990 car ain't worth shit. Nobody wants your fucking 1990 Camaro. Get the fuck out of here with that thing.

But if you have a 1968 Camaro, people will stop in a parking lot and stare at it. What is that? I think those guys were on drugs, I think all those guys were on drugs. I think the guy who created a Corvette had to be on drugs.

These guys.

Felt something the same way Hendrix felt something when he was on stage, playing guitar in a way nobody had ever heard before. That guy came out of nowhere and everybody was like, What the fuck is he doing? It was so different that Eric Clapton watched him for the first time and was like, I should probably quit playing guitar. What the fuck am I doing compared to this guy?

Jesus Christ, everybody was humbled and confused by it. Psychedelic inspired 100%.

100. There's something about throwing water on that in the 1970s that I think has done a massive disservice to our civilization, a massive disservice. Because it's equated these things with people that have poor discipline and bad social skills, and ne'er-do-wells who fail in society, and that's not true.

All these people that I know that are billionaires, I know people that are super rich, people that run these financial institutions. And I know a lot of brilliant venture capitalist guys and brilliant tech guys. And almost all of them are enthusiasts, almost all of them have had these experiences, and they're all kind of quiet about it. It's very unfortunate because of these stupid laws that were passed 50 years ago, we've gotten ourselves in this.

Make-up. That makes these drugs problematic, should we find out who's allergic to them? There's many medications and many different compounds, and many plants and natural things that people are allergic to. Let's avoid that, let's try to figure out what works for some people, what doesn't work.

Let's have legitimate counselors that could guide people through experiences. People that have experienced it themselves and can understand how to do this with intent and possibly aid your life. They have been shown to be hugely beneficial for soldiers, for our military men and women coming back from overseas, experiencing horrific trauma to help them get past that. And yet they're illegal. Still, we're both middle-aged men, right? So who is telling us what we can and can't do?

This is preposterous, this is other men our age that haven't had these experiences, maintaining this control on them in a completely ignorant way. They don't even know what they are, they don't know what these things are, they don't know what the experience is. And yet they want it to be kept out of the hands of kids.

We've got to keep it off the streets, we've got to keep drugs away from our society. And you don't know what you're talking about. It might be why we're here, and it also the absence of it. Might be why we're so fucked up. It might be why we're so disconnected, why we're so disjointed, and our society is so hypocritical.

The most pro-life people are also pro-death penalty. It's like, across the board, everything. The people that want no crime but don't want to stop the emergence of crime by funding programs to try to fix the inner cities.

Our whole thing is disconnected. And I have a feeling that a big part of that is that we have not been given access to tools that have helped people literally become what we are today. If you read Brian Murrow's work, and if he's correct. And these people that are studying the mysteries and the literal emergence of democracy, as we know it, probably all of it came out of psychedelic experiences.

Now there was a major problem with that and that was partly what led to the kickback. So you might say that the first stage of something approximating a religious revelation is the understanding that your perceptions have been constrained by forms of conformity. That were so extensive that you didn't even understand them, you didn't even know they were there. And so you're freed from that. And then maybe the first response to that is the celebration of an unlimited, hedonistic freedom.

But the problem with that is that freedom from constraint and hedonism is not freedom, it's just subjugation to a kind of instinctive chaos. And that emerged with the hippie culture. And Leary, in particular, made a huge mistake. When he said tune in, turn on and drop out, He should have said tune in, turn on and grow up.

I'm dead serious about that because there's a different form of responsibility that emerges once you realize that you were constrained by a conformist box. Let's say, like Moses, when he was being a normal shepherd. That you can step outside of that, but you don't step outside of that. Into worship of the golden calf, like in hedonistic orgies, you step outside of that with a more conscious upward aim. And if the use of transformative technologies, like psychedelics, isn't accompanied by that framework of enhanced responsibility, then it can degenerate into a kind of hedonistic chaos.

And that's what the Nixon types were reacting to. They were terrified by it, they had their reasons to be terrified. Because, as you're intimating, these technologies are unbelievably potent and destabilizing. Now, that destabilization can be used for better or for worse, and it should be used for better.

That's complex, it's a very complex thing to manage. And so Carl Jung said that one of the main functions of religion was to stop people from having religious experiences.

And what he meant by that was that a direct experience of the transcendent is enough to shake you to the foundation and to destabilize not only you, but your culture. This is why there's another scene in.

But you can imagine the opposite catastrophe, which is that, well, everyone's letting it all hang out and doing their own thing, and that's equally dangerous. And so there's some balance in the middle, well, that's that balance between chaos and order that we were referring to earlier.

Let me give you another example of this. If you don't mind, I'm going to use another biblical story.

In the story of Abraham, Abraham is a.

He's an old man when the story.

This is wild.

So he has rich parents, and he has everything he needs at hand so he can live the life of a satiated infant. Like he's in the throes of, what would you say, materialistic plenty, the voice of God comes to him, but it's characterized in a very particular manner.

So God comes to Abraham as the call to adventure, and that's a very useful thing to know. So in the Moses story, God comes to Moses as that which attracts his interest and takes him off the beaten path. In the story of Abraham, God comes as the spirit of adventure.

So God tells Abraham if you leave your zone of comfort, if you remove yourself from your father's tent. If you move away from infantile, materialistic satiation and go out into the terrible world, and you do that voluntarily, you have the adventure of your life. This is what will happen. You'll be a blessing to yourself that's genuine. So instead of being wracked with self-doubt and being self-conscious and taking yourself apart with guilt and shame. You'll ride the wave of adventure and you'll feel that your life is a blessing.

Not only will you feel that it will be a blessing, that's the first thing that will happen. The second thing that will happen is that other people will notice. And your name will become renowned, and that will be valid, You'll be a blessing to other people in that regard, your name will be upheld.

So you'll stand out among your peers, but in a justifiable manner. That's a consequence of your own intrinsic merit. The third thing that will happen is that you'll have the opportunity to establish something permanent. For Abraham, it's a dynasty, right? He's offered the possibility of being the Father of nations.

And the fourth thing that happens is you'll do it in a way that's of cardinal benefit to everyone. And so what happens in that story? This is so cool, it's so remarkable. It's the answer to the selfish gene, by the way, as well.

So what this story does is it takes the call to adventure, which is the instinct that makes children move out into the world. It's the spirit that you encourage if you're a good father. It lines that up and it says, if you follow that and let it pull you out of your zone of comfort. Your life will be a blessing to you. Your reputation will grow, you'll establish something permanent, and you'll do that in a way that's good for everyone.

Right, so that's a hell of a good deal, and that's the story of Abraham, okay? So why is that relevant to the psychedelic debate? Because if you're going to move into the zone of the transcendent, you have to take on the requisite responsibility. Or the process of transcendence turns into something like a descent into unstructured chaos.

And that's not an improvement, it's just a movement from tyranny into the desert. That's a good way of thinking about it symbolically. So what happens in the Exodus story? Because it also details out how this should be structured, is that Moses has a vision of individual responsibility and social organization.

That's maximally responsibility based. So Moses tells the pharaoh to let his people go, but that's not the phrase. The phrase is God tells Moses to say this. He says. Let my people go so they may worship me in the desert. And so you move out of the tyranny.

That's what happens, let's say, in the throes of a psychedelic experience, is that the preconceptions are shattered. Now you're somewhere unstructured. Okay, well, you can't worship what's unstructured. You have to find the proper structuring for your new freedom. The vision that's put forward in the book of Exodus is a vision of multi-dimensional, responsible identity.

So you take on responsibility for your own life, you take on responsibility for the life of your wife. You take on responsibility for your husband, you take on responsibility for your family. You're a model for your community.

You serve your state, you do what you can for your nation, and that's all united under your highest upward orientation. And that's ordered freedom, that's ordered freedom. It's not the same as the hedonistic freedom that the people like Nixon and the sort of right-wing conservatives of the 1960s were terrified by that kind of hedonistic anarchy.

It's not freedom.

There's nothing different other than the threat of AI and war. And socially, the world's the same, you go from 1956 to 1966, you have a completely different world, completely different world. Everyone's going crazy. The opposition to the Vietnam war has got people in the streets.

Ken Kesey, Tim Leary, Tune in, Drop out all that. This world is changing in this radical way. There had been nothing like it. And a lot of what you're saying about these experiences happening. And people just disconnecting and not having discipline and structure, and just experiencing these things and just disconnecting completely from society was the problem.

That was the problem.

It's partly pointless and meaningless, because, imagine, and this is part of. The implication of the story of Abraham, is that the instinct of meaning comes to you when you pursue a pathway that specifies, what would you say, the limitless development of your integrated psyche. But it's not just the psyche, it's the integration of the psyche with all the different levels of society. Like, for example, insofar as you're well put together, you're going to be a highly functional husband to your wife.

Your own psychological organization integration cannot be divorced from the union that you make with your wife. They're the same thing, and then you can extend that to your kids. For you to get your act together means simultaneously that you establish the proper relationship with your wife and with your children. Those are the same thing.

And then, if you can manage that, you do the same thing with the broader community. It all stacks up musically. And so then mental health doesn't become how your psyche is organized internally, which is what the clinical psychologists misled people into believing. It's more like the harmony that obtains.

From the psyche upward, through society, when everything is stacked up properly, up to the highest level possible of being, and that's another definition of God. So one of the things I tried to do in this book is to actually define what it is that we're arguing about. Because the old man in the sky superstition doesn't cover the territory. So, for example, if you look at God in the story of Abraham and you say, Do you believe in that God? What you're asking, even though you might not know it, is, do you believe that? There is a call to adventure? And that following that call will not only integrate you, but serve society in the highest possible manner?

And that's a very, that's a pretty straightforward question. It has very little to do with anything that's even vaguely superstitious, like, is that call there? You certainly reward it in your children if you have the least bit of sense. And so I've been trying to define what it is that we're arguing about.

And so there's another definition, too, that you see this in the story of Adam and Eve, so in the story of Adam and Eve. One of the ways God is characterized is as the spirit that calls you on your pride and presumption. So then you ask yourself, Well, do you believe that exists? It's like, how often in your own life has pride gone before a fall? Is there some?

Spirit that's operative in being that.

Shows you the error of your ways when you get ahead of yourself or not. And if the answer to that is no, you say, well, you have no conscience. Nothing calls you on your moral impropriety. You're overreaching. No one wants to be near you if you're one of those people.

That's for sure. And is that real? So, one of the ways God is presented in the Old Testament is this dynamic between calling and conscience, right? So there's the calling that is indicated in the story of Abraham and Moses. That pulls you forward to the adventure of your life. And the other side of that is the constraint of conscience. That tells you when you're wandering off the straight and narrow path.

That's more, the voice of negative emotion and threat detection and calling is more like the voice of positive emotion that pulls you forward and invites you. But you need the dynamic between those two. That's the pillar of light and the pillar of darkness that guides the Israelites across the desert. Jonathan Pazio helped me figure that out.

Just flattened me when he laid it out because I could see the Taoist view of the world and the ancient Jewish view of the world stack on top of each other. And the implication of the story is very straight. It's like you leave a tyranny and you're lost. What guides you when you're lost?

The interaction between what calls you forward and upward, and the constraints of your own conscience that warn you when you're deviating from the straight and narrow path. That's the definition of God that emerges from exodus.

All of it has to be kind of balanced together in order for you to have.

The judgment?

Yeah.

And I'd seen these poor decisions right in front of me, I'd seen poor thinking and excuse-making.

I genuinely felt like I was on my own and I had to figure things out on my own.

I developed a very early trust and recognition of the importance of that, and it's led me through my entire life. Everything that I ever did that was like a big risk, was like a calling to me. Every single thing that I ever did. From getting into martial arts, I went from not doing it to doing it every day, all day, seven days a week, it was a calling.

It was like, my.

Mind interfaced with whatever that was martial arts was, and said, This is my ticket out of here, this is my ticket to be a different person.

He wants to catch it right when he's right there. When the body hasn't broken down yet, the immune system hasn't broken down yet, the endocrine system isn't fried, the adrenals aren't fried. You're getting it to right. When your body can recover and is forced to maintain this insane level of fitness, and then you have to take a break. You cannot maintain fight camp all year round, you will not be able to do it, your body will break down.

My point is that requires discipline. You're no longer in the inspiration realm, you're not in the obsession realm you are, I'm sure as well. There's no fucking way you want to do it.

There's no way you want to do more sprints, there's no way you want to do all this stuff. You must do it, though, you must do the calisthenics, you must do the live wrestling drills.

You must do the Shark Tank, where they throw in a new fresh opponent every round for five rounds. You're dealing with rested killers and you're exhausted. You have to do that. That's pure discipline and generally enforced discipline by coaches, because it's so rigid, it's so hard to do that. You need someone over you with a stopwatch to go, let's go, let's go, let's go.

And everybody has to get up and go at it because even the most disciplined, their body recognizes they need a break, so that's pure discipline. What I had was this obsession that made that hard work easy.

And it also means that the higher your goal, the more positive emotion you experience when you're moving towards it, because positive emotion signifies progress towards a goal. So you need a goal, the goal of the deepest religious traditions is the ultimate goal, by definition. So the idea is that you need a goal, and so you should pick the utmost possible goal. That's another good definition of something like the kingdom of Heaven or the realm of the divine.

The ultimate goal? Now you have a goal and every time you see movement towards it, you're going to get, um, what would you say? You're riding on the energy that's associated with movement towards that goal. That's dopaminergically mediated, that's the same systems that are affected by cocaine and methamphetamine, and so forth.

All the positive emotion drugs. So you need a goal, that goal now. You can imagine this. That if you're attentive to the action of your own instincts or the divine voice, I don't think those are distinguishable, then a goal is going to emerge. That catalyzes a series of transformations. This is what happens to Abraham, so he has a series of adventures after he decides that he's going to go out in the world.

And every adventure is marked by the erection of a sacrificial altar and a recommitment of his upward aim. Now there's two reasons for that One is that he reminds himself that he's aiming upward and he's on an adventure. And the second is, he admits to himself that with every transformation of character, something has to be sacrificed. So, you know, so now I'm curious about this in your own life, right?

So you started?

Obsessively committing to martial arts, what did you have to give up to do that?

Continually remind yourself of your fundamental goal and then let go of everything that isn't appropriate as you transform forward. So Abraham ends up with a new name because of doing that, that's how different he becomes in the course of his adventure. It's like Jacob, Jacob becomes Israel, and Abraham becomes Abraham.

Because the consequence of him following the pathway of adventure, the calling, is a transformation that's so complete, it's as if he's a different person. And those stories are maps of that transformative process, so they culminate, they culminate in the Christian view of things, with the ultimate sacrificial offering. So that's the idea that lurks in the New Testament is that the ultimate in transformation is brought about by your willingness to put absolutely everything on the line, no matter what.

Right, and that's a very different view of the religious enterprise than something like defense against death anxiety, right? It's the ultimate adventure. And that's the willingness to welcome everything about life that's terrible and painful and malevolent, to welcome that with open arms, to accept that. And that's predicated on a deeper idea even, which is that sacrifice is the basis of community.

Which is exactly right, because you have to give up something to be in relationship to the future and to other people, right? So, the Biblical Corpus is an examination of what would you say, levels of sacrifice, moving downward to the ultimate possible level of sacrifice.

So in the Abrahamic story, Abraham is requested by God to offer up his son. Right now he does it, he gets him back, the threat isn't carried through.

And what does that mean?

It means, first of all, that everything in your life, no matter what it is, including your relationships, should be made subservient to the highest possible aim. It also means that a good father sacrifices his children to what's highest. That's the offering of your child to the world, the faithful offering of your child to the world. That's what Mary does.

There's a famous statue of Mary in St. Peter's in Rome. Michelangelo made it when he was like 23, some ridiculous, early age brilliant statue. Mary is holding the body of her son, broken in her arms, looking serene.

He's an adult off the cross, it's like the female crucifixion. And the idea is that the good mother, the proper father, offers their children to be broken by the world in the pursuit of what's highest.

Well, every woman who brings a child into the world knows that the child is going to be broken by death and malevolence. Right? And so motherhood, in the highest, in its highest aspect, is the offering of the child to the world to be broken. That's what's portrayed in Abrahamic Story, too, with regards to Abraham. To get your child back, you offer them to the world.

That's a profound indication of faith, right? That life is worthwhile despite its suffering and its evil, and it's so.

Detail on the way the toe bends the heel. It's insane how good it is. He was so good. The fact that he figured out how to be that good at 23 years of age is just so shocking.

Insane.

I mean, that guy left behind so much like, what is that about, what is it about these unique individuals like him, that their work transcends time?

God offers Abraham the opportunity to be the Father of nations. So imagine this, imagine this as a father. So we use father as a generic word. everybody has a father.

So there's a generic aspect to it. There's a role that you play if you're a father, and then you can imagine there's a role you can play as a good father. And if you're a good father, you're radically encouraging, and you encourage your children to go out into the world and prevail.

You teach them to handle serpents, you don't protect them, you don't shelter them, you push them out. And you say, No matter what comes your way, kid, I've got confidence that you can handle it, no matter how terrible it is.

No matter how challenging or daunting or malevolent it is, you've got it. And when you see your children doing that, if you're a good father, it fills you with what it fills you with.

Gratitude and love to see your children acting that out, even at an early age. Taking the risks of their first steps, or climbing their first play structure. Or going out in the playground to make new friends when they're strangers, or going off to school alone, all of that you think it's dangerous?

Out there, it's like, Good go, I know you can handle it okay, so that's what Abraham plays out.

He plays out that archetypal role and the idea there. This is why I made reference earlier to the idea of the selfish gene. Dawkins characterized human reproduction as selfish. That's wrong because the human reproductive pattern is multigenerational.

And if you want to establish the pattern of fatherhood that's going to cascade down the generations that will make your descendants successful in the multigenerational manner. Then you follow the spirit adventure and you imbue your children with that confidence. And that's how that pattern that establishes the dynasty, so Abraham is the Father of nations is established. So human reproduction is way more complex than just sex, far more complex. It's a multigenerational commitment.

So now, the promise that God makes to Abraham, in part, is that if you fall into that pattern of maximal adventure and courageous movement forward. That your life is imbued with a meaning that transcends time, and that you embody something like an archetypal and eternal spirit. And that's the spirit of the Father. That's why Abraham understands that he's made contact with the God of his ancestors. And if you're a good father, you have that spirit dwelling within you.

And the Christian insistence is that that's the that spirit's identical to the logos. That bears the weight of the world on its shoulders voluntarily, and that that's what brings everything into being.

Stunning, It's a stunning conceptualization, and I think it's right, it looks right to me. And the idea that sacrifice is the basis of the community, that's just obvious.

Like the fact that you're married, so what's the sacrificial gesture there? Well, all other women, that's sacrifice number one. Then it's not about you.

It's also not about your wife. It's about the stability of your union across time, and it's about the stability of that union insofar. As that's a reliable foundation for your children, so that's sacrificial, too. You give up your whims in the present so that the future is stabilized.

You give up your immaturity so that your children can thrive. That's all sacrificial gesture. And we figured that out. That's why we put the crucifix at the center of our society. Because we figured out, even though we didn't know it, we figured out that.

The stability of the community is predicated on the willingness of the individual to sacrifice, and the exploration in the New Testament is the limits of sacrifice, right?

There he is, Praise Jesus, right, right. It's a very formulaic, surface level understanding of what it is we're talking about.

Well, I think it's partly because.

It's the most terrifying demand. So Jung described the Christian passion as an archetypal tragedy. Now, there was a reason for that. So think about it this way, think about it technically.

So imagine that a hundred great storytellers told the most painful possible story. And then imagine that you aggregated all those stories and you distilled them into one story where all the terrible elements were present. Okay, so now you have a representation, you have a representation of the worst life can throw at you. Okay, so let's take that apart a bit. So the first thing that makes a tragedy tragic is that the tragedy befalls a good person.

Because if a tragedy befalls a villain, it's just justice, it's not a tragedy. So it has to be a good person. So then to amplify that, you would not only have the tragedy. Befall a good person, you'd have it befall a good person. That everyone knew was good, but was not only good, was the best, and that was persecuted because he was good. So that sort of limits it out in that direction.

And then you might say, Well, what does he have to face? Well, and the answer would be, well, the worst life has to offer. Okay, early death, early, painful death, early, painful, humiliating, unjust death. At the hands of his friends, at the hands of the mob, under the thumb of a tyrant, right. Brought about by people who knew that he was not only good, but the best of men.

That's an archetypal tragedy. And then it doesn't limit out, so then you have the death that occurs in consequence of that and its voluntary acceptance. But that's not where it ends. Because the mythology surrounding the crucifixion story insists that Christ harrowed hell after the crucifixion, which meant that he confronted not only death, but malevolence itself, and, in consequence, transcended both.

And so what's the underlying psychological message? It's something like.

The calling and the voice of conscience. Informing people that in order to thrive properly in life and to become who you could be, if you could be everything you could be. You have to voluntarily take on the weight of the worst life has to offer, including the depths of malevolence itself. And you think, Well, obviously, Joe, you know this, like, how are you going to adapt to a situation you won't even admit to, right? Well, so how could it be otherwise than for you to become everything that you could be? You have to embrace all of the catastrophes that life has to offer.

Like, how could it be other than that? You're going to hide, you're going to pretend, Right, how's that going to work?

No one thinks that'll work right, and so, and you're right, there is this defensive element to the.

Particularly the Protestant religious tradition, although I don't want to single out the Protestants specifically. That insists that, you know, the work has already been done. But there's a lot of ambivalence about that in the Christian canon, because there's an equal insistence that no, you're supposed to.

You're supposed to take all this on voluntarily, and that not only that, not only that, that that's. It's such an interesting idea because it makes so much sense psychologically. So imagine that as your courage grows, so that you can confront more and more of the horror of life. That a spirit begins to develop within you. That gives you a strength that's commensurate with your daring, that's walking with God, that's the same thing.

So the promise is that if you had the courage, something would be with you to.

Allow you to bear up nobly under the burden. And I all the clinical evidence supports that proclamation. Because what you see in people in the therapeutic transformation is that insofar as they're willing to confront what terrifies them voluntarily, they get stronger. And then imagine that there's no, there's nothing but a metaphysical limit to that.

And I think that's right, I can't see how it cannot be right, it makes sense.

We're launching with 20 courses, best lectures in the world, very, very high quality production. We invited the best lectures I could find down to Miami, eight hour courses on the topic.

They really want highest possible production quality.

We're hoping we'll make a high level university level, university equivalent education available to everyone for approximately 1 20th the cost. So that's the plan. You want to see the opening, the opening salvo?

There is a crisis now in higher education. The president of Harvard University resigned today.

What I'm hoping to do is to find the best lectures in the world.

And to bring them to as wide as possible an audience. He came to me and he basically said, I want you to do the best course that you've always wanted to do. We want to bring you the highest quality education possible at the lowest possible price. It's extremely high-level content that anybody can use to educate themselves, and it's available to everybody. Well, that would be good.

I think it's funny because I got cancelled at the university so I could try to return the favour.

Is it possible to rejuvenate the bricks and mortars institutions of higher education? Well, one answer to that is.

Things that are dead rot, and the universities seem to be rotting everywhere. Maybe that's because they're dead, maybe it's because their time has come. It could be that that's the case. I hope not.

I loved working at Harvard in particular, It was an amazing institution. I had a very good time at McGill, I had a good time at the University of Toronto. It's a real pain to see these institutions degenerate, but they're ideologically captured.

That's not good and thoroughly, and it's a very rotten ideology. It's the spirit of Cain, the resentful spirit of Cain. It's not good. They're unbelievably expensive.

They take terrible advantage of their students, plus the average quality of the educational experience is actually very low. At most places, not everywhere. Hillsdale College, I think, is a marked exception, but most places the lectures aren't good. And we're in a situation now. It's kind of like, what happened with YouTube, in a way.

You know, YouTube enabled you, for example, and Spotify as well to emerge as an independent commentator, and you know, you've cornered the market in some ways on that. There's no reason the universities could have seen this coming 20 years ago. They could have found their best lectures, and they could have filmed their courses in the highest possible quality manner. And taken advantage of this new communication technology.

And they didn't. That's not a good sign, you know, we've, it's so funny. We bring our professors down to Miami, you know, professors from Oxford and Cambridge, and they're so relieved to come there. And the reason they're relieved to come there is because they're treated badly by their own institutions, these great professors.

They're treated with contempt, they're paid miserably. That's especially the case in the UK. All we have to do is appreciate them. I tell the professors who come to Peterson Academy like, Here's the deal.

You can say exactly what you want in exactly the way you want, you can teach what you love. We'll put a studio audience together that actually wants to listen to you. That's the only reason they're there. We'll offer you a financial deal that's better than you can get with any book.

We'll give you more reach than you could ever also hope to get. With any published manuscript, you can bring what you know to the world for next to nothing. We figure we can offer a university-quality, high-level university-quality equivalent for about $2,000 over four years. Wow, yeah, yeah.

We have a great social media platform, so I don't know you tell me what you think about this. So we've been wrestling with price, right? because pricing.

Something is very difficult. And part of the problem with social media platforms is that they're free. And you might say, well, that's not a problem. It's like it is a problem because things that are free get overrun by parasites instantly. And so you get the trolls, you get the bots, you get the bad corporate actors, you get the scam artists, because there's no barrier to their participation.

Right? And so we put a $450 cost on our offering per year for the early adopters that's available now. And we're hoping that the fact that there has to be a bit of a financial sacrifice on the front end will make our social media network high-quality and clean. Because there's a little bit of skin in the game to participate, so we've taken the best elements of the popular social media networks and amalgamated that.

And we're hoping that we can produce a community of people who are responsible and achievement-oriented and upward-striving and intellectually curious. And bring them together so they can form their own communities. As well as participating in the lectures, and so I'm extremely excited about this, the courses. We got lucky, too, because we set up a production studio in Miami and we have state-of-the-art.

Film crew and editors. But just when we started to film, the AI, illustration capacity came online and we filmed everyone against a white background. And so we can fill the whole background with imagery and graphs and comments. Can you run a trailer for? Just pick one of the courses at random, because this is actually how the courses look?

So the trailers are very tightly edited. But so are the courses. And so let me show you one of them so you get a sense of what we've managed to accomplish.

A lot of fascinating questions, Where do we come from? where are we going? What is the universe made of? How can we possibly understand the grand landscape of the cosmos?

When you look back in space, you look back in time.

It's amazing we've been able to do this to study the properties of the cosmos. Time scales of billions of years size scales billions of times bigger than our own. And now the question is, can we go back to?

Time equals zero Can we go back to before time equals zero? And what does that even mean?

I hope in this course to keep striving and asking these great questions, because without great questions, there can be no great answers, and without great answers, there can be no understanding.

Every course has its own style sheet, so each course has its. There's an overarching style to the platform, but every single course has its own illustration, ethos and quality. Yeah, well, you can see them.

Certification at different time spans, so, you know, generally it takes you four years to get a degree. But you can imagine that it would be useful to have a one-year certificate, a two-year certificate, three-year certificate, four-year certificate. There's no compelling reason why it has to be four years. We'll keep very detailed records of our students academic progress, and they'll be able to offer them directly to employers.

So we want to be able to assure employers that anybody who's gone through the certification process that's part and parcel of Peterson Academy has done the work and met the standards. And the standards will be high. Now. Simultaneously, we're working on technical accreditation, right, so that we can pull this, so that we can have this operate as a standard university. Now, there's trade-offs in that, because the accreditation processes themselves are captured by the same forces that have captured the universities. And we're not going to compromise the quality of the offerings by kowtowing to accreditation processes that are producing the same problem that we're trying to address. Now. I'm in discussion with a number of different jurisdictions to move accreditation forward, and if that happens, it can also be applied retroactively.

So if we can figure out how to do it with an administration or a jurisdiction that's willing to do it. And we don't have to compromise the quality, then we'll go the classic accreditation route. Otherwise, I'm just going to go directly to employers and say, look, we're going to be very, very careful about who we grant certification to. And you'll be able to rely on the certification from Peterson Academy as an indication of intellectual ability and also work ethic. And we'll document that by the record-keeping process that we use as part and parcel of the platform. So I think we can do it, we're going to do it one way or another.

How are you going?

And that's obviously a problem, but it isn't an insoluble problem, and I think we've already solved it. So, and then once we move towards more formal and stable accreditation, there are. Lots of companies have emerged as a consequence of the Covid lockdowns to make sure that remote compliance with testing requirements can be achieved. So there's lots of ways to solve.

Those are the first three languages, but they eventually will scale out.

So there's an immense opportunity in the developing world to capture the market for higher education. And it would be a wonderful thing to be able to bring this to the world. And I just can't see why not, you know? The courses are very efficiently taught, we have AI mediated testing services and we can use the tests themselves as educational tools.

You know, so imagine you have a test and you get a question wrong, and you get feedback that it's wrong. And it'll tell you where in the lecture and the reading material that you made the mistake, so you can go back and review. And so even the testing itself will be educational. And, you know, we're hoping to develop a community that is composed of people who want to engage in lifelong learning. And it also means that you don't have to be like 18 to 22 to attend this university. You can stay a part of it for the rest of your life.

And we're hoping that spontaneous communities will develop and that we can bring people together for conventions. So, you know, if we can get enough people on the platform, we'll have conventions in different cities, where we bring our lecturers, you know, to a stadium or to a theatre for a weekend. And everybody who's part of the university can come and listen to their favourite lectures. And we've got educational institutions who are already interested in partnering in that regard so that they can be brought to their institution for, like, summertime, three-day courses and so. And it's so fun too, because we can use video and audio, and that's a wonderful thing as well. Because, as you know well, far more people can listen and watch than can read.

Now you have to read to partake in our courses as well. But it's a great opportunity and it's so fun to have the professors come down there and be thrilled about it. Most of the like we want the professors, we already have to teach multiple courses because they're very good lecturers. And they've, I think all without exception, enthusiastically agreed to continue participating. Because we took the idiot restrictions off them. It's like, teach what you want to the people who want to listen. No holds barred.

It's so fun, it's so fun.

But, at minimum, we'll be able to launch the courses independently if the platform itself doesn't take off. We're going to show Harvard and Stanford and Oxford and Cambridge what's possible with regards to lecturing with the new technology. They're stuck in, like 1860..

And you know, with these online large courses that places like MIT, for example, have launched. Basically, all they do is put up a camera and videotape, a lecture. It's like, you can't do that. That's YouTube and the technologies that allow for the dissemination of video. They have their own, they're their own medium.

The medium is the message, you have to use the bloody technology, you can't stay stuck a century back. Which is why we've done tight edits and filled in the backgrounds with images. And there's just no reason that that can't be everywhere. So, and why would you pay?

Look, people probably pay $300,000 for an Ivy League education because that's where they meet their wife or their husband when it gets right down to it.

It gives you an opportunity to mature away from your parents. It gives you the opportunity to build a new network of peers, not only living peers, but peers in the historical tradition. And it gives you an opportunity to meet the person that you might be with for the rest of your life. That's a big deal and it's a selective opportunity because you bring bright kids together who are hardworking and they get a chance to meet each other.

That might be the whole value of an Ivy League education. It's hard to specify these things. Now. We're trying to replicate that on Peterson Academy with the social media side. And you know, that's a new technology and we don't know how it'll work. But the fact that it's selective and it won't be full of trolls and bots and bad corporate actors should mean that people will be able to build social networks that are of high value. Because that's one of the things, obviously, that's what you do in a bloody MBA program.

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

And I think we can do that, and I think we can do it more effectively than universities do it. I know how to measure.

We can ensure that's properly measured, but we can also say here's a bunch of things they didn't learn. The courses are subversive in the most traditional possible way. So we have Larry Arnn, for example, who's the president of Hillsdale. He did a lecture series on Churchill.

Where are you going to go to university to get a lecture? Series on Churchill? And Arnn was Churchill's primary biographer, or one of his primary biographers. So that's a big deal, you know, we've got Nigel Baker from.

Oxbridge Lecturing on the legacy of UK colonialism. Well, you're not going to get that anywhere else. And he's a great lecturer and he's a brilliant man and very, very courageous. And Larry Arnn is in exactly the same category. So the technology we're using is revolutionary in a variety of different ways.

The lectures are high quality, but the whole ethos of the educational offering is completely different than what is on offer. Say, at the typical Ivy League Harvard, for example, which is such a catastrophe. I was there at Harvard in the 1990s. I loved that place. It was really forward-looking and aimed at excellence, with very minor exceptions, like truly minor exceptions.

It was a powerhouse man. And I went back and saw a bunch of my old professor friends a month ago, you know? And they've all joined the free speech movement at Harvard, and they're fighting against their own administration. And these were, like, the best professors I ever met in my life, and that's what they've been reduced to.

Specifically.

What would you say? Modified Marxism in the 1960s and then really accelerated in the 70s? It sort of went like this, you know how things fail gradually, gradually, gradually, then suddenly, and it hit a critical....

It hit critical mass in terms of failure, probably around.

2014 15. Pretty much when things blew up around me, that's why they blew up around me, you know? I mean, it was so ridiculous.

Okay, so the Mesopotamians believe that the world emerged as the interaction of two forces. We already alluded to them chaos and order. They had a God of Order, APsu, he was a male God.

He's the patriarchal patriarchy, you can think of Apsu as the patriarchy and a female god. Tiamat Tiamat is a dragon and a dragon of chaos, and the word tiamat is the same word etymologically as the word tohu vabohu.

And that's the chaos that God makes the world out of at the beginning of time in the Hebrew accounts. Okay, so you have Apsu and Tiamat, and they come together. Chaos and order come together, and they produce the first world. And in the Mesopotamian account of things, that's a world of higher order gods.

Now those higher order gods forget their ancestors and go about their business, and they get increasingly fractious and undisciplined, and noisy and hedonistic and immature. And at one point, they kill their father, Apsu, and they try to live on his corpse.

Right, so you see an echo of this is very complicated, you see an echo of this. In the story of Pinocchio, you know, there's a scene in Pinocchio where Geppetto ends up in the body of a whale.

Okay, so here's the underlying biological dynamic. It's so remarkable. So imagine a society sets itself up according to a set of principles, and it stores, it, creates a giant storehouse of wealth. Okay?

That's what a carcass is, right? So if you're a primordial herder, your wealth is in the bodies of your herd animals. Okay, a body is a symbol of stored wealth.

In the Mesopotamian pantheon, the careless kill their father and live on its corpse. Okay, that's what's happened to the universities. So since World War II, the West has gathered huge storehouses of value everywhere. Harvard's a great example.

Immense endowment, remarkably valuable brand, Disney's another example. And what's happened is, and this happens all the time. If you have an unguarded storehouse of value, the parasites come marching in, right?

And they try to live on the corpse now, they can for a while, because it's a storehouse of value, but they kill the spirit now. What happens in the Mesopotamian story is that chaos itself comes flooding back in the form of Tiamat, who's extremely the goddess of chaos, who's extremely angry. That her husband has been sacrificed by the careless denizens of the world, that's the death of God.

So, yeah, and the saviour emerges in the Mesopotamian story, It's so interesting, so the saviour that emerges to set things right. Has eyes all the way around his head, so he pays attention and he speaks magic words. That's Marduk, and so the Mesopotamian Empire was an avatar of Marduk. And he's the spirit of responsibility that sets the world right.

Okay, so what are we seeing? We're seeing the invasion of storehouses of wealth by the parasites. Fundamentally, has that killed them?

I don't. I can't think through how you would rescue an institution, a typical upper-level university institution. What are you going to do? how are you going to do that? Are you going to fire 80 of the people, who's going to do that?

No one's going to do that. Now. You could say, well, we'll make DEI initiatives forbidden. They're kind of doing that in Florida, but all you do is change the words. I mean, that's what the postmodernists did with Marxism in the 1970s, when it no longer was fashionable to worship Stalin. After everybody realized that he was a psychopathic murderer.

All that happened was the French intellectuals changed the terminology, and they invented a form of Marxism that was even worse than Marxism. Which was really quite the bloody achievement. Do I think they can be rejuvenated? I can't see how.

Carol Swain is no Black law professor from whom gay plagiarized much of her work.

It was alive in the French revolution, it was alive in the Soviet revolution. It's you can trace it all the way back to the story of Cain and Abel, as far as I'm concerned. And the story of Cain and Abel is the story of the fundamental human dynamic after the fall of man. So insofar as we're historical creatures, the story of Adam of Cain and Abel lays out.

The essential psychological conflict that characterizes human beings. And so you have Cain on the one side, so Cain Cain doesn't bring his best to the table. He makes second-rate offerings and lies about it.

And then they're not accepted by him or his fellow man or women, or by society, or by God. And that makes him bitter, and instead of learning, he takes his complaints to God. And he says something like, What the hell's going on here? I'm breaking myself in half, making my sacrificial offerings, and everything's being rejected. What kind of stupid cosmos did you produce?

And God says to him something very interesting and complicated, he says. Something like, you're blaming your bitterness on your failure, and you have failed, and you know it, and you didn't have to, but it isn't your failure that's making you bitter.

You've invited something in to inhabit you that's turned you against yourself, and what's good, he says to him. Sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused, predatory animal, and you invited it in to have its way with you. And there's a sexual metaphor there.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, it's rough, man, it's rough. You don't get to be a high school shooter until you've had a thousand hours of brooding over your misery. And so that's what God tells Cain.

And that makes him violently angry and murderous, and so he kills Abel, he kills his own ideal, and Abel. You have Cain, who makes poor sacrifices and whines about it. He's the perennial victim, shaking his fist at God and the world, refusing to learn from his experiences.

And he becomes, and you have Abel, who makes the right sacrifices and aims upward. That's the pattern, two spirits, that's the joker and batman.

That's Lex Luthor and Superman, that's Voldemort and Harry Potter. It's Satan and Christ, like it's this eternal recurrent pattern, and one of its manifestations is Marxism.

And another one of its manifestations is post-modernism. And so this is a very old story, it's a very old story and you can understand Cain's point, you know? Because people do break themselves in half in life, trying to struggle forward. And they're not successes in their own eyes, and they're rejected by other people, and it undermines their faith in being itself.

You can understand that, but.

You're called upon to bring your best to the table, no matter what happens to you, and to maintain your faith and your courage. And to aim up. There's no excuses, your past trauma, there's no excuses.

Doesn't matter what it is. And so there's this battle. And what's happened in the universities is the universities have been captured by the resentful spirit of Cain. And so it's all flowered up with post-modern language. There's no ultimate unity.

That's the claim of the post-modernists, there's no overarching narrative. It's like, that's what the post-modernists claim, skepticism with regards to meta-narratives. It's like, Well, what do you mean by that?

You mean that everything culminates in disunity, that's your theory of being. So how the hell do we come together as a society then, and around what? Well, everyone goes their own way.

Yeah, that's called war, so there's some. Is there a higher unity in which everything participates or not? Well, the post-modernists is like, No, have it your way.

Nihilism, disunity, anxiety, hopelessness, social.

Disintegration, conflict, that's that pathway, and that's just where it starts. That's the optimistic view so we're trying to present.

At Peterson Academy and in the other enterprises that I'm engaged in, we're trying to present a unified underlying vision and a traditional, unifying underlying vision. And I think that it's, it's understandable, what we talked about in the first part of this interview. Like, once you understand that sacrifice is the basis of community, and once you understand that there's a ultimate form of sacrifice. And that that's what's demanded of you. If you're going to strive upward, then the contours of the religious story that undergirds the West fall into place. And that's a very remarkable thing to observe, and I think that's going to happen.

I think that's, I think, we're at the end of the enlightenment, and something new is striving mightily to emerge.

The insane problem of first of all, student loans being something you never get out of.

So you're kind of taking advantage of a developing mind and locking them into an insane burden of debt and ideology and ideology, and so you're strapped with debt.

So you must work, and then you must work within these structures that have been infected by this ideology. Because everyone's coming out of the universities, into those places, into those businesses and corporations, and they're deeper and deeper interwoven into the structure of these businesses.

To the point where they're inescapable. And then you can't leave because you have financial burdens and you have all the student loan debt to pay off.

Because I know how to.

You shouldn't dismiss someone as being qualified for a certain position just because they've gone through some very formal process.

All bets are off, right? We're going to have hyper-intelligent AI within five years. In fact, we already have it, while I'm being pessimistic, right?

I've used ChatGpt and Grok, and some systems that my colleagues have developed. We built our own large language models in-house.

My colleague Victor Swift built a large language model for me, trained on my books, and I used it to help me write this next book. Because I could come across biblical passages that I couldn't understand. And I could ask this AI system for a first-pass interpretation and it could do a good job. And we're going to release that along with the book. Yeah, so that was really something, and I'll tell you, Chatgpt and GROK were unbelievably useful as research assistants.

So they're about as smart as high-end undergraduates. They lie a lot and you have to corner them like mad to get them to provide you with information that's valid.

It will produce a reference for you that's completely plausible, except that it doesn't exist. So if I ask Chatgpt a question, it'll answer and it'll give me the references because I asked for the references. Then I have to go and look up all the references and read them. First of all, because you're supposed to read the things you refer to. But also I have to make sure that it's not wandered off into some hallucinatory pathway.

But that'll be taken care of in no time flat, as far as I'm concerned, and Musk has already got plans to do that. So what will the?

Addition of these AI systems mean to us God. Well, I talked to Elon about this when we had our interview. And it's going to depend to some degree, Joe, on how we train the damn things. So there's this problem called the alignment problem, that's how the engineers describe it. Which is, how do we know that these AI systems will have human interest in mind?

And you think, Okay, how do we make machines that have human interests in mind? And then you think, oh, well, we have the same problem with adolescents. How do we ensure that we train our children so that they have their own interests and broad social interests in mind? And the answer is the answer always has been that you provide them with a classic religious and humanities education. Because that provides an axis of stability around which all other knowledge can be organized.

Now, the problem with large language models at the moment is they're hyper-trained on modern text, and so they're ideologically addled and woke. And so we've been experimenting with training LLMs on a more classic basis. So we trained one on the King James Bible and we haven't released it because I don't know what to think about it. It's like, you can ask the King James Bible a question, What the hell does that mean?

Like, seriously, what does that mean? And before we release it, we also want to make sure that we have it. We've developed the underlying technology properly. Okay, so what's the answer to your question? What AI will do will depend on the intent of the people who design it.

Here's a terrifying thing. You tell me what you think about this, alright? So your thoughts are orienting phenomena, so you think so that you can lay out a pathway to a desired destination. And then you can evaluate the thought to see if that's a good strategy to get there.

Okay, so there's an implication that comes along with that.

A thought enters the theater of your imagination in relationship to your goal, so you can formulate that. In religious language, the spirit that answers your prayers, the nature of the spirit that answers your prayers will be dependent on the nature of your prayer. Yeah, that's for sure, right?

So imagine that you're harboring feelings of resentment and bitterness as you're plotting your economic pathway forward. And so you're trying to think about what you should do. But you have the spirit of resentment and bitterness sitting on your shoulder. The thoughts that enter your mind are going to be a consequence of your possession by that bitterness. To the degree that you've allowed it to shape your goal. So here's a corollary of that. This is stunning.

It's a stunning thing to understand.

If you orient your aim upward in the highest manner, the spirit that informs your thought will be the spirit of the highest possible aim. And God, that's something to know, man. So that's what a religious practice, a fundamental religious practice, is for. It's like, get rid of the corrupt motivation, get rid of it.

Get rid of it, pray for the salvation of your soul. That you're aiming right, because your aim is going to determine the content of your thoughts, and that is how it works technically. That's how it works neuropsychologically. your thoughts are the handmaiden of your aim.

You watch a two-year-old have a temper tantrum. It's quite the show. And they want short-term, immediate gratification. Now, what happens? As your cortex matures, you transcend those lower-order instinctual motivations.

That would be the Freudian ID. And you start to regulate your behavior in relationship to your own future, so you stop doing stupid, pleasurable things in the moment that will compromise you. And you start to be able to incorporate the views of other people. That's how kids at three start to develop the ability to have friends.

And the more sophisticated you get, the more other people and their perspectives are part of your perceptions, and the more the future is taken into account in your actions. And the cortex is actually there so that that can happen, and it has to happen in a social context, because you have to pick up the society of your peers, obviously. And so conditions like psychopathy, or even power-seeking, for that matter, are conditions of radical immaturity. And so that's how you explain their emergence.

And one of the things that's interesting about that is it provides a very powerful argument against moral relativism. It's like there's a real difference between maturation and immaturity maturation is productive and sustainable, and immaturity is divisive and destructive. And there's no if, ands or buts about that.

And so, see, it's a different view of mental health, because the classic, therapist-produced view of mental health is that mental health is sort of inside you. You know, it's in your psyche, it's in your mind, but it's not like your.

Mental health is the harmony of your existence in relationship to the future and other people, right? And that sense of well-being that can infuse you if you get the balance right. Isn't a reflection of the proper structuring of your mind, function of your mind or your brain. It's a phenomena that emerges when everything is in its proper place and operating harmoniously. That's what you experience in music.

Like, music represents that everything in its proper place. That's what Adam is called upon by God to do in the story of Adam and Eve. To subdue the world, Subdue everything in its proper place, so that the whole structure operates in a harmonious manner.

It's a much more expanded view of what constitutes mental health. Anyways, education should serve that right. And so if you take the staff of moses that's planted in a single place, the community grows around that, that's the same as the magic wand of Gandalf.

That idea of a magic wand, it's the traditional ethos.

Associated with transformation and sacrifice, around which communities aggregate themselves. And the proper humanities and religious education inculcates that center structure so that knowledge can be organized around it. The last time we talked, I suggested to you that we see the world through a biblical lens, literally see it, I mean, literally.

It structures our perceptions, and I've investigated that far more deeply. What seems to be the case with a corpus of stories like the Biblical Library is that, if you know the stories, it structures your psyche so that you have a place to put information. And so that enables you to understand the current world and everything that's happening. But to place everything in the right context. And so, the transmission of an unbroken cultural edifice, story based edifice is the manner in which you solve the alignment problem. Unite your society, integrate your psyche, pursue what's meaningful, and protect yourself from chaos and anxiety.

Solid education has been the traditional way of ensuring that that occurs, and so that's what we hope we can offer with Peterson Academy. That's the purpose of my books, as well, to elucidate that. And so can the universities do that. I don't think so.

Philosophy, The philosophy and the way you're laying it out resonates with me. I think it's accurate. When I'm in harmony in my life, it all seems to make sense, it all works together.

What you're saying, it just rings true. I don't know if it, if they're so infected with this ideology that flies in the face of it.

It's the narrative of power, and it is a very powerful counter-narrative, because if you don't put the proper uniting principle at the pinnacle, power emerges immediately. Because people play power games, you can attain a certain degree of success and a fair amount of domination by playing a power game. And so Marx observed that one of the cardinal power games is economic.

And it is probably the cardinal power game. There's economic disparity. Those at the top do take advantage of their position at the top to stabilize their position. In a functional society, productive people are at the top, but even among those at the top, there's still power-seeking crooks. Now. Marx, of course, would say that everyone who's economically successful is a power-seeking crook.

And that's a great thing to believe if you're a resentful satanist.

They said, Okay, we've got a victim-victimizer narrative that's played out in the economic sphere, and that's basically Marxism. We'll just multiply that until the same interpretive framework can be applied to all possible group distinctions. That's basically intersectionality, so sex is an oppressor versus oppressed narrative, gender is an oppressed versus oppressor narrative.

Ethnicity, race, ability, attractiveness, height any qualitative distinction is now recast as a battle between oppressor and oppressed. It's an unbelievably brutal story. It's basically equivalent to the claim that the spirit of power is the ruler of.

Wild, right, that is wild. Look. One of the things you see that's very characteristic of the utopian left is the absolute insistence that anyone oppressed is a victim. It's like, Okay, we'll give the devil his due.

Some oppressed people are victims, but some people who claim to be oppressed aren't victims. They're the worst kind of monsters that the most deranged imagination could barely conceptualize. Utopian, naive, radical progressives refuse their imagination for evil, and that delivers them into the hands of the absolute bloody psychopaths. And they just don't see it. It's like, Oh, those trans people, they're just striving to be free.

It's like, you wait, you wait until you have one of them in your house, buddy, and you're going to find out just exactly how naive you are.

So.

So how do they protect themselves? They just deny the existence of malevolence or attribute it to socioeconomic inequality. All criminals are victims, It's like, No, first of all, lots of people who are victims aren't criminals.

In fact, poverty does not cause criminality. That's a lie, and it's a very damaging lie to the poor. Because if poverty was equivalent to criminality, the logical thing to do is just to lock up all the poor, right? Well.

There are many pathways from poverty forward, and one of them is criminality, but you can say the same thing about wealth. So the idea, and that's basically a Marxist theory of causality, is like, well, those people's oppression is what's causing their lack of law-abiding conduct. It's like, no, no wrong, seriously wrong and dangerously wrong and ridiculously naive. That's not how the world works at all.

Psychopaths, Okay, so they're psychopathic. That makes them predatory and parasitic. That's the definition of a psychopath. Okay, they're narcissistic.

So what does that mean? They want unearned social status, right? They're Machiavellian, so what does that mean? It means that their use of language is subordinated to their demand for hedonistic gratification and power.

So, like you and I, in principle, we hope we're trying to pursue a thread of conversation that leads to further development. Let's say, for us and for the audience. But I could easily be in here thinking, Okay, what the hell do I have to tell Joe? To increase my social media status, right? And to play this situation as a game, to enhance my own status or to further my selfish desires? That's Machiavellian. That was the dark triad.

And what? Further investigation revealed that you had to add an additional dimension to that to fully flesh out the picture. Sadism, What's that positive delight in the unnecessary misery of others? That's the dark Tetrad types.

Well, dark Tetrad types portray themselves as victims, right? That's one of their machiavellian strategies. So now your question is, Well, how do we segregate the real victims, so to speak, from the false victims? And one of the answers to that is like, beware of those who claim victimization as a justification for their moral. What would you say for their moral transgressions? I did this because I'm a victim.

It's like, really, really, that was your reason, poor you, that's your story.

You monster, there are no monsters, it's like.

If you think there are no monsters, you're naive and willfully blind to the point of delusion, and what would you call it?

What do they say? There are none so blind as those who will not see. That certainly applies on the malevolent side.

So they future discount badly, and that produces a proclivity for short-term gratification. And that includes, like, idiot criminal behavior. So what you need in a father? you need someone who encourages.

Intelligent, upward-aiming, sacrifice and an orientation towards others and future development, that's what the spirit of the Father really does, that encouragement.

And that what reward for delay of gratification? So that's another indication of the relationship between, say, upward-striving moral orientation and maturity. If you're mature, you can delay gratification. And what does that mean? It means you've integrated the future into your perceptions.

And that has to be socially scaffolded, especially for men.

Women, they get initiated by nature. in every society that we know of, men have to be initiated.

Because that catalyzation of maturity is a difficult thing, difficult and unlikely, but possible and necessary.

And the overwhelming pattern of response is something like, I started to understand the necessity of responsibility now. You might then ask, Well, you hear from your parents, you, in principle, you hear from the school system, although that's probably gone, that you know you should grow up and be responsible. Why did it make a difference? Why did it make a difference to you to read that in what I wrote? And the answer is, I think the answer is I didn't take the standard conservative approach.

I didn't say you should, you must, you ought, even though those things are true, I said, there's no difference between responsibility and adventure.

That's a killer thing to know. The heavier the responsibility, the more profound the adventure. And so everyone knows that, but it's not catalyzed, eh? So I just watched The Hobbit a while back, classic adventure story and of course, what? It's Bilbo, to begin with, Bilbo, he's this little hobbit, right? Sort of like Abraham, he's living his comfortable life. And the wizard comes along and says, It's time for you to develop your shadow side because, of course, he becomes a thief and to go on your adventure.

And he agrees to do that, and it's a weighty adventure. He has to contend with the ring of power, right? That's the ultimate in temptations, that's the temptation that Christ is offered by Satan in the desert.

The temptation of power, and that's what, That's the temptation that Frodo has to, Bilbo has to contend with. Well, he has this adventure. Well, what's the adventure? It's responsibility.

He has to carry that ring, and it is one of the rings that unites everything, power, it's just the malevolent ring that unites everything. And so I've been suggesting to young men in particular, it's like, you want to get your life together.

Take the path of maximal responsibility, not because you should, even though you should, that's not why, it's because that's the pathway of maximal adventure. So you say, Well, what's the meaning of life?

It's like it's the meaning that reveals itself when you take the pathway of maximal responsibility.

That's exactly the message of the crucifixion, that's precisely the message pathway of maximal responsibility, and that's a terrifying thing. There's no difference between that and the Dragon and Treasure stories that are unbelievably archaic.

The greatest possible treasure is to be found where the danger is most intense, right?

Really.

Assaults in the public sphere that were designed to be deadly.

It wasn't real journalism, the nuanced.

Various elements of what a human being is the pros and cons, the goods, the bads, the ugly, the battle that they have. Not that, not an accurate assessment, not an objective analysis of the person.

No, you're not doing journalism, you're doing hit pieces, you're doing it under the guise of journalism, but it's not journalism. It's kind of evil.

So, like, the costs are real.

But we have an appeal in at the moment that's blocking it.

If I don't undergo the re-education process successfully, they'll suspend my license and well, also say why? they'll say, Well, Dr. Peterson is uneducable, he's unprofessional.

He's violated the ethical tenets of his profession, right just because.

They went after me because of the comments I've made about the trans butchers and liars. The surgeons and the therapists who are enabling them. That's a major part of it, that's a major part of it. They went after me because I went after Trudeau and his former chief of staff. And what else?

Those are the major three. There's probably four complaints aligned with each of those dimensions, and so that's cost me about a million dollars in legal fees so far. So it's a very hard battle to fight. It's very annoying because the accusations continue to flow in, even though that's a choice of the college.

And I've already been sentenced to re-education of indefinite duration, right till they're satisfied that I've learned whatever the hell lesson I'm supposed to learn. So the only reason that isn't happening is because we now have an appeal in front of the Supreme Court in Canada. And so I don't think it'll succeed, but we'll see.

Moralists, lying moralists who are facilitating the butchery and sterilization of children, take away my license. Not without a war. So that's one thing. The second thing is, I'm likely I'm in a prime position in Canada to undertake this battle against the woke licensing boards. Because I have the money and what the hell are they going to do to me? I'm not practicing.

They can't take away my income, and likely they can't blacken my reputation. Except among those who are willing to assume that the licensing colleges are playing a straight game. So, really, there's nothing they can do to me. Plus, if it was only a personal thing, apart from the fact that I'm not letting my license be taken by a pack of intellectually addled hypocrites, I don't really. There's a part of me that's deeply ashamed to be a psychologist. At the moment. I'm so appalled by my compatriots.

They know that this gender dysphoria.

Pathology is a lie, they all know it, and they won't say anything now, partly they won't say anything. Because the consequences for saying something are not trivial, but the consequences for not saying anything is that. People like Chloe Cole end up with their breasts cut off when they're 15..

Right, well, that actually matters so.

So, practically speaking, in a sense, the battle doesn't mean anything to me because I'm fighting to remain a member of a club that I don't really want to be part of. But there is a Is there a principle at stake?

Well, there's a variety of principles at stake. And so if I stop or lose all of the woke licensing.

Enterprises, they'll just have their sway. All the physicians in Canada are terrified to say what they think. Anybody who's governed by a professional college, they censor themselves like mad. And it's really appalling for psychologists because all of the psychologists who are properly trained, they know that. All of this is a lie, and not just a lie.

A malevolent, vicious and destructive lie, everything about, it's a lie, you know? Musk revealed the other day that the people, the professionals that were interacting with him. In regard to his transitioning son told him that if he didn't abide by their dictates, that his son was much more likely to commit suicide. That's a lie, no one who's educated as a psychologist believes that to be true.

No one, at minimum, if you're educated. What you understand is that underneath gender dysphoria is something more substantial, which is a proclivity towards depression and anxiety. If you're depressed and anxious, you have a higher risk of suicide. You have to account for that before you attribute any of the remainder to gender dysphoria as such. And everyone who's a psychologist also understands that body-focused discomfort for women at puberty is normative.

Because when women who have a higher probability of being depressed and anxious do become depressed and anxious. It preferentially takes the form of bodily discomfort that's been known forever. So Chloe Cole, for example, no one explained that to her, no one sat her down and said, Well, you're not very. She told me that the reason she decided to transition was because she kind of had a crush on Kardashian and that body type.

You know, hyper-curvy, hyper-feminine. And Chloe realized when she entered puberty that she was probably going to have a boyish figure, and Chloe's a very attractive person. She would have had no trouble attracting the attention of men, but, you know, she was 11 12, what the hell does she know?

And she wasn't going to be the woman she had envisioned, she didn't really understand that. You know, there's a variety of female forms that men find attractive, that's for sure, and she certainly would have fallen into that category, she didn't know that. It was typical for girls to undergo a fair bit of confusion when they hit puberty, and that that would take the form of negative emotion.

No one told her that they just rushed her down the puberty blocking and surgical pathway. That's inexcusable, it's evil. Yeah, it is.

It's the worst thing, it's the worst thing I've seen professionals do. Not only in my lifetime, I've studied atrocity for 40 years, I've never seen anything worse than what's happening right now. And that includes the sorts of things that were done in the camps.

In Germany, at least, the goddamn Nazis admitted what they did was wrong. They tried to hide it. We trumpeted it as a moral virtue. We're freeing the children.

It's like, No, I don't think so. Mothers, I think what you're doing is sacrificing your child to the parading of your moral virtue. Oh, my son, he's so confused. He thinks I's a girl, but I still love him. That's how wonderful I am.

Jesus Christ, Joe, you have no idea how dark that is, it's dark, it's unbelievably dark.

What was the exact phrase that? The way? They described gender transition as life-saving medical care in order to get insurance for it.

Yeah, yeah, because otherwise insurance won't pay for it. So they were willing to describe it in that way to ensure that people would profit off of it, which is wild.

And then sterilized and mutilated.

And I can understand that, because the more you look into it, the worse it gets. It's unbelievably bad. These surgical procedures are so brutal and so experimental that they're, they're, I'm going to say it again.

They're worse than what the Mengali types did in the concentration camps in the 30s and 40s. And that's a pretty goddamn low bar. And it's no wonder people don't want to believe it and people say the lefties, I've talked to the centrists, well, it doesn't happen.

Very often it's like, Oh yeah, how often? is too often? like once is too often, and it's not once.

Right, and aren't being guarded by anyone and are vulnerable, right, right?

Right, right, oh yeah.

That's the devouring mother, that's the maternal instinct. Gone mad, right? Everything good has the potential for pathology in proportion to its goodness.

So Lucifer is the intellect gone mad, right? The devouring mother is the mother who's a little too close to her kids.

Yeah.

You know, I've talked to experts who figure that the ratio of people on black market puberty blockers to medically prescribed puberty blockers is at least 10 to 1.

Oh god.

Yep.

Anyways, that's why we're trying to educate people. Well, Jordan.

I'll try some of your courses, it looks.

Jonathan Paggio on Symbolism and Christianity. That's excellent. James Orr. He's from Cambridge, lecturing on Plato Marion Toupie on the economics of human flourishing. That's a very optimistic course.

There's Brett and Heather evolutionary.

The greatest leaders of history. That's a great course, that's very inspiring. John Verveche I really like John.

He's so damn smart. The Boy crisis with Warren Farrell. I did a course on Nietzsche, on Beyond Good and Evil. Do you want to run that? That's a fun preview.

Sure, let's run that, we'll wrap it up with this. Okay, okay.

I write in a single sentence what it takes other men, a book, to write, that it wasn't egotistical, because it happened to be true.

Beyond Good and Evil is a cardinal work, a prodroma to the entire intellectual and political history of the 20th century.

Brilliant romantic.

Insightful, deep.

Psyche-shattering?

Dancing bit of literary genius.

He's had a remarkable impact on thought over the last 140 years. It's reasonable to say that he philosophized with a hammer because his thought is extraordinarily condensed. To read Nietzsche is daunting psychologically, he's like a motivational speaker.

He's practical in a way that philosophers seldom are. Nietzschean philosophy is a call to arms. To familiarize yourself with him is to arm yourself against a sea of troubles.

And since you will encounter a sea of troubles, you better pray that you're armed, and this is one way to do it.

How to philosophize with a hammer?

JORDAN Thank you very much, my friend.